• Stories: The Path of Destinies
  

  3 hours playtime

  25 of 37 achievements

This is a hack ‘n’ slash. Tap X to attack, push A to dash, push Y to use your grappling hook (can be upgraded to remove enemy shields), and you can parry an incoming attack if you hold the left stick toward the enemy and push X. Parrying happens as soon as you do it, but regular attacking has a very noticeable delay, and I always had trouble dashing out of a combo (for example, if there was about to be a nearby explosion that couldn’t be avoided with a parry). While most of the game-play is based on fighting enemies in flat, empty arenas, I was impressed to see a little bit of level design here: some levels have cannons that constantly shoot fireballs you need to avoid, and later on, there are pillars that spit flames at regular intervals (but these aren’t as noteworthy since you can just dash through the flames unharmed).

After you beat the opening level, you’re given two choices on where to go next, and that leads to the game’s main selling point: the branching paths. Your choices affect which levels you go to and how the story plays out, but all paths converge on the same final level; after beating it, you’re taken back to the first branch. Sounds okay in theory, but even though each path only consists of 5 levels (including the always-fixed final level), you’ll often find yourself playing through the exact same levels as previous paths, even if you made different choices. Even the aforementioned level design is unchanged, adding to the repetition. At least the original Super Mario Brothers had the decency to lop a tile off the moving platforms!

You could argue that the core of the game is the combat and not the level design since most levels are just empty paths between mechanically-identical arenas anyway, and sure, the game does slowly introduce more enemy types, with some not being introduced until your second or third run. However, the moment-to-moment combat can also be repetitive in and of itself: the second type of enemy isn’t introduced until the first time you make it to the final level, and the game doesn’t get much faster at introducing enemy types from there. Plus, the game never mixes combat with level design, so combat becomes samey and repetitive until the next enemy type comes along, then it goes back to being samey and repetitive until the next enemy type comes along, and the cycle repeats.

However, what finally made me give up was its approach to the branching paths. Most endings are bad endings, so you’re expected to replay the game until you get a good ending, but on top of the already repetitive combat and recycled levels, you can’t even skip to choices you haven’t made–heck, you can’t even skip cutscenes! At first, I didn’t think much of it since I unlocked a third path when I beat the final level the first time, but after I beat the final level using all three available choices, a fourth never materialized. Between that and the fact that purifying the Iblis stone with the skyripper core and attaining inner peace so it doesn’t overload STILL resulted in a bad ending, I decided I was done.

EDIT: Speaking of the repetition, I never encountered a boss fight in all three of my runs; it was just the samey enemy waves.

Overall, if you already have the game in your inventory, it might be worth playing through a couple paths, but I wouldn’t recommend spending money on it.