why was six afraid of seven? because seven ain't nine and a nine is just a six upside down. wait, how does this go again?
I believe fully in the idea of the "7/10 game" as an unpredictable and chaotic subgenre. they are the hole-in-the-wall restaurant of video games. does this place have a low food safety rating because they care about their cuisine more than cleanliness? or is it actually just a mess from top to bottom?
the 7/10 is where all the unique experiences that aren't breakout enough to get serious money or attention live. it's where you'll see the unhinged genre combinations that didn't quite flesh out into a coherent game, the saucy story beats that started somewhere exciting but then forgot to go anywhere, the game mechanics with deep implementations that are used for very shallow purposes because implementing and balancing content is hard
it's where you can run your hands over a game and feel the Seams of Creation, the stitches of its limitations where its worldbuilding falls away, and can sense the mechanical core of how it ticks, dissect the ways the corners were glued in order to tie everything together, and truly understand the ways that, because a game has to Be Done at some point, game development is the marriage of creativity and compromise (and let me tell you, this is one toxic ship)
when I laid eyes upon Ground Divers in a switch sale last week, I immediately sensed that this was A 7/10 Game just from the topline, and after having put about 8 hours into it, I can say that it's delivered completely on that promise
suddenly i remember watching youtube videos of mr driller: drill land
Ground Divers is an Arcsys title from 2022 that effectively reads and plays like an indie game that got lost on the way to Comiket 10 years ago, and this constant struggle between "one person's idea that just manifested itself onto the internet" and "Actual Professional Game With Budget And Promotion" is endlessly fascinating to me
this morning, I found this developer interview which basically describes the conception of this game as a submission to Arcsys's "mess around and find out" division, which makes a lot of sense for the game it is.
Ground Divers is marketed as a roguelike strategy game, a sort of Dig Dug with a bunch of modern elements like procedurally generated levels, roguelike progression resets, and randomized equipment buffs.
the twist is that rather than directly controlling a character, you're driving a cute robot (design by Shigeto Koyama of Promare, among others) by wire, dropping waypoints for it to path itself between and pressing the "cheer" button every few seconds to keep it powered (because Ganbare Tsuruhashi-kun is a nice and high-spirit title).
you have a limited amount of Action Points which you can use to command Tsuruhashi (either by dropping waypoints or activating his special attack), which are earned by excavating blocks, so there's a balance to be struck between being micromanaging him and carefully charting an energy-efficient path.
this means that the gameplay is both meditative and frantic, a mix of careful route planning and chaotic flailing, as if you take too long to assign Tsuruhashi a route, he will wander off on his own and walk into the range of a mermaid that will beat the crap out of him
it's a simple core game mechanic, but a satisfying one, and one that I felt myself actually growing better at understanding its nuances as the game goes on.
what's a 7/10 if you don't come moments from dropping it, before popping off
it's also fundamentally at odds with a lot of the "modern" components of the game; you are alloted one (1) equipment slot on Tsuruhashi to customize his abilities, but equipment needs to be constructed from random loot drops (along with a secondary, non-loot currency) and comes with randomized abilities, meaning that I would spend like 30 minutes grinding drops, only to build an equipment with 1 desirable ability instead of 2, meaning that the entire exercise was useless.
and this matters because the midgame of Ground Divers is balanced around you actually having Good Equipment - when the levels start having higher durability blocks, an attack buff is all but mandatory (and much more desirable than movement or 'press the R button every 4 seconds instead of 3' buffs), because each level has a hard time limit which cannot be avoided, and in order to get from point A to point B you simply have to get through a lot of blocks
(the game tutorializes this to you by saying "enemies will gang up and attack you when you've been in a level too long", only for you to find out later that this means a piece of text reading "GAME OVER TIMER 00:59" will appear on screen with no other change)
this is what I would call 7/10 Game Design where there are cool ideas that are bogged down by tiring implementations (and honestly, fixing it is as easy as making a slot-based system where you can craft buffs directly and equip a few at a time), but luckily, the spirit of the 7/10 has a countermeasure: 7/10 Game Balancing
there are many minor gameplay features I have glanced over so far - the ability to craft helper bots (which are expensive in terms of A startup), to call enemies to other parts of the map to create a safer path, and consumable items which grant small buffs or heals. this is because I did not really find any of these useful. do you know what I did find useful? drugs
there is one specific item that increases Tsuruhashi's attack by 100 for fifteen seconds, and then reduces it by 150 afterward. Tsuruhashi's base attack is like, 6, and the best attack equipment I could find granted 18 attack (see why I said equipment matters?), so 100 attack lets you walk through blocks like they are water
obviously the downside is very painful, but here's the secret: each use of the item stacks. use two at once? now you have 224 attack. did they wear off and you're at like -76 attack now? use three more of them and you're at 224 again. the compounding suffering is a problem for future you. just win, baby
I feel like this was not the "intended" way to play the game, but was it a fun thing to figure out, just like how it was fun to figure out that the "shoot a laser beam straight ahead, incincerating blocks" special is basically 1000x more useful than the "blow up things in a 3x3 square centered on you" special? absolutely. that's 7/10 Spirit
here's just a bunch of things i find funny
moving away from the gameplay and back towards the tug-of-war between one person's idea and A Retail Game, the precise level of investment and polish this game has fascinates me.
the game has all of like 300 RT in Japanese and 30 RT in English on announcement tweets for it, and its marketing push seems to have been "give 20 Vtubers with like 10K followers or less prerelease keys for the game" (these compromise like 99% of the Ground Divers footage on youtube). I also don't really know why this game is a Switch exclusive.
the game trumpets the fact that "Cha-La Head-Cha-La" Hironobu Kageyama worked on the (very good and fitting) theme song, only to put this song just on the main menu screen and nowhere else
is there an opening cinematic? no. is there a title screen? no. boot up the game, arcsys splash, unreal splash, main menu. new game / continue / options (and there's only like two options)
is it in the credits? only the instrumental version. and speaking of the credits... they don't even roll during gameplay! you have TWO separate endings, one after beating the last stage, and one "hidden" one you can find by examining the shop menu after beating the last stage.
both of these endings are "the journey continues" endings, one of which states "the real renewable energy source that will save humankind is the friendship we made along the way". neither feels like the game is over, and only by the grace of the one Vtuber to 100% - much less complete - the game (to the tune of about 1000 views, god bless her) do I know that there's actually nothing more past where that point.
the story of this game is exactly what you'd expect. it starts with a clear hook: in order to fight off the nonrenewable resource depletion of earth, humans have invented Cool Fucking Robot, which we can use to mine magical renewable energy. for example, you go to the desert to mine for a black liquid that is Not Oil (It Is Not Oil Because We Said "It Is Not Oil").
what happens after this? the character Who Is Definitely Not Modeled After Someone's Boss comes in and says "hey heroes trying to find infinite renewable energy! I signed us up to instead find something worth a ton of money, because I like money". this is never challenged in any meaningful way, and then you end up in space and the game ends. roll credits (looks up) actually, I guess don't roll credits
i will buy any game with good enough character designs
the character design by Kakeru Kakemaru in this game, more than anything else, is what obviously shines. I can and will post about Anne, the bespectacled genius scientist, and Dorothy, your standard 2000s-anime grade obsessive lesbian with elf-y ears, for the rest of my life, and the cast is rounded out by an eternally young boy and a ripped bara tiger.
there is also a robot who cannot talk in anything other than bleeps who is implied to be the soul of someone critically injured on a previous mission transfered into a machine? anyway that's never addressed either
they breathe life into the game with their vibrant appearances and light banter (none of it is groundbreaking, but fun is fun), and it's also inherently funny to me that two characters are added to the cast late game and one is Obviously A Stand In For Your Boss and the other is Just Literally a Dog.
one thing Ground Divers has taught me is that you can stuff a LOT of flavor text into a 7/10 game. the enemies have profiles, the charactesr have multiple profiles (the bara furry's exclusively describes how he clogged up the only toilet on the ship for some reason), there's a bunch of decorations for the ship you can sink resources into, you can select any character as your UI navigator and they'll react to your menu actions. it's really quite charming
7/10 games are also extreme Make Your Own Fun zones, which is why Ground Divers has normal and hard modes for each level, as well as a 0-3 star ranking system, and neither of these have any appreciable impact on the gameplay loop. stars give a negligible amount of currency, and the loot tables seem the same for normal and hard variants.
yeah, we coded these systems, one because we like implementing systems more than content, and two because we like giving ways to extend longevity if you want to For Some Reason. keep scrolling
I should also note there are precisely 7 levels in the game (this is advertised in the catch copy).
outro
should you buy and play Ground Divers? don't ask me, I just want you to hear my rambling about all the funny little points in this game that stick in my memory.
ultimately, I want to ship a 7/10 game like Ground Divers. it is unique, has memorable components, and is built at a quality, content and polish level that I find feasible. it is a game that I empathize with making and playing.
the spirit of a 7/10 game is that you don't need to play every 7/10 game, but they're often fun to hear about, and when you see one that you know will click with you - either from a mechanical or from a meta standpoint - you will know it instantly.
it was 7/10 at first sight.