Maybe the best vibe that a game’s opening sequence can give off is Saturday-morning cartoon.

This is a post about why I stopped playing Lost Sphear. It contains plot spoilers for the first few hours of the game. They are behind the cut. You have been warned.

I wanted to like Lost Sphear. I considered I Am Setsuna to be underrated, with much of the criticism levied against it unfair, so I had plenty of benefit of the doubt to give Lost Sphear. And at first, I really did enjoy it! Like I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear has beautiful visuals and music. I immediately found its world comforting, its characters likable, and its storytelling compelling. The initial group of characters, their relationships, and their role in their town are well established and feel real enough to invest in.

But after a few hours, the story started going in strange directions that felt less grounded and less plausible.

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This is a petty complaint, but I’m gonna whine about it anyway.

I Am Setsuna has an active time battle system very reminiscent of Chrono Trigger. One wrinkle added on top is the momentum system - your characters gradually build up “momentum” over the course of combat and can store up to three full “charges”. When taking an action, a character can expend a stored momentum charge to enhance that action, with the nature of the enhancement depending on the action. This increases the strategic complexity of combat - if you almost have a full charge, you might delay an action slightly in order to finish out the charge and then perform the better version of that action. And depending on the state of the combatants, you might want to spend your momentum charges to hit the enemy harder or save them for improved healing spells. And so on.

That’s great. The problem is how momentum is activated. If a character has any momentum charges, right before they perform their selected action, there’s a quick burst of light around them. If you press the Y button (on Switch; I assume it’s Square on PlayStation) during that burst, they’ll use one of their charges and enhance the action.

That probably sounds fine in isolation, but keep in mind that this is real-time menu-driven combat. The way this sort of system is supposed to work is that you keep an eye on the state of combat and plan ahead, making quick decisions and issuing commands rapidly without burning a lot of time in menus. As implemented, the momentum system breaks that flow, because commanding a character to use momentum becomes a delayed, multi-step process. You might decide to attack with momentum, but you can’t just pick “Attack with momentum” from the menu and move on to the next character. You have to pick “Attack” and then keep an eye on that character so you can react quickly and hit the momentum button when they flash. The flash is very quick so as not to delay battle, and in my experience if I stop watching the character and start thinking about what I want the next one to do, when the flash comes I don’t react quickly enough and don’t get to use the momentum as planned. And it’s unwise to just train yourself to hit the button for every flash, because sometimes it’s very important to save charges.

This is frustrating and incoherent. Turn-based RPG combat is about preparation, strategy, and tactics - not action. It’s one thing to add some action flavor via timed hits like in Mario RPGs - those are fully turn-based and don’t split your attention. But a system like this adds the action in a way that directly interferes with the tactics that you signed up for, and in an uninteresting way - you’ve already made the decision to use momentum, and the execution is just about noticing the flash and hitting the button quickly enough. It’s a failure to ensure that what’s hard about combat is also what’s interesting about it.

It’s also totally unnecessary. The Y button is otherwise unused during combat (which is why it’s safe to use for this purpose even when you have another character’s menu up). Why not just attach it to the actual command? Normally you hit A to issue a command - why not just make it so that hitting Y instead means that same command, but with momentum? This would have no effect on the actual strategic depth of combat and is no harder to learn, but would make issuing the command single-step and immediate, allowing you to immediately move on to the next character and keep the flow going without having to pause and waste time on an uninteresting reflex test.

Ultimately it’s not that big of a deal, and overall I still liked I Am Setsuna just fine. But little touches like this can make surprisingly large impressions. Recently I got around to starting Lost Sphear, the next game by the same team, and was disappointed to discover that while the momentum system has been somewhat refined and improved, you still activate momentum the exact same way. I found myself immediately (and unfairly) assuming that this meant that Lost Sphear had failed to learn the right lessons from its predecessor and wasn’t going to resolve its flaws. I’ve played a few hours now and I don’t think that impression is accurate, but I still wish they’d changed this.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that Animal Crossing: New Horizons, through NookLink in the Nintendo Switch Online app, will allow you to scan and use QR codes for custom designs - including ones created in New Leaf and Happy Home Designer? Meaning that over seven years of player-created content is still usable?

I like when Nintendo makes its games into platforms and then doesn’t abandon them.

Now that we know that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will support island names of up to ten characters, maybe you’d like some inspiration? Well, Angie’s Town put together a bunch of themed words, and I went ahead and made a generator based on it!

🏝️Animal Crossing Island Name Generator🏝

By the way, I like making little web tools like this. If you’ve got a name generator or some other guide or calculator or something that you wish someone would make an interactive version of, let me know!

I’ve finally gotten around to trying all the free QubicGames titles I picked up in December. Most of them I bounced off pretty quickly as not the kind of gameplay I’m interested in, but one surprised me: Mana Spark.

Mana Spark is a roguelike. I never get into roguelikes, but I figured I should give it a fair shot. I played it until my first death and then put it down.

The next day, I found myself thinking about it again. The combat had felt great and the music, sound, and art were excellent. I played another session, enjoyed the atmosphere and game feel, and thought it was a shame the game was a roguelike and I’d never be able to get into it. After a few more deaths I put the game back down.

About an hour later, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the game and I picked it right back up and went on to play it obsessively for days.

I’ve thought a lot about why this happened. It actually reminds me of my experience with SteamWorld Dig 2.

Metroidvanias are all about remembering what’s where and how to get back to it, so my terrible sense of direction renders most of them borderline unplayable. But SteamWorld Dig 2 has a fantastic map and generous fast travel. It fully solved my problem with Metroidvanias, allowing me to enjoy what’s good about the genre.

Before, when I’d seen someone talk about how satisfying it was to bring a new tool back to an old area to conquer a previously-encountered obstacle, or to figure out how to skillfully use your tools to sequence-break and get somewhere early, I’d roll my eyes at this bizarre celebration of backtracking and subversion of carefully-designed pacing. But now I finally understood it! That stuff was fun, now that my poor sense of direction was no longer getting in the way. What I disliked was frustration and wasted time finding my way around with sub-par navigational aides - not Metroidvanias themselves, which it turned out I actually liked a lot!

Mana Spark provided a similar entry point into the roguelike genre. What I dislike about roguelikes is their permadeath punishment and their random layouts, and how those factors combine to create exactly the wrong kind of repetitiveness for me. Starting over each run from the beginning means you replay the early content long after it’s ceased to be an interesting challenge, and if you die to a late-game challenge the randomized layouts/upgrade/enemies prevent you from practicing or retrying that challenge even once you get back through the early content again.

Given my reliance on novel challenges, it’s unsurprising that I’d be turned off by roguelikes. When I fail, what I want to do is try again on the specific challenge I failed, to learn how to handle it. The last thing I want to do is be forced to make my way through the early levels that are no longer novel or challenging.

But Mana Spark has combat unlike any other roguelike I’ve played. Its deliberate pace and varied enemies requiring different tactics made for a high skill ceiling and kept even the early areas' combat engaging for me for quite a while - long enough for me to get hooked. With that problem solved, I could finally enjoy the things I’d heard people say they liked about roguelikes - experimenting with different upgrades, finding effective builds, having great runs that take you farther than ever before. And so Mana Spark showed me that it really is that reliance on novelty and learning, not the core structure of roguelikes, that causes my dislike of the genre.

More and more, I find myself thinking that most of the analysis we write about games is really about justifying automatic emotional responses that we’re not even aware of and which vary widely between players.

For a while, I thought Mana Spark might be the first roguelike I’d actually finish. It’s looking unlikely, though, because the novelty problem gets worse the further into a roguelike you get. By now I’m consistently able to get past the second boss and into the third and final area where the game’s strongest enemies appear. It’s taking me a while to learn to fight them effectively, and every time they kill me I have to get through the first two areas and first two boss fights before I can try again. And by now I’ve seen all the upgrades, and there’s basically nothing new going on in those first areas - it feels like a run doesn’t even really start until I get past the second boss, and it takes a while to do that.

If I could spend some in-game resources to restart a floor when I die, without starting completely over - or to skip the gameplay up through the last boss I beat, getting the random upgrades I’d have gotten along the way - I’d probably still be hooked, and would expect to finish the game. As it is, too high a percentage of my time is now spent on non-novel gameplay and I’m losing interest.

It’s a shame that Mana Spark couldn’t permanently solve my problems the way SteamWorld Dig 2 did. But I still had a good time with it for a while and am glad that I can now understand the appeal of its genre.