Every other Momodora:

Kaho/Momo: Time to stop the evil curse and kill these monsters with the power of my sacred maple leaf!

The first Momodora:

Isadora: Time to break into a temple and kill these monsters with the power of my sacred maple leaf and this gun I found.

Cute indie game with a fair amount of charm but ultimately very barebones. On top of that it's unnecessarily difficult at times, to the point of tedium. There's only one boss so the gameplay can get repetitive even considering how short it is lmao. It doesn't help that once you get the revolver you have almost no reason to use the other weapons. Also, fuck them for not putting a checkpoint before the final boss. I didn't know you had to use the maple leaf to deflect and felt so scammed. I think the collectible items were fun but they didn't do anything which kind of sucked, especially the pause fairy- it didn't even do what the description advertised it do! Whatever though, the foundations are definitely laid for what will be a great franchise here. This early, rough installment just isn't super fun unfortunately.

it's "fine" in its best moments. nothing too special or original at all. it's clearly inspired by cave story, which is totally acceptable, but the inspiration is mostly just in the graphics and music versus how the game feels to play. cave story has a smooth movement system with some momentum and multidirectional aiming and everything, while this doesn't. it's start and stop movement that just feels awkwardly stiff.

there's multiple weapons with different use cases that i can appreciate, but they all feel super weak and switching between them with just one button is clunky and annoying.

checkpoints are few and far between. with just 5-hits til you're dead, it's pretty annoying to replay the same section and over-encourages playing safely to the point that it's hard to enjoy the combat at all. this is especially a problem with the final section of the game, as it's one long segment with a full heal at the end, but no save before the final boss, so if you do die to that, you're SOL and have to replay the whole final section again.

i just wanted to play this as im interested in getting into the series especially with the most recent release that is allegedly a banger. i like going in order in a series regardless of quality of early entries, so i am ultimately glad i played this, but i really think you can probably skip out on this one.

ech, its hard to recommend. it feels super loose to control in that really bad way you dont want your sidescroller to feel, the hitboxes are super weird, the save points are all on really annoying places where you can go entire sections without one when you really need it and theres no way to recover health midway through a section so hope you just dont get hit. also you get kicked to the main menu every time you die, which you will be doing a lot of, and its like too strong a deterrent to keep going.
if you like the franchise and want to see where it started its fine enough but its not really a game id recommend to anyone.
the music is good at least.

The art and tone are really the highlights here, as it plays extremely rough and is very of its era when it comes to indie platformers. I came to this to prep for Moonlit Farewell as I began the series with Reverie, but to be honest other than the cute girls, little of the appeal of the newer entries reaches back this far.

I suggest using a turbo button, as I absolutely tore up my fingers before caving and setting one up. I'd probably enjoy this more as a harmless little early experiment if playing it wasn't causing actual physical pain.