風の祝子 ～早苗さんの妖怪退治～

Мой отзыв будет первым негативным на эту игру. Неплохой инди-проект по Tohou, представляющий из себя платформер. И я бы его допрошел и возможно мог бы порекомендовать к покупке, но нет. Все дело в управлении. Не знаю как там обстояли бы дела с геймпадом, но на клавиатуре раскладку устанавливал какой то больной человек. Такое ощущение, будто я должен быть мутантом с третьей рукой, но не как не человеком, что бы одновременно лететь, включать щит и стрелять. Первые акты было терпимо, но на четвертом 2 стадия босса непроходима. Тебе нужно прожимать A + D + срелки влево-вправо-вверх и зажимая еще enter и при этом умудриться не слиться во время боя. Возможно после создания игры, Японцы подумали: что-то мы слишком легкий платформер создали, может управление поменяем на рандомные кнопки? Вот прям осадок теперь остался. Вроде играл, играл и уперся в тупик. Помимо этого в игре нет системы сейвов. Если прошел далеко и закрыл игру - начинай с самого начала.

[h1]Game Design so solid that I could still win despite completely and utterly dooming myself[/h1] [b]tl;dr: I completely butchered the game's controls on accident, and despite unknowingly fighting with them the entire game, still had a lot of fun and was able to get past everything.[/b] [hr][/hr] This game, which DeepL tells me roughly translates to "Sanae's Youkai Extermination", is a 2D Action Platformer where you jump around, shoot enemies, and fight the boss at the end of the stage. It's a simple concept, and you have a good amount of movement flexibility to help you along: infinite jumps that have a high-damage projectile attached, indefinite hovering, and a wind shield that lets you move faster and damages enemies around you (instantly defeating smaller enemies and some projectiles). Of course, that alone isn't the reason I'm writing this. The reason I'm writing this is that, within 5 seconds of starting the game, I effectively took a sledgehammer to the game's control scheme. Upon first launching the game, I was shown some text boxes that told me to press the keys for the above movement options. Unfortunately, this being a Japanese game without an English translation, they're all in a language I do not know. So like a smart person, I started pressing keys at random until they all went away. This meant that while my shoot key was bound to the normal value of Z, I had accidentally bound the left arrow to jump and the right arrow to hover. As in, the keys also used to move the player character, Sanae, around. This meant that any time I wanted to move left, Sanae would jump at the same time. If I wanted to [i]continuously[/i] move left, I would have to commit to a full jump left. I could also jump in place while holding right, but doing a standard jump to the right was not an option. Similarly, this meant that whenever I held right off of any cliff, or at any point in the air, Sanae would start gliding. I could glide in place by also holding left (which also made her jump in the process), but gliding to the left was also not an option. This also meant that I could only fall down directly in place. Finally, the wind shield could only be activated by holding shoot while standing on the ground. Since trying to walk left would make me leave the ground, and reaching the ground from the air meant no directional input whatsoever, this meant that activating the shield had to be done very deliberately. And somehow, some way, I beat the game like this. For a while, I even considered the possibility that the game's controls were supposed to be this way. This is because the game's movement and attack options are not only flexible enough to make it work - they get transformed in quite the interesting way! [hr][/hr] The infinite jumps with high-damage projectiles aren't just a free-pass-over-platforms anymore: jumping means moving backwards in the stage, and away from anything I was attacking with its projectile. Since trying to move and shoot normally during boss fights wasn't an option, though, making proper use of that jump projectile was key to actually being able to defeat them, and the leftwards drifting meant I couldn't just spam jump in place above them - I had to be constantly re-adjusting! Similarly, the hover is an incredible movement tool for precise dodging through enemies and boss attack patterns. But since I could only move to the right, hovering was very limited, as I would corner myself if I relied on it too much. This meant another balancing act between the safe rightward hovering, and the risky leftward movement (remember - every left requires a jump!) to get more hover space back. The level design ended up working quite well with this! While there were a few sections that I had to end up damage boosting through, many of the more dangerous sections either had nearby checkpoints or plenty of health pickups throughout. The single section where I got stuck was during Stage 4, where spike walls attempt to crush you from both sides and you must escape by jumping quickly. Despite my best attempts, I am not a very good button masher, so I had to set up an AutoHotkey script to mash the jump button for me. Once again, this is the only point in the game where I was legitimately stuck (and a better masher wouldn't run into this issue). Even a certain sequence in Stage 5 that's quite similar in nature was able to be done! Finally, the boss fights. As I hinted at earlier, proper positioning and use of the jump projectile is important, but anything past Stage 1 is going to require some good old pattern learning to know when things are safe and when to run. The bosses will typically win a straight-up damage race, and I had to make use of every single movement tool Sanae had available to come out victorious. The final boss probably took the most amount of time to get down - [spoiler]the first phase was a damage race against a fast-moving target, and the second phase has her gaining a giant death spear that she spins around herself frequently. I had to be really precise ducking in and out of the spear-spin zone so I could deal damage without having my own limited health obliterated in return, and that was just in-between all of her other attacks![/spoiler] It seemed impossible at first, but with enough practice, things fell into place. [hr][/hr] In the end, my playtime ended up about 1.5x the expected amount. There were definitely some tricky parts to work around, but it was really fun having to play this action game almost as a puzzle game! Would I recommend assigning important controls to the same buttons you use to walk around? Probably not! But the fact that every part of the game was still doable (assuming proper button mashing) says a lot about how flexible the design is. Maybe give it a shot if you liked the game and wanted a bit more oomph from its challenges, or something. Of course, playing the game like an actual sane human being is definitely preferable. The game is fully playable without needing to know any Japanese once you get past that initial control screen, so maybe grab a Japanese-knowing friend and/or translation software of your choice for that part. All in all, good fun game with an unintentional interesting challenge mode!