Someone dared to ask what if we made Cuphead bad and low effort, and forgot just what made it a good game. The game has barely anything going for it. The one thing saving it for a 1/10 is that the art style sometimes changes to match the location. The witch fight has an art style shift that turns the characters into a weird gothic Invader Zim-esque look, the final boss gives the characters a more anime look, and the computer world has the characters covered in glitchy code. That's it. If they focused more on making each level or world have its own unique aesthetic and music, I think that would have done wonders for this game and made it more than just a Cuphead clone. As it is now, it's a terrible, unfairly hard, and frustrating time that could be beaten in 2 hours.

take the blood stained sanctuary challenge!

try to beat the blood stained sanctuary 29,998,559,671,249 times in a row!

update: ok i beat it

So funny story about this game. I went on ebay and bought a PSTV console for around 60 GBP, just so that I could play this game... only for it to come out on steam one week later. So yeah that was fun

This game is one of my favourite games of all time. Maybe its because it took the first persona game I played and expanded and improved it so much. But I love it. I love the characters, the story, the music. I still listen to the music often. I love the message this game sends.

Much like persona 5, I fully recommend this game to anyone looking to play the series

9 Years of Shadows is a game that I've been waiting for quite a long time since the day I discovered it. Knowing that a game of this kind was being developed by people from my country is something that captivated me a lot, and even more because of the strong inspiration from Castlevania (one of my favorite franchises) which was noticeable from the first concept trailer. The game clearly changed and evolved over time, and although it is a game with imperfections, you can tell that the team that developed it has talent and a lot of potential to discover, because the good parts of the game are really very good. But well, let's talk about the game itself.

9 Years of Shadows presents us with a world where a curse has caused humanity to slowly begin to die and has completely removed the color from the world, making everything look gray, hopeless, lifeless. This curse was generated in a castle called Talos, which in ancient times was an orphanage. After 9 years of living in a world like this, a young girl named Europa plucks up the courage to go to the castle, find out what caused all this and end the curse once and for all.

One of the best aspects of this game is undoubtedly the music, it's lovely, and most of the OST is the work of the game's director himself, which I admire a lot. The pixel art is great with very well done and fluid animations, it's Symphony of the Night quality, and the art direction of the game is very good and unique, as the colors look vibrant and very striking, and although the game takes place in a castle at times it also gave me a strong feeling of exploring something more than just that.

Now, as for the game design, unfortunately the inexperience of the development team means that some things don't end up being completely good or end up having somewhat mixed results. For starters, something that hurts the game a lot is the lack of variety of enemies, and of the few that there are, some have a behavior too similar, which makes most of them fight the same, it's usually "you attack, enemy attacks, do backdash, wait for the enemy to become vulnerable again, repeat". I came to feel like I was facing the same 4 enemies from the beginning to the end of the game. Another negative aspect is that some things feel unnatural, like the musician NPCs or some dialogues. And on the story development side, sometimes I felt like I missed something, I don't know if it's because I didn't pay attention or it's because it's never really explained inside the game, because for example I don't think it's ever explained properly what the relationship between Europa and Draythus is, how they met and that, he's supposed to be one of the important characters, but at the end the game makes you not give him too much importance.

But well, as I said at the beginning, the things they did do well have an excellent result, and those are the things that make me like this game, starting with the character controller, which is super fluid and smooth, and once you get the elemental armors and their upgrades you get a quite pleasant mobility. The Poseidon armor is my favorite, its design fascinates me and being able to become a mermaid while in the water is wonderful. My second favorite armor is the Helios armor, which allows you to enter places with extreme temperatures and also allows you to float and propel yourself a little bit attacking enemies, it is by far my true favorite armor. Finally, the Gaia armor allows you to enter tunnels similar to a Metroid game, but with a slightly different approach more oriented to puzzles you could say, although what I like most about this armor is its design, which resembles the leaves of a plant.

Another thing I love is the teddy bear that accompanies Europa throughout the game, I'm talking about Apino. Europa alone only endures about 2 hits at the beginning of the game, and although you can eventually improve the vitality, the one who is really in charge of protecting Europa is Apino, who has a magic bar and would be like a secondary life bar that protects us from enemy hits, and in turn, also serves as fuel for Apino to shoot projectiles, because yes, Apino can shoot magic projectiles to cause damage to enemies. And here what I love is that despite being a very experimental mechanic and sometimes even seeming very stilted, despite that, it ends up becoming a great mechanic that distinguishes (along with armor) 9YoS from the rest of other Metroidvanias. This mechanic is a great risk-reward factor as it allows you to defeat the enemies very easily if you spam said projectiles and at the same time attack with Europa, however, that way you'll be exposed to enemies defeating you more easily as well. I must admit that at the end of the day I would have liked this to have been more exploited with the common enemies of the game, since the trick I mentioned shines more with the bosses.

Going back to the dialogues and NPCs, I know it will sound contradictory, but I really liked them, since you really get to know the personality of Europa and the NPCs through the conversations they have, and it's something I haven't really seen in many games of this style, since many just have a mute protagonist and that's it. Europa on the other hand will have an evolution from when she enters to when she leaves the castle, and it's cool to see how every time you go up or down an elevator she sometimes has something new to say, similar to how when Samus talked in the elevators in Metroid Fusion.

And yes, speaking of bosses, there are a lot of boss battles in the game, and in fact I feel like they are the real prize for exploring. While in the beginning these battles are very simple and easy, as the game progresses, the bosses get more complicated and challenging. There are some battles that really are very good and memorable. I would have liked the exploration to have been complemented with more stuff, as the game is pretty linear, but I guess it's decent.

Conclusion
9 Years of Shadows is a good game, I really liked the story. However, you can tell that there are some aspects that needed a bit more work or polishing (like the game's performance, which leaves a lot to be desired). I feel that the team would have been able to achieve a better game if they had focused more on solid game design instead of just good graphics.