Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon

It's a Japanese platformer in the vain of Mario, but with elements of Kirby, where you can kill enemies and take their abilities.Graphics are decent, and the music is quite good. Difficulty leans to the hard side of the spectrum. Especially the boss of World 4. Everything feels fair so far, though. From what I've played so far, it's Nintendo Hard, not Platform Hell. EDIT: Note that I haven't played the postgame levels, which I understand are insanely hard. My only real gripe is the control felt a bit too loose, and took a while to get used to. You'll need to take some time to acclimatize yourself with the control. All in all, a very good platformer that is not as easy as it looks. If you like Difficult games, this is probably for you. Do not buy this expecting a casual romp.

Updated to include info about another release. Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon is a puzzle-platformer that takes the Kirby motif of stealing powers from your enemies to kill other stuff more easily, solve puzzles, etc. It should be obvious, but I'll state it anyway: this is a cute anime-style magical girl game with fluff for plot, so if any of these these things bother you, you should probably stay away. Tobari is one of many puzzle games by the doujin circle desunoya, which has released many games at Comiket over the years. Unlike most other Comiket groups, their games tend to be extremely well made and polished, which is why I've made it a point to keep track of their releases. Tobari is no exception to this - the character art is nice, the sprites are well made, the music is good, the controls are solid (hugely important for a difficult puzzle-platformer), and the game itself suffers from very few bugs (which is a huge plus for doujin titles). Additionally, the translation quality is pretty high too - Sekai Project did a very good job on the localization. Desunoya's games also tend to share a common structure, which includes Tobari: sort of difficult but manageable core game, with extra collectibles that are generally harder to obtain than it is to actually complete the levels themselves. Getting all of these collectibles unlocks an EX world, which tends to be [i]much[/i] more difficult than the core game and the collectible-hunting. There are also additional hidden achievements within the game, some of which are tied to Steam achievements as well. If you enjoy a moderate challenge in your puzzle-platformers and like the anime styling, completing this game without messing with the extra content much is probably a good fit for you. If you're looking for a much tougher challenge, both in terms of execution and actual puzzle difficulty, you'll feel right at home going after the extra content in this title. For those looking for more from this developer: [strike]unfortunately, Tobari will probably be the only desunoya title available on Steam for a long time, as the others are almost all derivative works of the Touhou Project[/strike]. If you still want to check those games out, look up videos of MariAri, Nitroid!, and Marisa & Alice's Trap Tower. UPDATE: Much to my surprise, Reverse x Reverse (Desunoya's Comiket 88 release) was almost immediately localized for Steam! It's significantly more difficult than Tobari, but I'd still recommend checking it out if you're up for the challenge.

Platformer with nice art, lots of variety in abilities and secrets to find. My main issue with the game is, that the movement, including jumping, is just horrible. If you can get past that ''problem'', it is a fairly good game.

Tobari has decent art and music and features cute characters. I'm not sorry I bought the game, but I can't recommend it. At about half way through the game, the levels become infuriating. Your character is, for lack of a better term, "floaty"; you also slide too much when you land on platforms. It doesn't sound too bad in theory, but as the difficulty ratchets up and jumps become more and more precise, it's a recipe for disaster. I got to the end of World 3 and that's enough. It has stopped being fun and I really don't care to go on.

Difficulty is such a funny thing in games. I’ve had hard-as-nails games that I’ve loved, and fairly benign games that I’ve hated, all because of how they’ve posed their challenges. It’s never as simple as something being hard or easy, it’s much more a matter of fairness and pacing. On both of these counts, Tobari knows exactly what it’s doing. From the start this charming platformer will be as inviting and comfortable as any budget indie platformer could be, and over the course of an hour or two you’ll find yourself chipping away at single ice block jumps and weaving through spikes on moving platforms. It’s a game that gets hard, harder than you may be comfortable with, but takes a very thoughtful and often creative route to get there. Tobari is a magically-inclined schoolgirl out looking for her friend Hina. As the title implies, this is quite a curious night indeed, with all manner of adorable monsters, mages, and spirits running loose and getting in the way. It’s clear something is very wrong, and that closer Tobari gets to locating Hina, the clearer it becomes that she’s involved as well. And it’s not just monsters standing in her way either, as several of their schoolmates are in on these mysterious machinations, and intend to keep Tobari from reaching her goal. Fortunately our heroine has a powerful command of magic, assuming she can pinch spells from her foes, and between that and her nimble platforming skills, she’s got a good shot at unraveling this nocturnal enigma. For the sake of easing folks into the game, the early stages of Tobari are pretty straightforward platforming challenges. You’ve got a particularly floaty jump and a good clip to your movement, which gives you plenty of mobility for jumping foes and gaps. You can also stomp most enemies, but the better option is to whack them with your magic staff. If they have some kind of magical ability it’ll pop out in the form of a medallion, and taking this for yourself will grant you that power. This can be anything from fireballs and lightning strikes to soaring jumps and a magical hamster ball. You can have two powers at once, and the shops frequently found in levels can sell you a greater variety than you can find for a pittance of coins, so having the right power for the job becomes a major feature of the game. You’ll soon find that stages are more expansive than they appear, once you come to grips with the full extent of your mobility and the options your powers afford you. Nearly every level has alternate paths and secret caches of powerups, and many have entire secret exits set aside from the normal ones. Locating these secrets will be a significant step up in challenge, but it might be worth it because the main game is going to jump to that level too. The platforming in particular grows steadily more perilous across the game’s six worlds, and while the early ones will likely go by quickly, you’re liable to start getting stuck on stages by the fourth or maybe even third world. The difficulty actually reminds me of a Super Mario ROM hack, not the insane Kaizo ones but the ones that offer steep but unique challenges, rather than the more natural platforming of the original un-hacked games. I must admit that part of the difficulty is in the controls and spotty collisions you’ll start to notice more and more. One feature that’s sure to cause a few dozen deaths is how attacking in midair almost completely kills Tobari’s horizontal momentum. That means if you’re jumping over a gap and swing your staff or cast a spell before you land, you’re probably plunging straight down into that pit. You won’t even notice this in the first few worlds but once the game starts perching enemies on ledges and flinging them at you during tight platforming segments, it’s going to become a problem. Doubly so because the collisions and physics feel very Game Makery, with a fair level of uncertainty baked into every hit and landing. Moving platforms in particular like to warp things around them, sometimes flinging medallions into pits that should have been waiting comfortably to be picked up. I wouldn’t recommend this one if the jank was a serious concern, but it is ultimately surmountable here. And learning to deal with it opens you up to dozens of creative, challenging levels to clear and explore. Tobari really does some neat stuff with the powers you get, offering all kinds of unexpected interactions with blocks and enemies to allow you into secret areas. The challenge is fair enough throughout the game, though I’ve heard of a post-game EX world that does indeed wander into Kaizo territory. Coupled with charming art and a goofy little story, this is definitely one of the better budget platformers out there. Steel yourself for some serious platforming and a little control wrestling, and you’ll be in for hours of inventive, open-ended fun. Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/11322459/]curation page[/url]!

I wanna give this game a neutral rating (rather than positive or negative) but as of the time of writing this review, it's forcing me to give an up/down recommendation. Anyhow, TL;DR: this game would be a lot more fun if it weren't for its overdone horizontal momentum effects. EDIT: I've gotten to what I think is the last world of the game (world 6) and 6-1 has other forms of punishing difficulty. I enjoyed the earlier levels, thanks to their whimsical atmosphere, but the game doesn't feel fun anymore. Basically, this is a platformer wherein every level you get to take powerups from enemies based on the abilities they use, and use them to your advantage. This includes attack abilities (e.g. a fireball), movement abilities (e.g. jump higher and fall slowly), and accessory abilities (e.g. a light, for dark places). You can have up to two of these powerups with one active at any time. This is a really neat idea, honestly. Trying out the different abilities, and playing through the levels using them, is actually a lot of fun. Or it would be... ...if not for the fact that its implementation leaves something to be desired: [list] [*]Horizontal momentum effects make the movement feel less responsive than I'd like it to be. This goes doubly so in the ice area, of course, but even outside it, I don't feel I have a very precise control of Tobari's positioning. (I wanna call the movement "floaty", but honestly, the jump being floaty is not the problem, it's the horizontal momentum.) [*]The difficulty isn't entertaining; it's just frustrating and tedious. With just 3 hit points, the player is afforded only two mistakes before being forced to repeat a level or section thereof, and these aren't just quick one-screen affairs of the sort that you might find in Meat Boy or other games reputed for their difficulty. These can be complex things that take a whole minute or two to get through. In some levels you can expand your HP pool to 6, but this gets reset when the level is over. [*]Actually, you lose all the magic medals you picked up, at the end of every stage. They just get turned into a miniature slot-machine-like prize pool, where you can get one-ups or extra coins for example, but that's not as useful. This by itself wouldn't be a problem, except... [*]Not having the right spell can mean a turning a mildly annoying situation into an extremely frustrating one. The boss of stage 4-7 is an example: You can steal a few abilities from her, but none of them are particularly useful, with the best one being throwing rocks in a parabolic path starting at a horizontal speed that varies with your own momentum, and needless to say it's rather awkward to use. One of the best abilities to use against her is the ground-hugging spark, but that requires getting it in the beginning of the level and then not dying in either the tedious second section of the level or the hectic autoscroller third section (both of which have instant death pits) -- both of which have checkpoints before them, as does the boss. If you happen to take any of those checkpoints, this means you might start off with far worse abilities, or even none at all, going into the bossfight. So ironically you might be better off NOT using the checkpoints. [/list] This one stage was horribly annoying, but other stages also have similar annoyances, albeit to lesser degrees. Aside from these criticisms, I have no others. The game runs smoothly without bugs, the controls are decent and reconfigurable, the music is generally pleasant (though not necessarily particularly memorable), the graphics are clear, and the script/story makes sense and uses proper grammar, and so on. If the gameplay weren't so frustrating, I would love to explore the stages for the alternate exits. But it's just that after playing it I feel burnt out on the gameplay, particularly the movement. If the movement weren't as annoying, trying out the spells and playing with them would be so much more fun. (Disclosure: I bought this game discounted on Steam.)

Mario meets Kirby meets Anime Girls in the Dark Souls of platformers. The controls take some getting used to, and it will feel unfair at times (especially if you want to 100% the game), but if you're into 2D platformers I recommend it.

・教訓「返金できる期間にゲームの起動チェックはしておこう」 Win版体験版は正常に動きましたが、 Steam版はゲームが高速化してまともにゲームできず。 公式HPでも 「※オンボードのグラフィックチップはサポート対象外です。」 こっちには書いていないのでオンボ勢は注意。 掲示板のテクニカルサポートでもゲームを起動するとクラッシュするとか、わりと深刻な問題が前例としてあり、自分と同じ高速化の報告もありました。 あと垂直同期とか色々いじってみましたがダメでした。 セール時に買って積んでいたゲームなので返金も出来ずお手上げです。 そもそもこのゲームを起動しようとするとSteamのソフトなのに「ユーザーアカウント制御」のアレがポポンと出て来ることから、やっぱり根本的に何かあるのかな、と。 PCとソフトの相性が悪いってのはどうしようもないことですけど、 評価としては「こういう例もある(あった)」というのを刻むという意味でバッド判定にします。 追記 サブPCで起動してみたら普通に動きました。ただサブでゲームする環境にないのでプレイするのは後日になりそうです。 プレイしてクリアできたら、レビューをまるごと変えるかもしれません。

This is an excellent mix of Mario and Kirby gameplay styles. It's one of those games I keep playing because it is just plain FUN to play. You can jump into blocks to get coins and health items, like Mario. When you swing your staff at enemies, you can get that enemy's power, like Kirby. The special magical powers you can get are many and varied, and most of them are actually pretty useful. One thing this game does better than Kirby is that you can hold two powers at once and switch between them on the fly. This makes the game alot more dynamic. Coins can be used to buy health upgrades or special powers. There is a hidden item you can find in each stage, as well as a secret exit to a secret shop in each world; these can extend the replay value if you like. The level design is generally good (not stellar like Mario 3 or Mario World, but fun). The graphics are simple yet effective, with levels having a style similar to Super Mario World and enemy designs similar to the Kirby games. The music is catchy and fun to listen to. The controls are a little bit floaty, making it hard to land difficult jumps at first. You character slides a bit whenever you want to turn around or stop. However, I got used to the controls after a few stages and can play it just fine now. If you play the demo and have some trouble, keep in mind that you will get used to the controls with a bit of practice. This isn't really a casual game, even though it looks that way from the screenshots. After the first couple of worlds, things start to get pretty challenging, probably slightly below the level of the average Megaman X game. Some of the stages are trememdously difficult to the point of absurdity. If you aren't already good at platformers, you'll probably have serious trouble clearing the game because of this. That being said, the difficulty curve is relatively gradual and fair. There are only a couple times where I felt the difficulty spiked for no reason. Deaths are usually the fault of the player, and not because you were blindsided by some random thing you couldn't see coming. And really, the gameplay is so fun that it has that "just one more time!" factor built in, so you'll want to keep playing until you overcome each challenge. This game puts a big smile on my face when I play it. It's not perfect, but a game doesn't need to be perfect to be worth playing. It's a must play for people who like 2D platformers.

Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon is a solid 2D platformer that borrows ideas from Mario and Kirby games. You can jump on enemies or hit them with your staff to defeat them. Enemies will drop power-ups and you can use those throughout the levels. You can also buy power-ups from shops. The aesthetics are both cute and mysterious. The character portraits used in cutscenes look amazing. The music is very nice and really helps set an otherworldly tone. The controls are a little un-precise but after getting used to them they feel right. The game does a good job easing players into the game. The levels start out simple and then gradually increase in difficulty. It gets pretty tough by the end. Overall, I really enjoyed this game.