Arzette is a really, really good game. It's an homage rather than a parody and I'm happy it exists this way. It shows us in an alternate timeline, the Zelda CD-I games could have been great & that there was something special about them

Put aside how they "ruin" the characters, add just a little polish & you can see how charming they could be. Make the levels more intuitive to navigate and you can see that the levels were always beautiful. And if the CD-I soundtrack just added... Actually, that was the one thing that always slapped about the CD-I games, but Arzette's OST rocks, too!

But even on its own merits the game still succeeds. It's almost like a mini-metoridvania with a level selector rather than an interconnected world, but you still get that same gameplay loop of starting out weak, getting the hang of the game, and by the end you're crushing every enemy on your path to the end.

Arzette is a short game, but well worth every ruby you spend on it. If I had to sum it up in one word it is, unironically, good.

Reviewed on Feb 19, 2024


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