Momodora is a series that is near and dear to me, playing Momodora II on TIGSource showed me that an open world-style game structure works even when making smaller games (in fact these days I would say they are probably more successful in my eyes than larger open games). The game inspired me to make countless Metroidvania-style prototypes over the years, none of them really getting off the ground. When Momodora III came out, it opted for a more linear structure, which Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and Momodora: Moonlit Farewell abandoned to return to the more open structure that Momodora II started. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is a fun and competent game that looks and sounds gorgeous. The game makes small refinements in some areas that the series has previously struggled with, but it brings little new concepts to the table that had not already been explored by previous entries.
A big issue that I feel that Moonlit Farewell mostly resolved is that gameplay clarity during boss fights has been greatly improved, with more pronounced audio and visual cues before enemy attacks. In previous entries, overwhelming screen shake and busy particle effects made it difficult to discern when bosses were about to attack, so I tended to just spam attacks and try to tank through any hits I took to defeat the boss faster than they defeated me. This can be fun to some degree as a sort of DPS race, but it does take out a lot of the strategy and payoff of learning a tough enemy's tells, dodging their attacks and retaliating with your own. Depending on the Sigils you equip, the particles can get a bit more distracting, and some of the game's more abstract and gaseous enemies and hazards betray this clarity, making it hard to tell how large their hitboxes are and when they are active threats, but overall I found this to be a big improvement over previous games in the series.
The boss fights themselves are a highlight of the game, they are often the largest and most well-animated sprites in the game which is impressive by itself, but many of them feature unique tracks, which is an unexpected but welcome touch. These fights are where the game's combat and systems really shine, though I wish that more of the enemy encounters were as fleshed out as they had been in Reverie Under the Moonlight. With lots of ambushes in more cramped areas, mixing of ranged enemies and aggressive enemies in interesting ways, I can still recall several specific rooms and encounters that were fun and challenging, whereas I did not have this same feeling for most of Moonlit Farewell's encounters. The battles where you are locked into a smaller arena definitely recapture some of that feeling, but only some of the later enemies feel like enough of a challenge that makes you fight them like you fight bosses, by learning their moves and dodging and punishing. Most of the enemies in the game can simply be spammed with attacks and stun-locked until they're defeated.
Moonlit Farewell's new stamina system adds some depth to combat to avoid spamming roll, but I would not say that this system is particularly effective to me. In my experience, constantly rolling was never a particularly dominant strategy in Reverie Under the Moonlight, so a limiter on that did not seem necessary. The stronger bow attack at full stamina is pretty fun though, and I think is much more successful than charging the bow attack in RUtM. In the early and mid game, where the player has lower stamina regeneration, stamina still feels like it was not particularly relevant in combat, and in late game where stamina is a limiter on your more powerful form (which feels like where this system is meant to really click together), you are so powerful and stamina regenerates so quickly that it doesn't truly get its time to shine at this point either. The stamina system is also a detractor to how fun it is to explore and backtrack through the world, since the new sprint ability helps you move at a more appropriate rate considering how large the screens are in the game with its extremely zoomed-out perspective. Sprinting is pretty fun, and I enjoyed using the new sprint-jump-attack that hits vertically above and below you. However, running out of stamina and having to walk slowly for some time was tedious, and as covered before, the stamina system does not add enough to combat to forgive its impact on exploration. As soon as I found it, I equipped the Hare Sigil, which gave me unlimited stamina in exchange for increased damage taken, which made exploration more enjoyable. Designing a system that hinders and limits the player from what the developer feels could be a dominant strategy makes sense to me, and providing upgrades and build options to reduce the impact of that limiter makes sense as well, but I felt disproportionately inconvenienced considering the little value that the combat got out of this stamina system. Removing a core system like this with a Sigil feels like a bit of a bandage solution to me.
Covering the Sigil system briefly, they mostly work the same way as the passive items in Momodora III and RUtM, except you get upgraded equip capacity throughout the playthrough rather than as a New Game+ feature. Equipping Sigils provides a passive benefit, and there are only a limited number of slots. I love features like this, such as the Badges in Paper Mario and Charms in Hollow Knight. However, a lot of Sigil effects are too minor to feel impactful or interesting. Many of these effects were underwhelming when they appeared in Momodora III and RUtM, so it's disappointing to see some return with little to make them more worth considering equipping. Earning new equipment slots in systems like this is usually exciting, but I found myself struggling to think of what to equip when I was able to equip an additional Sigil. Of course, not every Sigil can be groundbreaking and there's a place for more subtle effects, but more effects that made me change my strategies or see my abilities in a new light would be welcome. By the end of the game, you do end up with several powerful Sigils that lend themselves to interesting synergies, but by that point the game is over and you only have the unlockable boss refight feature to test them out on, which is a bit of a shame.
Getting back to the zoomed-out camera point for a moment, I feel that this change compared to RUtM was majorly detrimental to the game. Rooms have to be much larger to fill in the entire screen, which as mentioned can make traversal tedious, and there is lots of wasted space, with most of the time the actual gameplay happens in a small portion of the screen. It feels as though the level design suffered as a result of having to make such large rooms, with most of the game feeling very same-y, with few notable areas or interesting enemy encounters. That being said, the level design does end up harkening back to RUtM's philosophies towards the end in the bandit-ridden Meikan Village, with more interesting encounters and more environmental variety, which was a welcome surprise after all of the forest areas in the rest of the game.
Breaking up the game into its separate areas, it felt like Springleaf Path and Lun Tree Roots were essentially the same thematically. I did appreciate that at one point, Lun Tree Roots becomes more challenging and gets a change in palette, however the Ashen Hinterlands were a bit underwhelming and mostly felt like a grayscale forest. Aesthetically, the Fairy Springs were my favorite area, with one of my favorite tracks that kept getting stuck in my head, and just generally being a breath of fresh air after clearing two forest areas. I will say that the Fairy Village had a strong build-up with the music turning to an eerie low hum while you walk past fairy corpses on your way to save what fairies remain, but when you defeat the boss and enter the village proper, it feels like wasted potential as there is no sign that anyone lives there besides there being several fairy NPCs around. No cute little fairy houses or any real decor at all, which is unfortunate considering that the village at the start of the game feels much more alive. Having such large rooms, and such a detailed, high resolution pixel art style must have made these types of bespoke assets too time consuming to produce, which is understandable, but it leads me back to thinking the game would have benefitted from using a similar resolution and scale to what RUtM used.
One aspect of the game that I felt was a bit of a let down was the writing and characters. There was not a ton of writing in Momodora II or III, but I especially remember those games having very memorable writing with funny and interesting characters. The aggressive Princess Eri, swearing like a sailor and Melilot's charming theme song were fun and memorable. The darker story of RUtM moved away from this type of writing, but still had interesting characters like Askorn, whose side story was small but memorable and sad. But the characters in this game feel really dry and stilted, especially Momo, who offers dry apologies and well wishes to pretty much every character in the game for what they are dealing with. Even with Dora and Cereza, who we would expect her to be close with, Momo never feels like she comes out of her shell to do or say anything interesting. The scenes where you hang out and eat with Cereza were cute and charming, but Momo does little to contribute. Thankfully, Dora is probably the strongest written character in the game, with her headstrong personality mostly kept intact, making me wish she had more screen time. I think the main issue with the writing is that Momo was mostly a blank slate throughout the series, so her dialog feels uninspired, and since she's the main character, she's dragging down every scene. Momodora has always had cool and appealing characters, and even though the games' focus has never been on the narrative (I remember the older games having their stories tucked away in a readme file!), I feel like the characters were written well enough that I cared about them and the story, and that just did not happen with Moonlit Farewell. With this potentially being the last Momodora game, or at least the last game with this cast of characters, some heightened stakes and more interesting characters would have been a strong sendoff, but for now it feels like missed potential.
A big issue that I feel that Moonlit Farewell mostly resolved is that gameplay clarity during boss fights has been greatly improved, with more pronounced audio and visual cues before enemy attacks. In previous entries, overwhelming screen shake and busy particle effects made it difficult to discern when bosses were about to attack, so I tended to just spam attacks and try to tank through any hits I took to defeat the boss faster than they defeated me. This can be fun to some degree as a sort of DPS race, but it does take out a lot of the strategy and payoff of learning a tough enemy's tells, dodging their attacks and retaliating with your own. Depending on the Sigils you equip, the particles can get a bit more distracting, and some of the game's more abstract and gaseous enemies and hazards betray this clarity, making it hard to tell how large their hitboxes are and when they are active threats, but overall I found this to be a big improvement over previous games in the series.
The boss fights themselves are a highlight of the game, they are often the largest and most well-animated sprites in the game which is impressive by itself, but many of them feature unique tracks, which is an unexpected but welcome touch. These fights are where the game's combat and systems really shine, though I wish that more of the enemy encounters were as fleshed out as they had been in Reverie Under the Moonlight. With lots of ambushes in more cramped areas, mixing of ranged enemies and aggressive enemies in interesting ways, I can still recall several specific rooms and encounters that were fun and challenging, whereas I did not have this same feeling for most of Moonlit Farewell's encounters. The battles where you are locked into a smaller arena definitely recapture some of that feeling, but only some of the later enemies feel like enough of a challenge that makes you fight them like you fight bosses, by learning their moves and dodging and punishing. Most of the enemies in the game can simply be spammed with attacks and stun-locked until they're defeated.
Moonlit Farewell's new stamina system adds some depth to combat to avoid spamming roll, but I would not say that this system is particularly effective to me. In my experience, constantly rolling was never a particularly dominant strategy in Reverie Under the Moonlight, so a limiter on that did not seem necessary. The stronger bow attack at full stamina is pretty fun though, and I think is much more successful than charging the bow attack in RUtM. In the early and mid game, where the player has lower stamina regeneration, stamina still feels like it was not particularly relevant in combat, and in late game where stamina is a limiter on your more powerful form (which feels like where this system is meant to really click together), you are so powerful and stamina regenerates so quickly that it doesn't truly get its time to shine at this point either. The stamina system is also a detractor to how fun it is to explore and backtrack through the world, since the new sprint ability helps you move at a more appropriate rate considering how large the screens are in the game with its extremely zoomed-out perspective. Sprinting is pretty fun, and I enjoyed using the new sprint-jump-attack that hits vertically above and below you. However, running out of stamina and having to walk slowly for some time was tedious, and as covered before, the stamina system does not add enough to combat to forgive its impact on exploration. As soon as I found it, I equipped the Hare Sigil, which gave me unlimited stamina in exchange for increased damage taken, which made exploration more enjoyable. Designing a system that hinders and limits the player from what the developer feels could be a dominant strategy makes sense to me, and providing upgrades and build options to reduce the impact of that limiter makes sense as well, but I felt disproportionately inconvenienced considering the little value that the combat got out of this stamina system. Removing a core system like this with a Sigil feels like a bit of a bandage solution to me.
Covering the Sigil system briefly, they mostly work the same way as the passive items in Momodora III and RUtM, except you get upgraded equip capacity throughout the playthrough rather than as a New Game+ feature. Equipping Sigils provides a passive benefit, and there are only a limited number of slots. I love features like this, such as the Badges in Paper Mario and Charms in Hollow Knight. However, a lot of Sigil effects are too minor to feel impactful or interesting. Many of these effects were underwhelming when they appeared in Momodora III and RUtM, so it's disappointing to see some return with little to make them more worth considering equipping. Earning new equipment slots in systems like this is usually exciting, but I found myself struggling to think of what to equip when I was able to equip an additional Sigil. Of course, not every Sigil can be groundbreaking and there's a place for more subtle effects, but more effects that made me change my strategies or see my abilities in a new light would be welcome. By the end of the game, you do end up with several powerful Sigils that lend themselves to interesting synergies, but by that point the game is over and you only have the unlockable boss refight feature to test them out on, which is a bit of a shame.
Getting back to the zoomed-out camera point for a moment, I feel that this change compared to RUtM was majorly detrimental to the game. Rooms have to be much larger to fill in the entire screen, which as mentioned can make traversal tedious, and there is lots of wasted space, with most of the time the actual gameplay happens in a small portion of the screen. It feels as though the level design suffered as a result of having to make such large rooms, with most of the game feeling very same-y, with few notable areas or interesting enemy encounters. That being said, the level design does end up harkening back to RUtM's philosophies towards the end in the bandit-ridden Meikan Village, with more interesting encounters and more environmental variety, which was a welcome surprise after all of the forest areas in the rest of the game.
Breaking up the game into its separate areas, it felt like Springleaf Path and Lun Tree Roots were essentially the same thematically. I did appreciate that at one point, Lun Tree Roots becomes more challenging and gets a change in palette, however the Ashen Hinterlands were a bit underwhelming and mostly felt like a grayscale forest. Aesthetically, the Fairy Springs were my favorite area, with one of my favorite tracks that kept getting stuck in my head, and just generally being a breath of fresh air after clearing two forest areas. I will say that the Fairy Village had a strong build-up with the music turning to an eerie low hum while you walk past fairy corpses on your way to save what fairies remain, but when you defeat the boss and enter the village proper, it feels like wasted potential as there is no sign that anyone lives there besides there being several fairy NPCs around. No cute little fairy houses or any real decor at all, which is unfortunate considering that the village at the start of the game feels much more alive. Having such large rooms, and such a detailed, high resolution pixel art style must have made these types of bespoke assets too time consuming to produce, which is understandable, but it leads me back to thinking the game would have benefitted from using a similar resolution and scale to what RUtM used.
One aspect of the game that I felt was a bit of a let down was the writing and characters. There was not a ton of writing in Momodora II or III, but I especially remember those games having very memorable writing with funny and interesting characters. The aggressive Princess Eri, swearing like a sailor and Melilot's charming theme song were fun and memorable. The darker story of RUtM moved away from this type of writing, but still had interesting characters like Askorn, whose side story was small but memorable and sad. But the characters in this game feel really dry and stilted, especially Momo, who offers dry apologies and well wishes to pretty much every character in the game for what they are dealing with. Even with Dora and Cereza, who we would expect her to be close with, Momo never feels like she comes out of her shell to do or say anything interesting. The scenes where you hang out and eat with Cereza were cute and charming, but Momo does little to contribute. Thankfully, Dora is probably the strongest written character in the game, with her headstrong personality mostly kept intact, making me wish she had more screen time. I think the main issue with the writing is that Momo was mostly a blank slate throughout the series, so her dialog feels uninspired, and since she's the main character, she's dragging down every scene. Momodora has always had cool and appealing characters, and even though the games' focus has never been on the narrative (I remember the older games having their stories tucked away in a readme file!), I feel like the characters were written well enough that I cared about them and the story, and that just did not happen with Moonlit Farewell. With this potentially being the last Momodora game, or at least the last game with this cast of characters, some heightened stakes and more interesting characters would have been a strong sendoff, but for now it feels like missed potential.