I had quite a bit of fun with Itorah. The game looks great visually, with cartoony but detailed characters and backgrounds. I was surprised by how many unique biomes there were, each with their own styles and level gimmicks. I really enjoyed how fast the player moves, making any backtracking a lot more tolerable. The movement is further improved with the unlockable abilities. The player's new moves never become too outlandish, but they still help liven up the gameplay further.

All that said, the game is certainly a bit clunky. It can be difficult to platform or fight enemies due to the momentum feeling unreliable. I've even had moments where I'm launched several feet to the side due to what I can only assume is wonky wall jump physics. Sometimes it feels like I pass through a ledge when platforming, which then requires me to be extra careful in the future. Lastly, parts of the game are built around the fact that the player lacks a Fast Travel option. That said, it wouldn't hurt to unlock fast travel near the game's end, and simply disable it after reaching the point of no return. It makes it tedious to return to previous levels to explore.

If you can look past a little bit of jank, Itorah offers an enjoyable fast paced adventure with a nice story.

Beautiful artstyle! Unfortunately i cannot recommend this game. The biggest issues to me with the game is the level design and progression. It is a very linear game, that in itself is fine. But it just ends up being corridoor simulator where you run through corridoor after corridoor of terrain that makes you jump every now and then and some enemies running around randomly. Much of the issues i had could be remedied by making the distances you have to travel much shorter. The content on the map does not suffice to fill up the actual size of the map if that makes sense. I got a kick every now and then from looking at new areas, and there were two great bosses in the game. But it does not make up for the suffering of just running after the quest marker for 30 minutes past enemies that don't know you exist. The music is alright, does not stand out but it is decent background music most of the time. The text scrolls way too slow for my taste so i skipped many of the cutscenes so i don't know how much the story makes up for the other shortcomings. But the beginning did not really entise me very much. The ending was alright i did watch that. The platforming part of this game lacks some type of satisfying challenge. There were some slightly more difficult jumps but they were few and far between, and the difficulty many times just came from the corridoor being increadibly long so you had time to zone out once you got to the difficult part.

I am sorry for going so hard on this game. Because at the start i really thought it had promise. But i decided to get to the end credits and i have to admit that i am damn glad that it is over. I just could not really get into it. I wish the dev team the best and i wish them luck on any future ventures, i bet they learned a lot creating this game.

Metroidvania sencillito, bonito, el movimiento no está mal, pero tiene estamina para correr y esquivar. Rara vez te quedaras sin estamina para esquivar, pero sí que querrás correr mucho y no podrás, por algún motivo. Con el tiempo desbloqueas un ataque hacia abajo que no es demasiado cómodo y también consume vigor para no hacer mucho más daño y fallar, dado que se para durante unos momentos en el aire para realizarlo. Pasa igual con un ataque a distancia que usarás bastante. Es en arco, te quedas parada al lanzarlo y de nuevo parada al volver el arma a ti. En ese segundo puedes moverte claro, pero ni doble salto, ni dash ni nada. Los enemigos son o muy muy débiles o aguantan muchas ostias, y como tú no mejoras el Daño, eso se queda así para siempre. Bebe muchísimo de Hollow Knight, pero no tiene el mismo empaque ni movimiento. Todo se siente muy pesado. Con respecto a la historia, es la típica de ir a 4 templos temáticos a recoger 4 cosas y luego un mundo final. No es que estos juegos tengan que tener una gran historia, pero este intenta ser emotivo… y creo que se le da regular. Aun así es bonito, y no dura demasiado, siendo un entretenimiento que quizás sea útil para desengrasar de otros juegos más importantes.

I'll have to mess with this more, because it's definitely not a bad game, but it's a mixed bag that I really struggle to play.

First, it's way too easy. Enemies meander aimlessly or sit in one place and fire stuff, bosses are cakewalks. I got hit once on the first boss because I didn't know that some of its projectiles actually targeted you (a separate one just sprays in three directions). Once that happened, I just prepared to roll as needed.

Second, the level design is kind of...eh? It's not bad per se, but there's a lot of open area with not a lot going on and it feels like someone just took goal points for a map area, then threw together some random terrain to try and make up a path to those points along the way and in the process, made very long paths that don't really diverge at all with secrets pretty much out in the open at all times.

Third, the game sometimes has some weird chop for me. Might be resolvable in fullscreen, but I don't really feel like going to windowed mode to play a game.

Finally...it's just not entertaining? Visually, it's a lovely game. Aurally, it might be good but music seems sparse at times (I thought it wasn't working at one point when I was wandering through a particular part of one map, but it was just intended silence, I guess).

From a gameplay perspective, combat and platforming is just swinging without any deeper effort and hopping over pits that just return you to the other side if you fall in, minus a bit of health. There's a sprint and roll option that both consume stamina, but stamina doesn't start refilling immediately -- this seems like an intention to increase difficulty and make the user ration their stamina carefully, but rolling is almost never necessary and once you start getting tired of the winding paths, you'll be sprinting, only to find that you'll eventually have to stop after short bursts to get stamina back so you can keep sprinting.

There's a few bugs I encountered, but they were very minor in nature and I don't feel like they really detracted much from the game, so I won't go into them with the exception of letting you know that if you play with a DS4 controller, it may not register your triggers correctly, so make sure not to set the Sprint or Heal commands to those buttons.

As of right now (June 16th, 2022), the game is on sale for 35% off and I'd say that if you're a Metroidvania fan, that might be a good price for jumping in to try it (20 normally, 13 on sale). I'll come back to it at some point to run through the rest of it, but it's just hard to get motivated when a game is so bland feeling and easy, even if it looks lovely.