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20 Jul 2015 - 23 Aug 2015
A great beast has come out of the ocean to terrorize the islands of the realm. Your father is the latest to fall. There are tales of magical artifacts that can defat this great monster, and you set about to protect the realm.
Basically Zelda.
That's a little unfair, because it does try to do its own thing. But it's also difficult to separate this game from, say, Windwaker, aside from the fact that the boat in this game isn't sentient (and there are no map pieces to fish for). By and large, it wears its influence on its sleeve, and the controls and aesthetic are very similar.
Maybe it's because I was younger when I played through the Zelda games, but this game seems to have a degree of clunkiness, and I don't know exactly where it comes from. The combat is pretty good; it can be a little difficult to line up the shots, but the hitboxes are forgiving, and most bad guys are defeated in only a few blows. The boss battles are really just extended puzzles where you're trying not to get hit too much. You can land a hit or two to drop the health bar, but only a prescribed intervals, and only if you've beaten that part of the puzzle.
Maybe that's it? But what else do you do in a Zelda-like with the puzzles. What was Ganon, but a puzzle where you had to figure out how to reflect his shots? It's never about skill; this isn't Dark Souls here. There has to be some way to give the player both enough challenge to worry about dying and also give them a chance to succeed. So that comes down to doing a puzzle while the boss is trying to kill you.
I would complain that the game is just too short (a little over twelve hours), and if we're doing a strict comparison to Zelda games, that would be true. But the important thing is that a game stays just long enough to tell its story without being tiring, and I think that's done very well here. The islands are small, and so are the dungeons, and the bosses are dealt with in short order so you can move on to the next thing. If there were more than four pieces of the artifact to look for, would that have made things better? More sidequests? I think the answer is no; it plays well with what it has, and anything else would be rightly derided as unnecessary filler.
Fun, short adventure game which will have a lot of similarities to a popular Nintendo franchise. Still manages to do its own thing, and doesn't overstay its welcome.