Legends of Ethernal

Just plagued by poor design choices throughout.

The game is absolutely gorgeous, but listen here friends: there are way too many action platformers out there for you to play, and many of them are quite beautiful as well, and so simply "being beautiful" is not enough to excuse the fact that [i]Legends of Ethernal[/i] is simply not a very good game. And while it may be "beautiful" this is hampered by the fact that the game's "beauty" feels very repetitive. The feel of the physics, along with the avatar's silhouette, reminded me a lot of [i]Limbo[/i] in how it played; [i]Limbo[/i] had that distinctive "springiness" to jumping and falling that sort of felt like you were propelling a heavy ragdoll, which can actually feel very satisfying and fluid. Unlike [i]Limbo[/i], however, which exists under a completely despairing and oppressive atmosphere, [i]Ethernal[/i] is bright and whimsical and as a result winds up using this fluidity of play to create a very comforting, relaxing experience, to which this sort of game-feel is well suited. The problem, however, is with how the other elements of the game interfere with this fluidity. Firstly is the combat. Combat in [i]Ethernal[/i] is very stop-start. It feels "static" and makes the game's natural sense of motion come to a complete stop. A game that came to mind a lot was [i]Muramasa: The Demon Blade[/i] (an often relatively-neglected Vanillaware game that may not be as "complex" as [i]Odin Sphere[/i] but I think I'd still tie with it as my favourite of their games), initially just because the level design was very reminiscent of it, but then because the platforming elements of the game and the combat elements of the game [i]both[/i] felt really fluid, even though [i]Muramasa[/i] quite literally stops you in place whenever combat begins, it still feels as though combat and movement are extensions of each other, they both feel satisfyingly fluid. [i]Ethernal[/i] does not accomplish this. It doesn't help matters that pitfalls kill you instantly, even prompting a whole death screen, which feels weird in a game where enemy monsters chip your health away gradually, and there were at least two occasions where the game didn't really adequately communicate me that there WAS a pitfall to be concerned about. Another impediment is the game text. I generally hate when a game begins with a lore dump, I think that's just bad game design (even though some of my favourite games do this--[i]Super Metroid[/i], [i]The Wind Waker[/i], and [i]Mega Man 2[/i] all come to mind, although they each had the benefit of setting their respective lore dumps to some of the greatest video game music ever composed), and this game's lore dump is regrettably unskippable. The lore is... not particularly interesting, and frankly could have been conveyed better if presented visually through the game's beautiful environments. See, once again I find myself thinking about [i]Limbo[/i], where everything you need to know is inferred from what you see. Dialogue is another stop-start annoyance, is extremely perfunctory, occurs too often, and often says more than needs to be said. It would be enough to have the kid come home and find his family home destroyed, we the players can figure out the rest. Barring that, you could have the kid say something very brief (I'd have maybe even just confined it to a dialogue box that opens while you continue moving around to avoid the stop-start problem), but instead there's several dialogue boxes to click through, and then a brief bit of freedom to move, and then [i]more[/i] dialogue boxes. I know you might want to tell me that it might seem odd to have a character discover his ransacked home and say nothing, but I'd counter that by reminding you that in one of the most moving scenes in [i]Star Wars[/i], Luke Skywalker discovers his family home in flames along with the [i]visible charred corpses of his aunt and uncle[/i] and he does nothing but look at it mournfully and then look away. It is over in a fraction of the time this game takes to mourn the loss of a family home we've never even seen before and the disappearance of parents we've never even met. Skipping dialogue is inconsistent, because while sometimes you can simply press A to complete the dialogue string and then A again to quickly skip it, every other dialogue string is tied to an animation that must be played out before it can be skipped -- what's especially hard to understand though is why you can't press A during the animation to at least load the full dialogue string like you can when there [i]isn't[/i] an animation (I hate when dialogue boxes have the words or letters appear gradually rather than all at once, it's really f*cking frustrating when it's advancing slower than your normal reading speed, this is a video game design cliche that really ought to die out). I did not play much of [i]Ethernal[/i] but I played enough to know this wasn't for me. I checked out a playthrough online and skipped ahead to confirm whether or not this was all the game really had to offer and... yes, that seemed to be the case. In a saturated game market, a game like [i]Legends of Ethernal[/i] needs to do more to intrigue me out the gate because, brother, I have a steam backlog of unplayed games over one thousand titles long and I don't have the time for it.