That title, ARMS, will probably be revealed to be a comedy backronym – "Accentuated Reach Mechanism Seventhousand" or something – but I prefer to think of those four capital letters as a title named after the noises made by some Nintendo bigwig strolling past a young developers' cubicle: "What in god's name is going on with her ARMS?!"
What indeed! On first glance, ARMS is Wii Boxing gone anime, a quite literal extension of the motion control classic's core principles – camera perched behind some young slugger's head, you block, shuffle, dodge and, most importantly, throw gloved punches using the Joy-Con controllers' (thankfully, practically 1:1 accurate) motion sensors.
But play two matches – one to learn the basics, and one to see what happens when you start actually thinking about them – and it feels a little different. Pitched somewhere between Punch Out!! and Windjammers, it's a game that – with the right opponent, at least – pivots wildly from tense, tight circling to wild flurries of fantasy sports violence.
The core is, of course, those ARMS(?) – your chosen fighter's weaponised limbs able to shoot, strangely slowly, ten feet ahead of them (and few feet to the side if you add curl by tilting the controller mid-flight). But it's not simple punch-block-counter punch – there's a fighting game's thinking lingering underneath the surface of every match.
Any punch – even the ones emerging from the super-charged flurry power-ups you earn over time – can be blocked. With quick enough reflexes, you can even punch an opponent's punch out of the air, sending their arm flopping impotently to the floor. That said, blocking for more than a couple of seconds also supercharges your next punch, making sitting back and absorbing an assault the more palatable option. Any block, however, can be broken with a grapple, performed by throwing a punch with each arm simultaneously. But a missed grapple leaves you perilously open to punches, bringing the whole shebang full circle. It's very neat.
There's some level of thinking beyond this – the demo offered up five characters (no word on if that's the full roster, although I'd hope not), each with varying strengths and weaknesses. That's mostly your standard weak-but-fast, strong-but-slow business, but Ninjara offers a hint of extra complexity with an air-dash that has him literally disappear and reappear.
On top of that is the fact that each character comes with a choice of three weapons to wear on the end of their ARMS(!), from boomerangs that flummox players by coming at them from odd directions, to three-pronged missiles-on-strings that make dashing ineffective. And on top of that, you can mix and match between the three weapons, choosing different implements for each fist.
I'm not saying ARMS could be an eSport if the world rightfully prized colourful, readable flights of dexterity over metagames and sad-looking wizards, but – OK, yes I am.
Of course there are caveats. While the two arenas I played in (a standard ring with added edge-set bounce pads, and a set of Aztec ziggurat-like steps) and five characters offered enough variety for more than my couple of preview sessions, it certainly needs more to feel sustainable as a full-price game.
Not only that, but any online mode's netcode needs to be more than ship-shape to: a) get over the fact that local multiplayer will levy, at the very least, the $80/£75 cost of a second pair of Joy-Con controllers to play and, b) make the game in any way playable. Nintendo's record in that respect has been shaky (although the Wii U's online offerings were, for the most part, respectable).
Finally, while the motion controls are surprisingly accurate, and pleasantly intuitive, I do hold out some hope for a standard button-based control scheme of some kind to bring an extra level of precision (no one on the show floor at our event seemed to know whether this was going to happen).
The hope – and my feeling right now – however, is that Nintendo has pulled the same trick for fighting games with ARMS as it did for competitive shooters with Splatoon. Not only have they sanitised and injected a neon glamour into an oft-repeated genre, but thrown new aspects of sideways thinking into the mix.
Like my fictional Japanese executive, we don't know precisely what's going on with ARMS, but hell if I don't want to find out.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire