izigame.me

Borémon: The Legend of the Missed Opportunity
I never knew how to feel playing this game. On one hand it’s polished and technically competent, but on the other, it’s just so uninspired in actual gameplay and design. Its moments of inspiration and delight are few and far between; a fleeting moment where you wish you felt this way the entire game. I was always teetering on wanting to play it and being bored at the same time. The only compliments I can think to give the game is sometimes the music is nice and the Japanese theming of the levels are always beautiful and delightful to look at.
If you decide to read on, there are gameplay spoilers in this review.
You can’t ignore the little elephant in the room: this is a spiritual successor to Konami’s long dormant Ganbaré Goémon franchise, perhaps slightly better known as The Legend of the Mystical Ninja outside of Japan. It’s made by Good-Feel, who have been most notably working on products for Nintendo such as Kirby’s Epic Yarn (2010), Yoshi’s Woolly World (2015), and Princess Peach: Showtime! (2024). They’re a studio that is technically competent but have always put out bland games with appealing ideas but unappealing execution. Some original staff from Konami who worked on the Goémon series work there and on this title.
As a big Goémon fan I was excited to play it, but it just isn’t there.
The lead platform was the Nintendo Switch, so the game is graphically unimpressive and is saved by great art direction and design. The essence of Goémon is here in the whimsical and slapstick nature of Japanese mythology and culture, but doesn’t have the twisted edge that Goémon has with innuendo that gives that series its playful dissonance.
The game has 65 levels and is stretched thin with barely any memorable content. The first third of the game is a chore because it’s so damn easy, empty, and uninteresting a toddler would yawn. I can only make the educated guess that this title was designed to be aimed at extremely young players and the intellectually disabled that will never have an independent thought in their heads so they leave Jester Awards on critical reviews since their standards are lower than dirt.
The game never reaches its full potential and doesn’t use any of its mechanics effectively. Most of the game is uninteresting and flat. Rarely will you do something engaging that pushes back. I really think half the game should have been axed and the different level elements merged together to provide a higher level of interplay and variety.
Your main attack is you have two taiko sticks that you use with L and R bumpers, but the ambidextrous nature of this is never used in any creative way; a single button could have been used. Despite having the ability to jump, ground pound, parry projectiles, sidle, and use various special powers, the game doesn’t do anything to utilize them and even their very game feel is bland. Enemies are fodder and almost everything is just whacking it to death. The level design barely has any verticality or platforming challenges in most stages.
There’s literally tens of thousands of ryo to collect to buy things and they only exist in units of one; it’s a grind even with a power-up that temporarily doubles your income. The only thing you buy with them is one time use power-ups, masks that do nothing, permanent health upgrades, and robot upgrades.
Each level is padded with five hidden facts, three souvenirs, and some have a hidden tanuki. They slow the game down to give replay value, and getting them doesn’t do anything, except collecting a couple tanuki allows you to unlock robot upgrades. You’d think looking for the hidden tanuki would be fun, but in practice it’s tedious searching for a well hidden object in big levels as you spend huge amounts of time scouring every corner. The yellow poop fact guy, whose name I can't remember, that is hidden in each level has almost the opposite effect being horrendously easy to find. The facts about Japan are genuinely interesting at first, but with 260 them, even they couldn’t keep from running out of steam, devolving into grasping at facts that have no semblance of relevance. The essence of a straightforward run and attack platformer like some of the classic Goémon games is sabotaged with these useless distractions and trinkets to become meandering and unfocused. At times the game made me swear it was funded by Japan’s National Tourism Organization with how on the nose it was with pointing out and praising the distinct locales of Japan and activities in that region.
The map is awful. It starts out like a linear pathed game, like the classic Goémon games, and then psyches you out by allowing you to travel anywhere all over Japan in a flying vehicle. The camera never zooms out, you can’t see anything, know where to go, what levels you’ve been to, or what’s been collected in them. You have to go into menus to see what you’ve collected and to use a warp function, but it doesn’t help you quickly locate any level you want to go to. It is easily one of the worst parts of the game.
The boss fights are a chore. They come in two flavors: rivals and kaiju. Both varieties are about blunt force and endurance rather than skill or strategy. Defeating rivals gets you one of four permanent transformative power-ups that require spiritual energy you use from defeating common enemies. They're more for show than anything else. You running out of energy to attempt balance makes them tedious to toggle on and off to prevent you from running out.
The giant robot levels, which are analogous to Goémon Impact, should have been fun, but you move so damn slow it’s ludicrous. At one point I got stuck on one of the kaiju bosses and couldn’t figure out why the difficulty spiked. Turns out you can upgrade your robot and the game never even tells you! There’s no speed increase though and the battles are monotonous with no strategy, depth, or fun.
There’s a couple auto-scroller levels, and the isometric camera ruins them by obscuring the view and providing unclear boundaries of which will kill you.
The game also tries to give variety with racing and schump stages, but besides being easy, they make you wonder what the point is. The racing isn’t a race. You don’t rank, you can’t lose, you can’t win anything, or if you can, it was next to impossible to know. All you do is get to the end before the extremely gracious time runs out. I mean, the controls and obstacles are fun, but there’s no reason you’d ever want to go back or any challenge to it where you need to improve your skills. Their only purpose is to break up the monotony of the rest of the game.
Characters and story are, you guessed it, as interesting as rice gruel.
The game left me feeling unsatisfied and I barely managed to get through it. It’s an AA game, but it just doesn’t have that spark of magic Goémon has. In terms of my personal subjective opinion of value, it has enough content that you could justify the price, but the quality of that content is so milquetoast I wouldn’t recommend paying more than $20 max. If you do decide to spend time with it, I don’t recommend you collect anything except enough tanuki to upgrade your robot.
In terms of the PC version, it doesn’t seem to have an arbitrary framerate or resolution cap. It supports 21:9 ultra wide monitors. It looks fine and runs without any stuttering. The antialiasing is limited to FXAA or SMAA and is the biggest weak point with unpleasant aliasing and shimmering that can only be somewhat tamed with nVidia’s DSR feature. Its Nintendo Switch roots means almost anyone should be able to enjoy it on hardware from the last decade if not older.
I wanted to like it, and I want Good-Feel to reap the benefits in its talent, but I just can’t be dishonest; I don’t think it’s worth your time unless you’re a rabid Goémon fan who is desperate to relive memories of a forgotten franchise or bored as hell.