The Sword of Hope II

 The Sword of Hope II

Okay, so after playing the abysmally unfair adventure-RPG that was The Sword of Hope on the Nintendo Switch Online service, I remembered that I had actually purchased "The Sword of Hope II" from the Nintendo 3DS eShop before it had shut down. I remember at the time finding it strange that the eShop had the sequel available but not the original. (well, nowadays the 3DS eShop has nothing available, so I guess it's all moot at this point)

So... I suppose now's as good a time as any to actually play through it. I mean, presumably I bought it with the intention of playing it at some point, right? And it turns out that point is now.

Since I just finished having a rough time with the first game, I was hoping the second game would be better.
And...well, it is! it is better. It's still a real slog to play through, but it certainly is a better game.

The sequel takes place after the first game. An evil guy named Zakdos has taken the Sword of Hope and is planning to do something evil with it. Theo must once again stop it. There's not much more to it than that.

The basic commands are carried over from the first game - "Look", "Open", and "Hit" commands are the main way you interact with the world, with the ability to use Items and Magic as well. It has the same exact same point-and-click first-person presentation as the fist game. Though I do think the visuals are better in this game.
The world design is better in this game, too - environments are more varied and interesting compared to before. There's an underwater volcano, a beanstalk castle tower, and a bunch of other interesting locales. Compared to the first game, the adventure is a lot more straightforward too - there is no more required backtracking to previous areas, which means there are no longer points where you have to remember something unusual from an earlier screen. There also aren't as many trapped rooms that warp you to different screens - at least, not until the final castle. I guess this game could be considered a bit more streamlined.

The biggest improvement to the playability is the ability to save the game at any time. In the first game, there was no proper saving, and you could only get your password from the shaman NPC in the starting area. But in the sequel, you can just save at any time and it's fine.
So even if the combat goes poorly, as long as you've been saving on every screen, you can reload and continue without too much worry.


Combat has improved. The extremely wild fluctuations for damage rolls from the first game have been toned down significantly. The damage rolls now resemble that of a normal RPG battle system. So finally, it's actually possible to have any kind of combat strategy. fancy that.
The spells are also decently useful in this game - you can blind enemies to incapacitate them and make them attack their allies, which is fun. And some spells can target multiple enemies at once. It's a decent JRPG combat system, but it's nothing mindblowing. Overall, the enemy difficulty is quite high, so it will take a decent amount of grinding encounters to get strong enough to win.

We now have multiple party members too - Theo is joined by a mage boy named Mute, as well as one of three additional party members who join and leave the party as the story progresses.

With all of these combat improvements, I now no longer feel like the game would work better as a strictly point-and-click adventure - I do think the JRPG combat is worth having now that it's functional. But...as much as the combat has been improved from the first game, it's still not really all that fun to play.
The problem is, combat is so extremely SLOW to resolve. It's abysmal. The text scroll is slow, enemies' attack animations are slow and happen one-by-one... it all feels very clunky, and it just takes so long to sit through. And it doesn't help that encounters are extremely ridiculously frequent in this game too. Almost every step you take into a new screen triggers an encounter. It's not all that fun to explore because combat is constantly interrupting you, and the interruptions take such a long time every time.


I think it was actually a mistake to play this on the legit 3DS Virtual Console version I bought. I would honestly have had such a better time if I was on emulator and had access to speed-up functions.

Because... to be fair, the world design and dungeon design is not bad at all. And even the JRPG combat system is good - it works well and provides a reasonable challenge.... it's just too slow and painful to sit through so much boring combat. If I had the freedom to roam the dungeons and fight stuff at a decent pace, this would honestly be a really cool little game. But as it is now, it was just a frustrating slog.

So... if I was going to recommend Sword of Hope II to players nowadays, I would have to insist you play on an emulator with speedup. That's all it really takes to make this game fun tbh.

The overall verdict regarding the Sword of Hope series is... The Sword of Hope 1 requires rewinds in order to be fun, and Sword of Hope II requires fast-forward in order to be fun.
Funny that. Neither game really holds up without emulator functions propping them up.
Yeah. Don't play either of these games on original hardware if you can help it.

But I do think they are decently fun GB adventures. I'm glad I got to see them. ...now I want to go and play some actually good games next.

The Sword of Hope

 The Sword of Hope

Recently, a little Game Boy adventure called The Sword of Hope was added to the Nintendo Switch Online service.

I decided to give it a go.

The Sword of Hope is a small dungeon-crawler style exploration RPG released for the Game Boy in 1991.

You play as prince Theo, who must defeat the evil influence of a dragon who is controlling the king. Theo must visit three wizards to gain the power to confront the dragon. ...There isn't much plot in this game aside from this. It's a basic fantasy premise.

The game is played in the classic dungeon-crawler style. You have a small window showing a first-person view of the current room, a window showing the current available directions you can travel, and a window showing your commands: "Look, "Open", "Hit", "Magic", "Item".

As you travel through the rooms, you will encounter enemies, which are dealt with via classic JRPG turn-based battles. 

The adventurey aspects of the game are fun enough. You begin in a forest, and at any time you can "Look" at the trees in each room, and the forest spirits will give you hints about where to find hidden items or passageways. You need to find three keys in order to meet the three wizards, and each wizard has a small task for you to complete before they give you their aid.

The map design is okay. There are one or two confusing mazes, but there are generally enough unique landmarks that it's not too difficult to keep your bearings. It would have been nicer if we had an in-game map though. :/

As you explore the game, Looking, Opening and Hitting every interactable thing you come across, you may see messages saying "It looks like there may be something here...!" yet, oddly, nothing further happens no matter what you try. Later on you may get a hint saying "Go back and find something in the swamp" or "look for something in the graveyard", and if you've been paying attention, you might remember which particular rooms had the funny text last time you were there. So finding your way to the next objective isn't too bad in this game, especially compared to other games of this style such as Shadowgate. You just need to interact with everything on every screen, and not get too lost.

This game's English translation is pretty terrible, but it adds a certain charm to the game. I kind of love these really unusual and awkward phrasings, and thankfully none of the puzzle hints were botched too badly by the weird choice of words, so I've got no complaints there. You don't really get games with such weird English like this any more, so I like to relish it when I see it.

However... despite being a decent little adventure game, there is one aspect that makes this game bad. Not just bad, but truly miserable to play. And that is, unfortunately, the JRPG-style combat.

The combat in this game is just plain unfair. First of all, enemy encounters are extremely frequent. Not untypical of old RPGs, but still very annoying. 

But the biggest issue is in just how completely random the numbers are. You can do an attack, and it can randomly decide to inflict 6 damage or 45 damage. You can take a hit from the enemy, and it can deal either 7 damage or 50 damage. ...By endgame, you've got around 100 max HP total, to give you an idea of how bad the fluctuations are. It's bad.

Levelling up can mitigate this effect somewhat - regular attacks from enemies will get weaker and weaker the higher your level. But annoyingly, it seems that magic attacks are completely unaffected. You cannot level up your magic defense at all in this game, which means that the final areas of the game are a nightmare to traverse through. 

And this isn't the kind of game where level-grinding is satisfying either, because all of the damage variance means that you can never feel safe in how much damage you're doing. So in order to grind, it's either fighting nothing but weaklings for hours, or trying your luck against the stronger enemies, and dying repeatedly as you do so.

It honestly kills the playability of this game because you are always dying in unfair ways against any magic-using enemies. And the final dungeon is full of them.

The final boss is the most ridiculous final boss I've seen in a while. He is entirely immune to your spells, and he will take anywhere between 1 to 40 damage from your sword attack. And he will cast high level spells at you every turn, dealing anywhere from 7 to 70 damage. It's just impossible to plan for it and there really isn't much you can do to protect yourself other than pray you get lucky.

The only way I was able to defeat the final boss was making heavy use of the Nintendo Switch Online app's ability to rewind. If I got a low damage roll versus the final boss, I'd rewind until I got a good one. And if he killed me in one hit, I'd rewind until his hit did less.

I can't imagine playing and beating this on an actual Game Boy. It's so unnecessarily unfair. I honestly just wish it was a fully point-and-click puzzle kind of thing like Shadowgate. There was no need for the JRPG combat to be in the game at all tbh.

So anyway. This game sucks. the combat design completely kills the enjoyment. I guess it's good that the NSO version exists now with the rewind functionality available, but as a game from 1991, it's horrible.

Soul Blazer

 Another quickie. ...I was just playing a bunch of emulated snes games so I could get some quick game completions done before the new Switch 2 Donkey Kong game comes out, heh.

So anyway. this time I played Soul Blazer.

This is an action-RPG from 1992 published by Enix. ...I seem to be playing a whole bunch of Enix SNES games as of late, huh? 

in Soul Blazer, you play as a warrior, sent down to earth under the watch of The Master (...is this the same "The Master" from ActRaiser perhaps?), in order to restore a land that has been completely wiped out by the evil Deathtoll.

The game is structured like this: You arrive at a town area which is completely empty. You venture into a dungeony area and defeat monsters. Defeating the monsters frees the spirits of the trapped living beings, who begin to repopulate in the hub town as real people again, one by one. Freeing spirits also causes new buildings to appear and new areas to open up in the town. After reaching the end of the dungeon area, you fight a boss, free the spirit of the main townsperson who holds one of the magical orbs you need to collect in order to find Deathtoll, and you are then granted access to the next town to do it again. There are six such towns in the game.

Soul Blazer is a simple little action-RPG. Your main actions are walking around and attacking with your sword. The attack feels good in this game - your sword has a good arc to it that can hit enemies beside and behind you comfortably. You get Exp from killing enemies and can level up to become stronger. You can also find new equipment to increase your attack and defense as you progress through the story. 

Soul Blazer has an Ys-style inventory system where your weapons and armor menu contains every piece of equipment you've found, and you can freely swap back to previous ones if you want. This is useful since some armours have specific effects, such as the ice armor that prevents hot floors from damaging you, or the bubble armor that lets you survive in underwater areas. 

You have a little spirit orb that floats around you, which helps you cast magic spells. When you kill enemies, they drop gems, and you can cast spells by spending gems. You find spells throughout the game - it's fireballs and other things like that. The spell will be cast from the spirit orb's position rather than from the hero's position, which is a bit odd, but it means that your magic requires a bit more timing and precision to aim.

In order to free the trapped spirits of the living, you need to destroy monster lairs. Lairs are tiles in the dungeons that continuously spawn monsters. In order to destroy them, you need to kill every single monster that emerges from the spawn point until it runs out and there are no more monsters.

This system is.... kind of interesting, and kind of monotonous, at the same time?

The interesting part is that, if you want to do it efficiently, you kinda need to figure out a good position to stand in so that the stream of spawning monsters will each approach you in a way where you can safely dispose of them. Sometimes this is a simple matter of standing near a corner, but sometimes it can be a bit more tricky than that. It depends on the monster and on the terrain. The monotonous part is... since some of these lairs can have quite a lot of monsters in them, there's a lot of time spent in this game just repeatedly pressing the attack button standing in front of the spawn points, waiting for them to finally run out of monsters...It can feel like it takes a bit too long sometimes, because you don't know how many monsters are left in a lair until they're all gone.

The boss fights in this game are an unfortunate difficulty-spike in my opinion. The first boss, for example - it deals a lot of damage, and the arena has three conveyor belts in it that make it difficult to find a good place to stand. The later bosses aren't much better, especially one really annoying boss fight atop an airship, which has gusts of winds blowing you around the entire time...this one is especially hard.

 There is only one healing item in this game, a healing herb that restores all your health. You can always replenish your herb as long as you've resurrected the herb shop owner's spirit, but you can only hold one herb at a time, which means that there's no way to "stock up" on more items to help you with tricky bosses. You can grind enemies for level-ups if you're truly struggling, but for the most part, this is a game where you need to figure out the boss patterns and get good at dodging. 

Aside from the bosses, I'd say the difficulty of the game is pretty relaxed and easygoing. The dungeons never feel too complicated to figure out, even though there's no map. And there are enough opportunities to warp back to town and restore your health so that it never feels too oppressive to explore deep into the dungeons. I really like the way it plays.

Once you have rescued people, you can talk to them in the towns. They give you little sidequests, give you hints, or simply just say thank you. The NPC dialogue in this game is quite interesting in my opinion. They believe in reincarnation, and they even give hints about which of their loved ones might have reincarnated into some of the animals that populate the town. It's oddly sweet in a half whimsical, half melancholic kind of way. 

The second town is a very cute forest clearing, populated entirely with animals and trees, with no humans at all. In this game, trees also contain spirits, and even objects crafted from wood still retain their soul and can be rescued. There's a section where a bunch of wooden raft platforms refuse to let you ride them across the swamp until you've proven your allegiance to the forest town. I found this very cute. 

One of the more interesting locations was the mountain village, populated by a race of dwarves who only have a one-year-long lifespan. Yet the people here are happy and thriving, and it is said that they never once consider their lives to be too short.

This game seems to have a lot of things to say regarding life and rebirth. The themes and the messages of this game give it a unique spiritual feeling.

Overall... I really really like Soul Blazer. It's a short, cute little action-RPG, and it has nice, easygoing exploration and combat, plus some interesting meditative feelings to express. Very cool interesting experience that I would recommend to all fans of classic RPGs. :) 

Brain Lord

 

Just played Brain Lord

I don't feel like going too in-depth for this game. So instead I will just write some basic impressions.

so anyway. Brain Lord.

I don't understand the title of this game at all.

Nothing in the game is a "Brain Lord". The main villain is a Demon King. The plot involves the power balance between Demons and Dragons - as the last Dragon is slowly dying, there will be nothing to counterbalance the Demon King's evil. So it's up to the hero to defeat the Demon King before that happens. Y'know, normal fantasy RPG stuff.

...So where does the name Brain Lord even come from? What is it referring to??

"Brain Lord"...???

I don't think the word "brain" is even uttered a single time in the entirety of the game's script. ...is there any explanation? or did they think it sounded cool for some reason?

I don't think it sounds cool, it just sounds...  not representative of the game at all. it sounds way too 'heavy metal' for a regular ol fantasy rpg.

Weird title aside, Brain Lord is a SNES game from 1994 published by Enix. It's an action-RPG. I played on emulator.

You play as Remeer, the son of a Dragon Warrior, who is tasked with exploring and investigating the disappearance of dragons from the world. Remeer is part of a squad with four other members, and as you play through the story, you'll frequently run into your squadmates during your expeditions in the dungeons. Which is a cute detail. Sometimes they give you items, give you tips, or even open a shop so you can buy and sell items. It's nice to feel like you're adventuring as a team, even in a game with only one playable character.

The graphics of this game.... are honestly kinda not so great in my opinion. Environments are fine, but the character sprites just look really really weird. Characters are represented at an awkward half-overhead view that doesn't read well. Remeer looks weirdly broad when viewed from the front, and weirdly fat when viewed from the side, I just... don't like the way it looks lol.

Remeer can attack with a variety of weapons - sword, boomerang, bow, flail, axe. They aren't all useful - sword has the best arc, bow has the best range, flail has the best damage, and axe can break small rocks In one cave but is otherwise useless. Boomerang feels entirely useless.

Remeer can also jump, which is used for platforming in the dungeons. There is no EXP, rather Remeer gets stronger by finding powerups in chests - health upgrades, strength upgrades, and defense upgrades. Also by equipping stronger weapons and armour of course.

The game structure is quite skewed in favour of dungeon-exploration - the game has two small towns, two tiny overworld connections between them, two small connecting cave areas, and five MASSIVE dungeons to explore. The bulk of your playtime in Brain Lord will be spent inside the dungeons.

The dungeons are full of traps, monsters, puzzles and secret passages.

The first two dungeons are the trickiest and most interesting in terms of puzzles - they have secret walls to push, button combination locks to solve, and occasionally specific holes to fall down that lead to secret areas. These puzzles are hinted at by signs you see on the walls of the dungeons. Gives this game a very dungeon-crawler feel to it, which is something I always like.

You get "x-ray glasses" that can be used to see a map of the current floor you're on, but it really only shows the floor plan, and doesn't show doors or stairs very clearly. It can be useful for noticing hidden pushable walls though, if you're paying attention.

Most of the secret stuff is hinted at in some way, which is good, but there are a few optional secrets that aren't. Or at least I didn't find the hints. 

But there are some puzzles in this game that are just...plain bad. The worst puzzle in the game is this: There's a locked door, and three buttons on the floor. A sign nearby says "To open door, the secret is on your control pad". ...try all you might to press the buttons in the correct order, nothing ever happens. The solution is to face the locked door and press the X button on your controller. ... ... the buttons on the floor do nothing. ... I mean, what? What kind of puzzle is that? Just a red herring puzzle? I had to look up the answer online.

 

The third dungeon is the most obnoxious dungeon, in that it has slippery ice floors, spikes that pop up from the ground without any visual cue to watch for, fountains that poison you instead of heal you, signposts that poison you when you try to read them, and some other things designed to antagonise the player. Also, bizarrely, the Ice Castle is the only dungeon you can't return to once you complete it, so if you accidentally missed a health upgrade, it'll be gone forever if you beat this dungeon before getting it. ... I don't understand why this happens - nothing in the game necessitates the dungeon locking itself after beating it - it just literally removes itself from your warp menu with no explanation. ...all the other dungeons are fully backtrackable, and nothing else in the game is missable. Did they just want to make the Ice Castle as annoying as possible, or what?

The fourth dungeon, the volcano, is annoying in its own way - its main gimmick is rocks that randomly exist or not exist whenever you scroll the screen over them. Most of the time the passage is blocked by the rocks, but if you walk back and forth a lot, you can eventually get lucky enough that enough of the rocks chose not to exist, allowing you a path forwards. This isn't really a puzzle, this is just annoying. The cherry on top is when you find a special "Rock Breaker Axe" in this dungeon - its description mentions it can break rocks, but it doesn't work at all on these gimmick rocks, and in no way helps you overcome the dungeon. It just breaks the regular small rocks from earlier that any axe can break. ... Is this game just full of jokes at the player's expense, or what?

The fifth and final dungeon's gimmick is that it has a lot of pitch-black rooms with invisible walls to navigate through. it sucks.

The later few dungeons also get really annoying with the enemies and traps and platforming jumps too. You end up taking a lot of stray hits as you navigate around. Thankfully, just before entering the third dungeon, you get given a familiar who can restore your health. If you grind the familiar up to max level, it will restore life at a rate of 1hp every few seconds. Which means that you can at least mitigate the damage from the traps if you keep this familiar equipped at all times. As long as you don't mind spending a while leveling it up first. 

Overall... This game was okay. The first two dungeons set expectations high for a game full of interesting unique puzzles, but the latter half of the game really phones it in with bad unfun gimmicks that I wouldn't exactly call puzzles.

I don't really recommend playing this game tbh.

Also the name "Brain Lord" is stupid.

the end.

ActRaiser 2

 I just tried and failed to beat ActRaiser 2.

ActRasier 2 was released for SNES in 1993. I played it on emulator.
As far as I know, this game has never been re-released.


ActRaiser 2 is a slow-paced sidescrolling action game with extremely high difficulty.
In fact this is one of the most difficult SNES action-platformers I have played.


You play as The Master, a godlike being who descends to earth in order to fight the evil forces of the demonic Tanzra.


The game has a world map menu where you can choose from a selection of levels to play in the order you like, however some levels will only open up after beating certain previous ones. In total there are 14 levels in the game.


The Master can walk, jump, crouch, double jump, glide, and swing his sword forwards or in mid-air. He can aim his sword diagonally upwards while standing, and can thrust the sword downwards while jumping as well. Additionally, he has a shield that will block projectiles as long as he is standing still. So there are quite a few moves in this game, more so than the typical SNES platformer.

The Master's walking speed is.... really slow. This is quite a slow-paced game.
As a huge fan of Castlevania, I am no stranger to slow-paced action games, so I get it, but... I dunno, this game does feel especially slow-paced, even when compared to Castlevania.

The double jump and gliding controls are really awkward. This biggest issue is that the Master will automatically begin to glide after every double-jump. In order to double-jump without gliding, you have to hold up on the d-pad in order to preemptively cancel the glide, which is super awkward to do.
If you mess up the timing, then the Master will start soaring through the air, which will often lead to your death if you did it accidentally. Whenever he touches the ground while gliding, he has this sliding-braking animation that can get you in trouble... If you're stuck sliding, you can't avoid enemies, and you might slide off the ledge into a pit. It's really annoying.

I kind of just wish that this game had a specific button you needed to press in order to start gliding. I wish I could just double-jump without having to constantly worry about also needing to cancel the glide...

From a glide, if you press down + the attack button, the Master does a diving attack, which can be pretty handy on occasion. But it is also rather awkward to pull off.


Additionally, the Master has seven magic spells he can use. If you hold the attack button, he will start charging and glowing red. Once he fully charges, releasing the button will do a spell depending in which direction you hold:
If you are standing, he does a flamethrower. If you are crouching, he does an earthen barrier. If you are holding up, he does a fire bomb. If you are in the air, he does an electric blast. If you are gliding, he does a sonic wave. If you are gliding and holding up, he does a thunderbolt. If you are gliding and holding down, he does a phoenix dive.

I do like this system where your magic depends on your current action, but... most of the spell effects are pretty underwhelming in this game. The spell animation doesn't really last very long or look that impactful, and they're all super awkward to aim.
The only spell that I found to be any use is the fire bomb, as it travels in a big lobbing arc, and it inexplicably deals a ton of damage to the bosses. All of the other spells, especially the ones you need to glide to do, I found way too awkward to ever use seriously. Especially since it requires you to hold the attack button, meaning you lose the ability to defend yourself whenever you want to charge one up. So most of the time, trying to use a spell causes you to just take damage trying, and more often than not you don't even manage to land the hit after all the fuss.

Casting a spell costs 1 MP too - you start each level with 3 MP, and can occasionally find more from random enemy drops or from breaking specific power up pillars. So it is pretty limited.

...

So... what makes this game so hard?

To put it simply, you move slowly, there are enemies everywhere, and the checkpointing is extremely unforgiving.


So here's a typical first-time experience with ActRaiser 2...

You begin the game, and the world map cursor defaults to hovering nearby Industen, the forest level. You select this level and begin. First thing you notice is how beautiful the environmental scenery is. Lush jungle foliage, fantastical giant mushrooms, this game has some great environmental pixel art.

Second thing you notice, is that there are goblins on the mushrooms that jump directly in your face the moment you approach, there are worms crawling out of the ground and emerging directly underneath you, and there are dragonflies flying right at you, all at once. All at the same time. You can't make it very far before being completely overwhelmed by this cacophony of enemies.

So you try again. Again and again. You take it slower. You start paying attention to exactly how the enemies behave and where they are located. You learn exactly what distance a goblin will jump from the mushroom so you can back off at just the right time to deal with it. You learn how many hits it takes to kill a dragonfly so you know how safe it is to let them approach. You learn where not to jump in order to not trigger additional dragonfly spawns. You learn which enemies to prioritise - if there is a worm and a dragonfly chasing you at once, which one will reach you first? You might even figure out that your down-thrust attack can kill a worm or goblin in one hit. Nice. So you die and try again, you die and learn, you die and figure it out, piece by piece. And... eventually you get a decent grasp of the first few screens and can even sometimes get through without taking damage.

Eventually, you make it to the mid-boss. It's a carnivorous plant with a big flytrap maw. It charges at you, spits fireballs at you, and you die immediately. ...So you make it back to the midboss again. Every attempt requiring you to get through the hellscape of goblins and dragonflies beforehand. And you die immediately again. It's impossible. The plant's vulnerable point is behind its huge jaw, how can you reach it without taking a hit?

Eventually you might figure out to use the magic fire bomb for its high damage, or the flamethrower for its brief period of invulnerability. Or you might learn how to continuously down-thrust its weak point to do more damage than just slashing. There are ways to get through the fight, but none of them are intuitive, and so it will take some experimentation to figure out. And each and every death requires you to brave the previous path again.

And when you finally manage to triumph, what happens next? Well... the screen continues scrolling. That was just the midboss after all. ...And you don't even get a health refill either.

Immediately afterwards is a swampy mud floor, which spells instant death if you fall in. So you need to do some actual platforming now. You jump onto the mushroom platform hovering over the mud pit, and.... an offscreen frog jumps into you from below, completely unpredictable and unreactable. You die and it's back to the very beginning.
What in the actual heck was that. How was I supposed to know...?????

So okay. Try again. Goblins. Dragonflies. Big plant. ....do it again. And again. Until you can get through the plant boss consistently.

Okay finally. Now we know to avoid the frog, but... what is this next section? There is a faraway platform inside a tree trunk that can only be reached with a glide-jump. And not just any glide jump will do. It has to be an almost pixel-perfect glide jump.

...
For whatever reason, ActRasier 2 has a fascination with pixel-precise jumps. Almost every stage has at least one of these. A jump that requires you to get riiiight up to the very edge of the platform, and then jump as high as you can, initiate your double jump at the exact highest point of your jump, glide perfectly straight forwards, and land just on the very very edge of the platform on the other side. It's ridiculous. And if you fail this jump, it's back to the beginning for you. There hasn't been a checkpoint yet. Go kill that plant again if you want to try this jump again.

It doesn't help that this particular pixel-perfect jump also has an unreachable enemy in the way too? So you either have to somehow dodge the enemy mid-flight, or waste an MP killing it beforehand. And you only start with 3MP, so you'll have to have not used them all up on the plant beforehand, and have no plans to use them at the end-of-stage boss either.

So at this point, after failing this ridiculous pixel-perfect jump for the billionth time, you might decide to try one of the other stages.
There are six levels available on the world map from the start, after all.

Well............ the other levels aren't much better. what are you even expecting? Starting afresh with a new level means learning all the enemy placements and level layouts anew. Learning new miniboss patterns, learning new specific techniques that help in specific sections. And then failing to yet another pixel-perfect jump or unfair enemy spawn deep into the level. And doing this over and over and over.

The typical player's impression of this game is one where they try playing for hours, and yet never managed to make any progress at all. They try all the available stages, don't manage to complete a single one, and then give up entirely. I've seen this story online several times when looking up opinions about this game. People tend to dislike this game because they can't get anything accomplished, and have nothing to show for their hours of efforts.

...

So, anyway. I decided to play ActRaiser 2 for two days straight. I learned those levels and figured out how to damage the bosses efficiently. It took a lot of patience and a lot of practice. And you know what? I was actually kinda enjoying the game. I wasn't having an awful time by any means. It was pretty fun figuring out this game and getting the hang of things. There's something satisfying about getting to grips with a difficult game, even if it is designed to be maddeningly difficult.

And eventually, after all of this practice and repetition, I did manage to beat....12 of the 14 levels. ...That's as far as I could get.

The problem with level 13, the Tower of Souls, is that... in addition to a fairly lengthy platforming level with precision jumps and swarms of ghosts who love to appear right in front of your face without warning, is that the level ends with a boss rush segment. You have to defeat six minibosses in a row, and THEN the end-of-stage boss immediately afterwards. And... I just couldn't manage this. I was getting too frustrated because I kept having to redo the tower platforming so many times. It's so irritating when you just want to get back to try the bosses again, but keep failing the precision jumps because the glide is too finicky to control. It was getting on my nerves.
So after trying and trying and trying again and always eventually dying to the boss rush... I just gave up.

I looked up a speedrun of the game online so I could see the ending. Apparently level 14 ALSO contains its own boss rush! what the heck. And the final boss looks ridiculously difficult on top of that.
So you know what, I think I'm done with this game. 12 out of 14 levels is good enough for me.
...

Anyways. I had a fun time with ActRaiser 2 overall, even though it was way too hard and unfair for my liking.
It's not a bad game, but maybe they could have balanced it a bit better to make it more palatable?

If I was younger and had fewer games to play overall, I believe I would have probably stuck with it until I beat it. I have beaten every single Castlevania game after all, so I'm always up for a challenge. But for the point in my life where I'm at now, I'm just happy to have reached as far as I did.

Darkened Skye

 I played Darkened Skye.

This game was released for Windows and GameCube in 2002. I played it on GameCube.

Darkened Skye is a comedy adventure fantasy platforming shooter game. You play as Skye of Lynlora, on her quest to defeat the evil Necroth who has sealed away the magic of the world.

The adventure starts off with Skye as a simple shepherd. One day she finds a strange, round, bright orange artifact labelled with an "S". And when she picks it up, it transforms her shepherd's crook into a magical combat staff. 

Soon after finding this mysterious artifact, she meets with a friendly gargoyle named Draak, who takes her to see the wise old crone who lives in the nearby village. Upon meeting the crone, Skye learns that the orange artifact, is in fact.... a Skittles® candy. In this world, Skittles have the power of the Rainbow, and they are the key to restoring the magic and colour that Necroth has stolen.

Skye is now the hero destined to use the power of the Skittles to defeat Necroth and return the power of the Rainbow to the world.

Yes indeed. Despite not mentioning it anywhere on the box or in the marketing at all, it turns out that Darkened Skye is actually a Skittles-branded game all along! What fun!

Darkened Skye is a game that combines classic adventure game tropes with platforming and shooting combat. ...And when I say "adventure games", I mean stuff like inventory puzzles. For example, in the first area, there's a town with an exotic animal merchant. You can find a weird bunny in a tree in the forest, trade it to the merchant for a lamp-fish, use the fish to light up a nearby dark cave, find a rock in the cave, use the rock on a catapult to knock down an archer goblin, who then drops a clue you need to progress. ... ... You know, those kind of adventure gamey shenanigans. I always liked this kind of stuff.

Also typical of the adventure game genre is the overall tone and sense of humour. This is a game that does not take itself seriously at all. It's "the Skittles game" after all lol, you can't make it too serious.

Skye herself has a fun sense of humour and wit. She takes everything in stride, and always has some kind of lighthearted sarcastic remark for whatever's going on in the journey. Though she will also take things seriously whenever necessary, too - there is a subplot involving the whereabouts of Skye's mother which is not made fun of at all. I appreciate that the game doesn't turn everything into a joke just for the sake of shoving humour into every corner.

Draak the gargoyle acts as Skye's sidekick throughout the adventure, making wisecracks and playing off Skye's banter.

......okay, tangent time, but... I recently played The Legend of Spyro series, and oh man... in that game Sparx, the comic-relief sidekick, would not shut up with the sarcastic remarks every single scene, whereas Spyro's personality in that game was very straightforward and no-nonsense. Which gave the impression that the two were always at odds despite being "best friends". Spyro's main interaction with Sparx would be to tell him to stop goofing around, and Sparx's main interaction with everything was to complain and complain and complain and never take anything seriously. It got so tiring so quickly.

But Skye and Draak on the other hand actually play off each other quite well. They're both prone to a bit of sarcastic banter, but they seem to be in good spirits throughout. They actually seem to enjoy being adventurers together in this silly Skittles quest, and even when they're poking fun at things, it's never too mean-spirited. It's just fun. ...And it felt like such a breath of fresh air after playing Legend of Spyro, haha.

Skye and Draak are the main source of the majority of the game's humour - the actual world is a standard fantasy setting with forests and dungeons and castles etc, and the other characters are all various fantasy creatures that are fairly played-straight, which I think was a good decision. It makes the absurdity all the more fun when there is some actual normalcy going on too. It's a fine balance, and I think Darkened Skye pulls it off well.

But even though they don't make jokes, there is still humour to be had with the other fantasy critters - for example, the fish people who give you hints in the second level. They swim up to Skye, then proceed to say something that sounds like someone trying and failing to speak while underwater... no coherent words whatsoever. And then Draak translates their dialogue for us. ...It's one thing to have them speak in fantasy language, but it's kind of hilarious that their language just sounds so ridiculous. And that the stupid-sounding speech is played perfectly straight, as if it was a normal fantasy tongue. Oh it's good. This game has good humour.

Additionally, Skye will write in her quest log after every point of progression, and some of her comments are actually... kind of really witty and funny? There's one comment where she just straight-up complains about the game design, saying how "oh they only made it hard to figure out so they could sell more strategy guides" and all that. ...If there's a fourth wall here, I haven't seen it in a while. 

So yeah, the humour is really good. In fact, I think the humour is the best aspect of the game.

But now it's time to talk about the actual gameplay itself.

...

The game controls like a regular third-person 3d twinstick game - you move and strafe with the left stick, and aim Skye's facing direction with the right stick.

Skye can jump, attack with her staff, and shoot magic with her staff too.  

The default controls are really weird on the GameCube's controller - attack is L, jump is R, and B is entirely unused...??? why is it like this? I guess they wanted you to be able to jump and attack without taking your thumb off the right stick? It doesn't quite work with the GC's thick shoulder buttons tbh. ... Thankfully, the game provides controller remapping options. I put jump on A and attack on B so it could feel like a normal game. I don't normally tend to want to alter default control schemes very much, but this game's defaults were just so weird to me.

Skye uses her staff to fight - she can bash enemies with it, or shoot magical projectiles from it. 

The close-range combat is pretty loose and not very deep. You kinda just keep pressing the attack button, and Skye will keep swinging the thing around. There isn't much nuance to it, though you do have the option to attack while moving at the same time, which can be helpful to avoid enemies' attacks, or to weave in and out of enemy range. Annoyingly, sometimes I manage to trigger a more elaborate attack animation that forces Skye to stand in place for a while, and I still have no idea what input is required to do this attack. It's annoying when this happens because I do enjoy the ability to move and attack at the same time.

Shooting magic blasts is generally the better way to engage with enemies - your magic blasts can reach a very long distance, though aiming can be a bit finicky with the right stick, since it doesn't allow for subtle adjustments at long distances, and there's absolutely no lock-on auto-target feature or anything. You really gotta be good at twinstick aiming to hit those faraway targets. Which means a lot of tiny fidgety adjustments with the stick.

I actually think the long-range shooting in this game feels kinda okay, though it's not amazing or anything. Taking out enemies from a distance with the magic blasts is always satisfying, especially because enemies in this game do not respawn. So it's entirely possible to clear out the whole level of enemies to give yourself the space you need to solve the puzzles in peace. I always enjoy when that's an option.

Whenever you attack an enemy, the feedback isn't great - they often don't visually react to your blasts at all, even though they are taking damage. You just kinda have to trust the process.

The enemies in this game range from annoying to very annoying. The majority of enemies have some kind of projectile attack, and their aim is annoyingly good. You can use the terrain as cover if you can find a good spot to do so, and weaving in and out of cover is a good way to go about dealing with them. It's not very in-depth, but it is manageable once you get a feel for it. 

The most annoying enemies in the game are the swooping bat things. They pester you from the skies, and very quickly swoop down toward you, and immediately fly out of range again. There isn't really any way to get cover from them, and you really can't get anything done until you deal with them first, and sometimes there can be many of them all swooping at you at once. Aiming at them is tricky too. Blehhh.

I should mention, this is a game where you are going to die a lot, because the wonky combat and annoying enemies can often lead to unfair deaths. However, this isn't actually a huge issue in the grand scheme of things because this game features quicksave and quickload.

Hmm... Actually, I think this is the only GameCube game I have ever seen that has quicksave and quickload? Normally that's a PC game kinda feature. But it's right here on the Cube, and it works surprisingly as you'd expect. Loading is instant, as long as you're not loading into a different level than the one you're currently playing.

While quicksaving and quickloading are often easy on PC games (it's usually on the F5 and F6 keys, or something like that ), on a GameCube, it's less convenient. You have to pause with Start and scroll down to either the Save Game or Load Game options in order to quicksave and quickload. And annoyingly, these options are positioned right underneath the "New Game" option. which means that, if you're making heavy use of quicksave and quickload (which is pretty much mandatory to do), you may very well accidentally keep selecting New Game... And then you have to wait for the game's intro cutscene to load, skip the intro, go back to the load menu, and reload the level you're on.... just from a simple misinput. It's rather annoying.

And you cannot ignore the quicksave feature in this game - whenever you die, the game puts you at the start of the entire level. And a level in this game isn't short. Each level has multiple sections and multiple objectives with multiple puzzles. There's no possibility to get through the game without making heavy use of quicksave. ...so yeah, I do wish they didn't make it so bothersome in the menus.

If they had just let me map quicksave to L and quickload to R, it would have been so much better!!!

Maybe it's less annoying in the Windows version of Darkened Skye? oh well.

...

So. Anyway. Let's talk about the game's magic system.

At first you only have one or two spells in your magic list, but as you progress the game, more and more spells get added to the list. You have 23 spells in total by the time you reach the end of the story.

In order to actually equip a spell, you need to slot in the correct number of Skittles into it within the spell menu. So in order to use True Sight, the spell that uncovers hidden objects, you need to slot in one Red and one Orange Skittle. In order to use Prismatic Pulse, the first offensive projectile attack, you need to slot in one Yellow and one Green Skittle.

The Skittles are found within the stages. They float and emit sparkles and are generally positioned in conspicuous locations so you don't miss them, though some of them are a bit more hidden as well.

Skittles are not a consumable resource - when you grab a Skittle, it gets added to your Skittle pool and stays available for the whole journey.

Whenever you use a spell, the Skittles attached to the spell get drained of their power, which will slowly recover over time on a cooldown.

This becomes more interesting when you have multiple spells you can swap between - When your Skittles powering Prismatic Pulse are recovering, you can switch over to using Pyro Pulse so you can keep attacking. But Pyro Pulse is a much slower projectile, so you have to adapt the way you play to accommodate this. 

Additionally, you may have situations where you can't equip two different spells at once because you don't have enough spare Skittles in the pool. One of the stronger spells is Lightning, which takes 2 Yellow, 2 Green, and 2 Purple to equip. But if all of your Green Skittles are currently equipped to Polar Pulse (which requires 1 Orange and 3 Green), then you'll have to swap them out in order to change spells - but if the green ones are still recharging from you spamming so many Polar Pulse blasts earlier, then you'll still have to wait for them to recharge before your Lightning is available. But then later on, you might find another couple of Green Skittles to add to the pool, so now you have more flexibility when it comes to slotting both spells at once and swapping quickly between them.

It's actually kind of an interesting dynamic? The way you can use your magic does actually adapt and evolve in interesting ways as you progress through the game. I think it's cool.

The spells have a good variety to them - The offensive spells all have different properties in their attack speed and power. The Lightning spell is a continuous zappy bolt, but drains energy quickly. The Pyro Pulse and Polar Pulse spells are quite slow, but pretty powerful compared to the fast but weak Prismatic Pulse. It's nice when different attacks actually feel different to use and have their own utilities. 

However, many of the non-offensive spells aren't so useful. 

Strength Sap weakens an enemy, Impede slows enemy movements, Madness confuses enemies, Affliction poisons enemies. ...these spells unfortunately seemed pretty useless overall. The effect they have on enemies is not obvious - most of the time it looks like nothing has changed. And generally it's too fiddly to keep swapping out your Skittles to equip things like these and then swapping back to offensive magic... it's easier to just keep the offensive spells equipped and not bother with the debuffs at all.

There are some other non-offensive effects that can be pretty handy though: Veil turns Skye invisible so that enemies don't attack, Diminish makes her tiny so she can fit in small gaps, Fire Walk allows her to walk over lava pits, and Wind Glide lets her float, though of course, it's only available in the final few levels... The fun ones are always only at the end, aren't they.

Overall, the spell system in this game is quite interesting and fun, though a bit fiddly since you keep needing to go into the menus to slot the Skittles in and out. 

The progression of the game is very linear. There are 25 levels you play in a row, and there is no way to return to previously-beaten levels. There is no chapter select menu or anything either. Bit of a shame - the game is quite long, so it would have been nice to be able to return to your favourite levels whenever you liked.

...So, uh, apparently the levels in this game are based on various fantasy-themed Skittles TV adverts they had in the past...??? One Skittles advert supposedly features a woman on horseback at Stonehenge, summoning Skittles from the sky. ... and there's a level in Darkened Skye that involves taking a white horse through a badlands that does feature a Stonehenge at some point. ... I have to say, if they really went as far to reference specific TV ads in this game, that's quite impressive dedication to the Skittles lore. 

The levels have quite a nice variety to them in the locales, the level layouts, and the puzzles and scenarios. There's a sunken temple, a swamplands, a hilly plain, a goblin dungeon, a palace filled with mechanical traps, a secret laboratory, a catacombs... There's a good variety in terms of item puzzles, NPC puzzles, environmental puzzles, and also good old-fashioned enemies to fight. I enjoy how there's a level that takes place entirely with Skye in her shrunken form from her Diminish spell, too - it's always fun to play in a small environment where the flowers look enormous. 

Overall, this game does have a nice feeling of adventure, and I enjoy the levels aesthetically quite a lot.

Some of the levels do feel a bit long-winded and confusing at times though - there's no shortage of mazelike layouts, which can get annoying when you're trying to solve the maze while fending off creatures at the same time. 

There's one level that takes place in the sky across a series of magic carpets with no enemies or items to collect at all - it's just jumping and jumping and hoping that the carpet you're on goes the right way. It can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming.

Throughout the levels, you can come across various items that can help you - life potions are always helpful, bombs can give you a way to attack enemies more effectively, and then some levels have specific environmental items such as the "Spongite" which is a sponge creature you can throw into the water to create a temporary platform.

Items are not permanent - At various points in the game, they'll just remove all of your accumulated potions and bombs from your inventory. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to when this happens.

The platforming in this game is definitely on the janky side - it's got controls optimised for shooting and strafing, so the jumping does feel a bit off. Thankfully quicksave and quickload prevent the jumping from being too frustrating. Just make sure to save before every jump, eh? ...

The game does feel a little shoddily-built at times. There's one level where you're expected to hit switches in a certain order, in order to raise and lower the pillars to allow you to jump across to reach the next switches in sequence. However, it is possible to hit one of the switches early by doing some tricky jumps over water with a Spongite... and if you do this, then the level becomes unsolveable because the pillar heights are messed up. ... This is annoying, but thankfully, since dying resets you to the start of the level, you can get back on track by jumping in the water to die to reset the whole level, even if you don't have a quicksave from before you messed it up. So that's good at least?

...I'd say, generally ...you have to be in an agreeable mood to play this game. Y'know, you gotta meet it halfway. The game provides funny dialogue, while the player provides the patience to deal with all the platforming jank and fiddly menu jank. It's a good tradeoff, I'd say.

Overall... I genuinely enjoyed my time with Darkened Skye. It is no game design masterpiece by any means, but it is so cute and charming and really funny. It is so... unapologetically itself. You just can't help but see the love they poured into this stupid game about Skittles. It's great. It's honestly one of my favourite weird obscure games now.

Omori

I played Omori. 

This is an RPGMaker game released in 2020. I played it on Switch.

It took me a while to write this one because I couldn't quite put into words how this game made me feel. ... ...

As an RPG, Omori is definitely very heavily focused on the story and the characters. On the narrative and especially the artistic aspects.

The story it tells is one of a young boy. A stoic boy who doesn't speak a word. 

"Welcome to White Space. You have been living here for as long as you can remember". The young boy finds himself in this place day after day. White Space is somehow both a tiny room, and a vast expanse of nothingness at the same time. From the non-existent ceiling, a pitch-black lightbulb hangs down into the room. The boy has his laptop, his sketchbook, and a box of tissues. His pet cat Mewo is curled up sleeping in the corner. A closed door is suspended within the nothingness.

The boy is Omori. He spends his days in White Space.

While playing as Omori, you can look at the items in the room if you want.

When you check the laptop, you have the option to "stare at the screen".

When you check the door, you have the option "do nothing".

You can look at the lightbulb, but it is pitch-black inside.

When you talk with Mewo, she only says... "Waiting for something to happen?"

...

Some days, Omori does decide to open the door to visit his friends next door. Aubrey, Kel, and Hero. Omori's best friends. Aubrey, the rambunctious girl. Kel the rascally troublemaker boy. Hero, the charismatic older brother to Kel.

In stark contrast to White Space, the Neighbour's Room is full of colour and fun. Gentle pastel hues, and odd knickknacks strewn about. A TV, A blender, card games, a puddle of water with a tentacle poking through the floor... a single bean on a plate on the table. constellations sprawling across the sky. ... ... and of course, the giant yellow cat watching over the room from above. Is this a magical wonderland?

This contrast extends to the characters themselves. Aubrey, Kel, and Hero are all smiles and joy, and they appear in a gentle pastel violet colour scheme. But Omori himself is completely monochrome and always has a deadpan neutral expressionless face. Even among his friends, Omori doesn't seem to fit in. ...

Today the gang are going to the playground to meet up with Mari, Omori's older sister who has set up a picnic, as well as Basil, the gentle boy who tends to the gardens.

Together they play hide n seek, and Basil shows everyone his photo album, full of happy memories of the six friends together, playing, sleeping, making arts and crafts, enjoying a nice day out...

So idyllic, right?

...well, maybe not so much if you dig a little deeper. It may all start to fall apart...

As you explore this world, you will start to uncover what is really going on under the surface.

Omori is haunted by a strange shadowy something that keeps disappearing just out of sight. What could it mean?

The more he explores the strange and ethereal lands.... the more disturbing things he might come across.

The more you play, the more you discover the true nature of this reality Omori finds himself in.

Because despite appearing as a cutesy and surreal RPG on the surface, Omori truly is a horror game. And it makes no effort to hide this fact.

...in fact, it even has an 18+ rating and comes with a content warning before you begin a new game. This game deals with some heavy themes and does not want to misrepresent itself.

...

....Omori's depiction of depression is quite interesting. With White Space in particular... Mewo's single line of dialogue, "Waiting for something to happen?" really resonated with me. When you spend day after day after day in your bedroom, unwilling to go anywhere or do anything...well, Mewo... you've got a point there. What are we waiting for, exactly, anyway? Is anything ever going to change if we aren't doing anything different? Or are we waiting for the change to happen to us first?

Omori, the poor boy, isn't just suffering from depression though. There's a lot of other assorted traumas inside this boy too. And each and every one of his traumas manifests in some way shape or form throughout the game.

And the game does not pull any punches either. Throughout the course of the game, the full brunt of this child's various psychoses are brought up in viscerally unpleasant detail.

It's quite fascinating actually. This game is incredibly artistic in its depictions of mental health. And every small detail in the world has some kind of meaning or association behind it.

I think the underlying story this game tells is.... really really good. It really sticks with you. The way the game makes you care about the characters is wonderfully done. Everyone is very well-written, and the dialogue from the characters feels real and meaningful. And the journey, as a representation and exploration of mental health, is done in a brutal yet tactful manner. And some of the scenes can get...very sentimental and emotional. It makes you yearnful for better days. It gives you a small glimpse of the suffering this boy has gone through.  It makes you wish things could have turned out differently. 

It's a very evocative story.

...

...

...

Well. I think it might be time to talk about some gameplay at some point right

Visually, the game is mostly a pixel-style RPG, but it also combines its pixel art with a very charming pencil-drawn illustration style. Character portraits and important cutscene images have wonderfully whimsical illustrations, and notably, all enemies you battle in the game are also drawn in this illustration style as well. I think it looks really appealing. 

Omori is a turn-based RPG. You run around environments, exploring, finding items, talking to NPCs, completing sidequests, and fighting monsters. 

Generally, you will always have a full team of four - Omori, Aubrey, Kel, Hero. 

As you explore you can find weapons and items. Aubrey fights with plushies and other cute bludgeoning tools, Kel fights with basketballs and other spherical bouncy things, Hero fights with various cooking utensils. and Omori fights with.... a knife.

You can also find various Toys and Snacks in the shops and within watermelons (which are treasure chests) throughout the game. Toys are combat items, and Snacks are healing items.

 

Monsters are fought via overworld encounters, and the battle system is familiar, yet has a unique spin on things.

Battles are turn-based encounters. each character has Heart (HP) and Juice (MP). You can do regular attacks, or use Skills that cost Juice.

So far, fairly typical RPG battle stuff, but with a cutesy childhood playground theming. It's cute.

The game has an "emotion" system that neatly combines the typical RPG concepts of status effects and elemental weaknesses into one.

Both enemies and players can have one of four emotional states: Neutral, Sad, Happy, or Angry. These emotional states can be inflicted using Skills or Toys, and some enemies naturally begin battle as one emotion too. The team also starts off with skills that can change each other's emotions.

Each emotion has a specific effect:

- Happy increases critical hit chance and speed, but reduces hit rate.

- Sad increases defense, but lowers attack and speed, and causes you to lose Juice upon taking damage.

- Angry increases damage dealt, but reduces your own defense.

But in addition to these effects, the emotions have a rock-paper-scissors in terms of super-effective damage: Sad beats Happy, Happy beats Angry, and Angry beats Sad.

So in practice, this is a game where you get to choose your own elemental weaknesses on the fly, by inflicting enemies and your team with the right emotions to deal strong hits. It's quite cool.

Additionally, some Skills have special effects depending on emotions - Aubrey has a Headbutt skill that deals more damage if she's angry, and Omori has a Stab skill that ignores enemy defense if Omori is sad. Stuff like that.

The battle system also has "Follow-up" actions. After you perform a move, you can press a direction on the controller to perform an additional action on that character's turn. Kel can pass his basketball to the others, Aubrey can look at the others, Hero can call out for the others, and Omori...gets the option to attack again by himself. These all do different things depending on which ones you do.

These follow-up actions also have different effects depending on at which point in the story you are. For example, if you do Kel's "pass to Omori" at the beginning of the game, it says: "Omori wasn't looking and gets bopped, taking 1 damage and becoming Sad!". But later on in the game, it's: "Omori catches Kel's ball! Omori throws the ball, dealing damage to a random foe and becoming Happy!". I like this, as it shows how the team changes their dynamic over the course of the story. 

This battle system is cool and unique, and I really like it, however there is one problem with it...

The game is very low-difficulty, to the point where you don't really need to make use of the battle system's intricacies in order to progress at all. For the most part, you'll do fine just spamming regular attacks and healing whenever necessary. 

There are a few tougher optional fights scattered here and there, which are great and make you have to actually think about emotions and skills and stuff, but for the whole of the main story, the battle system feels largely underutilised.

I can understand why they did it this way. Omori is a game about its story first and foremost. It would not be good if a player invested in the story was stuck behind a difficult fight, after all. I imagine they chose the gameplay balance with story-focused players in mind. 

I don't think they made the wrong decision, but I do wish there were just a teensy few more enemies that really needed you to pay attention. 

The structure of the adventure is fairly simple - you explore an area, play through the storyline, and defeat a boss at the end. There are around six or seven main areas in total, separated loosely into chapters. 

Though, interestingly, in addition to each main area, there are these extended sequences in-between areas, where the focus is entirely on character interactions with no proper battles or items. But despite how it may sound, these in-between sections are actually some of the most interesting parts of the game, somehow? Without giving too much away, I'll just mention that, this game can shine both as an RPG with a battle system, as well as an adventure game focused on NPC interaction. 

This game is a fairly hefty RPG - it's around 30 hours in length, which is around the same size as an EarthBound or a Chrono Trigger. There's a decent chunk of optional things to see too, including an entire optional main area, which is fun to discover. The story plays out in a linear fashion, but having these sidequests gives you a bit more freedom in how you approach things, which is something I always appreciate. There are also a lot of secret strangenesses you can come across if you have a bit of curiosity and poke around the environments. Some optional dialogue you might find, or some hidden interactions that require you to do specific things.... Returning to earlier areas to see how they've changed... things like that. This game is good at hiding secrets in plain sight. 

If you want to collect all of the achievements, you'll need to do multiple playthroughs of the game, since some of the achievements require you to make mutually-exclusive choices at certain parts of the game.

I'm not too keen on achievements in games when they don't really add anything, but I do enjoy them when they encourage the player to engage with content that they may otherwise not have found. I decided to get every single achievement in Omori, which took two full playthroughs totalling 80 hours of play time! This isn't necessary by any means, but I was so enamoured with the game, I wanted to see everything it had to offer.

Overall. ... ... wow, Omori is one heck of an artistic experience. One that can only really be achieved via the medium of videogames. And it's a fun videogame on top of that!

A phenomenal game honestly. I recommend all RPG fans to try Omori, ...as long as they are prepared for a heartbreaking emotional story.