I wanted to love this game. Oh how I wanted to love this game. The art is gorgeous, the music is excellent, the characters and world are charming... But that's about where it ends.
The problems begin with the menus. The game's "Ring menu" system mostly just gets in the way. Almost everything you do outside of basic attacks and talking to NPCs is done with the ring menus. The menus display as circles that surround your characters, which can be navigated clockwise and counterclockwise by pressing left and right on the D-Pad. You also have multiple menus for different tasks (options, items, weapons, magic), which can be swapped by pressing up and down.
Additionally, each character has their own menu. One button accesses your active party member's menu, another activates both of your other party members' menus. Some of the menu entries will be the same for all—for example, all party members share a single inventory—but others will be different, such as each party member's individual magic.
This system is, quite frankly, too innovative for its own good. It's slow to open or change menus, overly focused on looking nice over providing important information, requires a lot of button presses to get to basic things you'll be needing to do over and over again during battles, and the mishmash of shared and non-shared menu entries is mind-boggling.
And when you're trying to do anything for someone who isn't currently the party lead, you'd better hope you've got the right menu open. Since it shows as a ring around them rather than showing whose menu it is, if two party members are standing in the same place (which they frequently will be during battles) it can be literally impossible to tell which menu you have open until you realize the thing you're looking for isn't there.
The combat in this game is baffling, to say the least. You have a party of three characters, of which you can control one at a time. The other two will be AI-controlled, but the AI is borderline useless. Your attacks have a fairly substantial cooldown to them, during which you can technically perform another attack but it'll be significantly weaker. And when you do attack, it might land immediately, or it might take a few seconds if the enemy is recovering from an attack from another party member.
There's also magic, which you unlock fairly early in the game. Only two of your three party members can use it, and to do so you have to navigate through multiple layers of menus. First to the magic menu for the character who has the spell you want to use, then to the category that spell is in, then to the spell itself. This might not seem like much, but with as much as you'll be doing it and as slow as the menu is to actually use, this gets tedious fast.
But my "favorite" part of the combat is the stun locks. Hoo boy, the stun locks. When fighting multiple enemies at once, it is very easy for them to corner you. You get stunned after each hit you take, and you'll find yourself unable to move or attack, leaving you no choice but to watch helplessly as your full health gets completely drained.
No problem, just have one of your other party members use aphoenix down cup of wishes to revive your downed comrade, right? Not so fast, bucko. You can only carry up to four of any given item at a time. Between healing and reviving the brain-dead AI characters and bringing back people killed by a nasty case of stunlockitis, you'll be burning through your inventory in the blink of an eye.
But at least you can change your weapons around whenever you want, even mid-battle. I guess that's pretty cool. It's too bad each character has a skill level for each weapon, so if you want this to be at all useful you'll have to spend hours upon hours grinding them.
Okay, so the menus are a mess and the combat is a disaster. But maybe that's not why you play a game like this. You're interested in the story. Well in that case, I'm sorry to say this isn't the game for you.
The story isn't bad per se. But it's super barebones. Sure, there are some cute character moments scattered throughout the game, some fun dialogue here and there, but they're fairly spread out, and on the whole the story mostly just ends up feeling like Cliff's Notes summary of itself. You pull a sword because you need to cut some grass, that dooms the world (even though it was apparently already actively being doomed), and now you have to go from place to place collecting the MacGuffins that will power up the sword so you can defeat evil and un-doom the world.
It'd be good enough, if the game was actually fun to play. A story like that is fine in a Zelda game. But when the gameplay itself is so tedious in its best moments and downright frustrating in its worst, such a barebones story doesn't cut it.
This game had a lot of ideas. Some of them were even good. But too many of them feel unnecessary, or half-baked, or in the menu's case overbaked to a crisp, and as a result the game just isn't enjoyable to play. It's a genuine delight to look at and listen to, but when playing it feels less like a battle against enemies or a great threatening evil and more like a battle against the game itself and its weird dogged insistence on not learning from other games in its genre, I just can't recommend it.
The problems begin with the menus. The game's "Ring menu" system mostly just gets in the way. Almost everything you do outside of basic attacks and talking to NPCs is done with the ring menus. The menus display as circles that surround your characters, which can be navigated clockwise and counterclockwise by pressing left and right on the D-Pad. You also have multiple menus for different tasks (options, items, weapons, magic), which can be swapped by pressing up and down.
Additionally, each character has their own menu. One button accesses your active party member's menu, another activates both of your other party members' menus. Some of the menu entries will be the same for all—for example, all party members share a single inventory—but others will be different, such as each party member's individual magic.
This system is, quite frankly, too innovative for its own good. It's slow to open or change menus, overly focused on looking nice over providing important information, requires a lot of button presses to get to basic things you'll be needing to do over and over again during battles, and the mishmash of shared and non-shared menu entries is mind-boggling.
And when you're trying to do anything for someone who isn't currently the party lead, you'd better hope you've got the right menu open. Since it shows as a ring around them rather than showing whose menu it is, if two party members are standing in the same place (which they frequently will be during battles) it can be literally impossible to tell which menu you have open until you realize the thing you're looking for isn't there.
The combat in this game is baffling, to say the least. You have a party of three characters, of which you can control one at a time. The other two will be AI-controlled, but the AI is borderline useless. Your attacks have a fairly substantial cooldown to them, during which you can technically perform another attack but it'll be significantly weaker. And when you do attack, it might land immediately, or it might take a few seconds if the enemy is recovering from an attack from another party member.
There's also magic, which you unlock fairly early in the game. Only two of your three party members can use it, and to do so you have to navigate through multiple layers of menus. First to the magic menu for the character who has the spell you want to use, then to the category that spell is in, then to the spell itself. This might not seem like much, but with as much as you'll be doing it and as slow as the menu is to actually use, this gets tedious fast.
But my "favorite" part of the combat is the stun locks. Hoo boy, the stun locks. When fighting multiple enemies at once, it is very easy for them to corner you. You get stunned after each hit you take, and you'll find yourself unable to move or attack, leaving you no choice but to watch helplessly as your full health gets completely drained.
No problem, just have one of your other party members use a
But at least you can change your weapons around whenever you want, even mid-battle. I guess that's pretty cool. It's too bad each character has a skill level for each weapon, so if you want this to be at all useful you'll have to spend hours upon hours grinding them.
Okay, so the menus are a mess and the combat is a disaster. But maybe that's not why you play a game like this. You're interested in the story. Well in that case, I'm sorry to say this isn't the game for you.
The story isn't bad per se. But it's super barebones. Sure, there are some cute character moments scattered throughout the game, some fun dialogue here and there, but they're fairly spread out, and on the whole the story mostly just ends up feeling like Cliff's Notes summary of itself. You pull a sword because you need to cut some grass, that dooms the world (even though it was apparently already actively being doomed), and now you have to go from place to place collecting the MacGuffins that will power up the sword so you can defeat evil and un-doom the world.
It'd be good enough, if the game was actually fun to play. A story like that is fine in a Zelda game. But when the gameplay itself is so tedious in its best moments and downright frustrating in its worst, such a barebones story doesn't cut it.
This game had a lot of ideas. Some of them were even good. But too many of them feel unnecessary, or half-baked, or in the menu's case overbaked to a crisp, and as a result the game just isn't enjoyable to play. It's a genuine delight to look at and listen to, but when playing it feels less like a battle against enemies or a great threatening evil and more like a battle against the game itself and its weird dogged insistence on not learning from other games in its genre, I just can't recommend it.
2 Comments
@Jetpackraptor I wasn't tracking my playtime for this one, but looking at walkthroughs it seems like I got about a third through the game. Long enough to see that my complaints were getting worse, not better, as the game went on. If nothing else, the more stuff you add to your menu over time, the more frustrating the game is to actually play because of how awful the menu system is.
Jetpackraptor
4 months ago