I fucking love music wow and I'm writing this while watching sanremo so you know im crazy
some part of me really wanted to enjoy this game way more than I actually did its probably one of the most artistically pleasing mechanically deep genre bending queer narrative driven puzzle adventure ever created and also probably a super slog to go through PLEASE DONT DOX ME YET PLEASE WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT
so I'm famously known nationally as a hater of puzzle games because my IQ is so below the average that I have to look up solutions after solutions to actually get the façade of a bump-less experience throughout . now puzzles in this one are not the worst shit ever because of the main mechanic being not only super interesting and ever shifting but also characterised by puzzle segments that are not super long (but sometimes could get really trying and repetitive) and not super difficult (once you understand the secret formula) and still I ended up kind of hating those parts after a while the game makes a lot of effort to shuffle things up a bit but I'm not the target audience for this type of gameplay
now the main gimmick is pretty fun !!! since youre a bard most of the stuff youre gonna do ingame is sing so most of if not the entirety of the puzzles are gonna be about you matching notes with the cues that are gonna come out of nowhere USUALLY since the developers are so fuccking intelligent thay they managed to bend this simple premise to new heights with some of the most forward thinking use of a simplistic gameplay mechanic to the point that it could rival undertale and the little bullet hell heart literally at first I thought this was gonna be a rhythm game but a part of me is super glad that is is absolutely fucking NOT a rhythm game at all for some reason you should be using the analog stick to match the notes but what these developers end up doing with it is absolutely insane
so yeah for this stuff I actually did enjoy going through the game because they just kept reinventing the main mechanic every 30 minutes and for that I'm genuinely so impressed I have no idea how they did that SURE sometimes the sing circle isn't really the most comfortable way of expressing the design philosophy the developers were aiming for but it comes real close its janky yes but also a damn blast throughout thats definitely one thing that kept me interested till the end of the game
again while this should be a praise sometimes it hindered the experience in some ways because of the puzzle segments I wish these parts were either streamlined or integrated better because they're whole areas of JUST puzzles that honestly made me go insane sometimes its not like they're hard or anything most of them are pretty easy but it's just that why would you put puzzle pieces in a narrative driven game if the reason is to make me more engaged in the game rest assured that you're doing the exact opposite ong which is basically what happened when chicory went full puzzle and to this day I still can't finish it for the life of me because wow do I hate puzzle segments
the narrative driven moments are definitely some of the best parts of the game but NOT ALWAYS the pirates arc was boring as shit the beginning of the game was really slow and I actually began to be enthralled by this whole experience when the game decided to go full majoras mask and until then I actually played this sporadically throughout the months because wow is this game slow and boring sometimes wow please don't kill me
it's not like it's inherently bad and I think if it weren't for my mind numbing adhd I wouldve probably enjoyed this laid back experience way more than I did but there's some really weird pacing throughout where either nothing really happens and you're left with countless and countless of boring dialogue or everything happens all at once - wait isn't this the title of that movie
I'm not against laid back experiences I'm so much in love with night in the woods my heart could explode and what really sets them apart is that wandersong while having basically the same structure fails to make me care for anything happening in the world or any single character appearing on screen
most of the events of the game arent moving until you actually get at least ⅓ in which isn't a lot for a 10 something hours game but it can be detrimental to the pacing nonetheless and the characters are either one trick ponies that are used for some kind of interesting dialogue interactions but then they're just taken out if the entire picture which makes me just not care for any of them UNTIL miriam comes in and im gonna talk about her plenty in a second and at that point i start caring for everything in this game all of the sudden
so yeah these are my main issues here puzzles i hate puzzles one note characters (they're not bad they're just how do you say usa e getta in english mmmmm disposable ??? yeah something like that like they're used for a single joke and then killed off screen . not cool man) and the story takes a lot to digest
it could also very well be that I wasn't in a particularly good moment that's also an interesting point of discussion
moving on the art direction is absolutely flawless now lemme just address the elephant in the room I'm not a huge fan of the art style………. but they managed to make me love it WOW the characters are incredibly well designed and diverse theres a lot of variety in the sceneries youre going to traverse in this pilgrimage the vivid colors are trying to make you wake up while you're snoozing theres a lot of expressions for the bard even though he's basically a mannequin the pop up book aesthetic has a lot of charm and while YES I don't like it it doesn't necessarily mean that I didnt find it super intriguing and gorgeous I can not like something but also praise it like I do with giottos painting they have that lobotomised use of perspective that would make everyone go crazy but you have to still understand that that was the blueprint of the art we had in the renaissance and so forward
that being said for a game with huge emphasis on music it's pretty weird how the songs can range from soothing to anonymous to epic to bopping to basically whatever they could make on a soundboard and they did a good job my only complaint is that there's a lot of good songs here and there like the ghost chant or something that get outright RUINED with the player-controlled bard noises which is probably a result of me being ass at this game but I don't think most of the time the bards singing actually has some good impact on the tunes in the background that you're gonna emulate does that make sense is that rude to say
the music is still godlike though I hope the die hard fans of this game arent already releasing my IP on the dark web hitmen pages because wow I still need to play a lot of shit please wait at least a few more years ok umh ……. at least persona 3 reload
so yeah art direction and sound design top notch we get it moving on im sleepy
some of the thematic elements of the story deeeeefinitely hit real close with stuff like inadequacy and depression which was something that I was NOT expecting for this game to dab into because it started out as this incredible positive journey of saving the world and living life at the fullest yada yada and shit like that until it actually is NOT and the game starts throwing a lot of deep shit at you like themes of loss and grief themes of not being good enough or not being worthy enough friendship and betrayal and existentialism and idealism if you had seen my fucking face when I realised the sheer variety of stuff the game explores I probably would've been munchs the scream
I do not think this should be overlooked most of the dialogues in the game can be taken as jokes and sometimes they really are but if you dig deeper you can see how sensitive the writing is to the themes its trying to convey and I swear some of them do hit . like . a . truck . some scenes of the game are forever printed on my eyelids and I not even bleach would be able to wash them away
the main trio is probably the main focus of the game and its in their interaction that all of that gorgeous luscious writing starts flowing abundantly and lemme be clear I did not care for the bard or any of them in the beginning but wow I ended up loving all of them so dearly
for some reason I think it's fitting how the bard starts as such a blank character until it actually grows a spine and some balls to confront injustices enemies and while literally the end of the world . he's definitely not my favorite one in the game and i would've preferred a more interesting approach to the protagonist BUT the way his character changed from this dilly dallying carefree bard to an idealistic mid-apocalyptic dummie is probably the best character development I couldve asked for in a game like this
I gotta give the developers an Oscar for creating my most hated character in the entire world now Audrey is a fucking pain I tried and tried to like her I cried for her I pained listening to her but she was MADE to be hated and they succeeded if I were there I wouldve showed shibuya a real incident
now
drums
my baby
my wife
my beloved
miriam
most of the reasons why I actually ended up enjoying the game as much as I did even despite all the problems I talked about can be summarized in: miriam
shes a grumpy little witch serious impatient and hates the bards attitude towards a more positive demeanour and at first I thought she was gonna be another one of those characters just falling in the background but she sure as hell became the most important character of the story for me
most of the game she just closes off from the entire world and doesn't really think about opening up to others in any way shape or form but slowly she begins to sweeten to the bards presence and starts sharing a bond that could be called friendship
while I definitely don't think this is the most convoluted character writing in the entire world I relate to her to a personal level and I think she's possibly one of the sweetest 2d beings I got to know till now just thinking about all the cute interactions she exchanged with the bard is making my heart warmer not even talking about the trauma dump or the finale literally words can't express how much I love this stupid fucking bitch I'm in love with her I want to adopt her and I want her to be happy for the rest of her life im not joking
i won't go into too much detail but miriam is special miriam deserves the world and miriam is the best character in the game bar none and if you wonder if you should play this game just do it for miriam im crazy for her
she got an inferiority complex and copes with anger issues she feels like an outsider and is scared of friendship and emotional intimacy she's just like me frfr
what got me was that the real reason saphy sent miriam on a quest to save the world and told the bard to go with her is simply because she wanted her granddaughter to make a friend before the world ended
point is I could talk about miriam forever so lets just
wandersong is perfect but also flawed it's interesting and boring it has a lot of great ideas and weird execution incredible characters and monotonous ones its such a fucking dilemma how they managed to either make me go crazy cry tear my hair out or
oh
forgot to say
cried like a fucking bitch too this game got me if you played the games you know the miriam scenes I'm talking about literally could not see the screens through the years . embarrassing
I was saying
or bore me to no end irritate me and make me regret all my life decisions
but maybe that's fine I slowly started to be seduced by this game it started to seduce me and it delivered
still conflicted to no end but I'm glad I got to play this miriam you're a part of me I will never forget you
gg it has homosexual yeti monsters fucking raw
some part of me really wanted to enjoy this game way more than I actually did its probably one of the most artistically pleasing mechanically deep genre bending queer narrative driven puzzle adventure ever created and also probably a super slog to go through PLEASE DONT DOX ME YET PLEASE WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT
so I'm famously known nationally as a hater of puzzle games because my IQ is so below the average that I have to look up solutions after solutions to actually get the façade of a bump-less experience throughout . now puzzles in this one are not the worst shit ever because of the main mechanic being not only super interesting and ever shifting but also characterised by puzzle segments that are not super long (but sometimes could get really trying and repetitive) and not super difficult (once you understand the secret formula) and still I ended up kind of hating those parts after a while the game makes a lot of effort to shuffle things up a bit but I'm not the target audience for this type of gameplay
now the main gimmick is pretty fun !!! since youre a bard most of the stuff youre gonna do ingame is sing so most of if not the entirety of the puzzles are gonna be about you matching notes with the cues that are gonna come out of nowhere USUALLY since the developers are so fuccking intelligent thay they managed to bend this simple premise to new heights with some of the most forward thinking use of a simplistic gameplay mechanic to the point that it could rival undertale and the little bullet hell heart literally at first I thought this was gonna be a rhythm game but a part of me is super glad that is is absolutely fucking NOT a rhythm game at all for some reason you should be using the analog stick to match the notes but what these developers end up doing with it is absolutely insane
so yeah for this stuff I actually did enjoy going through the game because they just kept reinventing the main mechanic every 30 minutes and for that I'm genuinely so impressed I have no idea how they did that SURE sometimes the sing circle isn't really the most comfortable way of expressing the design philosophy the developers were aiming for but it comes real close its janky yes but also a damn blast throughout thats definitely one thing that kept me interested till the end of the game
again while this should be a praise sometimes it hindered the experience in some ways because of the puzzle segments I wish these parts were either streamlined or integrated better because they're whole areas of JUST puzzles that honestly made me go insane sometimes its not like they're hard or anything most of them are pretty easy but it's just that why would you put puzzle pieces in a narrative driven game if the reason is to make me more engaged in the game rest assured that you're doing the exact opposite ong which is basically what happened when chicory went full puzzle and to this day I still can't finish it for the life of me because wow do I hate puzzle segments
the narrative driven moments are definitely some of the best parts of the game but NOT ALWAYS the pirates arc was boring as shit the beginning of the game was really slow and I actually began to be enthralled by this whole experience when the game decided to go full majoras mask and until then I actually played this sporadically throughout the months because wow is this game slow and boring sometimes wow please don't kill me
it's not like it's inherently bad and I think if it weren't for my mind numbing adhd I wouldve probably enjoyed this laid back experience way more than I did but there's some really weird pacing throughout where either nothing really happens and you're left with countless and countless of boring dialogue or everything happens all at once - wait isn't this the title of that movie
I'm not against laid back experiences I'm so much in love with night in the woods my heart could explode and what really sets them apart is that wandersong while having basically the same structure fails to make me care for anything happening in the world or any single character appearing on screen
most of the events of the game arent moving until you actually get at least ⅓ in which isn't a lot for a 10 something hours game but it can be detrimental to the pacing nonetheless and the characters are either one trick ponies that are used for some kind of interesting dialogue interactions but then they're just taken out if the entire picture which makes me just not care for any of them UNTIL miriam comes in and im gonna talk about her plenty in a second and at that point i start caring for everything in this game all of the sudden
so yeah these are my main issues here puzzles i hate puzzles one note characters (they're not bad they're just how do you say usa e getta in english mmmmm disposable ??? yeah something like that like they're used for a single joke and then killed off screen . not cool man) and the story takes a lot to digest
it could also very well be that I wasn't in a particularly good moment that's also an interesting point of discussion
moving on the art direction is absolutely flawless now lemme just address the elephant in the room I'm not a huge fan of the art style………. but they managed to make me love it WOW the characters are incredibly well designed and diverse theres a lot of variety in the sceneries youre going to traverse in this pilgrimage the vivid colors are trying to make you wake up while you're snoozing theres a lot of expressions for the bard even though he's basically a mannequin the pop up book aesthetic has a lot of charm and while YES I don't like it it doesn't necessarily mean that I didnt find it super intriguing and gorgeous I can not like something but also praise it like I do with giottos painting they have that lobotomised use of perspective that would make everyone go crazy but you have to still understand that that was the blueprint of the art we had in the renaissance and so forward
that being said for a game with huge emphasis on music it's pretty weird how the songs can range from soothing to anonymous to epic to bopping to basically whatever they could make on a soundboard and they did a good job my only complaint is that there's a lot of good songs here and there like the ghost chant or something that get outright RUINED with the player-controlled bard noises which is probably a result of me being ass at this game but I don't think most of the time the bards singing actually has some good impact on the tunes in the background that you're gonna emulate does that make sense is that rude to say
the music is still godlike though I hope the die hard fans of this game arent already releasing my IP on the dark web hitmen pages because wow I still need to play a lot of shit please wait at least a few more years ok umh ……. at least persona 3 reload
so yeah art direction and sound design top notch we get it moving on im sleepy
some of the thematic elements of the story deeeeefinitely hit real close with stuff like inadequacy and depression which was something that I was NOT expecting for this game to dab into because it started out as this incredible positive journey of saving the world and living life at the fullest yada yada and shit like that until it actually is NOT and the game starts throwing a lot of deep shit at you like themes of loss and grief themes of not being good enough or not being worthy enough friendship and betrayal and existentialism and idealism if you had seen my fucking face when I realised the sheer variety of stuff the game explores I probably would've been munchs the scream
I do not think this should be overlooked most of the dialogues in the game can be taken as jokes and sometimes they really are but if you dig deeper you can see how sensitive the writing is to the themes its trying to convey and I swear some of them do hit . like . a . truck . some scenes of the game are forever printed on my eyelids and I not even bleach would be able to wash them away
the main trio is probably the main focus of the game and its in their interaction that all of that gorgeous luscious writing starts flowing abundantly and lemme be clear I did not care for the bard or any of them in the beginning but wow I ended up loving all of them so dearly
for some reason I think it's fitting how the bard starts as such a blank character until it actually grows a spine and some balls to confront injustices enemies and while literally the end of the world . he's definitely not my favorite one in the game and i would've preferred a more interesting approach to the protagonist BUT the way his character changed from this dilly dallying carefree bard to an idealistic mid-apocalyptic dummie is probably the best character development I couldve asked for in a game like this
I gotta give the developers an Oscar for creating my most hated character in the entire world now Audrey is a fucking pain I tried and tried to like her I cried for her I pained listening to her but she was MADE to be hated and they succeeded if I were there I wouldve showed shibuya a real incident
now
drums
my baby
my wife
my beloved
miriam
most of the reasons why I actually ended up enjoying the game as much as I did even despite all the problems I talked about can be summarized in: miriam
shes a grumpy little witch serious impatient and hates the bards attitude towards a more positive demeanour and at first I thought she was gonna be another one of those characters just falling in the background but she sure as hell became the most important character of the story for me
most of the game she just closes off from the entire world and doesn't really think about opening up to others in any way shape or form but slowly she begins to sweeten to the bards presence and starts sharing a bond that could be called friendship
while I definitely don't think this is the most convoluted character writing in the entire world I relate to her to a personal level and I think she's possibly one of the sweetest 2d beings I got to know till now just thinking about all the cute interactions she exchanged with the bard is making my heart warmer not even talking about the trauma dump or the finale literally words can't express how much I love this stupid fucking bitch I'm in love with her I want to adopt her and I want her to be happy for the rest of her life im not joking
i won't go into too much detail but miriam is special miriam deserves the world and miriam is the best character in the game bar none and if you wonder if you should play this game just do it for miriam im crazy for her
she got an inferiority complex and copes with anger issues she feels like an outsider and is scared of friendship and emotional intimacy she's just like me frfr
what got me was that the real reason saphy sent miriam on a quest to save the world and told the bard to go with her is simply because she wanted her granddaughter to make a friend before the world ended
point is I could talk about miriam forever so lets just
wandersong is perfect but also flawed it's interesting and boring it has a lot of great ideas and weird execution incredible characters and monotonous ones its such a fucking dilemma how they managed to either make me go crazy cry tear my hair out or
oh
forgot to say
cried like a fucking bitch too this game got me if you played the games you know the miriam scenes I'm talking about literally could not see the screens through the years . embarrassing
I was saying
or bore me to no end irritate me and make me regret all my life decisions
but maybe that's fine I slowly started to be seduced by this game it started to seduce me and it delivered
still conflicted to no end but I'm glad I got to play this miriam you're a part of me I will never forget you
gg it has homosexual yeti monsters fucking raw