Severed on the Nintendo 3DS is a dungeon crawl-styled game with a mandatory touch-screen mechanic developed by DrinkBox Studios, the same company that created the Guacamelee series. For the gist of the game, you can check out the First Impressions article I wrote back in January. The game is broken up into three areas introducing more complicated game mechanics along the way that, looking back at least, have a steady and fair increase in difficulty and complexity. My own learning curve seemed to jump during the first large area, the Domain of the Crows, and I finally felt that I had learned how to actually operate the fighting mechanic half-way through the second area, the Mountain Ghost Town.
Because Severed is only available on devices that utilize touch screens (PS Vita, 3DS, iOS, Switch) knowing how to attack and defend is an integral part of the game that I apparently did not fully grasp during the opening tutorial. During the tutorial battle with your mother, I thought that you had to have the stylus on the screen leading up to block incoming attacks or even touching the screen the whole time during the battle, which turned out not to be the case. Secondly, there are several enemies that will attack using their right or left hands (for the enemies that have actual hands) and those attacks come in a diagonal direction. It was not until a few hours in that I realized you have to swipe in the direction that the attack is coming in. This means, being right-handed, swiping from bottom right to upper left felt very awkward when I had been swiping bottom left to the upper right for the majority of the game.
This realization hit me probably around the time that you learn the charge attack, where you tap the screen, hold the attack to charge, and then attack when your meter is flashing. Around this time, some enemies develop a charge attack too and the only way to block it is with a charge attack of your own. Sometimes I am very slow.
The leveling up system in the game was fun, but I could see it being either confusing or cumbersome if you are not the kind of person that likes budgeting items and saving up to purchase either skills or status upgrades. Throughout the game, you either find or scavenge body parts from enemies (when you build up a meter and make the killing blow, time slows down and you can sever specific body parts that you use to purchase upgrades) and once you gain the ability to convert Hands (the most common monster body part) to other rarer body parts like Jaws and Wings, then you have to weigh if you want to make the conversion of a lot of common items for much fewer rarer items. Then you also have essentially heart container pieces but for your brain/mana/magic abilities as well. The semi-tongue-in-cheekiness in these heart and brain container pieces I did greatly appreciate.
Without going too much into story elements, I kinda think that is about it as far as describing the game. You would gain access to new areas by way of an equipment upgrade, then you could backtrack to open up previously locked areas, usually resulting in finding heart/brain container pieces or a large jar containing a lot of body parts. Like a lot of games that use skill trees, I did reach the point near the end-game where I had purchased everything and was still racking up the number of body parts with nothing left to spend them on. I do not know if this was an oversight or just something that Drink Box thought, "Well, they've made it this far and have a lot of parts, oh well." Maybe having a skill that lets you convert X number of body parts to an in-battle health potion or mana potion (or fruit in the case of this game) would have been an interesting mechanic.
After talking quite a bit about the battle mechanic, I should mention that I impressed myself, or DrinkBox just did a great job with the final boss fight. Unlike the three previous main bosses, the final boss I only had to attempt once, and while somewhat stressful, I found it to be a lot of fun, utilizing skills and tactics that I had learned over the course of the game. Recognizing tells that the boss would give, visual design clues to attack certain parts of the boss first, as well as magic management and keeping my eyes on the multiple enemies that would spawn at various times of the battle. Also finding three family keepsakes that would give specific buffs was probably also very helpful.
The game ended in a way that felt appropriate, which I will not spoil here because it is definitely worth playing through. DrinkBox did a great job telling a story through a silent protagonist through an alien and unfamiliar world that did fit within the theme of their previous game Guacamelee without feeling like you were playing another version of the same game. I did impress myself though that I completed as much of the game as I did, finding almost all of the items, hidden areas without the use of a guide or out-of-game maps. There were a couple of times I felt lost, but those were in areas that deliberately did not have maps in-game and they only felt large at first, but once stepping back, you realize that the area is not as big as it is made out to be. The biggest hold-up I could see for people is if they genuinely do not like first-person perspective dungeon crawls, but for me, I enjoyed the experience and would recommend the game if you have a touch screen device...
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No comments:
Post a Comment