This review contains spoilers
This game wants very much to be Zelda, and its primary inspiration is pretty obvious... but this game has more in common with Skyward Sword than Oracle of Seasons. Absolutely awful pacing akin to Skyloft, the game said I finished it in 5 hours and 59 minutes... 2 and a half hours were spent getting to the four main dungeons. The entire time before that is a lot of filler overworld, three overly large towns with nonsense layouts and nothing to do in them, a pretty good 10 minute mini dungeon, and a lame cinematic linear "dungeon" that took about 5 minutes. I was about to drop the game when it got to the first of the four main dungeons... they're genuinely very good for the most part, I enjoyed them, even despite the two bad boss fights and the two non-bosses. But unfortunately that's all the game has going for it, all four dungeons combined take up about 2 and a half hours. Oops, that's how long it took for me to get to them... and they're the actual focus of the game... priorities, Ary.
Plus the story is bad with a nonsensical time travel twist that isn't really implied beforehand and just sorta happens. The characters suck, the writing sucks, and the game feels genuinely unfinished... it opens with "what happened to my brother" and continues to ask that question repeatedly and NEVER ANSWERS IT. They seem to imply that one thing is your brother, but that's actually you from the future, and then the game tells you to go home. I figured maybe he got home, but nope, going home does nothing (and despite "fixing everything", winter town is still summer??). It's clearly a case of an indie game not having enough budget, manpower, and/or time (maybe all three), and it's a shame because they had some good ideas for how to construct a Zelda dungeon... the rest could use a lot of work though. On a similar note, while I'm glad they didn't have more of them because what they had was bad, I can count around 4 or 5 things clearly built up to be bosses that ended up not being anything at all, and it was so awkward watching these things turn out that way. Buildup to a fight... then nothing.
If nothing else, I'll always be able to laugh about this game giving us a guy voluntarily locking himself inside Time Prison because his evil future self "had served his time", despite having no reason to believe that the evil future self wasn't about to just go and try destroying the world again. Ah yeah, punish me for my comparably minor indiscretions rsther than my evil future self for trying to destroy the planet, sensible logic.
Plus the story is bad with a nonsensical time travel twist that isn't really implied beforehand and just sorta happens. The characters suck, the writing sucks, and the game feels genuinely unfinished... it opens with "what happened to my brother" and continues to ask that question repeatedly and NEVER ANSWERS IT. They seem to imply that one thing is your brother, but that's actually you from the future, and then the game tells you to go home. I figured maybe he got home, but nope, going home does nothing (and despite "fixing everything", winter town is still summer??). It's clearly a case of an indie game not having enough budget, manpower, and/or time (maybe all three), and it's a shame because they had some good ideas for how to construct a Zelda dungeon... the rest could use a lot of work though. On a similar note, while I'm glad they didn't have more of them because what they had was bad, I can count around 4 or 5 things clearly built up to be bosses that ended up not being anything at all, and it was so awkward watching these things turn out that way. Buildup to a fight... then nothing.
If nothing else, I'll always be able to laugh about this game giving us a guy voluntarily locking himself inside Time Prison because his evil future self "had served his time", despite having no reason to believe that the evil future self wasn't about to just go and try destroying the world again. Ah yeah, punish me for my comparably minor indiscretions rsther than my evil future self for trying to destroy the planet, sensible logic.