Staged Fighting: Guacamelee's Combat

Guacamelee's combat feel different that of other beat'em up games I've played.

Elsewhere, combat seems like it's about rhythms, about getting in sync with the enemy, about learning the right times to attack and when to counter or dodge.  Or they're about button mashing, or combo memorization, or pattern recognition.

Guacamelee (2013) has some of that, all of that, certainly.  But it asks something different of you, I think, than games like Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Castle Crashers, Dark Souls, the Batman: Arkham games, or older beat'em ups like Double Dragon or that Simpsons arcade game.  It's more active.  More dynamic.  Like I said, different.

In the beginning of Guacamelee the combat seems pretty straightforward.  An attack button, a roll-dodge, a grapple, jumping.  Different directions with the punch did different attacks; up + attack sent enemies into the air for air combos.  It's all pretty standard, pretty laid back.  The game has a visually distinctive aesthetic, the music was cool, and the tone was light-hearted and jokey; it seemed like it'd be an enjoyable, chill little indie game.  It throws one enemy at you first, then another one that can dodge your moves, then multiple enemies, and the game seemed to be slowly ramping up in difficulty, making sure the player is there, every step of the way.

Then there was this room I hit, where I died.  Really quickly.  Then I restarted, and died.  Again. And again.  I didn't press restart immediately.  I took a breath, thought about it.  This game isn't just what I thought it was going to be then?  Fine, okay.  I pressed restart.  Clear eyes, full hearts, let's do this.

Guacamelee! (The exclamation point is a part of the official title, but I am not typing it out each time!) is a 2d sidescrolling game by Drinkbox Studios most often described as a Metroidvania style action platformer, one with a distinctive Mexican Lucha Libre style asthetic, although the Lucha theme sort of fades away after the second village.  The Metroidvania aspect comes from the special moves you learn throughout the game, which serve as keys to unlock new areas, as new combat tools, and to destroy blocks that might be protecting secret areas.  The secret areas generally aren't worth it in terms of loot; you might find a chest with money you can use to upgrade your health, stamina, or damage, or to buy costumes, or you might find a challenging combat arena or platforming section, which if you complete it, will grant you orbs, again either giving you more health or more stamina.  If you spend more time destroying blocks, finding secret areas and doing these challenges, your character just grows stronger, and the game actually just becomes easier for you.  But the challenges are fun for their own sake, and varied, and the platforming puzzles will always be cordoned off by the appropriately colored block so you'll have the right special moves needed to solve them.  And the special moves the game comes up with are great: powerful, multi-functional, fun, and distinctive, both visually and from each other.

The first special move you learn, for example, is called "Rooster Uppercut."   In mid-air, it propels you up and slightly forward a set distance, so it works somewhat like a double jump.  It also sends most enemies it hits skyward into the air, where you can jump up to continue comboing them.  You need it in order to get up to a ledge you couldn't reach before that leads to another area, which is where the Metroid-iness comes in.  And the move destroys red-colored blocks.

Standing on a green block.  Hey, there's a red block!  and a yellow one to the right

The color-coded blocks are blatantly out of place in Guacamelee's game world.  They don't even look like they're made out of any particular type of material.  Games have generally been eschewing having such video gamey in-world objects for a while now, but Guacamelee doesn't seem worried about that.  Dust: An Elysian Tail also had something similar to the blocks in color-coded floating crystal gate things which would only let you pass when you had the right colored gem (which are given to you through the story), but it was a world with magic in it, and it gave some sort of explanation.

Guacamelee! doesn't bother.  It's happy to employ video game logic if there's any sort of gameplay reason for it.  So although the game starts off just putting enemies in your path as you travel through a forest in the beginning, later parts might just drop walls around you once you've entered a certain area turning it into a combat arena, and then start teleporting in enemies for you to fight.  It has those treasure chests and floating orbs I mentioned earlier.  And it introduces platforming sections later on more reminiscent of the self-contained, challenging levels in games like N+ or Super Meat Boy than anything in Metroid or Castlevania; these aren't sections that care too deeply about logically or realistically fitting into the game world at large: glowy death saws, moving platforms, criss-crossing deadly vines over pits of deadly liquid, that's some of what's offered.  Drinkbox doesn't seem to care as much about breaking immersion so much as creating challenging, fun, levels.  As the game progresses, world design falls away and the environments become a lot of midair platforms and enemies in boxy, angular rooms tunneled through textured, miscellaneous materials.

The color coded blocks serve a purpose beyond just telling you what special move breaks what.  You learn to associate each the move with the color of the block it breaks through, and that's necessary later, when the enemies start showing up with colored shields.  Again, no in-game explanation; these enemies can still be hit, but they won't take damage until you break their shields with the corresponding color-associated move.  But they communicate clearly what needs to be done, and it seems straightforward enough at first; by this point you'd grown accustomed to reading the different enemy attack patterns, so this was just making sure to land that one special move on that enemy before beating on them normally.  But then, as the game continues and the fighting gets tougher, you realize that the shields re-generate after a while.  You need to keep on them.  But more enemies are arriving.

One enemy with a red shield, two with a green one.

The game also later introduces something else to the mix: there are light and dark worlds, and later after that, you'll learn a special move that switches between them.  Levels will look slightly different, platforms will be in one world but not the other, and enemies will also show up only one world; in the other one they show up as black or white silhouetted figures.  But even though you can't hit these other-world figures, they can hit you.  And that, combined with the colored shields, and the game throwing multiple enemies and enemy types at you at a time, and more enemies are teleporting in, and you're locked within a small arena, and suddenly you're going to be dying pretty quickly if you're not on the ball.

And along with the different mechanics, the game varies the types of enemies; they aren't just palette swaps.  There are enemies that dodge, ones that can fly, ones that can throw projectiles, huge ones with slow, unblockable attacks,  and others; learn these enemies and what they do, learn this game's intricacies, and adapt, or die.

Yes, there's your character on his back there in the middle.  Surrounded by different enemies, including two in the opposite light world, to the right

One of the most basic strategies in combat games where you have to fight multiple enemies is to focus on one enemy to whale on.  Take one down quickly, before their numbers start to overwhelm you.  But with Guacamelee, with the shields and the dual world mechanic and the sheer number of enemies it throws at you, you're going to have to think on a higher level than that, and button mashing will just lead to quick deaths.  In the combat-focused areas/arenas where the games just puts you in a room, which also happen to be my favorite parts of the game, Guacamelee's enemies come in waves.  Each wave doesn't arrive all at once; they teleport into the arena over time.  But you need to get your shots in early, before the numbers start adding up.  Once they do, the best way I found to manage their numbers was to knock most of them down again.  You need to prioritize; some enemies are much more dangerous than others, especially in crowds.  Take out the projectile throwers first, maybe.  Figure out how to get the space to eliminate the shields.  Develop a strategy.  It's up to you to figure out how to avoid putting yourself in a bad situation, cornered against too many enemies, getting knocked down over and over again, and where you can't even tell how many enemies you're facing or when they're attacking anymore.  And there's enough variables and options at any moment that it can become overwhelming, which is again, where the obvious visual language the game uses helps.  You need to know what enemies are in there with you, what they're capable of, and what you need to do to defeat them, so you can make the right decisions.  Guacamelee's combat is all about crowd control, about enemy management, and to that end, there were two moves that I found incredible useful for keeping the enemies at bay: rolling, and grappling.

Roll dodging is great.  It's a move that grants you brief invulnerability to move through most enemy attacks, and it's so important that they there are two different ways to control rolling on your controller: a button, and the right stick.  The use of the invulnerability is also so important that the game uses a blueish tinge around your character when you dodge through an attack that would've hit you otherwise, to make sure you know what's happening.  Rolling's a tool you need when you're in a bad situation and you need to get some separation from the crowd, to regroup.  The other important thing about rolling, though?  You can interrupt whatever you're doing with it.  That becomes important because of the animations that some of the special moves have; cancelling out of them with your roll becomes incredibly useful, especially in certain encounters.  Unfortunately, this tactic is something the game never explicitly teaches you; the game developers acknowledge this oversight in their postmortem on Gamasutra (http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/200658/postmortem_drinkbox_studios_.php?page=5).

That's your character, rolling between the huge skeleton guy's legs.  See him?

Grappling, meanwhile, is another move that gets its own button.  You can only grapple enemies once they've been hit enough times, in a certain amount of time.  But once they're stunned, you can grab onto them, and you can either suplex them, which does more damage, or you can throw them across the screen.  While grappling, you also can't be hit by other enemies; it doesn't last forever, but you do get some time to choose what grappling move to use on them, or what direction to throw them in.  Why it's so useful is because if thrown enemies hit other enemies, those guys also get knocked down.  They don't take too much damage, but that give you time and space.  And in Guacamelee's combat, you're always fighting for time and space, enough to isolate one enemy and land a longer combo on them without getting interrupted.  The game's combat is open-ended enough that other people might have different strategies.  Another player, Ben Ruiz, favored suplexing and higher damage over throws, in his "Combat Analysis: Guacamelee" article posted on Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenRuiz/20130522/192829/Combat_Analysis_Guacamelee.php).  Judging from what he wrote, he also likes, plays, and thinks way more beat'em up type games than I do.  Which makes sense, since he's a a game designer that makes these types of games.

Guacamelee's combat has little to do with actual fighting, or Lucha wrestling, or anything real world.  It's game-y: the dodge is game-y, the grapple is game-y, and it keeps introducing, training, and testing the player with new mechanics all the way through.  Parceling out new combat moves and new weapons to the player to keep things fresh is something that lots of beat'em up type games have done: witness God of War, or Arkham Asylum.  But in those games, one design problem developers seem to have is actually getting players to use the new-fangled moves and not just sticking with the old stand-bys, without just making the old moves useless.  Guacamelee forces you to use every single move it gives you, and it uses every button on the PS3 controller.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) also had something similar in that it had certain enemies that weren't affected by certain types of attacks, forcing players to mix things up, but it was more annoying there; it felt unfair, that these enemies didn't follow the rules.  One of the reasons why Guacamelee gets away with it more (for me) is, I think, because of how clearly it communicates that it's geared towards being a skill-based game first and foremost.  The color-coding and the dual-world white and black effects are obvious sign posts that makes it easier to accept a new set of rules (and to differentiate the enemies too), as well as the environments, the arena walls, and everything else that communicates that the game world is silly and game-y and unreal; the enemies aren't cheating, because they're not absoltely not meant to be living, breathing enemies.  They're Simon colored buttons.  You just need to figure out how to go over and hit them.

Simon, invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison according to Wikipedia

What about boss fights?  There are bosses.  They're fine.  But as you might expect, the crowd control aspect goes away, and the game becomes less interesting as a result.  A lot of the bosses are Megaman-like, about you learning their unique attacks patterns and dodging them.  It isn't about planning how to isolate an enemy from the crowd; reflexes play a huge role, and my reactions suck.  The developer tried to make the bosses still use some of the mechanics, but its in less interesting ways, for the most part. It feels more wait-your-turn, less proactive.  The second last boss is probably the hardest non-optional thing you'll encounter, but it still feels like part of the same game, at least.  The final boss just feels too random.  You wait for its attacks.  You dodge them.  Some of its attacks or more difficult to avoid than others, so maybe you get hit.  You wait for an opportunity, you dash in close, you take down its shields (it has colored shields too) and perform your best combo.  And hopefully, you drain its health down before it drains yours.  It felt a lot like every other combat game suddenly, and it wasn't what I loved about Guacamelee.  I think I spent more time fighting the second last boss than the last one, but I enjoyed the former way more than the latter.

Guacamelee requires a different mindset on how to approach its combat, or at least it did from me.  The platforming is also great, but the combat arenas is where the game really shines.  It's about not getting cornered.  It's about never letting the enemies get close enough to make randomness or reflexes matter.  Manage their numbers, manage screen space, knock down, isolate, and get your hits in when you can.  The game isn't easy, and combat, even without getting into the optional challenges, can be especially tough.  Guacamelee's difficulty spikes a lot, and it's definitely not "fair" with how it ramps up.  I found it rewarding, but others might not (and did not).  Even though all the mechanics and enemies are introduced well enough that most players should understand what every individual element does on its own, that's different from doing anything about them when they're all mixed together and thrown at you.  And although it's made clear throughout that Guacamelee is a game world and not at all a realistic analog of one, the type of game it's trying to be isn't made as clear.  The first hour or so of the game, when you spend time in a village talking to people and wandering through a forest with sparse enemies, it's a completely different game from the last hour.  Guacamelee isn't a Metroidvania game, really.  There's no exploration; you're always told where to go next.

I made a comparison to N+ and Super Meat Boy earlier in terms of challenge, but those games have a lot fewer game mechanics and moving parts to master.  You can jump and that's it, and everything else is just figuring out how to jump to avoid dying.  But those games, there's a more set path to success; you generally know what you have to do, and the problem is just doing it.  The levels are fairly static.  A lot of games are still like that; they have either single solutions or pretty straightforward strategies to bypass the obstacles it sets in front of you.  In Guacamelee, enemy encounters are dynamic, and the fights shift organically.  The enemies move, they attack unpredictably, and they don't play nice.  There's no block button which lets you sit back and decide when to engage (MGS Rising).  There's no counter button, so the game becomes about mashing the attack button and waiting for the enemy to attack (Assassin's Creed, Batman: Arkham games).  There's less room to back up.  If something doesn't work, change your approach.  The tools are all given to you.  You just have to figure out how to use them.