The controllers took a while to get used to, i was using a Switch controller so i mostly had to remap them because jumping with A was not a natural feeling.
However even after the remapping, the choice to have the interact to be it’s own button instead of being tied to attack or jump was a little confused, i ended up attacking everything i tried to interact through the entire game and then remembering the interact button was somewhere else.
The signs being interactable seemed a little unnecessary, since the player doesn’t stop to read them, it just shows what it’s written bellow, it should have been an image that shows up when you get to close to it instead (It is, however, very funny that you can spam interact and the screen just feels with the text multiple times)
The map wasn’t that much useful to use at the end, since it didn’t show where i was, i didn’t really get much use of it, but it was a real nice looking one, that i will give it.
When i talked to the Frog and told me to whistle “Left, Down, Up twice”, i assumed they meant “Left, Down, Up, Up” and tried to do it to my confusion about the menu not disappearing, until the third attempt where i realized all songs were of six notes, and he actually meant “Left, Down, Up, Left, Down, Up”, as in, doing “Left, Down, Up” Twice. Not that it mattered because the song didn’t work either way.
The gameplay itself was honestly really bad, consisting of platforming and combat, both of them extremely janky and hard to control.
The platforming featured really stiff air movement that never made me feel like i was in control of my character while jumping, and the fact that sometimes the player was able to double jump (like when jumping on top of a mushroom, or floating on those random sci-fi looking updrafts) but most of the time not felt real confusing.
The combat was extremely infuriating, every time i attacked i felt like i was anchored to the floor, and also for some reason the character felt in slow motion when hitting the attack, that is to say, ONLY the character, because every enemy was extremely fast, or like the lantern, moved away for me and most of the time out of range of my attacks, not that attacking it would have helped because it kept hitting me on the little amounts of time i managed to catch up to it, on a way that that made me feel like the game was not designed for combat and it was just an extra tool, assumption that soon proved incorrect when i encountered the first boss, Suzaku, who immediately destroyed me, made me go back the beginning and made me never go back to that zone, since i had no tool to fight a flying enemy (if there is such a tool, i wouldn’t know, because i never found it)
After wandering aimlessly and not being able to find the song of the dead to open that one door (Which i wasn’t sure it existed, since as i stated before, Whistling did not work for me at all), i decided to follow what the sign told me to “””not””” do and wall jump on top of it, ending up with combat with ghost that i could never hit, so i assumed they weren’t to hit and instead i was to dash and dodge… Which confused me soon after i found the lenses of truth, that removed my ability to dodge, and thus made traveling the lost woods part of the map annoying, since i had to open the sigh, see where the arrow pointed, then start trying to dodge an invisible enemy, which was ironically probably the most enjoyable part of my whole playthrough.
After advancing for a while, i managed to obtain the mallet and find the Byakko boss, who i got to remove like a third of it’s HP before i got killed, which is when i decided to drop the game because i was just not having fun.
Overall a really good looking game that i did not enjoy at all, which is a shame because it was the exact same aesthetic that i find enjoyable.
On a last note, i was confused about why all those people on Shinto Priest clothing were calling themselves Shinobi, or why for some reason Byakko was a pig, instead of a White Tiger.
Personal Score: 3/10 (All points given for the graphics)