Starting the new year with a great indie banger | Review - Momodora: Moonlit Farewell
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✨Overview
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the latest installment in the Momodora game series. After an almost a decade of absence, Momodora is finally back. It offers a blend of Metroidvania and 2D Souls-like gameplay wrapped in a retro pixel art style. Set in the village of Koho, the game follows the High Priestess Momo Reinol as she embarks on a divine mission to save her people from a demonic invasion unleashed by a malevolent bellringer.
🟩Pros
+Beautiful pixel art design and soundtrack
+Rich world and lore
+A mix of metroidvania and souls-like but without all the hardcore difficulty
+Great level design
+Sigil passives that allows for experimentation and build diversity
🟥Cons
-Not a lot of character progression/customization elements aside from Sigils
-Lacking regular enemy variety
⭐️Score: 9/10
📖Story and Premise
The game is basically the fifth Momodora game, following the prequel game Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight last 2016 and the first three Momodora games released around ten years ago. Honestly, I havent played any of the other games but this one seemed standalone enough and playing it, I still had a great experience.
The story is set five years after the events of Momodora III, plunging players into the midst of a demonic invasion triggered by an ominous bell toll. The village of Koho is in peril, and Momo Reinol is tasked by the matriarch to investigate and eliminate the bellringer responsible. Pretty much a standard plot that serves to move the story and compels the player to explore with a sense of urgency and purpose.
🎨Visuals and Art
I’ve had great impressions with the art style plus a great soundtrack. The art style adopts a pixel art design with really good effects and well-crated animations. The soundtrack has some retro moments with some 8-bit sound bites, but the actual background music quality is not limited to it and is high fidelity. It is amazingly melodramatic and soothing.
🎮Gameplay
The game plays like a mix of Metroidvania and Souls-like games: platforming to navigate the levels, jumping around, climbing, with a little bit of falling with style. Then, Souls-like by way of discovering Bells that restore your health and magic points and act as checkpoints. Every time you enter and re-enter a level, all enemies are reset. Every time you die, you restore back to the last Bell you rang.
There are lots of interactables give you a little bit of liveliness in the world, talking to every NPC, gathering artifacts, and activating mechanisms. It's the little details that make all the difference, and the world is rich in lore. If you're someone who hasn't played any of the Momodora games, it does a great job of exposing the player to the rich world of Momodora for the first time.
⚔️Combat and Movement
The combat is very simple; there are only two sets of attacks across the entirety of the game, one melee and one ranged. Range is a basic ranged bow attack, and melee is a three-hit combo with a ranged boomerang at the end. It’s just two weapons throughout the game, but their behavior can be slightly modified and altered in terms of ‘Sigils’, which work as equippable passives that are crafted or discovered in the world.
Movement is a little bit slow at first, and there are some points of annoyance early on, such as the collectible lunar crystals scattering around when enemies die, which can make gathering them a bit tiresome and tedious sometimes, to the point that I just ignore them.
📜 Progression and Passive Sigils
Eventually, you get to unlock new moves and Sigils to improve your character in all sorts of different ways. From a simple damage stat increase and additional projectiles to new moves such as spriting, double jump, and auto-collection of lunar crystals. In my experience, the game exponentially gets better over time. All these minor annoyances slowly disappear one by one.
Aside from collecting sigils, you also get to collect fruits and flowers to gain more health and magic points, adding a bit of exploration element while playing. In fact, you can get stronger faster in this game via exploration, rather than killing all the mobs and gathering lunar crystals.
🌍Level Design and Enemies
I love the level design. It’s not spoon-feeding the player with obnoxious quest markers and linearity and leaves just enough information via the map system to know where you need to go next. Some areas will be initially out of reach but will eventually be traversable once you've unlocked the necessary moves like a double jump or the ability to destroy enchanted barriers. The game encourages the player to explore every nook and cranny, and it may lead to more rewards; such as more plants to consume and more sigils to select from.
There are a lot of mini-bosses and bosses scattered throughout the levels, and I love how they don't totally follow the format of level then boss fight at the end. It feels like you're stumbling upon them more often than not, instead of having it feel like it's a finale that’s capping off a level. I found the bosses relatively easy to defeat, and their moves are easy to remember, so as far as difficulty goes, it’s not really aiming for that hardcore Metroidvania feel. Despite having said that, they’re all fun and varied.
Regular enemy variety is a bit lacking, with a set of distinct enemy types for every biome you enter, and even then, they don't really pose any mechanical challenge and can easily be defeated or outmaneuvered, especially once you’ve unlock a lot of mobility; you can easily just run past them and they don't really offer much in terms of upgrading your character’s powers to warrant your time.
📊Technical Performance
Since the game is in a retro pixel art style, hardware requirements are a non-issue. I also encountered zero bugs or crashes while playing the game. The game is playable on both keyboards and controllers. There is full controller support, but the default keyboard controls are a bit unorthodox for me. Luckily, you can rebind the controls so it’s really not a problem on both input methods.
⚖️Conclusion
Overall, Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is a solid experience for what seems like 6-8 hours of gameplay to finish the story. It does not overstay its welcome and is a consistent ride throughout that keeps players engaged with constant new elements and offering a well-crafted blend of rich story, pixel art visuals, and metroidvania souls-like gameplay.
It's like The Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3 situation all over again: not a lot have played the predecessor games, but this most recent one is an absolute standalone banger that it's generally fine to skip everything else and jump straight to this one.
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