Ostensible Improvements: When Better Isn’t
Today I’m looking at sequels with design changes that are ostensibly improvements but in practice have negligible or even negative impact. This is the intellectual cousin of my blog on incoherent game systems but with a key difference: in that piece the design decisions looked dubious even in theory when closely examined, whereas these sequel changes appear to be slam dunks on paper.
This piece will examine three types of dubious improvements:
Genuine improvements that are conservatively iterative enough to be more than cancelled out by the passage of time
Improvements that are in some sense objectively better but don’t make the game as a whole appreciably better
Improvements motivated by textbook good design that result in a worse game
Better But Not Better Enough
I recently began playing Super Mario Galaxy 2. It’s the rare straightforward Mario sequel from a company that normally eschews the standard “bigger, better and more badass” (AKA “conservative iterative improvement") approach. There are probably arguments to be made that Galaxy 2 is better than 1, and had I played them side by side or in reverse order I might agree. But playing them in release order Galaxy 2 feels fun but inessential — probably the most skippable game in the series.
Everyone is familiar with the concept of sequel and genre fatigue so I don’t need to elaborate. The point being that minor design changes, even when inarguable improvements, often can’t counteract the downward pressure of boredom with familiarity. As the number of “bigger, better more badass” franchise entries increases the less “is this game better than the last?” is a relevant question; the pertinent question becomes "is it better enough to outpace fatigue?"
Better in Ways that Don’t Matter
Project X-Zone 2
One of my favorite 3DS games is Project X-Zone, a Namco / Sega / Capcom crossover “strategy RPG” that takes no real strategy of any kind. Unit formation doesn’t matter, range doesn’t matter. There’s little unit differentiation — in most SRPGs you’d have a tanky low-damage front line protecting glass-cannon offensive units — in PxZ the units all feel roughly equivalent.
One of the weakest elements of PxZ design is the use of super and special moves. Both moves draw from the same globally shared resource bar. A super move takes 100% (out of 150% max...don’t ask me!) and can more than double the damage you do; a special move can take 30% of that same bar and do an extra 15% damage. Why would you ever use the latter given how XP inefficient it is? Answer: you wouldn’t, rendering 90% of the special abilities in the game useless.
I was very excited when I read about Project X Zone 2‘s changes. It struck me as similar in spirit to the detailed document the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn team put out, illustrating that they understood the concerns of the player base and had an eyes-wide-open view of the problems with the game. Almost every issue with the strategy layer of PXZ1 was being fixed in 2, bolstered by some nifty additions. Characters do extra damage when attacking from the side or back — positioning now matters! Special moves now use a unit-specific resource rather than drawing from the same global super move resource, meaning special abilities and super moves no longer compete against each.
The sequel introduces a leveling system that lets you power up individual moves and a character customization system that lets you choose passive and active abilities. More player choice, strategy, personalization and “reward loops” huzzah! The game even has Roman Cancels and Force Roman Cancels — google it!
Project X Zone 2 fixes every mechanical problem with the original. It’s like they read my mind when planning the sequel.
But then I played the game and those changes make almost no difference.
The big problem with PxZ2 is that while the strategy ceiling has been raised the difficulty has been lowered. The game is so easy (at least to me, being decent at these types of games) that any application of strategy is purely optional. You can attack from the back for extra damage, use special moves to increase movement options, use Force Roman Cancels to develop long and damaging custom combos — but you can easily beat levels purely by bumbling through them.
Tellingly the IGN review makes no mention of any of the system improvements at all. None! Despite the mechanics of the game being radically overhauled the review signs off with “Don’t come expecting deep gameplay or even inventive updates to distinguish it from the previous game.” While that’s not exactly right it’s right enough in spirit — the game is significantly updated, but along an axis irrelevant to overall enjoyment.
The main reason to buy PXZ2 is not for the mechanics but because you can call the werewolf dude from Altered Beast to fight alongside Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone, Ulala from Space Channel 5, Kage and Akira from Virtua Fighter, and, uh, whatever that squirrel thing is.
Low difficulty rendering the advanced mechanics superfluous seems to be the biggest issue with the game, but I'm not convinced that making the game hard enough to require the proper use of mechanics would make the game better. My favorite moment in part 1 is the introduction of a Gain Ground level that includes that game's unique character collecting system. The reason I love this moment is that I @$*!ing love Gain Ground (the secret best Sega game) and it makes me happy that someone somewhere remembered it exists. Similarly my favorite moment in part 2 is when Ken and Ryu fight against M. Bison, using the sequence of moves and the soundtrack from Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. (Snob voice: the Japanese version)
These are pure fan service moments, not gameplay elements. But the strength of the game — the entire point of the game — is fan service. A harder game with a realistic possibility of losing would mean repeating levels, and while that can be fun in a more strategy-oriented SRPG like Fire Emblem it would be jarring in such lighter fare. Turning the game into a challenging, mechanically satisfying one would take a lot of work, even on top of the substantial amount of work put into the sequel. It would require a radical transformation. The sequel improvements fail to make the game meaningfully better because while much work was put into strategy elements ultimately it's still not a strategy-centric game.
Tacoma
Along the lines of Project X Zone 2 is Tacoma. I'm fairly certain nobody has made this particular comparison before, but read on! (I realize Tacoma is a follow-up, not a sequel, but it's close enough — if it makes you feel better imagine the main character in Tacoma is the girl from Gone Home grown up.)
According to SteamSpy Gone Home has 700k owners. Tacoma has 26k. Gone Home was a subject of conversation for years, Tacoma for days. It's not my place to say that the game was a disappointment commercially or critically — I haven't played it nor do I know what the budget or sales expectation was. But it feels safe to say that it underperformed in some sense.
Revamping Tacoma to be more than 'Gone Home on a space station', in which the creators explain the differences and improvements from Gone Home to Tacoma is an interesting read in that the focus is squarely on mechanical improvements. The problem with Project X Zone 2 is that the improvements were mostly mechanical to a game that was not mechanics-driven, and I suspect that is even more true of Tacoma. (Normally I'm loathe to talk about games I haven't played, but this section is based on critical and audience reception, not my personal opinion)
My understanding of Gone Home is that the appeal is the subject matter, the atmosphere and the nostalgia. The mechanics are Resident Evil 1 style "pick up and rotate objects." Often when effusive critics write about the mechanics of the game what they praise is the lack of mechanics, as in this Atlantic piece:
Gone Home also feels a bit like an experiment. It's a new, effective attack on the convention that in order to be plausible and poignant, game stories necessarily need more complicated systems, higher-resolution graphics, the participation of real-world actors, and heaps of choices and rewards
The pitch for Tacoma is that it's more mechanically interesting, an embrace of the convention that the previous game rejected. If adding more mechanics makes a narrative game better isn't the endpoint just...Bioshock? (I would note that my favorite narrative game, Kamaitachi no Yoru AKA Night of the Sickel Weasel AKA Banshee's Last Cry, has no mechanics at all!) In Tacoma you can rewind and fast forward conversations to create interactive CSI-style re-enactments. When the devs speak of "active" vs "passive" observers the distinction is not emotional engagement or attentiveness, it's APM. The idea seems to be one follows from the other — that players who are more mechanically involved will also be more emotionally involved, but that may be a plausible-sounding non-sequitur, especially considering the success of the first game. If anythi
