u/BlueMikeStu

Fast travel is a shortcut for open-world designers who want to make an excessively open world without figuring out how a player would interact with it unless they're Marvel's Nightcrawler and could teleport to the important parts of the world and cut out the filler.

It's a convenience and "Quality of Life" feature for designers who don't understand how to make their worlds interesting to navigate.

I think the biggest win of "respecting a player's time" via Fast Travel versus player immersion and enjoyment of the game as presented is that Insomniac's Spider-Man on PS4 has fast-travel and has a specific trophy for using it 5 times. That number is important, because according to data tracked on psnprofiles.com, 66.43% of players got the trophy for PSNprofiles users, and 38% got it overall among Playstation players.

Like, how many times do you fast-travel in a typical open-world game with fast-travel? The answer is definitely a lot. I bet most players who played Skyrim probably fast-traveled more than five times before they finished the Bleak Falls Barrow quest for Whiterun.

So let's focus on that 66.43%/38% of the players who got that trophy, and compare it to other trophies that were nearly at or at a higher percentage of completion that players of the game received for completely optional content or end-game content.

• 66.41%/35.2% of players got the optional "Backpacker" Trophy for finding all of the hidden backpacks.
• 65.77%/35.8% of players got the optional "Hero for Higher" Trophy for getting to the very top of the Avengers tower and perching there for a second.
• 75.47%/47.8% of players got the optional "Amazing Coverage" Trophy for activating every single Surveillance Tower.

But more importantly...

• 83.05%/65.4% of players completed Act 1
• 76.75%/56.0% of players completed Act 2
• 71.91%/47.9% of players completed Act 3

That third one is especially telling for one reason: That is the number of players who went through the entire game's campaign, which takes around 17 hours per How Long to Beat and means that more people did that than used the fast travel system more than four times from beginning to end.

That is a staggering number to look at when you think about it. Once you unlock the ability to fast travel in the game after completing the mission "Wheels within Wheels", you can pretty much fast travel at any point from then on by clicking a point of interest from the menu map.

If you don't like the subway animations, you can even disable them to make the fast travel faster.

Yet a statistically significant enough amount of people chose to beat the entire game instead of fast-travelling five times during their entire run.

I'll admit, I'm one of them. Why would I fast travel for three seconds to get to a mission all the way across the map like 2km+ away when that's 2km+ of New York skylines to swing through and have a blast for five minutes while I catch up with the audio banter and maybe stop a few crimes along the way? Fast-Travel would have been a complete waste of the game's potential and the enjoyment of the traversal.

I still think that's an amazing statistic to consider. More people beat the entire game than fast-traveled. How many big, open-world games can ever claim that?

Take your favourite Open-World game and ask yourself how many times you've used fast travel before you got to the end. Was it less than five? Probably not.

Spider-Man is an exemplar of what the open-world genre should be. A game which gives you an open playground so fun to play with that Fast-Travel is an ignored option on the buffet.

I think the biggest win of "respecting a player's time" versus player immersion and enjoyment of the game as presented is that Insomniac's Spider-Man on PS4 has fast-travel and has a specific trophy for using it 5 times. That number is important, because according to data tracked on psnprofiles.com, 66.43% of players got the trophy for PSNprofiles users, and 38% got it overall among Playstation players.

Like, how many times do you fast-travel in a typical open-world game with fast-travel? The answer is definitely a lot. I bet most players who played Skyrim probably fast-traveled more than five times before they finished the Bleak Falls Barrow quest for Whiterun.

So let's focus on that 66.43%/38% of the players who got that trophy, and compare it to other trophies that were nearly at or at a higher percentage of completion that players of the game received for completely optional content or end-game content.

• 66.41%/35.2% of players got the optional "Backpacker" Trophy for finding all of the hidden backpacks.
• 65.77%/35.8% of players got the optional "Hero for Higher" Trophy for getting to the very top of the Avengers tower and perching there for a second.
• 75.47%/47.8% of players got the optional "Amazing Coverage" Trophy for activating every single Surveillance Tower.

But more importantly...

• 83.05%/65.4% of players completed Act 1
• 76.75%/56.0% of players completed Act 2
• 71.91%/47.9% of players completed Act 3

That third one is especially telling for one reason: That is the number of players who went through the entire game's campaign, which takes around 17 hours per How Long to Beat and means that more people did that than used the fast travel system more than four times from beginning to end.

That is a staggering number to look at when you think about it. Once you unlock the ability to fast travel in the game after completing the mission "Wheels within Wheels", you can pretty much fast travel at any point from then on by clicking a point of interest from the menu map.

If you don't like the subway animations, you can even disable them to make the fast travel faster.

Yet a statistically significant enough amount of people chose to beat the entire game instead of fast-travelling five times during their entire run.

I'll admit, I'm one of them. Why would I fast travel for three seconds to get to a mission all the way across the map like 2km+ away when that's 2km+ of New York skylines to swing through and have a blast for five minutes while I catch up with the audio banter and maybe stop a few crimes along the way? Fast-Travel would have been a complete waste of the game's potential and the enjoyment of the traversal.

I still think that's an amazing statistic to consider. More people beat the entire game than fast-traveled.

I was reading a review about an entirely different game, a roguelike, which basically said that once you figure out what abilities to bring into a run, the rest of it was boring., and that struck me as precisely the reason I found Cup Heroes boring: I didn't care about the actual gameplay or the fights, I cared about maximizing the number of balls I could squeeze out by dropping them in the right place so I maximized my gain.

Like, I'm talking getting the sort of flow going that the game screen is literally full of balls for a minute and if you don't mute your TV, it sounds like constant bubble wrap popping for minutes at a time and you've got enough balls to reroll until you get whatever upgrade you want and finish a level with tens of thousands of balls.

Make that more puzzle focused, maybe introduce some mechanics and "levels" that change it from a simple "dump balls here for maximum effect" thing, maybe even introduce some sort of mechanic where the balls change colors or size or shape which changes the amount of "currency" you get, and then use that as the basis for a more engaging gameplay loop than an AFK battle game where you literally have no input.

I've been checking every day and noticed something... I haven't been able to buy anything from the Fall Guys storefront for a long time now, except for Mastery Items. For a while I was just saving my Kudos for the stuff I wanted, but eventually I started buying out the shop every time I check it out, whatever I can.

It didn't take me that long to get everything except for the Nicknames and Faceplates, even the ones I really didn't like and never intend to use. I'm wondering when that well is going to run dry, as well. How many of you have beaten me to the point where that entire part of the Fall Guys Store is basically useless to them?

I mean I can still get Nicknames and Nameplates for now, but I like my current setup enough that I'm basically just doing it to see if I can get it done before whatever happens in a few months.

I've heard a lot of things about this game and I've gotta say... It's about a 7/10. But I got it for the price of a reheated slize of pizza and spent hours on it.

For the record I'm playing on the system where the bottom X button rotates into a square and my console name ends with 5, but I don't want this sub's jumpy auto-mod to quickfire on my ULT and send me back to the gulag.

So yeah, I finished it, but the saddest part about seeing it go is the part of the game where the final boss battle doesn't matter and none of the good ideas mattered. I beat Oceanhorn and I died the first time, but the second time I stopped being high as hell thanks to the many milligrams of THC I'd eaten before my first attempt and then rubbed two brain cells together and remembered where they were ripping this off.

This game, not the Oceanhorn series as a whole, but this game, as ugly and flawed as it can be at times, I've got to give it genuine praise for something. The puzzles were cryptic and open-ended enough that I lost my way a few times, and that's what made ut si fun.

The presentation is awful. It tries to reach beyond the scope and fails, and whatever they paid Nobuo and his back up singer, whatever it was, could have gone to making the main character's face plain boredom

I can't believe I went this long without playing it, and that was my mistake. I'm probably spoiling the direction the review is heading when I tell you that today is the day you should stop making that same mistake if you've made it this long.

So what is Oceanhorn: Monster of the Uncharted Seas?

Oceanhorn is a Zelda clone which very much wears that influence quite plainly. Specifically it borrows a lot of the DNA from Windwaker in the overall presentation and setting to a very obvious degree: The only way Windwaker's Link could have been copied more is if he never changed out of his casual clothes with the blue shirt and went on his adventure with those instead of the green classic tunic.

However, that's the basic surface level copying of homework. What is here is surprisingly a little more unique.

For all that this game firmly apes the Legend of Zelda franchise, it also does something very fundamentally different which makes it unique, and reminds me of the isometric Zelda-esque competitor on the Sega Genesis, Landstalker. The game's point of view is firmly in the top-down isometric viewpoint of that game, and how the game handles movement and map design is where it makes the the game stand out as something more than a mere clone.

All of Oceanhorn's game world (outside of the overworld) is essentially comprised of planes of height, with a very important, key rule: The protagonist, "The Kid", can freely drop one level from his current height, but most importantly, and unlike Landstalker, he does not and never gains the ability to jump up a level in height. One of his upgrades allows him to bypass a horizontal block of space, but once he descends a level, he isn't able to go back up.

The closest "maintstream" thing I can easily compare to it is how Final Fantasy Mystic Quest handles height versus mobility, and that's a pretty deep reference to make in general, but essentially what it means is that every single island and dungeon in the game is essentially a convoluted 3D maze of drop-down shortcuts and discoveries where you can often physically see somewhere you want to go, and you have to explore the environment and figure out how and where you can get to the height or a height above a given objective like a treasure chest or collectible and where you need to drop down to get there.

What this means is that even though the game only has a small collection of Zelda-style item "tools" (think the Zelda Hookshot, Bombs, Bow, etc) which is essentially very small, the way the game involves these in the map design is incredibly robust and rather than being a large collection of items with a small scope of use, most of your "tools" are frequently used in new ways which make them consistently useful and employed from the time they're introduced, which solves a key problem some actual Zelda titles have and which other clones tend to have as well: Your collection of tools is small, but they always wind up being useful from the moment you get them and once you do, the game can demand you use that specific tool to solve puzzles and progress at any time. There are no tools you get which basically sit in your inventory and gather dust outside of obvious "rub item X on roadblock Y" logic gates which make you remember they exist, and instead combine into forming more and more challenging islands to explore which requires you to fully utilize all of your "tools" on a consistent basis.

This is fantastic game design, full stop. I will gush about this for hours if you let me, because it does two fundamental things: It allows the dungeons of the games to demand that players fully utilize all of their tools as they progress, but it also means the relative lack of tools is more of an exercise in developer restraint rather than a limitation of their developer budget.

All told, you get a grand spanking total of just five "Tools", one of which is just for the terrible fishing minigame, and functionally four of them are the only ones that matter. On top of that you get a total of five "spells" that use a magic meter, but two of them are optional and essentially bonus spells which don't impact puzzle design.

So it's a Zelda game that essentially only has a grand total of seven items that change your traversal or problem solving options, but the game design turns that into a strength instead of a weakness by making sure none of those items get ignored or left in the dust.

So what are The Kid's "Tools" in Oceanhorn?

This is where Oceanhorn can look weak, to be honest.

This is a Zelda clone where two of your primary tools are a Bow that fires arrows and Bombs, which basically do exactly what the same items did in the original Zelda 1 on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The bow fires at ranged targets, bombs blow up destructible elements in the game world, etc etc.

The other primary tools you gain throughout The Kid's adventure are the Trencher Boots (which allow you to clear one block's horizontal distance to hop across gaps), the Chronos Shield (basically the Zelda ALLTP/OOT Mirror Shields), and two spells.

The Fire spell lights things on fire and burns them, allowing you unmelt frozen items. The Force spell randomly summons a throwable object which drops where you designate.

And that is all you have at your disposal to complete all the game's puzzles. You can progress from the opening moments of the game to the end of the critical path with nothing else, which sounds a lot more limiting than it actually winds up being. The game fully utilizes those six basic abilities to create a rich, fully explorable world which demands them in any combination the game feels like throwing at you no matter what portion of the game you're playing. Progression through the game doesn't care how long ago you got one of them, the game can throw it back into the mix with any other tool and demand you figure it out.

The Side Content

While I said the game only has six tools, there's technically a seventh. The Ice Spell is not STRICTLY required for progression, but it's pretty much an unofficial tool in terms of practical use. I'd put deliberately not grabbing it into almost self-imposed challenge territory, with the others basically dropping off from there.

The other two spells, the Black Hole and the Heal spell, are basically just catch-all spells that give you more options. The Triloth (gained by collecting 40 of the optional Bloodstone collectibles) is basically just a catch-all damage spell, and the Heal spell does exactly what you think a Heal spell does so I'm not going to explain it.

Your other unique tool is the Fishing Rod, which gives you access to one of the most annoying fishing minigames I've encountered in decades. It's functionally identical to a bunch of different fishing minigames that appear in random JRPGs of all stripes, but where it gets aggravating is that you sometimes have to wait a minute or more after casting your line into the water to tap a button to start the minigame to catch it.

And there's only seven fish to catch, only three of which offer any mechanical difference, and it's an entirely useless waste of time outside of the crazy people who want 100% completion and a platinum trophy (or equivalent) to show just how little they value their time. Completing it offers nothing, does not provide any material benefit, and you're best off pretending the entire part of the game doesn't exist at all unless you're an absolute masochist. It makes the Trails of Cold Steel 1&2 fishing minigame look like god-tier game design by comparison. Don't waste your fucking time.

Another unique item you can acquire is the Ancient Radar, and it's basically only more useful than the Fishing Rod in that it actually does something very basic which is useful enough that it has an actual use, but is functionally just as useless as the Fishing Rod. All it really does is let you know how many Bloodstones on an island you've collected, but the Triloth spell doesn't need you to get all of them and there's no benefit to getting all of them and there's easily more than enough to find to get it without it, so it's basically just a completionist item. It also functions like the Link's Awakening compass where it tells you which rooms have a key required for progression, but this is basically so obvious in the majority of cases that it's a useless function of the item.

Your other optional collectibles are pretty much just bonuses.

After you upgrade your wooden stick and no shield to The Kid's father's Sword and Shield, your only remaining upgrades are the prior-mentioned Shield of Chronos which doubles as a puzzle item, and the Coral Saber, which doubles his base attack damage and basically offers nothing else outside of being acquired in a smaller-scope bonus dungeon, and honestly, even then the Coral Saber does lackluster damage compared to most of your other options.

The entire thing which rounds it out are Heart Pieces... And you've played Zelda, this game has a heart meter for health and if you guessed you need to collect four for a +1 to health, congratulations on seeing what a naked rip-off it is. You can also buy one directly from the shop for 1000G, but that's it.

The game also technically has an XP-based leveling system, but it's nothing exciting and feels really half-assed. The first time you travel the open ocean between islands, you see some random floating debris that you can't really interact with. When you hit Adventurer Level 3, you get the Pumpkin Seed Gun, which turns each journey between two islands into a mini on-rails shooter which basically just gives you a bit of extra Adventurer XP and functionally serves as a way to top up your stock of arrows, bombs, health, and magic between actual gameplay and maybe gives you a piddling amount of XP and Gold Coins that is never really worth it.

The rest of your Adventurer Levels basically just act as basic bitch upgrades. You get to carry more arrows, bombs, etc, you get some bonus Gold Coins or slight reduction in spell costs, a slight bonus to overworld travel speed, and the final three are basically just easter egg bonuses which don't matter.

The one I did like was the Knight of Arcadia level up, which turns your Coral Sword into a Master Sword duplicate that fires ranged attacks at full health, but beyond that your Heal spell heals MORE hearts (and if you're at this level, you don't need it) at Level 14, your Destructive spells do more damage at Level 15 (and if you're at this level, you don't need it), and when you reach the max Level 16, you get to carry 99 Bombs and 99 Arrows at a time which, and repeat it with me now, if you're at this level, you don't need it.

And while I like that these are nice little "capstone" abilities which are nice to have, others would have been more useful. Your stamina bar sucks ass beginning to end, and honestly with how generous arrow, bomb, and heart drops are I'd have much preferred a more generous or even flat-out unlimited stamina bar for the final ability than 99 each of the bombs and arrows, but that's just a pedantic complaint if I'm honest.

Aesthetic Presentation

One of the most notable facts about the game's presentation is that it had a big marketing "get" is that it got two fucking legendary Squaresoft veterans to contribute, and better yet, it's not just a marketing stunt.

Although Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uemetsu "only" contributed three songs for the game, they had him compose three absolutely vital tracks: The main menu/core theme song, the sailing music when traveling on the overworld, and the final boss theme. They might have only had the money and negotiating power to get three songs out of an industry legend, but they picked those three songs very well.

Kenji Ito, the other stunt marketing inclusion and the Nobuo Uematsu for the Saga/Mana Squaresoft titles, is likewise well-used for the four/five songs he contributed. He handles the Opening Cinematic song and another version, a boss battle theme against a key boss, the dungeon theme for a major dungeon, and then the closing credits.

This isn't to say that Kalle Ylitalo's soundtrack for the rest is lacking and actually blends in well with the two absolute fucking industry titans they were working with, which is probably the highest praise I can give the rest of the soundtrack. Going from an Uematsu track to a Yiltalso track doesn't feel like a jarring drop in quality or execution in the slightest.

In terms of voice acting, it's pretty decent. I don't know if it's just a weird coincidence or what, but Ray Chase's depiction as The Kid's father and the narrator is basically a beat-for-beat, bar-for-bar voice that is so similar to Brian Bloom's work with Varric Tethras from Dragon Age and if you gave me samples of both spouting generic lines in each depiction and asked me to pick a difference, I simply wouldn't be able to do so.

The rest of the voice acting (in English, at least), is more than competent and not something that detracts from the game and overall the sound design is fantastic.

So... The graphics. Oh boy. Uh... Let's address that elephant in the room.

They're there, and that's about the best you can say about them. They do the job, don't make the difficult to play, but this was clearly a game designed for mobile and the visual presentation clearly reflects that. The characters are basically poe-faced, stiff, and lacking any real expression. Each one from the minor NPCS to the main protagonist, The Kid, feels like "that'll do" was their effort level, and I have to say this is probably why a lot of people who haven't tried it haven't tried it.

Character models are stiff and expressionless and just look terrible the minute the game scrolls in to give them more visibility than the top-down isometric view and it feels like the studio just didn't care even though they make a point of zooming in on them for key moments, when they absolutely do not hold up.

The environments are decent and disctinct and don't detract from the game, but it's not really stylized enough to feel like it went for the specific art style it uses the way Windwaker does, but more like they were the part of the game where the developer's vision ran into the reality of their actual budget and this is where the corners got snipped a bit.

Everything about the game's visuals do scream compromise, but honestly with everything else being equal, this is probably the best place for them to have cut said corners. It's not ideal or anything, but I'd much rather have the soundtrack and bland visuals of the game versus slightly better visual design for the few times the game makes me look at them closely and have a much more generic soundtrack.

The Plot

I'm just going to keep this simple.

It's a basic Zelda game budget clone and the core structure reflects that, as does the plot. You go through the game's islands and collect gear and loot, but basically it's just about grabbing three elemental amulets (like the first half of Zelda ALLTP/OOT) and then you get a final dungeon and a bonus dungeon, and that's basically how much impact the game's plot will have on you.

There is technically a romance subplot between The Kid and one of the residents of the game's one town, Neeti, but it's so wildly undeveloped and vague thanks to the art style that the game uses in general which gives everyone the same body proportions that it basically has no impact and is more of a confusing addition rather than a positive, to the point I didn't even know it was supposed to be a romance subplot until after a plot beat had her following The Kid around after a night under the fireworks and other townspeople telling me that I was the subject of envy because she spent that time with The Kid. It is so lacking in impact that I think the game would be better if it didn't even happen because it's so lacklustre.

Which is especially jarring because even as minimalistic as it is, the history between The Kid's father Blackhat and The Kid's mother Mary is surprisingly well told within the limitations of the game's presentation and is literally a million times better executed and conveyed to the player, with a surprising depth of emotional impact and "lore" if you're paying attention. How The Kid's parents can have such a great (for the context) romance story beside whatever they were trying to do with Neeti is just jarring as hell.

Progress Presentation

I'm actually not technically done the game yet, I'll admit but I don't think at this point the final island I have to visit is going to change my opinion unless it takes an absolutely wild fucking turn in overall quality.

I'm only at 25/37 PSN trophy completion, but realistically the remaining twelve are just 100% completion bullshit trophies I may or may not bother grabbing or definitely not grabbing because fuck that fishing minigame with a spade bit in an industrial power drill. I would rather mindlessly grind Mass Effect 2 planet scanning for 100% completion galaxy-wide than spend another minute on that minigame just based on the fact I have to wait like a fucking full minute sometimes just to "start" it.

If I have a final complaint, it's that the pause menu which brings up The Kid's inventory is so actively useless and occasionally useful it feels almost like it was designed to intetionally be terribl or whoever designed it needs to be fired. With a cannon. Into a field of mines and fire ant colonies.

it is just that fucking bizarre.

On the far right side, we have the settings which allows you to individually individually control the voice volume, sound effect volume, and music volume. Underneath is a Controls submenu which just displays a controller layout with what buttons do, and allows you to invert the sailing camera's Y-axes, and that's basically all the settings controls you get.

You have two items next to the Settings, Flashbacks and Log, which are the stupidest substitution of a quest journal's functionality I can't help but wonder just... Why? Flashbacks basically let you replay some of the poorly animated cutscenes you've already seen and the Log function just has a random mishmash of whatever text popups you've gotten, both of which are useless at letting you figure out what to do or where to go next.

You have a the main portion which breaks down items and Spells, and it is the most anti-player designed thing I can imagine for what it's supposed to do. You can click on your items to swap between them if you find using the d-pad to swap between them too difficult, but it literally has blank spaces that look like you're missing stuff. More importantly, the game doesn't have any additional information if yuo click on them or hover over them to tell you what the itme's actual name is or even a brief overview of what those spells and items do.

Below the Items and Spells is a Quest Item/Game Stats widget which you can't even touch, and also has empty slots even at 100% completion. What the fuck? Even though the game offers a 500 gold coin tool that tells you exactly how many Bloodstones are on each island, it never tells you how many of the total in game you've collected, and the game just tells you how complete your progress is and doesn't break it down into missing chests per island versus Bloodstones. To the left of that you've got a basic Heart Piece held counter and the ALLTP Pendant-style MacGuffin indicator.

To the left of THAT is a XP counter which shows your current level, the completion rate for your current island, and then three challenges which can grant bonus XP which don't count towards island completion, and aggravatingly, there is NO complete compendium of all the game's challenges and not only can you complete them regardless of what island you're on, but you can't click on the more obscure ones to get a better description of what you need to do to complete one if it's not obvious as hell.

One of the challenges is to "Bounce an enemy ten times with the shield", but all it really means is that you just need to block ten attacks. And since there's no tracking your progress on these challenges even if you happen to be on the island it was arbitrarily assigned to be attached to. Aggravating as fuck.

Finally, you get a worthless Fish Log for the worthless fishing minigame and the ability to quit to the main menu.

Conclusion

Oceanhorn is a fantastic game and for the money I paid for it on sale, I basically got a nearly 20-hour Zelda clone with some unique mechanical and style decisions which genuinely make it a unique experience to play beyond being Zelda on a non-Nintendo platform and at the end of the day, you're paying less than a dollar an hour even at full price.

More than that though, it's unique enough that I could see a world where someone makes an Oceanhorn-like game specifically using the isometric view and the jump-down topography map-design and I would enjoy the hell out of that, or even a Mario Maker-style level editor kind of game where you got to design islands for other players to explore just for the fun of it, because the bones of the game are just that good.

It's not perfect and in fact it's got a lot of irritating flaws I can't believe got out of the alpha/beta stages of project planning to the final game, but it's also so amazingly well-done when it clicks together and so inexpensive for the package that all of my complaints feel like nitpicking the flaws of a clearly-budget Zelda clone with some unique ideas. There are far worse games to play if you've finally exhausted the actual Zelda library and for the cost, there's really no reason to complain at full MSRP let alone on sale.

Go play Oceanhorn. If you like Zelda, you'll have a blast.

I hate to say it, but the control scheme of this magnificent game nearly had me bounce off of it when I first tried it. Maybe it's because I'm coming at this from the classic fighting game community angle, but spilling my basic attacks across a controller the way the default setup was is frankly no bueno.

I'm not 100% satisfied with my current setup, but what I'm rolling with is as follows:

Rise = X + L1 with Dodge for double tap

Dodge is L1 with Dash for double tap

Dash is L3

Starburst is R3

Target Switch is L2

Character Switch is R2

Main/Sub Shoot is Square/Triangle

Main/Sub Melee is Cross/Circle

Block is R1

Does this sound weird to other players, and is there something I'm losing by using this setup?