This review contains spoilers
I was following this game on and off, but more off I guess since I was kind of shocked to see it released on the Eshop, and even more so to figure out it was only a little over 2 weeks ago. But hey, for a game with the vibe of "DMC in a Metroidvania", this is really fun.
I think the main mechanics are really solid from the combat to the traversal. I specifically like moving around more in this game, as you progressively get more and more tools that let you just break the environment, but they still find ways of making it fun. Just the way you can wall run and combo it into dash jumps, or even early on with wall hikes followed by using the upward aerial charge slash to gain some meager distance to reach a ledge. Oh and the ledge grab is really snappy. Another favorite is sliding, especially when you get water sliding later on, it's just satisfying to be able to cross a long hallway with a ton of extra momentum because you slammed down on a slope.
These also help play into the combat mechanics, which they give you a surprising amount of freedom to customize your build between a mix of technique, stat buffs, or some mix of the two. Your main moveset is tied to your sword, where you can do basic attacks with it, do unique attacks called pulse attacks that cost some of your pulse meter to use but successfully landing hits will heal you, and spells, of which you can have four equipped at a time. The sword and pulse moves have aerial and ground up, down, forward, and neutral attacks as well, but you can also charge the normal attack for charge attack variants of all attacks.
Those are really important as they can let you break enemy's poise, which if you break all of their poise, they will be stunned and you can wail on them with combos for a bit. This is actually a really neat way to frame it for enemies and bosses alike, where with poise they will rarely flinch, but without poise, you can style on them like the ragdoll they are. You can also knock stunned enemies into another to break their poise a bit.
Your defensive options lie not just in your evasion (though I feel something is off about how long the invincibility frames last for), but in blocking where you can counter attack, or eventually just a parry. Both are handy, but a little hard to make full use of in this game. You also have projectile deflection on all attacks when you get it, and those are good when you mix the dash attack, so you can win by turning enemy projectiles on them so long as you can deal with the I-frames.
I keep saying "when you get to it" and that's because a lot of your upgrades are through memory discs that contain the given abilities, from main abilities required for completion and 100%, to essential battle abilities, to the fun stuff you can equip like an attack from taunt or time stop on footstooling enemies. This also applies kind of to spells, though they're treated as a separate resource, and they mainly help in diversifying your moveset, like helping break poise easier, or have extra dps. My personal favorites were cutter, searing knuckle, piercing ray, chaser, upper sword, and especially timebomb. That one creates sticky bombs that break two bars of poise, making them pretty handy in encounters and boss fights.
You got a lot of options to work with, and your enemy variety is pretty good all things considered. You got flying birds, normal guy, speedy mantis guys, giants, tall faust lookin' motherfuckers with axe hands, axe guys that are the worst to fight in the game, reapers, spell sage monsters, and the three church aloe types of knight, mace tanks, and white mages. Knights are my least favorite of them all though, because that stupid dropkick somehow always clips me. I also like the green coating enemies like normal guys and birds can have because they help clear the field a little easier if I lead their attacks near other enemies. They explode, that's why I like them, they explode.
I think the overall combat is actually pretty well done, and I only really have a few nitpicks. One is the dash, because I feel like the I-frame count is kind of strict but I might be stupid, blocking and parrying don't feel all that worthwhile to do, so aside from the few times I blocked and counterattacked, and very few times I parried to get the trophy, I didn't feel much doing it, and I think poise can be a bit more cumbersome of a mechanic than fun, especially when it's a group of hard-hitting enemies that are really fast and they all have immense poise pools so it's just a lot sneaking in charge slashes and hoping I don't get grazed, which I inevitably do. Also more a presentational complaint, but I wish there was like a combo meter or something that made getting into the heat of the action feel a little more satisfying. I'm not even just saying that because of the DMC inspiration, but because while combat is fun to figure out, if there was more to incentivize getting into those combos more and improving them, like a combo count to see how high the number can go, then i'd have a little more interest in trying to perfect them. It's small, but it would be cool.
The bosses overall were fine. I think a few of them are pretty cheap at times with most attacks that lock-on to you, especially the ones where they'll just stick to you like glue and do some kind of really damaging attack (the last two fights are very guilty of this), and I did have to retry plenty of times to get patterns down, but that's nothing new to how I play these kinds of games. This is where timebomb really helped a lot too, since you can just stick them on multiple times to a boss, and not only will they take a chunk of their health, but the boss's poise will be at best, 6 bars gone, letting me focus a bit more on sneaking in hits and dodging the patterns before going ham. And hey, since I have the ability that builds pulse more when you're waiting for the mana to recharge, you still can have at least enough for one pulse attack when you eventually break their guard.
Moving on from the mechanics into the greater world, the levels you explore are all sky islands that all have some kind of unique thing about them, whether they're towns, the wilds, abandoned labs and ruins, or just raiding a fucking airship, there's a lot of cool stuff to find in the world, not just in mini-games or side quests, but through the locales unique oddities or in the times you can enter Unreality, which is basically the void, to knock out some unique endeavors, ending up frazzled in different places. A lot of the game's objectives are also left mainly up to how the player wants to tackle them.
After meeting Chervil and getting your ship, Vernal's main goal is to find out more about the whereabouts of her father's location, but you don't know where to go. You got a bunch of islands, but nothings in specific is being pointed to. It's all on the player to get a baring for the world by exploring each locale, even getting wrapped up into a little story with whoever is in the locale. Like chasing a treasure hunting Aloe Knight who I'm 30% sure is corrupt until the treasure actually makes him corrupt, or challenging essentially tower coliseum so you can meet with an old friend. And that's just the early stuff. After what is basically the midpoint where you are properly introduced to Unreality traversal and get the new Bloom ability (which is basically a super attack), you have even more places to visit in the hopes of unlocking the final island containing the final boss, but the order you do most of that in is up to the player.
There's a lot of freedom in how you do things. There are technically required objectives to explore the islands, but how you do them is up to you, and honestly for someone doing this for the first time, it certainly added to the feeling of charting my own course, and trying to make progress where I could to get the answers I needed. It did unfortunately make things feel a little less cohesive by the time we actually got to the plot beats, but it was still pretty fun, especially since aside from a few islands, most of them tell their own little tale or build a bit on the overall story which helps makes these little random objectives feel fun to work through, especially since finishing them yields my ultimate objective at the time. The only downside I did have was finding the last few things in an area with a fine toothed comb, but that's typical for these kind of games, and only exasperated by the fact that this game is only 2 or so weeks old, so barely any resources are there to help find those items. The one that caught me the most that I actually really need help for was the 11th treasure in the airship. On the right of the elevator shaft above the main monitor room, there's a breakable wall that has the item. I dunno why'd you figure that out from a random review on backloggd but there you go.
Probably also helps that the characters we took through that adventure, Vernal and Chervil, were both pretty neat. Vernal comes off as a very hotheaded and stubborn, the kind of person that prefers to get shit done, and ask questions when it's convenient to her, and raise hell if she doesn't get those answers. Not without reason though, as much as she loves to fight, and even is ready to take on a bunch of people, she is still caring enough to help with people's needs and hear them out on their troubles. Though sometimes, she's the trouble, like climbing someone's already broken windmill and pissing them off, standing in front of someone's still drawing session and progressively pissing them off, and constantly trying to be a thorn in the side of the Church of Aloe, the current ones in power of the islands. They do get pissed at her antics, but they're also corrupt officials more than an actual church so fuck them. While she has cases of being a smug little shit, she specifically gets a kick out of causing trouble for the church, and again, fuck them.
Chervil on the other hand, the amnesiac scientist turned robot who pilots the ship, is a lot more reasonable, a lot more wise to the world (though a little uncertain due to his amnesia over the span of time from the rise of the islands to now), and is usually the one supporting Vernal through advice, knowledge, and well, piloting the ship. He mainly comes off as pleasant to be around, and very intent to right the wrongs he helped all those years ago. He and Vernal are pretty neat to see chat with one another. They got some good gags, Chervil's knowledge mixing with Vernal's exprience or lack of knowledge can be endearing and very insightful to the events or state of the world, and it's overall fine.
I think the one character I didn't really feel anything for was probably Saffron. He vernal clash a couple times, he runs into the void the first chance we got, and he's gone from the story. He clearly meant something to Vernal, as it's mentioned the two trained under the same master sometime after Vernal lost her mother and he lost his kingdom, but it feels like such a nothing beat since nothing really comes of it. He just pops up for a couple worlds, he's the boss in one of them, and that's it. I kind of wish they delved a bit more into him, because I feel he would've been interesting, but they just kind of show and drop him. Kind of disappointing.
But uhh.. yeah that's Vernal Edge. It's a really fun mish-mash of DMC and a Metroidvania in a 2D plane, with a lot of cool traversal and puzzles, a pretty good combat system with some good depth, some neat characters exploring both the world and the void it's attached to with a lot of neat lore, settings, background, and a lot more I wish we went into a bit more. It's a pretty fun game. I will definitely come back though once I hear that the game gets a patch for consoles.
I played this on switch, and not only did I experience a couple audio bugs, a bunch of random crashes, mostly after talking to NPCs, and one time where the game kept thinking I was in battle mode for awhile. In fight mode, you can't check spells. items, and memory discs, and after one experience with unreality, it just kept me in fight mode until I died. But the major one is that two things are bugged so I can't really finish them. Firstly is one town says it has 16 collectibles, it only has 15. And secondly is you can't unlock the palette change achievement if you accidentally open a chest in the same area you get the achievement in, so I couldn't get the palette swap. Looking it up, I did see the creator is gonna patch those two things out after Nintendo gives him the ok to do so, so I'll come back and maybe replay it on vicious difficulty. That'd be fun.
Oh and if there is one more complaint, I really wish that resetting the game didn't reset the controls so I had to rebind them over and over. I wouldn't normally mention this kind of thing, but resetting the game over and over because of random crashes sort of started to get on my nerves a bit.
It's still worth the purchase, just keep those things in mind until a patch drops.
I think the main mechanics are really solid from the combat to the traversal. I specifically like moving around more in this game, as you progressively get more and more tools that let you just break the environment, but they still find ways of making it fun. Just the way you can wall run and combo it into dash jumps, or even early on with wall hikes followed by using the upward aerial charge slash to gain some meager distance to reach a ledge. Oh and the ledge grab is really snappy. Another favorite is sliding, especially when you get water sliding later on, it's just satisfying to be able to cross a long hallway with a ton of extra momentum because you slammed down on a slope.
These also help play into the combat mechanics, which they give you a surprising amount of freedom to customize your build between a mix of technique, stat buffs, or some mix of the two. Your main moveset is tied to your sword, where you can do basic attacks with it, do unique attacks called pulse attacks that cost some of your pulse meter to use but successfully landing hits will heal you, and spells, of which you can have four equipped at a time. The sword and pulse moves have aerial and ground up, down, forward, and neutral attacks as well, but you can also charge the normal attack for charge attack variants of all attacks.
Those are really important as they can let you break enemy's poise, which if you break all of their poise, they will be stunned and you can wail on them with combos for a bit. This is actually a really neat way to frame it for enemies and bosses alike, where with poise they will rarely flinch, but without poise, you can style on them like the ragdoll they are. You can also knock stunned enemies into another to break their poise a bit.
Your defensive options lie not just in your evasion (though I feel something is off about how long the invincibility frames last for), but in blocking where you can counter attack, or eventually just a parry. Both are handy, but a little hard to make full use of in this game. You also have projectile deflection on all attacks when you get it, and those are good when you mix the dash attack, so you can win by turning enemy projectiles on them so long as you can deal with the I-frames.
I keep saying "when you get to it" and that's because a lot of your upgrades are through memory discs that contain the given abilities, from main abilities required for completion and 100%, to essential battle abilities, to the fun stuff you can equip like an attack from taunt or time stop on footstooling enemies. This also applies kind of to spells, though they're treated as a separate resource, and they mainly help in diversifying your moveset, like helping break poise easier, or have extra dps. My personal favorites were cutter, searing knuckle, piercing ray, chaser, upper sword, and especially timebomb. That one creates sticky bombs that break two bars of poise, making them pretty handy in encounters and boss fights.
You got a lot of options to work with, and your enemy variety is pretty good all things considered. You got flying birds, normal guy, speedy mantis guys, giants, tall faust lookin' motherfuckers with axe hands, axe guys that are the worst to fight in the game, reapers, spell sage monsters, and the three church aloe types of knight, mace tanks, and white mages. Knights are my least favorite of them all though, because that stupid dropkick somehow always clips me. I also like the green coating enemies like normal guys and birds can have because they help clear the field a little easier if I lead their attacks near other enemies. They explode, that's why I like them, they explode.
I think the overall combat is actually pretty well done, and I only really have a few nitpicks. One is the dash, because I feel like the I-frame count is kind of strict but I might be stupid, blocking and parrying don't feel all that worthwhile to do, so aside from the few times I blocked and counterattacked, and very few times I parried to get the trophy, I didn't feel much doing it, and I think poise can be a bit more cumbersome of a mechanic than fun, especially when it's a group of hard-hitting enemies that are really fast and they all have immense poise pools so it's just a lot sneaking in charge slashes and hoping I don't get grazed, which I inevitably do. Also more a presentational complaint, but I wish there was like a combo meter or something that made getting into the heat of the action feel a little more satisfying. I'm not even just saying that because of the DMC inspiration, but because while combat is fun to figure out, if there was more to incentivize getting into those combos more and improving them, like a combo count to see how high the number can go, then i'd have a little more interest in trying to perfect them. It's small, but it would be cool.
The bosses overall were fine. I think a few of them are pretty cheap at times with most attacks that lock-on to you, especially the ones where they'll just stick to you like glue and do some kind of really damaging attack (the last two fights are very guilty of this), and I did have to retry plenty of times to get patterns down, but that's nothing new to how I play these kinds of games. This is where timebomb really helped a lot too, since you can just stick them on multiple times to a boss, and not only will they take a chunk of their health, but the boss's poise will be at best, 6 bars gone, letting me focus a bit more on sneaking in hits and dodging the patterns before going ham. And hey, since I have the ability that builds pulse more when you're waiting for the mana to recharge, you still can have at least enough for one pulse attack when you eventually break their guard.
Moving on from the mechanics into the greater world, the levels you explore are all sky islands that all have some kind of unique thing about them, whether they're towns, the wilds, abandoned labs and ruins, or just raiding a fucking airship, there's a lot of cool stuff to find in the world, not just in mini-games or side quests, but through the locales unique oddities or in the times you can enter Unreality, which is basically the void, to knock out some unique endeavors, ending up frazzled in different places. A lot of the game's objectives are also left mainly up to how the player wants to tackle them.
After meeting Chervil and getting your ship, Vernal's main goal is to find out more about the whereabouts of her father's location, but you don't know where to go. You got a bunch of islands, but nothings in specific is being pointed to. It's all on the player to get a baring for the world by exploring each locale, even getting wrapped up into a little story with whoever is in the locale. Like chasing a treasure hunting Aloe Knight who I'm 30% sure is corrupt until the treasure actually makes him corrupt, or challenging essentially tower coliseum so you can meet with an old friend. And that's just the early stuff. After what is basically the midpoint where you are properly introduced to Unreality traversal and get the new Bloom ability (which is basically a super attack), you have even more places to visit in the hopes of unlocking the final island containing the final boss, but the order you do most of that in is up to the player.
There's a lot of freedom in how you do things. There are technically required objectives to explore the islands, but how you do them is up to you, and honestly for someone doing this for the first time, it certainly added to the feeling of charting my own course, and trying to make progress where I could to get the answers I needed. It did unfortunately make things feel a little less cohesive by the time we actually got to the plot beats, but it was still pretty fun, especially since aside from a few islands, most of them tell their own little tale or build a bit on the overall story which helps makes these little random objectives feel fun to work through, especially since finishing them yields my ultimate objective at the time. The only downside I did have was finding the last few things in an area with a fine toothed comb, but that's typical for these kind of games, and only exasperated by the fact that this game is only 2 or so weeks old, so barely any resources are there to help find those items. The one that caught me the most that I actually really need help for was the 11th treasure in the airship. On the right of the elevator shaft above the main monitor room, there's a breakable wall that has the item. I dunno why'd you figure that out from a random review on backloggd but there you go.
Probably also helps that the characters we took through that adventure, Vernal and Chervil, were both pretty neat. Vernal comes off as a very hotheaded and stubborn, the kind of person that prefers to get shit done, and ask questions when it's convenient to her, and raise hell if she doesn't get those answers. Not without reason though, as much as she loves to fight, and even is ready to take on a bunch of people, she is still caring enough to help with people's needs and hear them out on their troubles. Though sometimes, she's the trouble, like climbing someone's already broken windmill and pissing them off, standing in front of someone's still drawing session and progressively pissing them off, and constantly trying to be a thorn in the side of the Church of Aloe, the current ones in power of the islands. They do get pissed at her antics, but they're also corrupt officials more than an actual church so fuck them. While she has cases of being a smug little shit, she specifically gets a kick out of causing trouble for the church, and again, fuck them.
Chervil on the other hand, the amnesiac scientist turned robot who pilots the ship, is a lot more reasonable, a lot more wise to the world (though a little uncertain due to his amnesia over the span of time from the rise of the islands to now), and is usually the one supporting Vernal through advice, knowledge, and well, piloting the ship. He mainly comes off as pleasant to be around, and very intent to right the wrongs he helped all those years ago. He and Vernal are pretty neat to see chat with one another. They got some good gags, Chervil's knowledge mixing with Vernal's exprience or lack of knowledge can be endearing and very insightful to the events or state of the world, and it's overall fine.
I think the one character I didn't really feel anything for was probably Saffron. He vernal clash a couple times, he runs into the void the first chance we got, and he's gone from the story. He clearly meant something to Vernal, as it's mentioned the two trained under the same master sometime after Vernal lost her mother and he lost his kingdom, but it feels like such a nothing beat since nothing really comes of it. He just pops up for a couple worlds, he's the boss in one of them, and that's it. I kind of wish they delved a bit more into him, because I feel he would've been interesting, but they just kind of show and drop him. Kind of disappointing.
But uhh.. yeah that's Vernal Edge. It's a really fun mish-mash of DMC and a Metroidvania in a 2D plane, with a lot of cool traversal and puzzles, a pretty good combat system with some good depth, some neat characters exploring both the world and the void it's attached to with a lot of neat lore, settings, background, and a lot more I wish we went into a bit more. It's a pretty fun game. I will definitely come back though once I hear that the game gets a patch for consoles.
I played this on switch, and not only did I experience a couple audio bugs, a bunch of random crashes, mostly after talking to NPCs, and one time where the game kept thinking I was in battle mode for awhile. In fight mode, you can't check spells. items, and memory discs, and after one experience with unreality, it just kept me in fight mode until I died. But the major one is that two things are bugged so I can't really finish them. Firstly is one town says it has 16 collectibles, it only has 15. And secondly is you can't unlock the palette change achievement if you accidentally open a chest in the same area you get the achievement in, so I couldn't get the palette swap. Looking it up, I did see the creator is gonna patch those two things out after Nintendo gives him the ok to do so, so I'll come back and maybe replay it on vicious difficulty. That'd be fun.
Oh and if there is one more complaint, I really wish that resetting the game didn't reset the controls so I had to rebind them over and over. I wouldn't normally mention this kind of thing, but resetting the game over and over because of random crashes sort of started to get on my nerves a bit.
It's still worth the purchase, just keep those things in mind until a patch drops.