wanderingshade posted...
I do not know any of those artists.
Then it's a good thing I considered that fact when linking some of their more popular songs so people who might not be familiar with them could give 'em a listen.
Anyways. Tried the Adventure of Elliot. In true Team Asano fashion the bones of a good game are there but it's quite lacking in Quality of Life. They do feedback surveys, so I want to get me thoughts down now while they're still fresh.
The core of the game is pretty obviously a 2D Zelda Game. You've got Vials instead of Bottles, a fairy companion, bombs, arrows, a sword and shield. They're clearly doing their own thing with it, but the overall feel is very reminiscent of classic Zelda. I could even liken the Magicite system to Rings from the Oracle games, and some of my upgrades were bigger bomb bags and arrow quivers.
My biggest problem is with the menus. The Main Menu is fine. It's the Shortcuts menu that has problems. You open it with ZR, and this opens four submenus. Weapons, Fairy Powers, Medicine Vials, and Magicite Loadouts. You can tab between the submenus with ZL and ZR with Weapons being the default menu. Like most classic 2D Zelda games, you'll want to swap various items and powers around often to resolve various tasks. See a bombable wall? Gotta equip your bombs. Annoying ranged enemies? Let's equip the bow. Bottomless chasms got you down? Swap to Fairy's warp power, command her across the gap, and trade places.
And therein lies the problem. If I want to swap to a new fairy power I have to press ZR > ZR > ZR > then select the power I want and press A. That might not seem like that big a deal but I found myself swapping fairy powers pretty often, and with 5 dedicated controls for the fairy I feel like we could have
definitely
just made one of them be a context-sensitive menu for the fairy powers. Maybe holding down L1, pressing left on the D-Pad (the other 3 D-Pad are for commands like "Move Ahead", "Follow", and "Stay". ) or pressing R3 would be fine. One press to immediately open the Fairy's menu, another to choose the power I need. Done.
Even the basic Weapon Menu is less efficient than Zelda. To swap weapons you need to Press ZR > Select the Weapon you wish to use > Select the Weapon you wish to Replace. In Zelda you'd just press Y to bind the weapon to Y, and X to bind it to X. Needing an extra button press (more if you count the extra menu navigation you have to do) just slows things down.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the Magicite Loadouts though. It's a good idea. The Magicites are basically your "Weapon Builds". But that also means that if you want to swap weapons, you need to then navigate to the Magicite menu to swap magicite loadouts too. Just changing out bombs for bows might necessitate a lengthy string of inputs like ZR > Select Bow > Replace Bomb > ZL > Select Magicite Loadout 4. All that for a single item swap.
If it feels like I'm making a mountain of a molehill, I ask that you please consider how often you swap weapons in 2D Zelda games. It's
very frequent
. Often multiple times per room. This inelegant menuing is quite atrocious. But there's a really easy solution here.
Bind weapons to the Magicite Loadout Menu
. If I have a loadout for Swords and Bombs...it stands to reason I'd want Swords and Bombs equipped with that loadout active. So just make it so I can register a weapon loadout to a given magicite loadout, and when I swap to that magicite loadout the sweapons come with it.
Put it all together and we can do the following. Move the Map Button to Select (-). ZL now opens Magicite Loadout Menu. ZR now opens Weapon Menu. Hold L1 to open Fairy Menu. Press Left on D-Pad for Medicine Menu. Make it so that Weapons can be registered to Magicite Menus, such that when equipping a Magicite Loadout the correct weapons for it are automatically equipped. This does make the Weapon Menu redundant, but if the final game has more weapons then there won't be enough Magicite Loadouts for every possible pair, so I'm leaving that there for future-proofing.
There's probably further optimizations that could be made, but I feel like this one little thing was the main roadblock in just enjoying this fun, fresh take on the classic 2D Zelda formula.