Afterimage

I've been playing this a lot on steam deck and some on PC, so the game time above will show incorrectly. I've got maybe 3 or 4 hours in game right now? I play a lot of metroidvanias. I own tons of them. I can be pretty picky with them, as well. This game stands among the very top of the genre. It's one of the most beautiful, technically complete and rewarding metroidvanias I've played. That said, it isn't without its flaws. Firstly... its huge. Is that a flaw? Maybe. When I say huge I mean really huge. I couldn't believe when I saw some of the quest markers... I literally had to scroll past screens worth of black area on the map (undiscovered areas) to find my objective. It's going to take a lot of time to move that far across the map, especially one with so many nooks and crannies as this. This game is not for the faint of heart. I'm sure you could easily dump a hundred hours or more into this. Second thing I consider a flaw is the dashing. It has no i-frames. Yup. There, I said it. No i-frames on the dash. You cannot dash through enemies. The way the game works is as long as you aren't pushing left thumbstick, if you just hit the dash key it does a back step dash. That's your avoidance. Well, either that or jump up and dash over. I just find this system so basic... and it lacks the true feel of a good combat system like in a souls like. I mean it works.... most of the bosses and enemies have been tuned specifically for the distance on your back step. If you use a slightly longer range weapon, judge your distance well, and use back step you can avoid most basic ground attacks. That said, I really wish this had a normal dash with i-frames. The worst flaw though. The thing that will make or break you... the abundant preschool level dialogue and story design. Yeah sorry, you have some of the most awful, awful tropes here. Main character is waifu, which is fine... but accompanied by stupid, childish, unnecessary floating toy companion with really annoying, screechy high pitched voice? Yup, that's in the game. Conversations read like something out of a pre-schooler's text book on how to make friends? Yup, that's in the game. Don't get me wrong... the actual story is good. The minute by minute dialogue though, and how the events play out... get ready to be back reading at a 4th grade level. Ok, enough of the flaws. This game has positives in spades. This is one of the most beautiful metroidvanias out there, hands down. The colors are vibrant and vary so much from biome to biome. The backgrounds have just enough detail to add to the experience, and the foreground platforms have enough level to make movement clear, but enough of a natural edge to look more organic. The artwork is superb. The characters look great as well, and the voice acting is good (though see above for the content of the dialogue). The enemy designs are varied and colorful and fun. Really such a great job by the art team here. The sound design... oh my goodness the sound design here is superb. The thumping clangs and whacks of combat, the goopy squishy sounds when you kill jellyfish, even the soothing background tracks.... all really well done. A+ sound design here. I strongly recommend a great pair of headphones for this game! The weapons and abilities are really great. You get a number of different types of weapon, and basically you just pick whatever two you like and go with it. Maybe you change up for certain boss fights? Or maybe just to give yourself a change of pace from now and then? Great options. Each weapon feels a bit different. They aren't really evolving the game play but they do add just enough change to how you play that it works. This isn't a precision platforming game, but it has some really cool platforming nonetheless. You have to time well, and there are areas you will need to try a few times to get. Combos of falling, dashing, weapon swinging in mid air all work to help work you through various obstacle courses. It's really quite relaxing in this game, and takes your focus most of the time. The balance of platforming and combat here is really just well done. The spells are a bit limited so far, but from the skill tree I can see there are going to be a lot more options so I'll just leave a placeholder here for that. In either case, this is primarily a melee combat game. The difficulty is on the easier side, but I'm playing on normal. It has a harder difficulty mode. I have no need for it, I've found the game fun and relaxing in every way I appreciate. If you are looking for a souls like though, this isn't it. This is definitely more of a hack and slash. Ultimately I think this is one of the best metroidvanias on the market for you if you love good artwork and vibrant colors, and if you enjoy playing a kind of casual but still focused game that never ends. You do get more powers, ability points, and grow over time which helps keep things fresh... but you aren't looking for really tight, deadly combat. Other games offer that. This one offers something much more sublime.

game play is great but the map is garbage, no idea where i need to go, to try and get all the achievements was a frustrating experience which led to me hating the game in the end. if the map had more info yeah it would excellent, i had to abandon some of the achievements as i have not clue how to get them.

This is one of the best metroidvanias out there, and is really exceptional at what it does well. Most concretely, this game absolutely nails effective exploration. There are many different kinds of items to find, the rpg elements of leveling and monster item drops make even less-successful secret hunts still feel valuable, the maps are huge and filled with items and paths to find, and your movement tools are very powerful and satisfying. It's also worth really emphasizing that this game is huge - you will constantly have more places to explore and you'll constantly find that what you expect to be a small place to clear out ends up being entire new zones. Exploration is really what makes this game excel and if you're specifically focused on other goals - strong narrative, heavy combat focus, challenging platforming - you might find that afterimage feels diluted with everything else in the game. Those elements aren't bad, but the focus on exploration and the sheer size of the game mean that most of your experience is going to be some form of exploration and at times other elements can feel secondary as a result. (Also as a note on the story: It's neither as incoherent or as confusing as some people like to claim, but it does expect that you're okay wandering without having much specific direction and that you're okay not understanding a lot of details until you get more context from the worldbuilding.) All in all though, this game has seriously impressed me and truly stands as one of the best in the genre. Not every fan of the genre will agree, but those who like this game will probably be similarly impressed.

This game is amazing! The map is 20 times larger than Hollow Knight, but in such a good way. It interconnects through tons of different biomes, there is fast travel and a *Spoiler* way to travel the world which I wont mention here. The gameplay is tight, the graphics are great, the upgrades and systems are the best in the business. This is the most underrated metroidvania ever released. 20x bigger than Hollow Knight, 10x better than Ender Lillies and just as beautiful as Ori (well almost :p). BUY IT NOW

No clue what happened since the last time I played this game but it starts in the incorrect resolution with no way to change it and doesn't recognize any controllers. Quite literally unplayable.

I liked it. Good artstyle, big world, lots of equiment and secrets. It was maybe a bit on the easy side and the story could be better. Took about 30h for the main story. There's some aftergame content, independent stories which I didn't care so much about.

If I were to summarize this game in only a barely-witty sentence, it would be "It's Weeb Hollow Knight" While derogatory, I mean it in a respectful sense, because I adored Hollow Knight. This game was good, and I fully enjoyed a lot about it. The hours I have at this writing (30 hours) is very fair. I explored nearly all of the world, and I got all major achievements. The only remaining achievements I have are collect-o-thon "get every item" type achievements I don't care to get. Summary: Great quality metroidvania with multiple hours of enjoyment to be had. I got it on sale for less than $10 and more than got my moneys worth. GOOD The game is beautiful. The various backgrounds and environments have a variety of range that evoke many emotions. Desolate areas feel desolate. Calmer, more tranquil areas still feel and sound that way, even if enemies can still be in the area trying to murder you. Enemy design was delightfully varied The games difficulty (I played on hard, no idea what normal is like) felt right. If you kept to appropriately leveled areas, you could be killed if not careful, but was overall not overly punishing. Checkpoints are everywhere. Bosses felt well designed, and if you encountered a boss that was too high level or too difficult, go somewhere else. The world is huge with lots to see and find. The pacing of the game is overall very good. Even on hard difficulty, The game clearly marked areas where enemies were far higher level than me, and there was always other places to explore where i was appropriately leveled. There were 1 or 2 key abilities I somehow missed and didn't acquire until late game which would have been INSANELY helpful, both in traversal and in boss fights. Though its kinda my fault for getting literal keys and not checking the locked doors i marked until way later. I found the story to be a bit hard to follow at times, but even so, being a bit of a brainlet, it was still mostly understandable, and I wasn't exactly working my brain on overtime either. I still liked it, and it kept the game going towards various goals. Speaking of marking, this game, like many metroidvanias, is very much emphasising exploration, and it feels well understood the game gives you a map, and a "map marking" system of which to make your own markings. Please use it. I recommend only using a guide or external maps when you are stuck, or have already beaten a few of the games multiple endings. It always felt good to get the new traversal ability and go back to something I clearly marked to get new loot. The sound, music, and all audio just sounds good. Many wonderful and fitting tracks. I'm the type who normally drowns out music and sound as long as its not grating or horrible sounding. Since I have no complaints and nothing bad to say, its all very good. Emerald Falls music was wonderfully calm and memorable (despite the enemies trying to kill you). There's a boss rush mode where you can play as 1 of 3 characters. It's completely optional, and separate from the main game. While I appreciate it, it has no achievements tied to it, nor is there any extra rewards for playing it or beating all bosses or that sort of thing (that I know of). Neat, but ultimately, I had my fill of this game and don't care to engage with it. Others will appreciate it though. To extrapolate more on achievements, if you are one of those "must get 100% achievements" individuals, the achievements are overall not daunting, and well within reason. And best yet, all achievements can be done on 1 save file, with none being missable (unless you yourself F-up and sell things you shouldn't. When in doubt, always keep 1 of every item. you can usually safely sell duplicates). BAD (Take my BAD section with a grain of salt. I like to type out my complaints as I play with things that frustrate me. Hate and spite power me more than love, so often times, the BAD section is longer than the good. I don't give games a positive rating unless I truly believed the good outweighs the bad, and this game is amazing. Except about contact damage. Hollow Knight has that as a negative too, as do many other Metroidvanias.) Contact damage is dumb. Stop having enemies have contact damage when it doesnt make sense for them to have such. Give each enemy a quick slice animation or something if you REALLY want them to have a "contact damage" equivalent. Good lord do I hate contact damage on every single enemy. You cannot understand how much I hate contact damage in 2D games like this for every enemy. I would have used some of the shorter ranged weaponry in this game, but unfortunately, it wasn't worth it... because contact damage kept interrupting the flow of up-close combat for me. For more information on how much I hate contact damage, please refer to Am's signature "Hate" speech from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". Lack of status effect notifications. There are times when either spells (subweapons) or food you eat gives you a temporary buff or status effect. However, I could find no indicator of these buffs, nor how long they last. I also noticed more than once, a spell said it cast a spell, but many of them never articulated what they did... just a spellname and figure it out I guess. This segways into my next point: the various stats in the game are not fully explained. There are lots of different stats in the game, but what "exactly" they do is left to testing and educated guesses. Most are fairly obvious, but some are not. For example, what is "Final Damage"? Is it the final hit of any skill or combo move increased by that amount? or is it just a modifier which takes any sort of damage you deal and increase/decrease it by that percentage? The elemental damage of this game seemed inconsequential, and I'd go so far as to say adding nothing good to the game overall. In fact, i made it a point to ignore weapons which dealt elemental damage. Additionally, when it came to armor, i basically just prioritized anything which increased my defense the most. These 2 core principles carried me through the game. I really would have liked elemental damage to not be "these enemies take increased damage; these enemies take reduced damage" type system, but instead a status infliction system. Fire inflicts burn, hydro does slow, etc I felt like a lot of the talent tree and equipment, when they did grant stats, granted such small amounts they didn't feel impactful. With enough gear and stat stacking, you COULD get a noticeable effect on 1 or 2 particular stats. However, it never felt good to see a piece of gear or unlocking a talent which gave "+5% extra pyro damage" or "+3% more critical damage" This was balanced out by certain pieces of truly impactful gear appearing, like "every strike explodes at MP cost" or "This weapon grants a unique skill" sort of gear. NEUTRAL There were a lot of unique weapons and subweapons (I just call them spells) which I loved the special effects of, but i couldnt keep using them. Weapons of the same or similar type, but with FAR greater damage would come along. Or worse, a far better damaging subweapon would appear, but the application of it wasn't fun or useful to me. And you couldn't upgrade a weapon to keep up with the higher tier weapons you find to a meaningful degree. Nor was there any blacksmithing system in place to take a weapon's unique property and give it to a more damaging weapon, as an example. Or perhaps make it so theres a rare high tier upgrade material you can find VERY infrequently that you can apply to any weapon, so that its damage is proportional to your level. I don't know what the "best" solution would be, but the current upgrade system falls flat to me.

almost 4 hours and i havent unlocked double jump, jump on walls, nothing, i-ve unlocked most of the places my character can go, the only place where it looks like there's something to discover is guarded by a elite mob that 1 shots and the respawn is 3 min away, the only gameplay i get is hit once dash back, wait for his combo and repeat

It is a pretty game. It is very long as far as Metroidvania are concerned. It is just too vague. The story begins similar to many JRPG's but assigns confusing names to characters and objects. I hang on hoping that the environmental storytelling would bring some clarity, which it does. There are places that you can end up that if you defeat the boss ends the game without really telling you that is what happened. I have swept almost all of the areas of the map and still have areas that I cannot access or require a story item to open access to. As others have noted, the game lacks clarity of where you are supposed to go or what you are supposed to do. I've played the genre since it the beginning with the original Metroid and Castlevania on NES. I would say in terms of vagueness this would line up close to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest on NES. It took a guide to be able to complete the game. There was one location that required you to squat and hold it for something like 10 seconds to be able to access the next area. Afterimage has some of that similar jank. It could be a good game but falls just short.

i truly loved this game so much, i played hollow knight, ori, and so many other metroidvania games and this one is on the top of the list for me. beautiful graphics, amazing challenging boss fights, and story as well. i enjoyed every second playing this game and i hope ill see more games like this from you in the future!

I was very pleasantly surprised by Afterimage. Its a huuuge and very fun Metroidvania with fun combat and great exploration. took about 35h to 100% (all endings + all items on map) and it never felt like a slog. The movement really comes together with the upgrades that you'd expect in a metroidvania game. The bosses are fun yet rather easy most times if you explore, since you will be either too strong or overgeared. Facetanking some bosses is very possible, unless you play the game in order its intended, whatever that looks like. the game really wants you to explore, which i did from the get go, making some bosses trivial, once i got to them. On the other hand, getting into an area where every enemy sports a "skull" icon is then suddenly a "oh shit" moment. Great game, recommend. Lots of content and good fun to be had

main character is pretty, its a fun game. Until you got tons of respawm steps, respawn thunder balls and needles all around you. you have to perform some 20 or more moves at a exact right timing. One miss move or 0.5 sec miss calculate will teleport you back to the very beginning ;o... Asmongold is right. do not make game to 1% hard core gamer. Make it fun to play but not tons of torture mechanic react time testing environment ;o..

Great game, i did a almost 100% complete run, and took 35 hours. i got only 3 complaints. 1 is that you're lacking in defence tools compared to other metroidvenia's. 2 they talk a lot, like, really a lot. towards the ends i just skipped trough it guess it was so much. 3 is contact damage, which needs no explanation. now the good stuff. its a really big world. best cooking system i have seen till now. motion inputs, as a guy that likes fighting games to, was really nice to have. everything is voice acted. and don't forget they gave us a boss rush with a 3rd char who is not playable during the normal game, for free. all in all, good game, i'm happy i played it

Almost an hour in and I'm just not feeling it. I find the combat to be a boring and not bringing anything new to the table. I'm also surprised at the lack of no iframes or parrying. While the game looks really nice it's not enough to carry it.

I thought it was pretty but I got really bored with it after awhile. Even with warp points I found traversing the map to be tedious and I got lost frequently. There are better metroidvanias out there.

Discount some hours of playtime for backtracking/being AFK/mopping up content to 100% achievements. Real game length is probably around 20-35 hours for normal walkthrough, depending on how completely you want to experience it. A curious representative of the genre. I think overall, this is a well made fairly enjoyable Metroidvania, that neither forces you to explore every nook and cranny nor lacks in content should you want to go beyond basic ending. As per usual with the genre, you have to work for your "better" endings in this one with a lot of areas you could skip entirely if you're just speeding towards quickest resolution. Build variety is there to a decent enough extent. Talent tree is at first fairly limiting and requires prioritizing if you want to get stronger faster, but eventually you can max it out entirely and play around with other weapons. Similarly, I didn't feel like I lacked in upgrade materials nor it was unfeasible to use weapons without them. But eventually you can buy all upgrade materials in unlimited stock at relatively modest price. As far as visuals and music go - I'd say it's a rather great looking game, good animations, pretty good music. Is it the best one out there in that department? Probably not, but it's above average from my perch. Difficulty is largely very tame, even when I played on harder difficulty. Which seems to be entirely optional and not mandatory for experiencing entire game. WIth a sizeable spike in required reaction speed towards the very final bosses. I think only one boss in the entire game drew some ire from me, namely [spoiler]Renee[/spoiler] first true boss. Not due to being difficult, but specifically because one move it has doesn't seem to have any reactive counterplay except for brute memorization of safe spot or timing to use i-frames. In stark contrast to every other boss in the game, including the "true" true final boss (which is arguably tougher gauntlet otherwise). Besides that my gripes are largely small. Some bosses can be a tad too far from checkpoint to refight. Some bosses might include dialogue you can't really quickly skip and have to mash button through lines of dialogue instead. A lot of early gear and Cape slot entirely feel like they provide too miniscule of a benefit to bother with them. Especially on top of early limitations of talent points that further put a barrier on trying different weapon types until later already. Magic slot tends to lack proper explanation of mechanics for a lot of items. You can generally guess about combat spells, but for some of the buffing ones you sometimes have to really test things out. Which contrasts gear bonuses generally well explained. Healing mechanics felt somewhat underbaked, using both Estus-like system from Souls (mainly), as well as (much more limited) potion system from Bloodborne. Potions for some reason are instantaneous, while unmodified with Afterimage healing using charges is sometimes barely usable on some bosses due to how long it takes. Feels like game could use more focused design here. Last but not least - story and world are fairly interesting, but it felt like the last stretch was somewhat rushed. Just feels like endings could use a tad bit more of a fleshing out, few more lines of dialogue here and there. To feel more organic. But all in all, I'd say this is definitely a recommendation. Probably more so for more avid Metroidvania fans that experienced the very best games and would want to try something new. Not everything it tries is great, but there is definitely a good amount of polish and care taken.

Honestly I'm a bit mixed about this game. But reviews can only be positive or negative so while the view will mostly focus on the negatives. I'll still make it positive because I think this game has a lot of charm. The game has a decently fun combat system juxtaposed against middling enemy design. There's about a dozen enemies that all explode on death and more than a few enemies where close=bad in a game in which your standard melee kit until the halfway point is all close range strikes. There's aplenty of the other usuals like enemies attacking you across elevation, linearly across the entire map, and other miscellaneous things where you're not allowed to engage with the thing being a nuisance for a longer than necessary amount of time. A lot of the fun in combat comes mostly from a string of input based actions blending into dash animation cancelling. It is VERY clear the game is not meant to be played this way, with certain weapon combos being more broken than others dependent on input speed when you weight in the fact that your attacks in some combinations come out as fast as you can input them. But it's fun. The translation could have used some work. I would dare call this translation job almost as bad as the one in Senko no Ronde Duo. Characters names will fluctuate between multiple different spelling. There's no fewer than four lore important information tomes where the text occupies more space than the box located at the bottom of the screen, and therefore is unviewable. The grammar is almost as bad as the best I can do. Which is to say it's awful. There are spelling mistakes everywhere constantly forever. The story was still capable of being followed despite the sometimes gibberish work. But that at best is a pyrrhic victory. In roguelike fashion you unlock new movement abilities that take you new places and help with exploration. But exploration in Afterimage is slow. Triple jump is given to you within a stones toss of getting the super jump. There is no super sprint beyond using an obviously unintended animation cancelling trick using dash and attacks. Beyond just the usual suite of wall kick and double/triple/super jump there is no unique movement mechanics that make traversing older areas take on a different shape. The joy of moving from zone to zone during the collectible collectathon backtrack victory lap was a drag in this game. The endgame and endings are where I find myself souring on the experience. All variations of the endings you can get before achieving the "true" ending are varying assortments of nonstandard gameovers usually with a single asset being animated via tweening with no accompanying voice audio. Even after spending the macguffins to unlock the "not-so-bad" ending it's still very clearly obviously left on a cliff hanger that requires you to play through the games "new game plus" The games new-game plus even calling itself that is a bit of a cruel twist. It's a collection of 10 extremely (5-8 minutes) short chapters playing an uncustomizable character with less moves than Ricther mode Richter in SotN. As you power through the same exact enemy placements with depowered versions of several bosses as a character at level cap. All the while for the game to use that character as a vehicle to projectile spew the exposition of what's actually happening in the plot at you. And much like the main game, the endings are also essentially nonstandard gameovers. After this you still have to go through the process of unlocking the "true" ending. For me it wasn't that bad, but I can imagine a person getting to this point and having to spend 30 minutes to hours of their life collecting nearly every single skill expanding item in the game to reach the threshold to get an item that lets you fight the final boss. The time I spent, while not a lot overall, still ultimately soured my experience with the game and put me in a state of "I just want this to be over" anxiety which I never thought I'd feel in a game this overall gorgeous. In some ways it's a bit painful to be this negative on a game in which the experience I ultimately liked. It's a very pretty game and despite my misgivings about the enemy layout the animation cancelling by itself rescued the combat for me. I'll still buy whatever sequel there is and hope they bring their experience to the front.

Well... it sure was a huge undertaking to complete this game in some degree.. I found like 5 different endings and got credits from three of those so I think I can say I completed this game... But I'm sure there is like a "true" ending somewhere I can't find. I looked secrets of everywhere and randomly found NPCs around that still had questlines going but no indication where to go and where they went next. The "endgame" was so cryptic that I just gave up in the end to find the rest of the quest lines scattered around. I also found that there was a quest line for my companion that revealed another location I couldn't do anything in. So that was a big waste of time in my opinion. I think I really can't recommend this one because it turns out into a La-Mulana...esque cryptic secret hunting but as a game it sure was enjoyable to go around and fight monsters, cast spells, fight bosses and such. Bosses were a ton of fun to fight and they were quite challenging. I nerfed myself not to find the evade upgrade before fighting some of the tougher bosses and I just had to face tank a lot of hits just because of it. So. As a Metroidvania it sure works but the overly cryptic story and quest progression can be a bit overwhelming. Spending around 5 hours just to find something new isn't that fun in the end.

I am voting yes because this game is clearly a masterpiece. The art, especially the backgrounds, are beautiful, as is the music. The world creation is intriguing. If you like metroidvanias then this is a great one. There are a lot of choices between different weapons, armor, accessories, etc, that make it feel a little like an RPG. Some nitpicking - things I didn't like: The map of this game is huge. I haven't played a lot of metroidvania games, but trying to traverse this map in order to get different objectives quickly became a big chore. I hunted down all the achievements, and by the end I was burnt out and ready to be done. Also, while the animation is great for some things, the movement of the enemies felt to me like playing a flash game, especially when wobbly effects were being applied. Combined with that is the fact that you have contact damage and, until near the end of the game, no way to dodge/phase past enemies. The plot of the game I found to be mixed good/bad. From the beginning they throw out madeup term after madeup term, and it's hard to understand what's happening. It's really nice that most of the dialogue is voiced though. But I would have liked a ~little~ lot more explanation, even just at the opening cut scene, which is very vague. I really wanted to understand the world better, but it was hard to build a story out of all the little quotes you encounter along the way. I still don't understand most of Renee's story, while 42's is more clear to me. There are a few scenes where after a cut scene it shows a static picture of the main character walking or whatever, with all her clothes and hair, and the trees, etc. moving as if in the wind. IMHO, this type of animation feels kindof shoddy, though maybe it's better than a static image. Just my opinion. Finally, I really struggled on the bosses until I leveled up to 99. Maybe I'm just bad at video games, but dodging the attacks of some of them seemed pretty impossible. It was kindof like the enemy animations above--sometimes it didn't feel like it was designed with a possible dodge in mind. There was a lot I didn't like about AfterImage, but it's so clearly a great game, I'm voting yes. I felt like I got burnt out because it is so large, but perhaps others would enjoy it more.

I can't comment on it for metroidvania experts, but as someone who doesn't normally play metroidvanias, I've had a lot of fun with this game. So, if you're not really an avid player of the genre, I can recommend it for sure (Maybe even to avid players of the genre, but I just can't comment on that since it wasn't my experience). It's fun enough that I'll definitely be poking around for similar games once I finish this one (but I'm not in a rush because I enjoy having this game to just open up and chill and play for a while). The art is pretty, the music is really relaxing, and I like all the different weapons. The only real place I think it needs some improvement is that it's not really clear where you're supposed to go, but at the same time, the game is fun enough that I was able to take a long break and then pick it back up and now I'm back in the groove again. Just look up a map I guess! (It worked for me!)

You need a consumable item to fast travel. That's reason enough to make me quit, but also, the second boss (named ???) has like a billion health and is weirdly difficult for a boss this early. EDIT: Yeah I'm done with this shit, EVERYTHING is a super-tedious damage sponge now. I think you're supposed to grind/craft shit for a hundred hours, which is fucking dumb. I'm so sick of RPG elements. Quests, NPCs, level grinding, crafting, skill trees... whatever happened to REAL video games that don't have this time-wasting trash?

Honestly was 50/50 about giving it a good or bad rating. The map is huge, bigger than any other metroidvania I've ever played. While that sounds great, eventually there is so much to explore that I hit a point where I just want to be done with exploration. If you follow just the main story, the game will take you through maybe 30%-40% of the game's map. The combat is neat but once you figure out the greatsword animation cancel with that one move where you hold up and swing the sword and keep cancelling it with a backstep and repeating, it trivializes the bosses and enemies. Ended up killing a level 76 boss at level 60. Also, having levels in a metroidvania is more of a con to me. I ended up exploring a lot and unintentionally overleveling which lead me to deleting bosses without even using the greatsword cancel. I ended up beating the game without even knowing I could enhance my weapons. I liked that there were multiple weapons that fit your playstyle. Sword, Scythe, katana, dualblades, whip, greatsword and probably missing one. Each one has it's own pros and cons. The art is beautiful, the game is very pretty. Story was mildly interesting but it gave an enormous lore dump in the first hour of the game and that almost made me stop playing. I got the 1st ending in about 9 hours, then I tried to explore the rest of the map, but as I said it's way too large for me to enjoy without the desperation of wanting to be done with the map. I'm the type of person that loves any and all metroidvanias but this one is a mixed bag for me. Theres pros and cons but yea. That's my 2 cents.

Pros: •Gorgeous graphics •Decent UI Cons: •Very clunky, finicky combat •Too easy, on the difficulty I played at least. Which makes it worse in conjunction with the clunky combat •Story feels forced •There's no incentive to explore the world. The world feels anti climactic and unrewarding I'm a big fan of metroidvanias, but this one really bummed me out. Overall, I don't recommend this game. It feels like all the budget went into the art and none of it into the mechanics or story.

Excellent metroidvania with tons of content. Absolutely worth the money.

This game is amazing, no hand holding awesome fun filled adventure. Buy it.

If where the f@#$ do you go was a game. It's still fun, but come on man.

this game runs like chunky peanut butter

best metroidvania

Very good metrovania

Nice game

The design is very Megaman X

kinda good

YES