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Weekly Update - Satisfying Length??
3 years ago1,198 words
ArtAtonal DreamsBrainConcept IdeasLoreMARDEKMaybeProgressQuestionsRPGsUncertaintyWeekly Updates Writing
Does this Mementome introducing the imaginary version of Savitr seem too long to you? And how long do you prefer RPGs to be??

Bleh... I have another brain scan on Monday, so it's been difficult to focus all week with that hanging over me. It's just another routine checkup to see if the cancer's regrowing, and all the previous scans I've had have come back okay... but there's always a chance that this'll be the one where I'm told my life's essentially over, which never stops being a difficult thought to deal with. Plus I've been digestively ill this week on top of that, which has been worrying me since I'll have to sit in a car and then an MRI machine for hours with no escape should that flare up (they do give you a button to press if you need to get out immediately, but I've never had to use it and would be embarrassed about the hassle it'll cause if I did). I may have to postpone the appointment depending on how I feel on Monday... Ugh, I just want to get it out of the way, though.

So because of all that, I didn't do nearly as much as I'd like this week. I did do a couple of things, though.




Since zero people shared their thoughts on last week's post about how I could write the dream version of Savitr such that he seemed like a generic JRPG protagonist, I used my own judgement to come up with the content of this first Mementome, which Collie gets from defeating the Preyloot. When you open the chest, this UI book appears, which you can progress through the pages of (and go backwards if you want).






I was difficult to know exactly what to do with this. The general concept is that of a 'transformative narrative' - something that introduces Collie to new ideas that inspire her to change her life around, to show that narrative works can be more than just distracting entertainment - combined with JRPG tropes that should be familiar to most people who'd choose to play this game.

So I wanted it to sound like a somewhat silly but still interesting super-short story (or at least the beginning of one). But I don't exactly consider myself a writer, so I leaned towards making it 'deliberately bad', kind of (the first line references two cliches, for example)... but then I wonder whether it just comes across as actually bad. Hmm.

I'll need to tweak it anyway; it's very much a first draft! While including these screenshots, I see stuff I could do differently, like having Blight the Betrayer appear directly instead of the weird declaration that it was his work.



In some ways it's similar to the beginning of MARDEK 1, in that it plays with overused tropes in a dream setting before moving onto something hopefully more interesting...

That precedes the gameplay in MARDEK, while Atonal Dreams starts with a short conversation between Collie and The Beast hinting at her story (it is her dream, after all) -



- which is followed by Collie killing the Preyloot - to involve the player in the dark past she's trying to move away from - and only then is this mementome acquired.

As I write this, I'm wondering whether the content of that mementome should just be a MARDEK-style intro instead, with accompanying visuals... but I've already changed everything around several times! And the start with Collie, The Beast, and then her killing the Preyloot makes more sense for her story...

Ehhhh.

One thing I'm concerned about with what I do have there is the length. Someone mentioned on a previous post (or on Patreon, I forget) that reading books like this felt like a chore, compared to the Dreamstones in MARDEK which engaged the mind differently as they felt more like conversations. I can understand that, and I know some players are averse to reading in general (though I wonder why they play genres like RPGs then).

Do you think it's too long? Not long enough?? There's not much text at all per page, but I feel there are definitely bits I could just prune entirely without losing anything too valuable.



I also spent some time refreshing my memory about the plot I've planned, and revising some minor details. The story and setting have been mostly the same since I started planning Atonal Dreams, though for the first time I decided to do a concept sketch of the setting as a whole:



It's a small group of islands called Crescent Rift, where one of Bronzeal's six elemental Sanctrees (the Destruction one) can be found. At the top of the Sanctree, there's a tear in reality, the Drealmscar, through which the Drealm can be seen. I wrote more about it on ∞ my Patreon ∞.

I wonder whether this makes you think "is that it?"... Whether you expected some world-spanning epic or something?

Atonal Dreams has been intended from the start to be a short prequel-of-sorts for the longer Divine Dreams, which would be an adaptation of MARDEK's plot. I originally thought I'd finish it in around six months! Which turned out to be laughably naive.

But keeping the scope manageable has been a key part of the plan from the start. Making something enormous is just impractical, and honestly I'd rather explore a small area in detail than a huge one sketchily.

There'll still be a decent amount of content, I hope. It's looking like I'll have 11 dungeons in total, or 9 unique ones since two are visited twice (different parts of them though). That's more than MARDEK 1+2 had for sure, and I'm not sure how many MARDEK 3 had.

I'm unsure how long each one would take to play through. Half an hour? An hour? Less?? More?!? Obviously it'll be subjective anyway; some people take 50 hours finishing an RPG others finish in around 6.

I saw a poll recently that I annoyingly didn't screenshot and can't find again; I think it was on a Reddit community about JRPGs or something? It asked how long people would prefer RPGs to be... and the lowest-scoring was the 0 to like 30 hours option, with subsequent ones scoring higher and higher. People like long RPGs, apparently.

That's how I used to feel too, as a teenager. I remember games where I'd get to what seemed like a final boss, only to realise that after 30 hours, I was only half way. How exciting!! These days, though, it all just feels so exhausting... I've been playing Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for maybe around 10 hours now? And while I've been enjoying it, I'm also feeling impatient, like I just want to be done with it. I have other stuff to play! (I'm probably like half way though, if my memory's accurate, which it might not be.)

So I'm curious:

Question: How long do you prefer RPGs to be? Does this one seem like it'll be long enough to you?

20 COMMENTS

Falcon64~3Y
I was honestly expecting Atonal Dreams to be *less* extensive than it seems to be planned to be, due to its nature as a "manageable prequel". As it stands, there's multiple distinct areas, so it definitely seems like it's going to be a full-fledged and fully-featured game—as you said, perhaps even longer than MARDEK 2!

As for my length preferences: I am notoriously bad at finishing extremely large AAA epics, and have been ever since childhood, as after a few weeks of playing something, I start getting distracted by other things. MARDEK never reached that point, though, even MARDEK 3 has a very manageable length. More self-contained games, like Disco Elysium (I recommend it, by the way, if you haven't played it yet!), I can finish in one go without issue.

That said, there is a certain appeal about huge worlds that are just waiting to be explored, and even if I don't finish them in one go, I tend to return to those games after a while. Their biggest issue is that the gameplay can eventually become repetitive, and new areas start to lose their luster.

One thing I've noticed is that in the past you had a tendency to expand the scope of your projects as you went, making the games bigger than initially planned in the end (and most commonly not finishing them at all), and while recently you write the entire thing in advance, which helps in limiting the scope, this tendency is still noticeable when it comes to things like gameplay elements. I'm not saying it's a bad thing per se, as I think all the gameplay additions and revisions in Atonal Dreams so far will make for a better game, but it's something to keep in mind, I feel. The currently planned length of Atonal Dreams seems to be well within the scope of your older projects, and thus manageable by me.

I don't think the book is long at all, it only takes, what, a minute to read through? The dreamstones were *much* longer. While too much text can definitely be grating (like in the beginning of Taming Dreams, where you kept getting essays without being allowed to actually play), this amount seems well within expectations for any RPG. And I assume that non-plot-relevant Mementomes (like monster descriptions) will be optional to read.
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
I've definitely got carried away with feature creep in the past, but what is it about Atonal Dreams that seems I'm doing that with this? I've been trying to avoid deviating much from my original intentions, though I suppose it's so easy when spending many months on something for every "I'll just make this little change" to build up.

The main thing that I can think of is revising how battles work, adding the summoning focus, though personally I see overrides like that differently to new features added on top. Still time-consuming though, so not 'better' from a development standpoint than feature bloating.

I suppose I've also added this intro that comes before the game was originally meant to start, and I've expanded some dream sections from what were originally single prolonged cutscene battles into full dungeons. But the story's scope hasn't changed drastically.

Also, I should add a card minigame! And a fishing minigame! Where you fish for cards! And you can also befriend and eventually date the fish/cards using an extensive personality/dialogue tree system!!
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Astreon152~3Y
The scope of the story hasn't changed drastically...

From 0 to 1, it's a small scope of numbers, yet there exists an infinity of numbers between them :)

Falcon's point stands: you were supposed to make some kind of short prequel to a main game, and it's turned into a bona fide game in itself that you already spent longer to make than initially scheduled.

Yet again, that just seems to be your character: can you even bind your creativity and publish a game you'd not find satisfying following your personal criteria ?

Not that i care, since the game will be outstanding in its own right once finished :)

Also, i like RPG that are short in themselves (like 20h max for main story). I can play longer ones if the plot doesn't feel overstretched in the process (which i find to be very rare). I usually spend some time on after-the-end quests, but i get tired of them pretty fast. And there's no way i'll drop 80+ hours into a game just to complete the bestiary or stuff like that.
0
Tobias 1115~3Y
I think the main issue was dramatically underestimating the amount of time it takes to make even a short RPG in 3D by myself. This seems to be a common issue among indie devs; human minds seem to be especially poor at predicting how long things will take, especially if they haven't done them before. It's still a short prequel, but even making one of those takes years.

I played that game OMNO recently, which had about six hours of gameplay. And the solo dev (who didn't even do the music) spent like five years on that!

I definitely don't intend to spend 5 years on this though.
1
Williyum1~3Y
Hey Tobias! This is unrelated but I have been reading your blogs since the early Fig Hunter days and I am a huge fan of your work. I just had an idea for you. I don't know if you have ever heard of Stadia, but it is a cloud gaming service owned by Google. They work with Indie developers a lot and because there are not many games on the platform yet, most games get a lot of exposure and reach most of the platform's audience. I think this service would be perfect for some of your games. Just a suggestion, would be cool to see some of your games there! Anyways, hope you are doing well!
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Tobias 1115~3Y
Hello! And I'm glad to know that whatever I'm doing has held your interest to some degree all these years!

I've only vaguely heard of Stadia, but I thought I'd heard it'd been shut down? Maybe not. I'm reminded though of Kartridge, which was also indie-focused with limited games on there so I hoped Sindrel Song would face little competition and do well on it... but the limited audience meant I sold only a handful of copies even when featured, way fewer than on Steam. I suspect it'd be similar with Stadia, and it takes a lot of effort to put games on platforms, so it might not be worth it.
0
PerfectVanity27~3Y
I like long games when they manage to keep their appeal to the end, but it depends on how interesting the gameplay is. Shorter games can also be very cool, but they don't feel as meaningful or memorable as longer ones, those I believe are directly correlated to the amount of time/thought spent on them.

Some of my favourite RPGs are relatively short to finish but contain loads of optional content, which can multiply the playtime for those who wish to do it all, while also making it all feel less linear. I know this is hard to do well in heavily story-based games, but it's something to consider.

Since you've divided Atonal Dreams into these dungeons (what I assume from your post will be around the same length), try just making one of them and then have a few playtesters go through it and report how long they took along with other feedback (whether they got bored or were left wanting more). That's really the only way to know how players will feel about it.
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purplerabbits148~3Y
The book intro definitely hit my nostalgia for MARDEK 1's opening. I'm not sure why, but as I was reading the book, I was struck by the expectation of, "There should be some pictures here." Maybe because the presentation was like a fairy tale and that's where my association comes in?

I really like the Cresent Rift drawing, its really pretty and looks like it came from an art book.

For how long I prefer rpg's, my answer is that it depends on the story. There is an expectation the rpg's are long epics like the Lord of the Rings. I think a better way of looking at length of a game would be by asking "is this part nessasary and how can I keep the player engaged to get to the point?"

As you have mentioned, younger you found that long rpgs were quite exciting. Since younger people had much more free time, they of course would enjoy long epics. While as adults, we need to be more efficient with out limited free time. Because of the need to maximise productivity, we, as adults, would find much enjoyment in a story that is efficient with its presentation of information. So, a thing to think about would be whether something is padding the run-time or is nessasary for the plot.

One of the most interesting case of unessasary padding with very compelling opening and visual style can be seen with the mmo Otherworld. Joshua Strife Hayes did a complete playthrough/review of the game: [LINK] The game's opening is a outstanding masterwork in visual design, so maybe it's somethibg to look at if you still are iffy on the opening of Atonal Dreams? The story is rather compeling since Joshua usually, in his worst mmo series, plays until things get unbearable due to bad game dessign. But, this game had a compelling enough story and outstanding visual style that he sloghed through the extraneous padding and, in the middle, restarted his playthrough with a different class character in order to progress through and see it to the end. The padding in otherworld consists of excessive fetch quests, kill x number of enemies, the grinding needed to level up and make it through the game. Due to corporate meddling, the devs were forced to increase the playtime of Otherworld much to the detriment of the story. The excessive padding partially contributed to why the game has so little players concurently, before Joshua did his review, because it took so long for players to get to the very cool stuff. The other main reason why so many people stop playing is that the combat is atrocious.

A contrasting example would be Portal. In that game Valve added in GLaDOS in order to get the players through the chambers. Without her voice taunting the players throughout the game, most players would get bored before the end of the game.

In both Otherworld and Portal, something in the game compelled the players to see the game to the end. Portal can be completed in one sitting while Otherworld is an mmo, a "forever game" the time spend in those games are really not comparable if asking for how long a game should be. Portal is efficient with its game where it introduces new mechanics or story when the old ones feel tired, while Otherworld has a very interesting story that is bogged down by corporate meddling.

On a tangent, I do love the world building in your games. It reminds me of the process of homebrewing a campain in dnd. You start out small and build up piece by piece until you have an entire world that's lively and full of thiught behind the why and how things became the way they are/will be.
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Tobias 1115~3Y
One of my goals with Atonal Dreams was to cut out padding that didn't contribute meaningfully to the story; I think I might even have mentioned that in some early descriptions. It bothers me actually that people might prefer 50+ hour epics, even though the vast majority of that time is spent doing inane, repetitive quests and there's probably not more than a couple of hours story in total...
4
Kalin24~3Y
The proper length will depend a lot on how much you charge for it. Free games can be any length at all: if it's super short, well I got what I paid for; if it's super long, at least there's no sunk cost fallacy making me feel guilt for quitting in chapter 1. But if you're asking for $60, then players will expect 10 hours of gameplay and 1 hour of voice acting, etc. Is it possible to split Divine Dreams into chapters to sell separately?

For the book, have you considered illustrating it? Like some of the cutscenes in Mardek, but instead of full color paintings try to make it look like woodcut illustrations.
2
Tobias 1115~3Y
Indie games typically go for around $10, it seems; I've seen discussion about what's considered the ideal price for one, but I'll need to look into it more when I need to set the price.

Come to think of it, Undertale's maybe equivalent to Atonal Dreams in length? And I think that is - or at least originally was - around that price?

I have considered illustrations for this mementome, but it's way more work than just writing. I'll probably experiment with something like that, though.
1
astralwolf92~3Y
Tough question. I'd say a 15-25hr campaign is nice for me. On another note have you ever played Divinity original sin 2?
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
I haven't played that, no.
1
ElektrikMagenta20~3Y
I feel like the best length for a game is 20-30 hours. More than that is perfectly fine, but just isn't necessary for me to feel satisfied. I really like the size of the map. I was a little surprised at first that it seemed smaller than I thought, but when I thought about it, it's not really smaller, it's just more... expansive? Like it really gives an opportunity to explore the intricacies of the island. Things don't need to be "vast" to be rich and interesting.
I guess some people prefer the dreamstones because dialogue is typically more engaging than just descriptive writing (big ole generalization there). Maybe changing up the form of the different mementos would keep things fresh and fun. Someone's could be a dialogue, someone's could be a poem, someone's could be a manual, stuff like that.
2
Tobias 1115~3Y
That's a good idea, about the mementomes being different styles of books depending on whose thoughts they contain! I'll keep that in mind.
1
MaxDes45~3Y
This is unrelated but do you do anything special to get echo or reverb on Sibelius in your divine dreams music? I love your tracks but never found out how to do reverb on Sibelius myself
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
I use the piano pedal line, or whatever it's called! The thing that adds a thing like 'Ped_____,' under a section, listed with the other lines like section repeats, accelerandos, etc. It's meant for piano only, but works okay for other instruments too.
2
LightAcolyte22~3Y
I have been pondering all week on this. My completely unhelpful answer is: it depends. (frown) I know that's super disappointing, but let me try and spruce up a lackluster answer with...qualifiers! (smile)

Usually my interest in a game is based on the plot, but I also enjoy having different mini-games at each new location to spice things up and make each one memorable. I have spent hundreds of hours (400+) on a single game that had maybe 16 hours of play, and I've spent less than an hour playing some that supposedly had over 100 hours of gameplay. It's nice when there's continuity of play...but what's the motive to re-visit an old locale? Why do I want to talk to every townsperson in this game? What shiny new objective will be completed if I explore this nondescript road to nowhere? Sometimes I don't want to go back and see how everyone's text updated just because one little thing changed in the plot, other times I go back every time just because "Dude, do you remember the bike game there? I gotta play that again." Occasionally giving the world a bit of a "lived in" feel because each area is not just visually unique but also mechanically unique is probably the #1 factor for when I would re-visit anything that wasn't plot-driven. So...how long should a game be in my opinion is...forever if the gameplay is engaging enough that I'll keep coming back to it. Even if I'm only coming back because I want to play a mini-game or two. How long should the actual plot be? I'm not sure...I'm fairly sure if the entire plot worth of sentences was less than 10 pages or so then it's not going to be a great game to me. I find that if you have 25-30 pages of sentences comprising the main plot this is adequately memorable and engaging for my taste. In terms of plot-relevant game transcripts: I've enjoy some that were only a few dozen pages worth just as much as ones that had over 200 pages (and plenty where I wouldn't even finish a transcript over 20 pages with really poor writing). For reference, a page to me is about A2 size with 14 point Courier New Font, single-spaced. How you add that script into the game with gameplay mechanics is an entirely different matter because even the speed that you allow a player to go through dialogue can drastically affect actual gameplay time over the entire course of the game, so I can't give a really relevant metric associated with just the gameplay time. Some games can more easily be rushed (some games you really want to rush through mechanical elements or just cheat through them), and some games penalize you heavily for rushing in terms of brutality or missed content. I can't rightfully answer you, perhaps: but I hope these considerations have helped and that my benchmark example for the plot-related transcript will help, too.
1
Tobias 1115~3Y
Interesting that you mention minigames as a point of appeal, since I've always found them tedious things to trudge through, myself!

Also interesting that you speak of plot in terms of pages (isn't A2 enormous though?); are you talking about something like a plot summary like you might read on Wikipedia, or a collection of every dialogue line included in the game? As a dev, I have no idea how many pages of writing would be in any of my games! And what of stuff like easily-missed NPC dialogue or optional scenes?

The Bravely Default games contain a ton of inane prattle that absolutely doesn't contribute to the main story thread, which I have mixed feelings about. I mean, I value story, lore, etc above other aspects of the experience, but I don't think that more is better exactly!

In MARDEK, I was inspired by Western RPGs - most notably Neverwinter Nights - and each dialogue 'line' (that is, a 'page' of the speech bubble) was fairly verbose. Since then, though, I've made the conscious decision to streamline dialogue, so now each 'line' in my games is often only a handful of words, or less.

These days, I feel that something short but well-crafted would appeal to me more than something mediocre but stretched out with repetitive padding, but I wonder how many other people would feel the same! I suppose I'll find out when I finish Atonal Dreams...
1
LightAcolyte22~3Y
I got a good laugh when you said "isn't A2 enormous though?" By some standards, it may very well be! For me it is the minimum comfortable size to "upscale" entire pages (text and everything else) to be legible by mapping it to that size and inverting colors if needed for light text on a dark background. This is a great question and definitely an important point to understand how much text I mean, though, because I am directly upscaling entire pages from A4 to A2, so the content that started out that way in 14 point Courier New Font is still the same relative scaling to the page. In effect, with this method, if it's 50 pages of A2 14 point at 100%; then, it will be 50 pages in A4 also as printed by a PC, but the true print size of that 14 point font would then now be upscaled 4x (like playing a NES game at 4x basically where each pixel is now a block of 4 pixels instead).

When I'm playing a game with text I can't read without painstaking manipulations of the visuals (if indeed they can even be read after such methods), I usually use a plot transcript. So I'm very familiar with plot transcripts for video games and how much plot-related text there is. For game design, I think this makes an accessible way for a developer to gauge how much textual content there is to the core of the game. As in, how much story should the game have compared to a game you find to be a good length. I don't know how else you'd do it with any reasonable accuracy. Such transcripts generally do not typically include random commentary by NPC's that's worthless to the plot, side quests or any mini-game text.

Here is an example of one that's everything in the game: [LINK]

Here is an example of one that's particular about the plot of the game but also includes much of the other text in defined sections as well:
[LINK]

Here's one that other than some "optional areas" (really almost the whole World of Ruin is an option area to some extent) really only has the plot-related transcript and not the dialogue of every NPC you could talk to in each area:
[LINK]

That said, gameplay "hours" is certainly a metric that gets a lot of use in many contexts, but one I find incredibly difficult to find meaning in because so many factors can affect the actual rate a gamer gets through a game's content (even if 50 Hz vs. 60 Hz standards were not a thing with the 15-20% difference in game speed on many platforms, which is sadly still a problem today in particular for software emulation even on the most current gaming consoles...looking at you in particular Nintendo Switch). Anyway, you can easily manipulate gameplay hours just by changing the maximum/minimum speeds various game elements allow the player to progress at, too...which every developer either uses "the standard" of the platform they're on, tweaks some baseline to their satisfaction of play, or develops their own engine timing to get the exact feel they want. Hence, I don't find gameplay hours to be particularly compelling as a result. Granted, you can tell almost immediately if a "100+ gameplay hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" game as advertised is only going to be that long because you are literally watching as each letter of text is rendered on-screen, the battle intro sequences have a good 15-20 seconds of just transition trash or worst of all you just have inexplicable "waiting" periods in between selection options/commands and something actually happening. There are many ways a developer can "pad" their gameplay hours which makes the metric unreliable for determining how much game content there really is, but VERY reliable for adult gamers pressed on time who just want to know how long it took most gamers of a certain type to complete a game.

Developers can kind of do the same thing as you mentioned with worthless text...like in Grandia. Oh my word...unique battle system, but slow...and the amount of worthless conversation available is just mind-boggling in that game! However, again, that's not usually covered in a game transcript unless it's also just a complete text dump of the game so I do mean plot transcript to exclude such random text tidbits. This can definitely vary also based on how the transcript is presented depending on how it's generated...but usually what I do is download the transcript in plain text and omit the extra line returns with a text-based software like Atom (which I incidentally also use when progamming) to get an idea of how much plot-related text there actually is.

As for mini-games, when done right, they can be integral parts of the backstory of a particular area or even character that makes it more memorable. As gameplay elements, they can break up any sense of monotony in the continuity of game mechanics up to that point which can allow for increased attention span and reduced player burnout when the game is epic in length. If a game is too short, mini-games just muddy the waters and dilute the value of the gameplay continuity you need in a shorter game. Mini-games are not one size fits all, and if you just want to make them to make them rather than carefully conceive and construct it within the context of the game world, it can make a ton of difference and you may want to just back off the idea. However, to give you an example of how it can be used to drive content, what you did in Taming Dreams kind of gave a mini-game feel even to dialogue for completionists (at least if your idea of fun is looking up words in a dictionary and following the rabbit-trail of cross-referencing definitions Wikipedia-style until every word stops popping up in a different color). That could sometimes almost feel like whack-a-mole though for people who didn't find that an enticing mini-game concept... (Dramatic Re-enactment of Someone Totally the Opposite of Me Getting Giddy When More Terms Pop Up: "EGADS!...I just wanted to know what that word meant...but now another 6 more popped up when I selected it....noooOooooOooo...why Tobias?...why have you redefined every word of English and made a whole new lexicon of neologisms? I just want them all to go dark and stop it with the shiny colors...is the final boss a Dictionary-Wielding Palindrome???") That said, the Secret of Monkey Island definitely did make a mini-game out of in its own right of pirate passage duels that became somewhat legendary. A mini-game doesn't have to be something confined to one zone or gameplay element...and also doesn't need to be called that or evoke that concept to have the same effect as one. For some great (and several lame) examples of mini-games embedded in the game AND mini-games existing as separate instances from the rest of the gameplay, look no further than Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. When even Mario's "Super Jump" and "Ultra Jump" moves basically are their own mini-game in every battle that some creep in Monstro Town is tracking and you could've been playing the game for real battle results and more jumps since the very beginning: it invokes all sorts of gamey elements of frustration for completionists in how hard it is to ever get the best reward or find an ultimate cap to the game in-game...and amazement at the depth for most everyone else. On the other hand, totally crappy mini-games at Grate Guy's Casino and Booster's Tower can be so laughably bad luck toss-ups that you can't stand to do them anymore after "achieving" whatever it was you'd hoped to gain from playing them. A fourth-wall-breaking trans-dimensional mini-game available from the menu at all times after a certain point just let's you shoot beetle shells with stars anytime you want...with a video game handheld console in a console video game. Yet another shell-jumping mini-game at Land's End actually serves as a tutor of sorts to prepare you for jumping better and faster on the later game platforms to avoid battle monotony as the game matures, but again making that area more memorable as a result. Hope that helps! (smile)
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