Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Steam): A quiet, hidden forest treasure

Oh the steam summer sale. That magical time of the year where you spend money you probably shouldn't on games that you will never get around to playing. I've done it, you've done it. 90% of the time when I buy one game I was really looking forward to and about 10 that I never even touch. But every so often I stumble across one that seemed like it could be interesting if given the shot.

I've never heard of this series, but this is the 4th in the franchise. It also happens to be a prequel so despite it being the newest I get to start its story from the beginning. Would this be just another title that was purchased and then immediately forgotten to the pile of shame? Or would I stumble upon a gem to be treasured and valued? Let's find out.

MOMODORA: REVERIE UNDER THE MOONLIGHT: (Steam)

The tale of Momodora starts 400 years before the events of the first game, where a young priestess named Kaho travels to the eastern kingdom of Karst to investigate a spreading curse that is threatening her lands and village. Upon reaching the outskirts of Karst city she is confronted by a Knightess called Cath.

Cath informs Kaho that the source of the curse is coming from the Queen of Karst, but she has locked herself away in the castle. Cath advises Kaho to leave while she handles it, but the curse affects Kaho as well. They can't enter without finding crest pieces necessary to enter the castle so armed with only a bow and a maple leaf (the signature weapon of these priestesses), Kaho explores to find the crests to confront the queen and curse.

Uh, Nice to meet you too, Cath.

Wow. Very few games have such a cut and dry story these days. I actually had to fluff some of it up to get two paragraphs of description. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is a classic styled 2d Castlevania style game the borrows some mechanics from the Dark Souls franchise, done in the retro style pixel graphics that oh so often make me weak in the knees from the onset. 

Let's start with that, actually. From what I have seen in previous games, Momodora titles were typically done with small sprites that allowed for minimal animation detail (think Super Meat Boy). This iteration however the sprites are significantly larger, which allows them to have much more significant detail in their sprite animation. It clearly shows because all of the action animations have been beautifully detailed with multiple frames and poses to give it a very natural and fluid feel.

The dodge roll looks natural, the attack swings have a sense of weight that give a very realistic timing that just feels right. Characters and bosses have lots of signature motions to telegraph attacks which is incredibly crucial for this style of combat engine, and they appear to do a lot with a very minimal color pallet. Monsters and characters are all very differently and interestingly designed.

Bells function as checkpoints. Like Dark Souls bonfires they restore health,
refresh your items, and give you a checkpoint in the case of death.

Environments look like they belong right at home on the NES or SNES consoles, and while there is only so much detail you can give to castle corridors and caves, the environments make great use of parallax hiding details of the background environment in layers, making cityscape and forests look so much more impressive because it allows them add subtle details that fade with each layer of distance. I'm a huge fan of pixel art and good sprite work so this kinda stuff really appeals to me.

The map is long and sprawling much like you would expect of a Metroidvania game with locked doors, paths that require specific abilities to get through, and looping paths to provide short cuts back to other areas of the game. The game is not massive in its size but it is modestly sizable so it's certainly not a game you are going to blow through in one or two hours. I would say there are about 8 or 9 different areas that you'll need 4 keys to fully unlock.

Combat at its core uses very simple mechanics. I hate to constantly use the credit of Dark Souls because it's not the first to use the invincibility frames but much of Salt and Sanctuary's 2d styled combat rings familiar here. Kaho's running speed if I am being generous is moderately paced, so you will probably be using the dodge role to pick up the pace. When fighting you will spend the majority of your time with simple button mashing combos to swing your leaf, and then using your dodge roll to roll through or away from enemy attacks. If the situation demands you are also able to rapid fire your bow for weaker but safer ranged attacks.

Battle is augmented by the items that you can collect that give you various stat boosts and abilities. Some of them provide immediate effects like attack buffs, but a large majority of them have passive abilities such as lifesteal, status aliment resistances, magnetism for items and so on. You can only equip two and their affects could be for battle or for exploration and they can be restored at checkpoints which is nice. But, you will only get so many uses between them so you need to choose wisely based on your play style as well as alternate based on need.

The music of this game is generally chill, and kinda dark. The opening theme when starting in the forest opens with a very slow paced and somber tune. After that when going from castle outskirts, to cathedral, to caves and so forth the music sticks to more of an ambient droning rather than actual music, but when it does it tends to stick to pretty melancholy melodies.

Even the music when fighting a boss monster tends to stick to a relatively deep noted loop or an uptempo melody. I like the music in this game but I wouldn't say that it's catchy in any capacity. It's perfectly acceptable for the tension level of these moments, but I wouldn't say that the music is the strength of this game. It's totally serviceable but nothing to write home about.

Even when monsters are not violent, they are not friendly.

It isn't a very long game, either. Depending on your level of determination and frustration to boss fights, the entire game can be ripped through with bad and good endings inside of a couple of sittings. I think I managed to play through its entirety in a few days. Maybe spanning that 7-12 hour range. There is a new game plus where you can start with the equipment you collected, but it doesn't really change the game much.

There are also a number of difficulty settings, but I feel that normal really does provide the best experience. It provides just enough challenge that the game is not a pushover and will punish you for making stupid mistake or rushing too carelessly, but fair that you can learn patterns and make easy work of bosses so long as you pay attention and learn. I tried to start streaming this game on Hard and even knowing where things were or what patterns enemies had it was still punishing me to the point where I was struggling to make it to the first boss with increased enemies and reduced health.

And this is a minor nitpick at best, but I found the jump to be needlessly frustrating. Kaho has a relatively low jump height, but she does have a double jump. I supposed that would sort of lend to realism if it was reduced to a single jump, but with a double jump it feels like it should be much higher than it is. I don't know. I don't think it really affected battles as much as I felt they did. Again, minor nitpick.

I suppose my biggest complaint about Momodora is that its weakest aspect is probably its story. You are given a minor back story, and primary goal, but the game doesn't really seem to evolve past that point. Cath is the only major NPC that gives some meaty exposition and she doesn't feel like she in the game enough to really flesh out the story.

There are a couple of NPCs that you can speak to, but at best they give some minor explanation about an upcoming boss. After beating the game both bad and good endings, I didn't feel like I had much in the the way of resolution, and didn't have that strong connection to the universe it presented me with because it felt like it never really explored it, which is a real shame. Perhaps I will get more if I play the other titles, but for my first entry to the series I was left wanting more.

But despite those flaws I ended up greatly enjoying Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and am very glad that I took a chance on it. That's really the one thing I can put trust into with steam reviews. If they say it's getting overwhelmingly positive reviews, I can generally trust that. This game feels like it would be right at home on the NES, but will polished modern controls. You can find it on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for as low as 10 bucks, and it also goes on sale so I would say check it out. Good games like this deserve to be played.

Oh yeah, and you can turn into a cat.

Valkyria Revolution (PS4): Oh Valkyria... What has Sega done to you...

So a little over 5 years ago (Jesus Christ) I had written a review for a game I thought was great that almost nobody played. It was a bizarre blending of anime, JRPG, tactical RPG, 3rd person shooter, and first person shooter. All these mechanics should have made it some ridiculous mish-mash, but somehow it worked. I really enjoyed it a lot, and felt since nobody bought I would heap some credit on it. That game was Valkyria Chronicles. 

Apparently there must have been some demand for it, because after the release of the PS4 Sega decided to give it a purdy HD sheen and re-release it with all the DLC on PS4. And I bought it again, because I'm a sucker. There was also apparently demand for the two following sequels released previously on the PSP. So someone at Sega figured why the hell not, lets toss out a new Valkyria game and see how it does? I couldn't wait, and bought it without hesitation.

VALKYRIA: REVOLUTION(PS4)

The story of Valkyria: Revolution takes well into the future of the first game. It begins with a man and his teach discussing a private grave honoring the 5 traitors of the nation of Jutland, and why history doesn't explain why they were honored so. Richelle is teacher to the Jutland royalty and knows the true story, and sits to tell him the true story of the Jutland Liberation.

The continent of Europa is still a country of nations, and ragnite is still the resource that rules the world now not only for its potential as a power source, but now for the alchemic properties that allowed so many nations to enter an advanced industrial age. The Ruzi empire has the biggest slice of the pie, and has advanced and expanded its influence to maintain its military power and ragnite control over Europa. During its expansion, the emperor Klaudiazs and his five generals set flame to a stand alone orphanage and took hostage to its caretaker, a woman named Maria.

She basically put up zero defiance, so I don't know why Ruz had the raze the orphanage.

Five of the orphans that survived formed a tight knit circle and after their adoption advanced themselves with skills to take revenge with the nation of Jutland. Amleth, rose as a soldier to captain an elite squad. Violette uses her femme fatale charms as a spy, Basil uses his economic influence and power to equip the military, Fritte uses his skills as a columnist to stir the will of the populous, and Solomon uses legislature to advance political action of the nation. The five of them decide to use the nation of Jutland to push to war with the Ruzi empire to kill the Emperor and his 5 generals and learn of Miss Maria's fate under the guise of Jutland liberating the empires captured nations.

But all is not so easy as the Princess of Jutland herself, Opheila, joins the military to fight along side her people on the front lines, stationed in the unit under Amelth's command. The 5 now have to advance carefully to pursue their revenge and manipulate the war, without their intentions being discovered by Opheila, who wants truly nothing more than the liberation of Jutland and the surrounding nations.

Violette, Basil, Amleth, Solomon, and Fritte: the Traitors of Jutland.

Did that seem wordy? Because it was. I know Valkyria games really heavily lean on cutscenes to get their stories across since the levels aren't really long enough to effectively weave the narrative into the gameplay, but this one is in a severe, SEVERE need of an editor. First off it's trying to tell this complicated tale of two nations militaries at war, then it's trying to explain the subterfuge of the 6 major characters trying to control it from the shadows, (only one of which is playable).

But then it also deals with the interpersonal relationships with the squad, and the princess. The squad has like close to 15 playable characters, and it's like they all try to cram a line or two of dialog into every cutscene like a bad impov session. When this happens scenes that should have been over like 20 minutes ago will drag on and on because every character has to drop some trite one line platitude that does nothing to contribute to the story or develop their character. The squad is literally a pick and mix of anime tropes and most of them aren't even good. Some of them are literally the same as the character they share the scene with.

It's made especially bad by some phenomenally bad voice acting. This to me is the more amazing thing because since I play a lot of games, I recognize a lot of voices. Some of these actors are incredibly talented. I've heard them in better works. Hell eff'n Matt Mercer who does amazing voice work is in it and while he's one of the better acted characters in this game, overall the voice acting makes cutscenes that drag on far to long feel even longer. I've had some story segments run over 40 minutes before I actually got to a level (and when you are streaming this does not keep people watching, let me tell you).

Toooooo many eff'n characters.

They changed the battle system for Valkyria: Revolution and I honestly have no idea why. Valkyria as I know is more or less a tactical RPG. Think kind of like in Phantom Brave terms: You bring out your set peices to the battle. They have their own moves and ranges and abilities. You move your pieces for attacks (while getting shot at as you) and then once you've made you moves, the enemies get their crack with you shooting at them. It was a weird amalgamation of game elements but they actually managed to work well together.

Valkyria: Revolution has completely done away with the tactical element of the game, and when the fans rebelled in the first trailer videos they tried to adjust the abilities to give it a more tactical feel. Essentially how the missions work is you select 4 troops from your Vanargand squad between your Shocktrooper heavies, fast and nimble Scouts, your Sapper mages, and your Shield-bearer tanks. Typically you will take Amleth and Princess Ophelia for your shock and scout, since 90% of the time they are required for the story anyways. You basically round out the party with whatever characters or roles you want left.

Once the mission starts you usually have a relatively simple objective: Hold this point, take this base, beat this boss. As soon as the missions starts you basically have free reign to wander the map and take out enemies. You have an attack button, guard, dash, menu and lock on. It's not turn based anymore but the action does freeze when you go into the menu if you want to fire a shot with one of your guns, use a grenade, or abilities. This is part of the concession to try to make it a little more tactics based (because upon first seeing the game play fans complained) but it doesn't really hold up that well.

The point of giving use of the guns or terrain is what allowed the tactical combat system to work. You could run to cover, take your shot, then have protection when it wasn't your turn. Now I find that there is little reason to use it as I can just vault the cover and swing my sword around since there is no turn order anymore. The only time you really want to use a grenade or ability is when you have a bunch of enemies grouped or have a particularly stubborn foe like one of the mech tanks.

When you complete missions you get spoils of money and abilities to equip to your characters. These abilities have affinity levels so on top of leveling your character, you basically have to bank in your unused abilities to move around a skill grid to allow you to use greater abilities, as well as build up characters individual abilities on top of their base stats. The problem is you have squad of like 15 people, the grids expand, and you don't get a lot of spoils from fights as you play through the game. So you for sure can expect to be doing a bit of grinding to try to get your mainstays up to level. I think even just focusing on 2 characters, I never seemed to have enough.

In between story missions you can also take on a number of free missions as well. There is no story tied to any of these so they are basically a free sortie to get spoils and levels. But what this also does is affect the map during the course of the war, so there will be hot-zones where you are pushing or getting pushed back. The more area you take during the free battles, the more the trade embargo will be lifted and more items you can purchase during when you are back at your home base.

Skill upgrading in this game is the fucking bane of my existence.

Much like the previous game, in the home base you can go to your R&D department to improve your guns, grenades, and launchers as well as boost your characters grids. There are also a number of shops where you can buy supplies and you can take them to a main outfitter where you can rework your gear for the team as a whole with bonus effects. I will be 100% honest I did this maybe once or twice at best because the upgrades seemed marginal at best and you have to wait a battle to pick up the item you crafted AND you can only do them one at a time. Sorry Valkyria: Revolution but I got shit to do. For the most part this didn't seem to impede my progress.

So usually when I review a game I go into the basic mechanics then go into what and I liked and what I didn't but as you can already tell from this one, there is a lot of shit that I didn't like. So let's keep that ball rolling. Now I've mentioned that that every single cutscene is much too long and relatively poorly acted, filled with trite and pointless lines.

But it also suffers from the problem of the first game of forcing you to go back to the main menu of the two characters in the future discussing the events at the end of every single chapter. There is no reason to do this. I can't go back and play old missions until the beat the game, and I honestly don't want to see the extra cutscenes. All you are doing is adding a step in getting me through the trudging story and makes it that much harder for me to get the action.

There is no reason to keep bringing me back here. Let me jump to the main menu
from the pause menu when I want to go. Keep the story going.

What the hell happened to graphics in this game? Both of them are anime looking yes, but the original had this beautiful watercolor washed out style that made it a joy to look at with bright colors that looked rustic, and classic anime design with soft fluid animations that made it look like I was actually watching old footage. Valkyria Revolution swapped that out for this almost generic video-gamey looking anime archetype. While all the characters are well designed that they all manage to stand apart from each other, something about the eyes just makes them all look too similar to one another.

The animation in combat is fine, but it does the old Resident Evil animation of hand conversations during talky portions of the game, which are silly in their own right. But when a single character has like a 10 minute monologue, that never cuts to a different camera angle, you have a single jackass waving his left arm at about should height in the same circular animation for the entirety of it. It's impossible not to notice and looks even dumber when you do.

The music isn't all that spectacular though either. The majority of it is tolerable, well fitting for the menus or scenes you are in. But two songs are played almost ad nauseam throughout the whole game. One is the song that plays when the villains are talking, which sounds so relentlessly sinister they could be talking about giving away puppies to new forever homes and you'd think it's the most evil thing of the world. The title track of the game is the other one, which plays almost every battle and in many cutscenes. It does have a good melody and does give the battle a feeling of epic so in that regard it is well placed, but it's a pretty paltry offering overall.

The grind is insufferable in this game. Things started off hot with me getting a quick level advantage over the enemy that carried me through the meat of the game, but in the later stages where you have boss fights with one of the Valkyria they become these painful battles of attrition because of these bullshit defense stacking abilities that bring your party's damage to next to zero. Even your shock troopers who usually can mow through everything will barely dent through, making these fights take forever.

And as stated above the rewards for doing this are negligible at best. After a few missions I only would get enough reward to move Amelth a few spaces on his grid, because if you want good experience you have to burnt he better skills you get. But those are the ones I want to equip! Thankfully the game continued to dump a number of abilities I never ever bothered to use which helped a little, but again the tedium of the process would just kill any motivation I had to grind.

There is no way to sugar coat it. This combat system is fucking boring. It's not fast paced enough to truly feel like an action game. The animation has no weight behind it so all the strikes glide through as if there was no impact. It's too free form to have any sense of RPG structure too it. Like I said using the skills and guns feel like a token attempt to go "hey see? this is still kind of a tactics game right?"  On top of that a significant portion of the missions just take too long, even when they don't. There have been times where I have playing missions that feel like I have been going for well over an hour only learn I played about 12 minutes.

The game also feels just too easy. Like I said its got a pretty convoluted skill and upgrade system, and it can't be that effectual if I was able to basically not use the shops in any capacity, only grinding up a few characters and was pretty much able to cruise through a significant portion of the game. It has about 10 episodes and a finale,  and aside from a few trip ups on a few boss fights I sailed to chapter 10 with relative ease.

No connection Slyvia Bles, who actually was a deep, conflicted, and interesting character.
By having it jump so far down the timeline this is really the only connection to Valkyria Chronicles.

But this game makes one fucking cardinal sin that made me put the game down. Near the end of the game in one of the final missions, it pulls the bullshit "we need to split up" deal and forces you to control two teams. I think this happens only one other time in the game, and the problem is if you played the game like I had done, you would get the mission with two stud main characters, two acceptable supports, and a whole load of fucking trash because I don't have the 90 hours I would need to level up these stupid characters to equip stronger abilities.

So now I'm stuck. Either I break up my good team and struggle to get through it, or I go in with a team of scrubs and hope for the best. Either way it killed the pace of the game and motivated me to move to something else. Sorry Valkyria Revolution, but I'm a working adult with shit to do.

And the real tragedy of it is, despite some incredibly dumb parts and even dumber dialog, the story was starting to get me a little bit. While the most of it is just useless fluff that I didn't care about, I was interested to see how the situation with the traitors and the princess were going to play out. Looks like I won't be doing that myself, because this game shot its one saving grace in the foot. Its single shred of interesting narrative.

I did end up growing to like Ophelia in her naivete. She's for her country first,
but she is surprisingly receptive and understanding to all sides of the conflict.

Honestly I don't know why this surprises me. Sega has a long track record of not knowing what the fuck they are doing. The only reason they are sort of succeeding is because they purchased Atlus and them left them alone. They haven't messed up my beloved Yakuza or Persona franchises yet, but other than that if they're not pimping out Sanik's used asshole, it's ruining a franchise people used to love. Valkyria is no exception.

I stomached as much of this game as I could. Hoping it would get better. I really wanted it to. Sometimes you can push through bad voice acting and find a hidden gem of a good game (Star Ocean: Last Hope and Infinite Undiscovery are great examples). But there are just too many horrible errors to overlook on this one. The game was universally panned by other reviews, and I have no other choice but to pile on: Valkyria Revolution sucks. Buyer beware.

Ugh, I didn't even get into the English singing in this game.
Dreadful.