Imagine Mario Odyssey releasing a few more DLC worlds, except they required beating 4 Kaizo Mario levels first before you could access them. It’s a hilarious hypothetical, but less funny IRL.
The opening of this DLC is wildly off-putting and misjudged, a one-hit death redux of the Great Plateau as a bafflingly ill-conceived roadblock highlighting the most frustrating (but easily ignored) annoyances of the brilliant main game. It abandons imaginative and flexible challenges that don’t ruthlessly punish combat and platforming experimentation for a tedious trial-and-error slog. Thankfully, I pushed through to the great new Beast Emblem shrines.
The 12 emblem shrines are all fantastic escalations of the original shrine puzzle mechanics, often at much grander scale. The open-world riddle solving that unlocks each one is also a treat, and there’s a nice diversity of what unlock actions are required, including another stealth mission, flying course, and shield-boarding course, among others. Figuring out where on the map each of those occur is also a fun time, locating where each excerpted map snippet lies on the broader overworld map. I also loved the final divine beast it all leads to, and the story insights into the champions were all very characterful and charming.
The redux blight bosses are sort of a drag, including the muddy wash visual filter applied to each one, but they at least have the interesting premise of giving you a specific restricted item “build” to complete each fight instead of just beating them with the overpowered stockpile of weapons I had on hand.
The opening of this DLC is wildly off-putting and misjudged, a one-hit death redux of the Great Plateau as a bafflingly ill-conceived roadblock highlighting the most frustrating (but easily ignored) annoyances of the brilliant main game. It abandons imaginative and flexible challenges that don’t ruthlessly punish combat and platforming experimentation for a tedious trial-and-error slog. Thankfully, I pushed through to the great new Beast Emblem shrines.
The 12 emblem shrines are all fantastic escalations of the original shrine puzzle mechanics, often at much grander scale. The open-world riddle solving that unlocks each one is also a treat, and there’s a nice diversity of what unlock actions are required, including another stealth mission, flying course, and shield-boarding course, among others. Figuring out where on the map each of those occur is also a fun time, locating where each excerpted map snippet lies on the broader overworld map. I also loved the final divine beast it all leads to, and the story insights into the champions were all very characterful and charming.
The redux blight bosses are sort of a drag, including the muddy wash visual filter applied to each one, but they at least have the interesting premise of giving you a specific restricted item “build” to complete each fight instead of just beating them with the overpowered stockpile of weapons I had on hand.