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Not my favorite Bombservice Metroidvania, but still a decent game.

The pixel art is quite good, and the soundtrack is excellent, but I feel the gameplay and story could have been stronger.

Exploration
The game features a fair variety of areas, though none of them are particularly memorable. The map system is minimal but functional nice to use. Overall, this feels more like a Metroidvania-lite, as there’s not much emphasis on revisiting areas. However, fast travel unlocks once you’ve explored most regions, which is a nice touch. Hidden items are marked with question marks in rooms you visit, making it relatively easy to find most of them without much effort. Some might dislike this lack of challenge in exploration, but it’s a matter of personal preference I guess.

Combat
Combat shares some of the same issues I’ve had with other games by rdein. While I’ve primarily played these games for the pixel art, the gameplay mechanics often leave me frustrated.

Key issues include:
• Too many visual effects: Excessive particles, flashes, and camera shakes make it hard to see what’s happening.
• Fast-moving enemies: Enemy movements feel overwhelming and chaotic.
• Attack mechanics: Spamming attacks pulls you closer to enemies, often resulting in unavoidable hits. While this isn’t new to the series, it still feels unintuitive to me.
• Explosions and projectiles: While explosions are telegraphed, there are simply too many of them for my taste.

Skills and Upgrades
There’s a good variety of skills and hidden items to discover, and some items require extra effort to obtain, which adds a nice touch of challenge and reward.

Gameplay
The platforming is relatively easy, though I disliked a couple of areas where excessive darkness was used. Movement feels very floaty, almost like you’re in low gravity compared to many other Metroidvanias. While this is a subjective point, it might not appeal to everyone.

Difficulty
Due to the combat issues I mentioned earlier, I opted to play on Easy Mode (which I appreciate having as an option). I can’t comment on the difficulty of bosses on Normal Mode, but late-game enemies do involve a lot of hit-spamming, which can feel tedious.

Graphics
While the pixel art is really good, I wasn’t a fan of the enemy designs. There are too many surreal demon enemies, and I would have preferred more human-like enemies and NPCs to balance things out.

Music
Aside from the pixel art, the music is arguably the best part of the game. It’s beautifully composed and really enhances the atmosphere.

UI
The UI is polished, and the game feels thoughtfully designed overall.

Final Thoughts
It’s an okay game to close out the Momodora series if this truly is the final installment. Hopefully, Bombservice will continue making new games—perhaps even experimenting with 3D graphics in the style of Minoria!

C+ Beautiful game visually and musically but a step back to Reverie under the Moonlight (RutM) in terms of writing, level design, and gameplay.
Graphics : The strongest part of this game for me. I already loved the pixel art aesthetic of RutM and this game takes it to another level with much more fluid animation and detailed backgrounds. The characters all look amazing and the areas, while few, are varied and scenic. Bosses feature some lovely pixel art as well and are a definite upgrade.
Sound: The music is probably the second part of this game that I unequivocally enjoyed having several tracks that stood out for me and most of the other background osts feeling just right. The hit effects are a little lackluster (though to be fair technically the main weapon *is* just a leaf) but the rest of the present sound effects were satisfactory to me.
Plot: I enjoyed the general overt nature of the plot and progression in solving the mystery of the demon resurgence. However, I do think that it could have been better overall. I'll refrain from much criticism though due to the fact that this is my entry point into the mainline Momodora continuity (this game being the conclusion of the 4 game story to boot). The plot is simply written so that it's not a Herculean task to understand the basic of the story. But I definitely felt like I was missing some world building and story telling to help the writing solidify itself, though again it is highly possible that the legwork was accomplished in past 3 entries. My only point of reference here is via RuTM which served as a prequel to the series. At the end of that game the writing, while not masterful, displayed a competent level in drawing you into a world on the brink of ruin where most inhabitants have perished and those that remained on the brink of despair. At the end of the day I won't hold it against Momodora since I chose an entry point at the final hour but I certainly wasn't swayed by any of the developments that happened in this short adventure. It *is* a shame though that the loss of worldbuilding makes many of the bosses forgettable by the end of the game. While beautifully crafted, most end up being random characters slotted into the world because there needed to be boss fights. One of them is even just a giant blob, or another just a giant spider with basic designs on both. There isn't really any lore behind them so they end up being just another face in the crowd as opposed to RuTM where you end up fighting characters that mean something to the story like a Dark Souls for example.
Gameplay: The gameplay is adequate if somewhat stiff. The moveset is incredibly basic which to be fair is satisfactory given the short length of this adventure. Mainly just one string for the melee attack, bow and arrow, and a dodge. Later powerups include just the double jump and wall jump but ultimately you're trying to master the basic skillset to conquer bosses. I generally don't hold game accountable for a simple control scheme but in this case I feel it is a step back in their previous entry. My two main complaints are 1) RuTM has much more fluid dodge mechanics while Moonlit Farewell introduces a relatively frustrating amount of animation lock. It isn't abysmall levels of aniamtion lock but RuTM had such responsive control and feel that Moonlit Farewell is a clear stepback. 2) Also unlike RuTM, you cannot actually dodge in mid air in this game forcing awkward attempts to close in on ranged enemies situated on a high platform. Aside from player control the game also lacks real challenge. Regular enemies typically only have 1 move and are easily stunlocked by your melee combo. This makes traversal and combat somewhat boring as nearly every enemy can be negated by just hitting them first. Of the remaining enemy types, they typically follow the same behavior in that within a second or so they'll take a swing at you. Knowing this it is easy just to preemptively dodge and begin attacking at which point they will typically die before a second attack can come out. Bosses display similar lackluster behavior in that they are typically fairly easy to avoid and burst down in this game. Part of what made bosses of RuTM memorable was their difficulty. The game ultimately feels way to easy all around. I will give props to the team for the relics in this game since some of them are gameplay altering items in addition to the classic passive ones you'll see in many modern Metroidvanias. Collectibles are also easy to find, in a good way, and the map clearly defining boundaries and important landmarks.
Level design: The game is styled as a Metroidvania but unfortunately I think this entry is lacking, particularly in that it is a step back from RutM. RutM did not have the most amazing overworld compared to other metroidvanias but it did adequately in creating the interconnected world that you discovered as you obtained new powerups. Moonlit Farewell in contrast attempts to create a similar layout but lacks much of the openess and non-linearity of standard Metroidvanias, even compared to those that do a great deal of hand holding. The levels attempt to create an illusion of being open but by the end of the game it felt incredibly linear it its approach to exploration. This is further damning due to the fact that rooms are not particularly exciting in any capacity. Not really any puzzles, platforming challenges, interesting enemy placement, or even instant death traps that you have to watch out for. It leaves me somewhat dissappointed, though at the end of the day level design isn't really what I enjoyed the most out of RutM anyways.

As much as I respect the Momodora series for being simple and knowing it, this entry was too plain for me to really enjoy. I think RUtM worked because every element there was just good enough to form a balanced whole, even though none of them were exceptional. Here, it’s clear that loads of effort went into sprites, animations and presentation, yet the core gameplay remained equally simplistic (if not more so), and the contrast actually undermines the experience.
Momodora 2 and 3 worked too, but only since they were both 1-2 hours long. Moonlit Farewell lasts about 10 hours for no good reason, because the majority of this time is spent on a typical "hit, hit, i-frame dodge" combat. There’s no token platforming with spikes like before; only basic traversal.
You get many boss fights, but all of them are utterly straightforward, and the best battles are where the aforementioned contrast gets downright jarring. Beautiful animations, lush special effects, cool cutscene intermissions, badass music… and barely anything to do. The final boss has three completely different stages yet attacks so rarely and simply that many harder 2D action games would barely count this as a tutorial fight.
You could say there’s an attempt to get more mechanically complex using the Sigils system (basically your regular "many perks, limited slots" thing leading to different builds), except there’s really not enough balance for it to work. Some perks barely deserve a glance, while others are too good to not use all the time unless you’re doing a challenge run.
The game also invites min-maxing through its occasional awkward attempts at increasing difficulty, trapping you in tiny areas with large enemies or giving their attacks brutal status effects like bleeding (there is, of course, an immunity perk that negates all that). There’s a post-game boss rush section with no recovery between fights, and it might feel like you’re finally in for some challenging test of attrition… except the mana regeneration perk negates such handicap entirely. So even when you die in this game, the answer is usually "use a more OP build" instead of "git gut".
The story got an upgrade, but only in quantity of conversations and characters, not in their quality. RUtM was more of a typical moody dark fantasy; Moonlit Farewell is a typical JRPG-inspired romp about fighting a god with a double sprinkling of fan service. There’s a new girl Cereza acting as an NPC companion + shop, but she contributes absolutely nothing other than her cute cat ears. Momo and Dora are actually having chats here for the first time, except I couldn’t find any personalities in their lines beyond the most basic archetypes that were already established before.
Lastly, it’s disappointing how the extra modes and achievements have almost zero variety this time. RUtM had a pacifist achievement that meant moving through the same areas differently, as well as higher difficulties that at least invited you to do the battles near-flawlessly, and Momodora 3 had pacifist and speedrun achievements too. Here, instead, there’s a YOLO mode (which forces you to rely on OP perks even more) and the "arrange" mode (which mirrors the map, removes one hit from the base combo, and changes pretty much nothing else), so getting 100% basically means repeating the same thing 3 times in a row. Naturally, by the end of it the already simplistic and overused combat starts to feel like nothing but a chore.
Big props to the developer for making and finishing this game, despite the reported severe burnout, but there’s no denying that larger scope comes with its own set of challenges, and sometimes you just need a bigger team or even more time to make it work.