Blade Chimera Review (gruglas)
i dont even know what to say, team ladybug has been so consistent with their releases up until now but this game just flat out sucks. its fucking brimstone. im honestly surprised the same devs behind touhou luna nights and drainus could put this out, what did it even get delayed for? the pixel art is beautiful and the combat is very fun and customizable with lots of weapons; still the game manages to waste these things. the game might as well not even be a metroidvania, it's divided into 4 separate maps that you take a subway between. but that's not the biggest issue, you can unlock an ability very early on to fast travel. not just any fast travel, you can literally fast travel to ANY square on the map. this results in a domino effect where every aspect of the game either becomes flat out easy or just bad. the player can easily abuse this mechanic to get out of difficult situations to save and heal just to come immediately back to the same square they were on previously. this game does have challenge with it's level design and enemies but the player can completely ignore that with the abundance of currency and the aforementioned fast travel mechanic. but that's not the worst of it; the player can also use this mechanic to completely skip difficult platforming challenges and puzzles. teleporting to a square sometimes just puts you behind these obstacles completely trivializing them. there is a section of the game where you play as some past version of the protagonist that just plays like complete ass. funnily enough, the game takes away the fast travel mechanic for this part so you are forced to drudge your way through like 60% of the map with one attack going the speed of molasses. the game wanted you to care about it's story, but after the halfway point I was just skipping all the cutscenes because I wanted it to end already. the game also has a distinct lack of bosses, there were only 6 (iirc) and none of them stood out besides the 2 in the demo before these broken mechanics were introduced. for the final boss I just cheesed my way through with maxed out healing items, never learning the bosses patterns or getting better at the game.