This was recommended to me by a friend on hearing that I was interested in dipping my toes into the waters of Metroidvanias - a genre that always seemed like something I would enjoy but I never got around to trying.
First things first: like many people, the character designs nearly put me off trying the game entirely. If I'm being charitable, I could say that the game is trying to poke fun at stereotypical anime girl designs as well as people who go crazy for them (you even spend an entire section of the game beating up weebs who are trying to take pictures of you), but it doesn't lean into the satire heavily enough to be convincing. Another thing that nearly filtered me was its clunky translation and clumsy storytelling, which caused both the mystery elements of the story as well as the potentially heartwarming plot elements to fall flat.
Underneath all of that, though, is a package with enough fun to keep me playing all the way through to the end of the postgame. I had mixed feelings on the exploration elements; it was quite fun unlocking new areas and discovering hidden items, but some of the level designs tend to loop within themselves, 'rewarding' exploration with lots of backtracking. In addition, many of the differences between locations are purely cosmetic, leading to a bit of 'sameyness' and making exploration feel like a chore at times. The character progression is stronger though, with the steady drip-drip-drip of finding new abilities and powering up existing ones not only being a great source of dopamine but being a great way to gradually expand the player's moveset without overwhelming them with too much information at the beginning.
One only need to look at some of my other reviews to know that I can sometimes bounce off difficult games, but the boss fights are the strongest part of this game for me; they are examples of difficulty done very right. The waves upon waves of projectiles that you face are absolutely brutal, but they're mitigated by the tools you have at your disposal: crisp and responsive controls, a versatile moveset, a very small hitbox, as well as other anti-frustration features like autosaves and the ability to change the difficulty whenever you want. (I started on the easiest difficulty, turned it up once I got a bit more used to the mechanics, and I'm not ashamed to admit I dialled it all the way down to 'casual' for the postgame final boss who kicked my tail more times than I can count)
I started on this game thinking it would be the first of many Metroidvanias - but I had enough fun that it might also be a gateway into the world of shmups for me. In the end, it earns a high score because it takes a special kind of game to absolutely slaughter me, but have my thought at the end be "yeah, I'll definitely come back to this again later!" I'll definitely revisit this, perhaps on a higher difficulty level, but in the meantime I'm off to play more Metroidvanias and shmups. Hopefully those will be less awkward to play in front of my wife.
First things first: like many people, the character designs nearly put me off trying the game entirely. If I'm being charitable, I could say that the game is trying to poke fun at stereotypical anime girl designs as well as people who go crazy for them (you even spend an entire section of the game beating up weebs who are trying to take pictures of you), but it doesn't lean into the satire heavily enough to be convincing. Another thing that nearly filtered me was its clunky translation and clumsy storytelling, which caused both the mystery elements of the story as well as the potentially heartwarming plot elements to fall flat.
Underneath all of that, though, is a package with enough fun to keep me playing all the way through to the end of the postgame. I had mixed feelings on the exploration elements; it was quite fun unlocking new areas and discovering hidden items, but some of the level designs tend to loop within themselves, 'rewarding' exploration with lots of backtracking. In addition, many of the differences between locations are purely cosmetic, leading to a bit of 'sameyness' and making exploration feel like a chore at times. The character progression is stronger though, with the steady drip-drip-drip of finding new abilities and powering up existing ones not only being a great source of dopamine but being a great way to gradually expand the player's moveset without overwhelming them with too much information at the beginning.
One only need to look at some of my other reviews to know that I can sometimes bounce off difficult games, but the boss fights are the strongest part of this game for me; they are examples of difficulty done very right. The waves upon waves of projectiles that you face are absolutely brutal, but they're mitigated by the tools you have at your disposal: crisp and responsive controls, a versatile moveset, a very small hitbox, as well as other anti-frustration features like autosaves and the ability to change the difficulty whenever you want. (I started on the easiest difficulty, turned it up once I got a bit more used to the mechanics, and I'm not ashamed to admit I dialled it all the way down to 'casual' for the postgame final boss who kicked my tail more times than I can count)
I started on this game thinking it would be the first of many Metroidvanias - but I had enough fun that it might also be a gateway into the world of shmups for me. In the end, it earns a high score because it takes a special kind of game to absolutely slaughter me, but have my thought at the end be "yeah, I'll definitely come back to this again later!" I'll definitely revisit this, perhaps on a higher difficulty level, but in the meantime I'm off to play more Metroidvanias and shmups. Hopefully those will be less awkward to play in front of my wife.
mellorine
2 years ago
...Or so I'd say if the art wasn't so shameless. I'm pretty sure if it's parody, it's the kind of "self-aware" parody that comes across as half-hearted - like characters in comedy whose sole purpose is to point out how unfunny everyone around them is being, in the hopes that the audience laughs at them in spite of the writer(s) knowing that they're not actually being funny.