Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

The existence of this game is of course, a meme. It's heavily inspired by and takes many cues from the infamously awful Phillips CDI Zelda games. Expect Hotel Mario references thrown at you too. If none of this makes sense to you, then you probably aren't going to enjoy it because the whole game pretty much hinges on this one joke, what if "Wand of Gamelon" but with legally distinct stand-in characters? The one thing they thankfully tried not to copy accurately is the gameplay, much more closely resembling a modern Metroidvania now. That's pretty much why I give it a thumbs up, they took the entertaining aspects of the old and left the frustrating and dated elements behind. The big draw, of course, are the animated cutscenes for almost every NPC interaction. These are a mixed bag, a lot of them do look like they belong in Wand of Gamelon with the strange way characters move, the unsettling facial expressions and camera zooming. But at the same time, a lot of them feel unfinished like you're watching a storyboard, with a much lower frame count and far more rigid "on-model" designs. The voice acting is also hit and miss, the consistency in quality is all over the place. A mix of actors that sound too good to be here, some that perfectly capture the strange delivery and inflections of those old Zelda games, and some that sound like people who have never spoken into a microphone in their life. But all in all, it's alright, a little on the short side but it's paced in such a way that you get a decent feeling of making progress and being rewarded for exploring, with secrets that aren't too cryptic. It's also very easy, there isn't much in the way of challenge. Just a harmless bit of fun, if you're in on the joke.

vincent pizzapasta melpert is in this game, buy

[i]“Mah boi, this game is what all true players strive for!”[/i] Pretty cool game. A 2D Zelda-style game with Metroidvania mechanics. It has an unique jazzy soundtrack, funny and entertaining cutscenes, and a pretty colorful artstyle. What surprised me the most was that they were able to make a somewhat serious, but enjoyable story, even with its goofy cinematics and voice acting. I guess some of my complaints are that there were some sections where I needed to take a leap of faith because I couldn’t see what was below, and a map would be nice so I could analyze and remember the places before backtracking. But these are pretty minor issues that can be easily overlooked. 4 / 5

It is really something for someone to come in and basically say, Hey, what if we took Zelda CDI and made it better" and for that to actually come to. This game was an awesome throwback to "crappy" animation of the Zelda CDI game and style (I say crappy as in it was inteneded) the only problem being, is that its actually a good game with good level design SO I CANT SAY ITS COMPLETLEY SIMILAR TO CDI. I have played this twice, and man, it was fun doing this in hard mode. 8/10

Para um jogo que é basicamente uma grande paródia dos jogos de Zelda exclusivos do Philips CD-i, ele conseguiu ser muito melhor do que realmente precisava ser. É um jogo até que muito fácil, independente da dificuldade escolhida pelo jogador, mas ainda assim consegue ser bem divertido, devido a sua jogabilidade simples e satisfatória, além das cutscenes hilárias envolvendo NPCs caóticos em situações absurdas.

I had the monumental privilege of playing the Zelda CD-i games on original hardware growing up, not to brag or anything. My lil brother is huge into collecting, and had his start when he was still barely a teen, with the CD-i stuff being one of his first big gets. Outside of the many memorable YTPs (shoutouts if the words DINNER BLASTER still live rent free in your head after all these years) that many a child around my time have been subjected to back in the day, i do also have fond memories of playing those games with said lil brother, so Arzette is something i've been very intrigued by as soon as i became aware of its existence. Once i was done with my playthrough, i had the itch to purchase the developer diary as well, just to see what was going on behind the scenes of such a peculiar undertaking. After reading through the entire thing, not only i can state that it greatly served its purpose of satiating my perennial interest over the beautiful art of game development and its intricacies, but it also enhanched by a lot my enjoyment for Arzette, because it pretty much confirmed to me that many of the aspects i so much liked about the game weren't either incidental or my own personal headcanon, but all by design. There's just an aura of respect towards the CD-i Zeldas all throughout the Arzette, over what could have been easily just low hanging mockery and blind callbacks. If you had no idea of what Arzette was based off of, outside of the... vintage artstyle you wouldn't think you'd be missing much context from anything you might come across, and this is an important accomplishment as far as i'm concerned, that sets Arzette apart from other reimaginings of much more revered titles. Getting the original voice actors for Link and Zelda back in the game as cameos was such a nice get too, it was fun to find out they were both theatre kids who never did any voice acting before, and seeing them in a role that most would better be able to take seriously kinda makes you realize that, in spite of the state of the original game's cutscenes, their performance was truly not any bad in a bubble. Arzette at its core is a fun little adventure with tons of charm and personality, a well crafted level design from start to finish, and a fantastic music. While i'm glad specifically about this last aspect, with the CD-i classics having a lowkey fr fr banger of a soundtrack of their own to compare this one with, there's other elements of this game that i wish strayed a bit further away from the source material. Exhibit A: the bosses. There comes a point after you obtain the item that allows you to bounce off bullets where some of the bosses straight up cannot hurt you and you can defeat them just by sitting there and waiting for them to kill themselves with their own attack, and even before that just walking into a boss fight with enough bullets is a mere matter of jumping in place when needed and pressing a button when they happen to spawn in your sight. They were in no way designed with all of the obtainable upgrades in mind and it's hard to look past that. The lack of selectable checkpoints when you re-enter an area can be quite annoying. The levels, like i said, are nice and short on average so it's not a huge deal, but if you wanna be a completionist you'll have to do a lot of back and forth that loses its sense of challenge the more you obtain stuff, other than when the quest markers will randomly decide to not appear on the map. Checkpoints within levels do exist thankfully and they're all well placed as far as i'm concerned. The last point i wanna address is the story, which for a lighthearted game like this may seem like a pointless endeavour, but hear me out. It's a story about SPOILER ALERT a princess learning to break long standing traditions for the sake of her own kingdom and its safety, something seen with how, instead of trapping the Ganon legally distinct replacement inside a book like told to, she just straight up murks him. I do like the concept but with how she meets pretty much no real pushback from any of the characters the message isn't as poignant as it should be. The intro to the game (beautifully draw, to its own credit) sets up way too much context that was better off scattered across the game itself rather than in that one singular scene, almost making me think there was a prequel to this game that i somehow knew nothing about, with how bit by bit everything was described. It's an approach that doesn't work all too well. Still, Arzette is badass. Far from perfect, yes, but valuable as a work of art in a lot of ways that go past what you see in the game itself. I'm adamant that the developer diary is a mandatory read if the premise interests you in any way, they'll make you appreciate stuff you might not have given much thought to otherwise.

Man I went into this game with kind of high expectations, a Zelda CD-i inspired game that has more modern and polished gameplay sounds great. Then I started playing the first level and my expectations immediately sank to the bottom. Good things first; the cutscenes are very funny and charming, they're not as good as the actual Zelda CD-i cutscenes but I had a smile on my face for the large majority of them. The art in general is pretty solid, as is the music. Arzette also feels responsive to control which is also kind of important for a platformer. Unfortunately the rest of the game is not really good... better than the CD-i games for sure, but that's a really low bar to clear. Levels mostly consist of really basic platforming with a lot of enemies put everywhere. These enemies do things like; walk back and forth, throw projectiles... or both! And that's it, and they're everywhere in each level, and enemies that take more than 1 hit to kill get a second of invincibility on each hit, and you can't skip past enemies without losing 1/4th of your health. Which wouldn't be as annoying if after the level you're done with it, but no, this game has a metroidvania structure. Except, instead of an open world where you open up shortcuts, you have to replay each area from the start, over and over and over. And if you don't know what you're missing well then have fun replaying each area you've unlocked a good 3 times. It doesn't help that the abilities you get are; "spell that breaks pink blocks", "spell that breaks blue blocks", "spell that breaks green blocks", "spell that breaks grey blocks" and a double jump. Better hope you remember which color each out of place barrier was! Ultimately, the cutscenes did not make up for the rest of the game which started feeling tedious pretty early on. I was already getting bored 1/3rd through the game and nothing really changed my mind, except that I could skip past enemies with the double jump and the defense upgrade to get the final stretch over with.