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!
