Indiana Jones and the Legend of Black Unicorns in a Great UFO of Wisdom: Wukong Overlord 50 (Part 3)

 Hello again! Another little "here's what I am playing" update. Let's hop in with a game that I finished. 

Black Myth:Wukong

Wow what a delight of a game. I chewed through the last three chapters at a pretty rapid pace. Let's start with chapter 4. 

Chapter 4 is probably the highlight of the game for me. For one, it is a descent then climb out of a mountain crevasse, starting with a plummet into a lair of insect and spider demons. It is a really creepy environment as you see the ruins of this town suspended in webbing, and the creature design really hits a peak in terms of creepiness. The second half of the chapter is a bit less impressive, as you are entering yet another corrupt mountain monastery, just this time with a bunch of worm, beetle, and scorpion demons. The late spring aesthetic is quite lovely, and the finale boss fight against a centaur-a-pede in a field of blooming flowers is quite lovely. 

Chapter 5 is much more on rails, reminding me a great deal of the first chapter. You are climbing a volcanic peak to meet with an ally of Sun Wukong's, the Bull King, who is portrayed as truly massive (he is using a mountain as a backrest as he slumps wounded) minotaur. The main conflict of this chapter revolves around his demonic son staging a coup against his father, as he wants to claim the Wukong relic as his own. Overall, it's a fine chapter, with some good boss fights (including a really neat Yin Yang themed boss fight against a Taoist master), though it is basically very long boss rush, and the aesthetic is a bit uninspired as compared to the other areas encountered in the game. 

The sixth chapter is certainly the most divisive amongst players of the game, and I will admit it feels like the most rushed out the door. Basically, you have recovered Sun Wukong's relics (which amount to the six parts of his person), and now you must claim the remnants of his armor, which have all grafted onto other living beings. They are spread around the mountain range where, having unsuccessfully challenged the heavenly court, Sun Wukong plummeted to earth and was imprisoned in his stone cocoon. The idea is this area has been left mostly barren, due to the desolation wrought by this plummet. The result, though, is a gorgeous open zone that you can explore using the flying nimbus cloud, but a zone that is also devoid of NPCs or much else to do aside from fight boss fights. There are no treasure chests, very few enemies, and very few secrets to find. The boss fights in this chapter are also brutal, so you end up ping-ponging around the map trying your hand at them until you make progress with one of them. The hardest boss, in my opinion, is a fight with a praying mantis who will combo you into oblivion, though you fight him in the stomach of your pig companion, which is pretty novel. 

The final boss is, narratively, a bit hinky. The game decides, at this point right before the final boss fight, to lore dump the story of Sun Wukong. It is an odd choice to do this instead of interweaving it throughout the story. You are walking the pilgrim's path that Sun Wukong followed and seeing the foibles of the demons from "Journey to the West" but you really only deal with Sun Wukong as an individual in the last chapter. The final boss fight starts with a "stone monkey," the actual shell of the rock Wukong is entombed in, and then culminates in a final boss fight with a perfect doppelganger of yourself called "the Great Sage's Shell." You learn that Wukong is truly dead, and that your journey is not to reincarnate the Great Sage but to instead become an incarnation of his spirit. You are more of an echo of Wukong than Wukong himself. It is a hell of a boss fight and very difficult, but it loses out the spectacle I was hoping for in a final boss in a game all about spectacle. Also saving all this Wukong lore till the end really kills the impact of what the game is going for: do you really want to become the Monkey King after seeing the impact he has had on the world? He truly is a chaotic neutral presence, and he does as much evil as he does good. As far as narrative, the Destined One, you have very little agency in this choice. The game sometimes hints at this, as NPCs will comment that the title and narrative of you being a "destined one" has been a way to manipulate your path rather than a heavenly ordained fact, but it never feels narratively realized. Definitely a downside of the souls inspired story-telling where the major storytelling is left to the codex.

Overall the story falls a bit flat, but it is serviceable enough when the real memorable part of this game is the spectacle and bombast of the combat and the design of the space. This, in many ways, stems from Wukong being a side character in this till the final couple of chapters. A very strange choie. 

 As a caveat, I did not defeat the secret super boss, Erlang Shen, in a reprise of the battle from the beginning of the game. Apparently this boss, aside from being the toughest fight in the game, is one of the best in the game, but I am saving it for when the rumored DLC for this game drops and I get the urge to do a NG+ run of this game. This fight also adds a ton of context and direct story for Sun Wukong, plus you get the final animated cutscene instead of the subpar normal ending. For now, this game is considered completed. 

Unicorn Overlord

While I have been playing Unicorn Overlord for a while, this is the first time I've decided to talk about it having reached the final mission. This game is the latest Vanillaware Ltd. game, a game studio that I have a ton of affection for, with Odin Sphere in particular being one of my all time games. It is a studio famous for either taking niche genres and either modernizing them or mixing them with components of other genres. Each of these games is also designed in the Vanillaware house style, which uses these lush watercolor hand-painted characters that are in constant animation (similar to old flash games where they are animated off the joints). In this case, Unicorn Overlord is a real time strategy game with auto-battling, harkening back to the SNES and N64 Ogre Battle games. 

To sum up both the gameplay and the narrative very quickly, you play as the exiled Prince Alain, whose Queen mother's throne was usurped by the heavily armored General Galerius, who has now taken over all five regions of your home country of Cornia and established the Zenoiran Empire. You are now mounting a resistance in order to slowly and piecemeal retake your home country from this autocratic rule. Each battle is, ostensibly, to retake a portion or region of the map and to help inspire the populace to turn against the bootheel of their oppressors. 

Sadly, the game doesn't do much to move behind this very basic storyline, and each beat of the plot is very predictable due to there being no real subversions to the story. There is a neat plotline where the Zenoirans are trying to recreate an ancient empire that collapsed, and are possessing people with the spirits of Zenoirans, but it really doesn't try to anything really groundbreaking narratively. Your army is good because it is not evil, and the villains are evil because of course they are. This is especially disheartening in a time when the conversation of "what does it mean to rule or have power" is one that is ever present in our world. You are trying to be a king: a benevolent one, true, but an absolute monarch nonetheless. Now apparently in the best ending you resign as king and instead institute a Democracy, but this seems very naive rather than progressive. 

This style of storytelling wouldn't be so offensive if there wasn't so much story to be told: each character and region generally has its own arc on top of the macro plot, and there are plenty of cutscenes that just add more and more simple tropes to the story. There are some really fun characters, but this is mainly in terms of design rather than writing. The writing is generally limited to anime earnestness and sincerity, where characters mean and say exactly what they mean, be it evil or good. Disappointing overall. 

The designs of the characters are quite stand out I will say, even though many of your female warriors are incredibly busty, with some of their designs bordering "Chicks and Chainmail" style. Your griffon riders' curves, for example, breast most boobily as their animation plays up and down. Even the canon female lead wears a top that her curves almost literally bust over. This has been a common complaint with many Vanillaware titles, and one that has sadly been baked into their house style. Otherwise the designs are a delightful mixture of fluid and sharp; there is a clear direction and voice in the styling, with a lot of care placed in accenting personality with design, even if the eventual personality is rather shallow. 

Overall the game is fine! I think a big issue is that the battles, since they play automatically, make the mistake of giving you a preview of results of the battle before hand, which led to me just skipping the fun animations and letting the game do the math for me in many battles. A good comparison to this was Ogre Battle 64 which would let you preview the enemy unit compositions, but the results of the battle were hidden until the very end of combat. This made you much more reactive in recompositing your party if you hit an enemy unit which decimated your crew. In the case of Unicorn Overlord, I would just pick a unit that was guaranteed a victory against an enemy unit, and wouldn't engage with units who would destroy my party. In turn, this took a lot of the drama out of the battles; there were some nail biter encounters to be sure when the enemies overwhelmed you or stage hazards were present, but the key combat was kind of dull. Plus, when gorgeous battle animations are your bread and butter, giving the option to skip these battles really short circuits one of your big selling points, especially when battle animations really eat up time too. 

Where I am standing now, I am at the final battle with an end boss who really just needs a certain "key" party composition to unlock. The Emperor Galerius has high defense, raises a shield, and then heals for a quarter of his health between every skirmish, so mostly your parties just bounce off of him until you run out of time. He needs a build that can do multiple hits to break his shield, have high initiative, and can't be debuffed so they can out DPS his health regain. I understand how to beat him conceptually, I just need to grind the necessary units and rebalance my parties, and that is work I really don't want to do after an incredibly successful rest of the game/level. Oh yeah, this boss is at the end of a half hour- 45 minute mega battle with four other bosses and a ton of stage hazards/units to combat, and a mechanic where the enemy can mind control your units unless you spend stage points to break the possession.  At this point, has worked through its scant charm, and I am going to put it down for a bit and just watch the ending on Youtube. 

UFO 50

For the past several months my Steam Deck has been devoted to one game only, and one that is actually 50 games. This game is the indie darling, UFO 50. UFO 50 is based off those cheap game multicart compilations you'd see for the NES like Action 52 except the idea more "what if all of those games were actually complete games that were fun to play." Each game in this compilation is a complete game, and the range of games covers a whole lot of different genres. 

This game was developed by Mossmouth, a team of popular indie  developers such as Jon Perry (a prominent board game designer), Eirik Schulke, and Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky. The conceit of this compilation is that these three, when buying a storage unit off auction, discovered a console known as the LX-III, a Commodore style PC console developed by the fictional developer UFOsoft. On the console were fifty ROMs, and the developers at Mossmouth decided to compile them into this collection.

What is especially interesting about this game is its narrative. Not only do you have the individual narrative of each game, but then you also have the macro-narrative of UFOsoft as a whole: starting as a couple of guys working on a game while bored at their data-analytics job, becoming a full on company with break out hits, developing its own mascots in the "Pilot," and then finally shuttering due to the tragedy of corporate bloat and interference. 

Even better, this macro narrative is not front and center, but dropped in a series of snippets and hints throughout each game. For example, in the credits of one game, the credits being limited to just initials aside from the producer, a practice for 80s and 90s game developers to prevent their employees from being poached that in turn devalued their effort and work. Another great example is the little profiles and "fun facts" written for each game, which give sneak peeks into the office culture at UFOsoft. Finally, there is a trail of easter eggs developed using the games terminal system that rewards your knowledge of each of the games and unlocks the 51st game in the collection: Miasma Tower. This game is a tour of the fictional UFOsoft offices with a ton of shade thrown towards the producers who took over UFOsoft from the original developers. 

Instead of going game by game, as that would be just way to tedious, I am going to pick a random assortment of five fun games that I have achieved a Gold Trophy (the first level of completion, which is followed by a much more rigorous Cherry Trophy goal). I should say, before I start the list, there is really only one or two games that I would consider outright bad, with most ranging from a fun diversion to truly great games. 

1. Party House: Considered by many to be the best game in the collection, this game is a deck builder where you are trying to throw the best party in the neighborhood in the span of a month. Your "cards" in this case are guests you call from your rolodex, and each turn is a random pull from your rolodex that determines who walks through the door. Each guest (who are all quite charming in their design) comes with a score value: some guests grant "popularity," a currency you can spend to add other guests to your rolodex, and some just straight give you money, which you can use to expand your house to fit more guests. The issue comes with the fact that some guests are "trouble" and if you get three troubles, then the cops shut your party down. That is the core loop of the game: a press your luck style game where you are trying to gain the most resources without the party crashing. To win, you need to invite the most elite "star" guests, and usually have to have at least four star guests show up to one party within the time limit set by the game. 

2. Mini and Max: Mini and Max is a 2D collectathon where you are a little sister whose sister has locked you in a knick-knack closet while she throws a party. It is here that Mini and her dog Max learn you have the ability to shrink, and you end up exploring the room at the size of a bug. It is a really interesting use of a single "level" and a simple sprite art map, as each part of the room, from the flower pots to the toy train to the stack of books, becomes its own biome within the stage. This gets an additional layer of complexity when you learn how to shrink down to the microscopic level, adding even more stages and secrets to uncover. This game does something magical in that it makes a single room feel massive in scope. I think it helps that you have initial goal aside from gather 500 of the currency (stars), so you are encouraged to explore and interact with various NPCs in order to make this quota. Really quite fun game with great sprite art. 

3. Lords of Diskonia: This is a really strange one: it is a mix of a turn based SRPG and air-hockey. You control the red army, and you are trying to capture the blue stronghold in an ongoing campaign against their army. Each unit on the battlefield is represented by an air hockey puck that attacks by either colliding with an enemy unit or casting a projectile. Of course, you do bonus damage for causing enemy units to collide with other units, or by knocking them into hazardous terrain. Each puck has different values: Ogres do high damage and have high health, but they are one of the biggest pucks and can only move once. Rats have little health and only do one damage, but they can attack three times per turn, still can knock units about, and can cross the battlefield easily. It becomes a really tense battle of positioning and utilizing your battlefield, and really punishes the "murderball" strategy of most SRPGs. 

4. Kick Club: If you were hoping for a 2024 version of Spanky's Quest then boy does UFO 50 have the answer for you. Kick Club is a single screen action platformer where you play a Soccer player who is fighting other sports equipment, and you only weapon is a soccer ball that you have to retrieve first (similar to the Neo Geo game Zupapa! in which you have to gather little guys you can throw). This game is really punishing and difficult, but what makes you come back for more is the Smash Bros style movement tech you have at your disposal. You can air attack the soccer ball, slide kick into it, headbutt it, or charge kick it so that it will ping pong around the room. It gives you a really satisfying learning curve to master which crests with the difficulty of the game. It is 40 levels, so it is a lot of perfection that the game is demanding of you, especially when failure sends you all the way back to the beginning. Overall, though, I became addicted to conquering the challenge that this game was offering. 

5. Elfazar's Hat: It's a Pocky and Rocky clone! That's right, a top down schmup platformer that is tough but nowhere near as challenging as Pocky and Rocky. That's really it! Fun sprites with a stage magician theme, and just a really good execution of the concept. 

So far, I have Gold Trophied 26 games of the collection, and Cherried and additional 2, and I plan on completing this collection. I haven't dug into about 15 of them, and I know I have a 35 hour JRPG, an immersive sim, and a metroidvania left to tackle, so I know there are some real gems left to devour. 

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

I beat it. Man this game really bummed me out. Truly never really pulled out of the nose-dive into the issues that I elaborated on in my last post. It really was quite the slog by the end. The boss fights probably end up being the best part of the game, but the game is really restrictive in what it allows you to do, and the UI really limits the creativity the game is so clearly going for in its gimmick. 

Honestly, the gimmick itself is really lackluster: the effective uses that your echoes can accomplish feels much smaller than the overwhelming amount you can get. Sure I have a brazier, a torch, and lava, but I really use them only to burn obstacles or light other torches. Sure I have a bed, a crate, a chair, and a trampoline, but I really only use them to climb onto ledges or span gaps (though you can also use the bed for healing). I am sure the community around this game will find some neat things and good skips using these items, but for the casual player this game is woefully inadequate. 

Narratively, while Zelda has never been a powerhouse in this department, this game really doesn't do anything to elevate the source material, or really even tell an interesting story. It is incredibly boring and lackluster. 

Okay, this post is getting a little long in the tooth, we will talk about Indiana Jones and a new crop of games next time. Ciao!

Super FamiComplete # 122: Yuuyu no Quiz de Go! Go!

 

Title: Yuuyu no Quiz de Go! Go!

Release: July 10th, 1992

Developer: Taito

Publisher: Taito

Weirdly I've seen this game before on Game Center CX and through a blog that recaps that show in English. It is a quiz game, it is! I am thinking this is going to be a very short entry on this blog. 

Background and Developer

A genre of video game that never really translated to American culture was the Quiz Game. Sure there have been and will always be shovelware ports of game shows and the like (I always think of the NES Jeopardy or the Wii Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?), but the big examples of Quiz Games have been left to digital board games. The latest examples that even come to mind are You Don't Know Jack and *shudder* The Guy Game (gross). I imagine the demand for trivia and quiz games, which age quickly and poorly, have cheaper and easier mediums to be designed for rather than video games, so they really died, in my experience, around the PS2 generation. If you do still see them, they really are considered shovelware. 

Is this game shovelware? Yes. This is some kusoge weirdness. The title translates to "Quiz with Yuuyu! Go! Go!" Who is Yuuyu you may ask? Yuuyu is the nickname of Yukiko Iwai, a Japanese idol from the 80s and early 90s. 

For the uninitiated, idols are all purpose entertainers in that they are singers, models, and dancers that adopt a persona to interact with their fans. Their appearance and persona are heavily monitored and scripted by their agencies, similar to how Disney has stringent contracts that regulate and set an expected behavior for their actors. While idol culture had its heyday in the 80s and 90s,  and is still very popular now, it has notoriously become much more cutthroat and competitive due to the influence of K-pop and the general fracturing of the music industry into more niche genres. Yukiko herself belonged to a girl group called Onyako Club, and was considered the breakout star of that group. 

Onyako Club

Here is some of her singles from her heyday...

Yukiko Iwai left the industry in 1997, and really has not been seen in public since 2002 when her group had a reunion concert. Hilariously, one tabloid said that the reason she retired was because she hated children, though I am assuming this meant as fans as she had a couple of children herself. 

The game itself was developed and published by Taito who, on top of making a bunch of big games, also made niche products like this. 

Gameplay

The game is a series of several rounds of general knowledge questions and some more esoteric Japanese pop culture questions. Yuyu serves as the host and emcee of the quiz, usually in some fanciful or, in some cases, cultural appropriated outfits (I mean look at the front cover where she is wearing a sari). The presentation is colorful, but certainly of its period in terms of the compressed pictures of Yuyu, cartoony sprite art, and a very cutesy/childish aesthetic. This seems like it would have some FMV in it, but instead you get still pictures of Yuyu. It seems a very strange choice to develop a game focused on a the image of a real life figure without the hardware to back it up. This feels like it should be a PC Engine or DOS game from this era rather than a Super Famicom game. 

The one thing it does have a lot of is compressed voice clips of Yukiko Iwai, who will introduce new segments and, my favorite, do a delightful "bing bong" when you get a question wrong. The sound design is also pretty fun and well crafted for a quiz game.

The game play does seem to be slowed a good bit by using a text parser in order to enter certain answers. Not really fun to do that on a D-Pad without a keyboard available. 

Overall

This seems like a fun relic of its time, but not really something that someone should seek out to play. I don't know how much a modern Japanese collector would get out of this, because quiz games, especially ones endorsed by a celebrity that hasn't been active for 25 years, tend to age like milk. A neat little time capsule of an era in Japanese pop culture, but nothing really there for the general collector. 

The Legend of 9 Black Unicorn Sols in a UFO of Wisdom: Wukong Overlord 50 (Part 2)

Hello again! Between the first post of this kind and this one, I have made some good ol' progress on a few of the titles hinted at in the title, and even beaten one of them! In this post, I am going to give some updated thoughts on Black Myth: Wukong as well as my first thoughts on the newest Legend of Zelda AND my first and final thoughts on 9 Sols. 

Let's start with some more monkey madness! 

Black Myth: Wukong

I have made pretty good progress! I just finished Chapter 3, which I have heard is the longest chapter in the game. It really is like six smaller chapters all in one, and feels by far the most sweeping and threatening locale yet. In this chapter, you traverse this games take on the Tower of Latria from Demon's Souls; a temple and prison complex that spans a snowy mountain range where a set of malevolent demons masquerading as monks have made their base of power. The combat has become really challenging to match the ever expanding toolset of your monkey man. I now have a ring of fire that can allow me to regenerate health/stamina as long as I can defend it, a parry (it's on a cooldown) in the form of turning to stone right before a hit lands and will stagger your foes for a second, and a new and improved hub that collects all the NPCs that can give you permanent upgrades in one place. 

The bosses, as well, are becoming much more wild in design and abilities: a gigantic scarab with the head of a buddha lodged in his back, a really hard tiger demon that you fight in a pool of blood and offal, and, weirdly my favorite boss so far, a mad monk who starts with his hands bound behind his back, and then a second phase where he unbinds himself and becomes a dervish of kicks and punches. 

The chapter concludes with a grandiose final dungeon: a temple complex just filled with enemies, including these stories tall towering giants who are modeled after Bishamonten, the War Buddha. It is really challenging (and at times kind of annoying) and the boss of this chapter was easily the most rage inducing due to his ability to turn your spells against you. The false Buddha "Yellowbrow" is a towering fat monk who you engage in a 3 phase boss fight with that is quite the spectacle. You start fighting just him, who wields a spiked mace that can extend along a chain, and casts powerful lightning spells at you. His second phase is actually a fight against the toughest version of another boss you fight throughout the chapter, a Macaque demon, whom you fight inside Yellowbrows magic seed sack. Finally, you are shrunk to the size of a miniature, and placed inside a giant shrine amidst a bunch of animated clay figurines. After you tear through the altar, you finally fight Yellowbrow again, who is able to use a golden version of your parry, as well as turn your monkey duplicates against you if you try to summon them. It is really damn hard, but super rewarding when I finally beat him by the skin of my teeth. 

The game has also become less of a corridor and more of actual levels with some choices in exploration. Each area has little secrets to find and some really well hidden bosses and challenges. I am excited by the fact that I still have three more areas to fully explore! Really good stuff and the game continues to delight.

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The newest in the storied Nintendo series, and the first official Zelda game where you play primarily as Zelda, Echoes of Wisdom is a bit of a sour note when I was hoping it to be a revolutionary entry in the series. Perhaps those expectations were a bit too lofty, but even at a base level the game is a bit of a disappointment for the series, and it makes some key missteps that would have made this a much more engaging experience.

So far, I have completed two of the regional dungeons and the big halfway dungeon, so these impressions will be based off of that. The game so far, focuses on a Hyrule where rifts into a void dimension have opened over the kingdom and absorbed the land and its inhabitants. Worse, these voids start spitting out shadow monsters and doppelgangers that replace those who have been swallowed, and are working to push the kingdom over the edge into chaos. On paper, this sounds cool, especially with these void dimensions taking the place of the "dark world" that has become a fun part of many Zelda games. I was expecting one of two things (and maybe expectations are part of the issue): either a "dark dimension" or the rifts to be dungeons dotted around the map to slowly and piecemeal put the map back together, sharing a similar role to the shrines serve in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. This is sadly not the case. 

This sense of putting the world back together piece by piece, and having the freedom to choose an arsenal of tools with which to do so, was really appealing. This was bolstered by the main gameplay conceit of the game: a wand with which you can record the "echoes" of monsters and objects, and then repopulate the world with these objects to do your bidding. Maybe you summon a swordsman or land shark to defeat your enemies, or stack a trampoline on top of a bed to reach a tall ledge. This promise of using the toys and the toy box itself to solve your problems and potentially sequence break the game sounded really appealing and refreshing. It was like refining the freedom of the modern 3D Zelda's into the nostalgic mold of the 2D Zeldas. Again, at least so far, this is not the case. 

This game is one of the most handholdy and constrained of any of the Zelda's so far. It is like they were intimidated by the scale of the idea they were building towards, and were afraid that someone could get easily overwhelmed or lost. After the intro of the game, you are given a "choice" of the Gerudo or Zora area of the map to start hunting for dungeons. In reality, you pretty much have to do the Zora dungeon, as you get the ability to summon echoes further away from you, without which you cannot complete the Gerudo dungeon. You then do the Gerudo dungeon, and finally return to Hyrule castle as the halfway dungeon. There really aren't optional rifts to explore, a small handful of sidequests, and no real Echoes that "break" the game (we will talk more on this in a bit). Granted, the game has opened up a bit since the halfway point, and started offering some optional challenges, but it took a good bit too long to get to this point. 

It also doesn't help that there are some other sloppy issues that present a lot of friction to the player. First off, the style is very cute and harkens to the Link's Awakening remake, but nothing about the game really reflects this style other than providing a contextual reason for having 2D platforming on top of the Link to the Past style 2D exploration, a gimmick present in Awakening that is present here. The UI is more reminiscent of Breath of the Wild and feels like a tonal mismatch with the cute "playhouse" miniatures aesthetic. As well, Links Awakening benefited from the slightly off dreamland aesthetic with some bizarre environments and characters. At least so far, Echoes really doesn't have that. You have all the Zelda staple races: two types of Zora, the Gerudo, the Gorons, the Hylians, and the Sheikah, but there is nothing unique about these iterations or implementations. They just are there in another Zelda adventure. Especially with the promise of a Zelda led title, it really feels like they gave her the dullest adventure possible. 

Second, this game is way too chatty for a story so slight. All the characters trip over themselves to over explain the goals and the mechanics of the game, sometimes beating a certain plot points in three times before letting you move on. This is further exacerbated by the lack of a meaningful skip button to dialogue or cutscenes. The writing is utilitarian and not really charming in the least; they don't add onto the Zelda lore in any neat way, there is no sense of humor really, and the characters are all just kind of milquetoast. I was really hoping that they would, instead, just kind of emote or do little speech bubbles with icons/emojis in them, with maybe one character (like the little orb who follows you around, Tri), who acts as interpreter for the player. They had to do something, because right now the game is severely devoid of charm.

Finally the "freedom" offered by the echoes really isn't offering the dynamism I was hoping. Most of the echoes boil down to monsters to fight for you, objects that act as throwable objects, or objects to act as platforms. There are a handful of really useful echoes that are clearly the "dungeon items" traditional to Zelda, such as the water block that makes a bridge or a ladder you can swim across or up, a spider who leaves a rope to climb, and a flying tile that allows you to fly across gaps. This leaves most of the echoes feeling like cruft next to the few handful, and you only really use those small handful instead of exploring and playing through all of them.

Compounding this frustration is a really piss poor UI for the echoes. It is similar to the Tears of the Kingdom menus, where you have to scroll through options in a horizontally scrolling menu. While Tears of the Kingdom provides you with specialized menus for swords, shields, items, etc, Echoes has all of your echoes in one big menu, one which, already just halfway through the game, takes about 10 seconds to scroll from one side to the other. It is incredibly cumbersome and makes it a pain to want to find and try new echoes. This is exceptionally frustrating considering they could have fixed this with a different UI option, like a favorites menu or a weapons wheel, or segment the echoes further by utility. It just comes off as inept from a company that is usually known for its slick UI. 

Overall, this game really is quite the bland stew, and one that I keep putting off going back to when it's time to play video games. 

9 Sols

9 Sols, by Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games, is a 2D metroidvania souls like ala Hollow Knight that drinks more from the Sekiro well than the Dark Souls well. With an aesthetic affectionately coined as "Tao Punk," 9 Sols takes place in a ruined world where a race of cat beings, known as Solarians, have purloined a group of humans from Earth and taken them to a Shambala styled "paradise" to serve as fodder for their technologies that corrupt the natural and spiritual order. The story, which is told in a similar piecemeal and contextual style as Souls, is regardless much more rich in lore and character focused. There is a lot of dialogue, many diary entries, and other bits of lore to help flesh out the world and characters; the player still has to do the leg work to piece the story together, but the pieces are readily available and much less left to interpretation. 

While this is a story of rebellion against the order of this world, you do not play as a human rebelling against their captors, but instead one of the leaders of the Solarians, known as a Sol who was betrayed by the other nine Sols (*gasp* the title!) and is now on a quest for vengeance. The player has the ability to choose, through dialogue and actions, to choose whether this quest is one of bloodlust fueled revenge: killing the other Sols out of pride without caring for the plight of the humans/victims of this regime, or one of redemption, where you character reconciles with his own misdeeds in creating this system of oppression and overthrows the other Sols to fix these mistakes. 

The tale and world is a really rich one too. Basically the Solarians, a technocratic regime who views their Taoist heritage as a curious relics at best or dangerous distractions to progress at worst, are all stricken with a disease that eventually will turn them into husks from which white flowers grow. Instead of choosing to accept this fate, as a growing number of traditionalist Taoists are proclaiming, instead the technocrats create the "soulscape," a suspended animation that leaves the bodies of the Solarians in stasis while their brain enters a digital paradise. While they are in this digital dream, the Sols are working frantically on a cure for the affliction with the hopes to reawaken their population in the future. It sounds like a good plan if not for a couple things: 1) the Soulscape can only be sustained by a network of human brains, which the Solarians have made a pseudo-religion in order to keep the humans compliant and ready to sacrifice themselves for brain harvesting, and 2) the people awakened from their stasis are often driven mad at being plucked from heaven, and go violently berserk when awakened. Throw on top of this the corruption, apathy, and misconduct, and sick experiments of some of the other Sols, you have a system that is built on cruelty and is completely perverted from its original purpose. 

It's pretty gripping, and how your character's relationships with the other Sols, the Sols motivations for their actions, and the plight of the humans throughout the story is told in a very relatable and charming way. You can find gifts for the human child you take in, and poisonous dishes that are deadly to anyone but one NPC who can only eat deadly toxins, or help a sentient warbot who has become a serene poet locate his still very much a warbot brother. Each of the other Sols has their own backstory and motivations, and they try to do their best to endear you to your rogues gallery, and add a bit of depth to their villainy. Admittedly, some of these are still a little moustache twirly, and I actually found the main villain/final boss to have the least impactful story, instead trading compelling reasoning for her actions to "oops she's just been driven crazy now."

While I really enjoyed the story and world of 9 Sols, I found the game to be tuned a little too high in terms of difficulty. Enemies are really rather relentless in their attacks, and the timings between your parries, your charge parries (necessary to deflect the powerful "red" attacks), and your jump counters (similar to the Mikiri counters in Sekiro which you use to counter thrust attacks), is quite short. As well, your character is a bit of a squishy little kitty, and he dies very quickly even with a healthy supply of healing items. Luckily, the game let's you tune the difficulty to your liking with a great deal of flexibility, and you can basically make the game a cakewalk if you want, but judging the game as-is means that this is really one mean game. I decided to up my damage so that I hit a good bit harder, so that it made the game more of a DPS race; I still had to learn enemy movesets, but I never became hard stuck, aside from a very few sticking points like the final boss. Eigong, who is already making waves as a particularly nasty final boss, is a standout for being two phases of just relentless screen filling attacks that you have to counter near perfectly, as well as an ability to freeze you in place while she wails on you. If you want the true ending, in fact, you have to do another third phase that is somehow even more difficult. 

The game is also a fan of the arena gauntlet of enemies, demanding that you master the movesets of each enemy type, as at some point you will hit a "quiz" that demands you face several different types at once and balance their moves. There is one, in particular, that is a long scrolling hallway that just continually fills with enemies that took me quite some time to overcome. I imagine if you really gelled with the combat, which I am sure a great many players did seeing how this topped a lot of peoples' "best of 2024" lists, but for me it was a bit of a deterrent to calling this game an unqualified win. 

I suppose this does work in terms of the story: redemption should not be easily earned, and if you little duder wants to atone for his past mistakes, he must suffer first. This means you must suffer and overcome, to a degree. 

In the end, I would recommend giving this game a try. The story is quite good, and I am sure that others will enjoy the gameplay much more than I did. 

Okey dokey, next time we will talk about UFO 50 and Unicorn Overlord. See you then!