Good LORD what do you mean I beat this over 4 months ago. I have a decent list of games I've beaten that I have been stupidly lazy about adding here so might as well start with this one cause lord knows where I'll begin with Cyberpunk. This is a pretty decent metroidvania, but one that never wowed me. It functions, its even enjoyable at times, but looking back there's a lot of the experience that was kinda just there, and the game never had me truly surprised. One exception, the gorgeous pixel art. Credit where credit is due, its a beautiful game that had me stopping to look fairly often. The animations are wonderful to look at, even if they repeat a fair bit. As for the gameplay, if you have played literally any game metroidvania adjacent you know exactly what to find here. Combat is a little challenging in boss fights, I remember a couple took me a lot of tries, but you can always just go somewhere else in the map and get noticeably stronger with health or extra damage pickups. This is made easier as the game clearly tells you where there's still items to be found, a godsend when trying to get everything possible. The combat itself was also a little basic, you don't have many moves but the tarot system opens up some build variety. Though I am boring and therefore mostly gravitated to the reliable extra damage and more healing ones. The story was also pretty whatever. Now to be fair, I played Reverie under the Moonlight at least 5 years ago, and none of the other Momodoras. Any kind of potential nostalgic callback in the enemy design or items is mostly lost on me. The game does provide a summary of the events of the previous games, but none made me think "shit I have to go back and play that" and the plot of this game didn't really keep my attention much. Momo may be the protagonist but she's completely silent during gameplay so she doesn't actually get that much time to shine as a character. Her relationship with the other heroines is kinda nice, particularly Cereza, but Dora barely shows up. There's still some stuff after you beat the game, like a hard mode, a boss rush or achieving 111% completion, but even on the best of games I have a critical lack of shits to give about any of that. If this is really the Momodora series' swansong, then it is kind of a whimper. I hope that the studio keeps going though, they clearly have the basics of a metroidvania perfectly nailed down, there just has to be something else on top besides their visual artistry.

Reviewed on May 02, 2024


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