Overview: Play as Kaho, a priestess looking to stop a curse that has spread and begun to affect her village. 2D metroidvania. It is the fourth game in the
Momodora series.
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| Kaho fights Lubella |
Reason for Playing: AStats Score: 8.7 (54 votes)
20210902 Part I:
I'm glad I played this game today. It's been a while since I've really played a Metroidvania that I felt inclined to play more. The last one I can clearly remember is
Teslagrad. Compared to
Teslagrad, this game feels more difficult (more deaths) and it's graphics have a more retro feel. Furthermore, the game feels darker.
Setup: Xbox controller. Fullscreen. Normal difficulty.
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Kaho fights Pardoner Fennel
(I found staying close and using melee resulted in taking less damage from her attacks) |
In any case, I still like the old
Castlevania games I played* more than
Reverie Under the Moonlight; in general, I liked the theme, movement, item drops, magic systems, artwork, and music of
Castlevania.
Ultimately, I'm inclined to continue playing the game.
After playing the game, I watched a part of a speedrun and the speedrunner tends to skip by most enemies, does a lot of rolling, and executes jumps that allows for omitting as many platforms as a regular run. The speedrunner also obtains an active item that allows for taking down bosses very efficiently. I later learned this item is called the Bakman Patch and can only be obtained by defeating Moka and Lubella without taking any damage. Apparently each boss drops an item if the player doesn't take any damage.
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Kaho fights Derelict Frida
(It took me a while to determine and react to this boss's attacks) |
Steam Game Time: 82 minutes (session game time)
*All the titles appearing on the Gamebody Advanced and Nintendo DS; I might have purchased
Order of Ecclesia without playing it.
20210902 Part II:
So I decided to play more and while it's mostly fun and challenging, sometimes it can be frustrating to lose so much progress upon death. I recall there were moments like that in the GBA
Castlevania games, but usually only against bosses and usually the save point is nearby. For this game, sometimes I die from falling into a pit or just a normal enemy. Due to the difficulty, I wish one could turn on a "quick checkpoint" option that puts the player at the entrance of their last failure for non-boss encounters.
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| Kaho as a cat. |
I would note that if it weren't for the above frustration, I'd likely continue playing.
I'm also not too happy about the fact that the warp system is a subset of all the save points and that the player has to memorize the locations by name instead of using a map to help choose where to go. Speaking of the map system, I dislike that the map doesn't show all the shopkeeper locations.
And last, but not least, the music and sound of the game are actually poor. Apparently the game is affordable and so can't possibly have a soundtrack that compares to the quality of a
Castlevania game, but I'm thinking they could have applied a sort of 80-20 rule. Get 80% improvement in the sound department with just 20% of the effort. Perhaps such an effort would even qualify boosting the cost of the game by 20-30%.
Steam Game Time: 2.4 hours (session game time) / 3.8 hours (total game time)
20240417 Snapshot:
I've been using Playnite to tackle my backlog starting with most time played and I've reached this entry (which was sitting at a little under four hours).* In assessing whether I should play the game, I read my blog post above and I think I will set the game status to "Abandoned".
Steam Game Time: 3.8 hours (cumulative game time) / 3h50m (Playnite)
Last Played: 20210902
*20240418: today I realized that I seem to have skipped a section of games within the 5 to 6 hour region.
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| Finally, I got the ability to warp... |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momodora:_Reverie_Under_the_Moonlight
