I do not remember the circumstances in which I acquired it, but somehow I own Episode 3 and ONLY Episode 3. That being said, I'd been aware of this game since its earliest Itch.io days, and never got around to trying it out until just now.
I'd like to echo the sentiment I see in another review: I wish Steam let you rate games as "Maybe." This is not a bad game, it's just a quirky game, and how you'll feel about it depends on a lot of factors. In some places, it leans very hard into feeling like a Jet Set Radio fangame, and in other places, it's very clearly trying to do its own thing, and sometimes that gels and sometimes it doesn't.
The controls take a lot of getting used to, and even after an hour, I'm not entirely sure I was playing the game correctly. The description mentions "ultra-tight momentum-based platforming" and I don't know if I'd describe this as tight. It's trying to simulate the feeling of rollerblading more than Jet Set Radio does, which means there's a lot more roll and sway to your movement. That's not necessarily bad, but I did find myself playing this wishing it controlled more like Jet Set Radio.
In Episode 3's first (only?) environment, there are a lot of places they expect you to reach by platforming up to them, but getting up there is difficult. For being a so-called "platformer", there aren't a lot of platforms, and I was always grasping for more height than Butterflies was willing to give me. It's nice that it lets me experiment and figure things out for myself (I eventually learned that wall rides were my friend), but it was getting kind of frustrating regardless. It's easy to miss rails, it's easy to bump into things, and enemies are a constantly-respawning threat. If I could just grind up lamp posts like in Jet Set Radio, a lot of verticality-related annoyance would go away.
I was also never sure where to go or what I was supposed to be doing. Even Jet Set Radio gave you easy access to a minimap, but unless I'm blind, I couldn't find any such luxury here. You're just dropped in an open world with MULTIPLE HUNDREDS of graffiti targets and that's kind of your lot. Finishing enough graffiti will present a notice that you've unlocked a mission, but near as I can tell, the missions are just more graffiti targets, but now they're in special or obtuse locations. The graffiti minigame is a little too simple to hold up to such repetition, too. If there's more to do than just spray 400+ graffiti targets, I had a hard time finding it.
The primary variety is when you have to deal with the cops, who wear reflective masks and speak through a Half-Life-2-Combine style scratchy filter. The cops LOOK cool, but there's never any way to get rid of them. You can attack them and spray over their masks to blind them, but that only lasts a few seconds before they start hassling you again. In places where cops are placed near graffiti, it's particularly annoying, because I couldn't figure out a way to exit out of the graffiti minigame in order to stun the next cop before they grabbed me.
Worse are areas guarded by security cameras. Most of these are actually just turrets that shoot at the player and can track from very long distances. There's nothing you can do about these. You can't disable them, you can't stun them, and you can't get rid of them as far as I can tell. There are a lot of graffiti targets specifically in the line of sight of these turrets, and the only way to finish your spray is to willingly get shot over, and over, and over again. It bares repeating: after an hour of play and something like 100 targets sprayed, I feel like there's a lot here I could be missing because the game does not tell you.
Even just a simple "How to Play" from the options menu, like an Xbox Live Arcade game, would go a long way to making me feel more confident that I was doing what the game wanted me to do. There's a major breakdown of communication here, and while that's on me for somehow not owning episodes 1 or 2, I get the impression the developers are expecting more people to be interested in Episode 3, given it seems to be where most of the focus has been placed.
I don't like being critical of this game. These are Jet Set Radio fans expressing their love in a time before even Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. And I like the aesthetic, I think they nail the art style, and though the music is a little derivative it's still very enjoyable. But in terms of how it plays and how much there is to do, Butterflies is pretty lacking. And yet it still feels like it's scratching the surface of something special. I can't be mad at it, or even too disappointed. I just wish there was a little more to it in the right places.
