I’ve just finished the game, and I didn’t really like it. My very subjective rating is 6/10, and a more objective rating is 7/10.
Should you get it? Probably: so many people have liked it and it’s not like the game is awful, so it’s not impossible that you’ll like it. The game has lots of polish, the combat is competent, it has quite a lot of content, and its visuals are very impressive.
So why didn’t I like it? Short answer: it’s not good at being a Metroidvania.
Long answer:
WARNING: I didn’t put much effort into ensuring this is absolutely spoiler free. Nothing major, and nothing plot wise, but some people would probably say there are spoilers, so proceed with caution.
Story: Due to some personal complications, I struggle to actually care for stories, so I can’t speak on if it’s engaging enough. Although, from an unengaged perspective, I’m fairly certain it was pretty good. What I can say was that I felt directionless. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, until over halfway through the game. Maybe I was just being thick, or I overlooked some obvious detail, but I’m just speaking from my experience. Not to mention, I had very little curiosity about the world or its history, and I didn’t really want to find out more.
Perhaps the narrative is one of the main reasons people liked the game, and I would’ve like the game had I been capable of caring for it. Who knows.
Combat: Serviceable. The spirit system means a lot of avenues of play will be untouched, plus the actual combat is rather basic and not very unique. Although, to be fair, it is polished and entertaining to some extent.
My main gripe with combat, however, is the balancing and awful artificial difficulty: In the final region, and last 2 bosses (Especially the second to last boss), all damage is ramped up to an insane level, More than a third on almost every attack — quite often the damage is around half, even going up to your entire bar minus a small chunk — and a lot of these attacks are stupidly large. Sometimes a minor miss-input means death, as long as there are multiple enemies around you.
This artificial difficulty encourages rushing through the final region, but also FAILS at making the game feel challenging! (I can’t quite put my feelings into words here, so you’ll have to bear with my inadequate explanation:) I never felt particularly tried by the bosses attack patterns, maybe only 3 or 4 attacks were actually hard to dodge. It just became painfully and annoyingly binary: either you know the attacks and can easily dodge them, or you can’t and you just die. No sense of gradual improvement.
Visuals and audio: It’s all good. The visuals don’t quite tickle MY fancy, and audio is usually very subconscious for me. No problems here. All hail Mili
Exploration and backtracking: THIS is the reason why I didn’t like the game. The exploration between regions is so linear (they’re literally set up in chapters), and the rewards don’t feel rewarding most of the time.
Throughout the rooms, there are so many rewards behind abilities locks, so I felt like I had barely explored. Once I got a new ability that could let me get some of those previous rewards, I couldn’t be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to go back for “+5 hp”, “10/30 currency”, “easy mini-boss for an attack I will not use”, especially since they barely help me: as I mentioned, the bosses feel so binary and the enemies will 2 shot me regardless, and getting extra hp and/or other upgrades will take FAR longer than just learning the patterns a little more.
I wish the system was something more like mini-areas or (sub)regions behind ability gates, and multiple at that, so when I get a new ability I have lots of options on where to go, and it’s not just for stupid minor “rewards”. As is, I was uninterested in engaging with one for the main features of Metroidvanias, henceforth feeling underpowered, with the bosses and enemies in the final region feeling painfully annoying, yet somehow it still all felt somewhat easy.
Progression and abilities: they’re all so par for the course and boring. I have nothing to say on it.
Obviously this is all just my opinion and experience. Someone else may completely disagree with what I’ve said.
