Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom (Switch)As a fan of the series I finally played the newest installment, which funny enough started development as an indie homage before eventually being turned into the real thing. The developers are huge fans of the series and it certainly shows since it's filled with references and callbacks. They certainly wanted to leave their own mark on the series, with this game easily being the largest installment, taking me over 20 hours to complete and 100%.
Of course I do think they kind of over did it at times. For starters the game starts you as a human before turning you into a Pigman, within the first 10-15 minutes. The Pig has the worst combat ability and is the least fun character to play as. You then play as the pig for the next several hours, mostly using his abilities for puzzles which some are pretty fun, but this whole section shouldn't have been as long as it was. Especially when the Pig transformation ends up being pretty worthless during the second half of the game, so it's like, why put so much attention on this things that just drags out the beginning if it's not even going to be that important in the end?
The second transformation turns you into a Snake and that's when things get better since the Snake can crawl on walls and spit venom. This vastly improves the quality of puzzles and gameplay for the next section. After that you got the Toad Man transformation and can finally use your sword again. Now combat is fun again, and the Toad's main ability involving his tongue opens up even more creative puzzles. The next section is easily the most polished because of that and it's no surprise is the most universally loved part of the game.
The next section though after you get the Lion Man starts to feel kind of rough. The game suddenly gets obsessed with trail and error puzzles, with pretty cheap enemy placements at time as well. Now I didn't mind it as much since the game is very generous with checkpoints so it's not like you lose a ton of progress. But still, it's annoying to get cheap shot by offscreen enemies or suddenly die because of a moving platform you had less then a second to react to.
The rest of the game is more or less like this. Some really great puzzles and idea's followed by some not so great ones. Like there's a shooting section that's clearly inspired by Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, but man does your character have a ridiculously big hit box. Some parts get a ton of projectiles on screen and it's almost impossible to avoid getting hit at times. Of course once again the game is pretty generous with checkpoints, so even when I died during this section it wasn't that big a loss but it does make a lot of the actions sections feel almost pointless since it's kind of easy to just tank your way through to the next checkpoint and hardly feels like your skills are even being tested.
There is a haunted mansion toward the end though which is easily my favorite part of the game. It feels like a giant Zelda dungeon with one giant puzzle that connected to a ton of smaller ones. I personally loved it but I've seen quite a few online that hated this section. Some of the puzzles are pretty obtuse, which I didn't mind but can certainly see why others would. I did have a problem with the cheap ghost enemies that can shoot you from offscreen, which killed me quite a few times. Once again the game has a ton of check points so it was still easy for me to get back to were I was to complete the puzzles, but for the love of ****, stop putting in cheap enemies if they don't even need to be there.
This also brings up another thing that drove me crazy. The game has some great bosses that are creative and challenging, but if you die twice, on the third try the game will constantly give you hearts throughout the fight. They don't even ask you if you want help or give an option like the Super Guide, they just automatically start giving you hearts throughout the fight. I tried looking in options if there's a way to turn it off and didn't see one either. Seriously, it's like the developers are saying if you die twice to a boss you're not good enough and must need some help. Just seems kind of condescending to me, which is rather weird since they have no problem putting in some rather obtuse puzzles that you need to do before reaching the bosses and they give you no hints on those. So they're going to make it hard to get to the boss but once you're at the boss they will make it easier whether you want it or not? Come on guys, be a little more consistence in the design of the game.
This leads me to the ending which was then just a little anti-climatic since you gain an ability is great to use and the final area starts with some great obstacles and fights that use it, but then it ends up being pretty short. The final boss also ends up being one of the easiest in the game, which is kind of disappointing since previous Wonder Boy games usually go all out in their final boss fights.
Overall though I still had a good time with it. There's a lot of great puzzles, which the classic Zelda fan in me loved. The game needed some better polish though. The developers where clearly huge fans and had a ton of idea's but probably should have cut a few of them to make sure the remaining ones were more refined.
Oh and I can't forget about the music. They got Yuzo Koshiro, Motoi Sakuraba, Michiru Yamane, Keiki Kobayashi, and Takeshi Yanagawa all to contribute. The results are nothing short of spectacular. Here's a few tracks from just the early parts of the game.
Title ThemeFieldsMisty WoodsBoss Battle (My personal favorite)
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