• Underhero
  

  13 hours playtime

  35 of 44 achievements

This is a hybrid platformer/ATB-RPG. Normally, you can only move left/right and jump (and hold the jump button in midair to float down), but when you touch an enemy, you enter the ATB mode, where you can choose one of three attacks (each has a delay before landing and costs points on your ATB gague), or you can jump, duck, or pull out your shield. You only have one party member, so half the game is just waiting for your ATB gague to fill back up so you can attack again. Jumping and ducking will evade certain enemy attacks, but you can only do them if you have 3 or more points on your ATB gague filled in. You can pull out your shield regardless of your ATB gague, but it also has a health meter and will break if it reaches zero, meaning you can’t use it until you get it repaired. It is possible to parry an attack if you pull out your shield right when an enemy is about to attack, but the game takes the worst cues from hack ‘n’ slash games by making the enemy tells arbitrary animations (that often loop and last over 1.5 seconds, defeating the purpose of a tell animation in the first place) and making the attacks themselves very sudden, so the only way you’d know how to dodge or when to parry is if you’ve gotten attacked by that move before and memorized where/when it hits. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure with Paper Mario, Superstar Saga, and TTYD, the enemies are far away enough that by the time they reach you, you’ll have a pretty good idea of when they’ll hit and when you should push the button; with this game, however, you and the enemy are always right next to each other, so you’ll see the same two frames repeat over and over, then suddenly take damage when the game finally decides to switch to the third frame. Almost every battle is like this, and it’s really frustrating (not to mention that you can’t do any defensive/evasive moves if you’re in the middle of an attack animation). Oh, and some attacks can’t be parried, but you’re not told this until after you try to parry them.

One good thing I can say is that the platforming isn’t just a gimmick; there’s actually some challenge added to the non-battle parts of the game. This is marred somewhat by having wonky physics: letting go of forward won’t stop you from moving forward, but you won’t slow down, either, so you gotta keep tapping right and left until your character decides to fall straight down. There’s also a very noticeable delay between when you push forward and when your character starts moving at full speed (it isn’t like Mega Man III where the delay only lasts a frame or two to help players position themselves to make jumps easier); it’s even more noticeable when you try to turn around and see yourself still moving in the other direction for half a second.

Level design isn’t very stellar, either. The first level’s platforming consists solely of moving platforms that don’t even sync up with each other (meaning more waiting).

The second level barely has any platforming at all, instead leaning more into the adventure game fetch quest/trial and error side of RPGs: one NPC asks you to bring it its favorite drink, but the only hint you’re given as to what this is is in your character’s journal, something that–until this point–is only for refreshing yourself on what you’ve been told rather than a place to look for more hints. Plus, you don’t even get hinted that the hint is there so you’d have no reason to think to look there unless you look it up. This level also introduces a miniboss that can’t be hurt unless you parry its attacks (something else you have to figure out through trial and error), so the fight has more waiting than usual. Also, after one parry, the miniboss knocks you away and enters an “angered” state where it can attack you, but if you try to enter ATB mode to attack it, it’ll just attack you and knock you back into platforming mode before you can do anything. Once again, you just have to wait for it to go away before you can attack again.

Level 3 introduces pufferfish that bounce off the walls in random directions and explode if they get near you, but since water slows your movement, it’s luck whether you’re in a position that lets you escape them or not. Later on, there’s a decline where you’re running down with falling rocks, but later on, you need to escape the level, and if you’re running up that incline, you won’t be able to see the rocks falling in time to react to them (they don’t fall in fixed positions; rather, they bounce down the slope). This level also has certain enemies you have to kill to progress since they’re shooting lava walls, but you can’t damage them until they do a specific animation, and when you first attack them, they won’t do anything until after their lava wall finishes slowly descending.

Level 4 is even worse since its required enemies are robots that hold you still (meaning you can’t do anything at all) for several seconds. Plus, the non-required enemies can drop a ball that shoots lasers after 8 seconds, and the only way to point them away from you is to attack them. Thing is, attacking them only spins them around a little bit (and only in one direction) so you may not have enough time for your gauge to fill up enough for you to hit them enough to avoid the lasers, and while all that’s happening the enemy can still use its other attacks on you. Oh, and the level itself barely has platforming and is mostly just switch hunts.

Level 5 tries to have a bit from each of the first three levels’ platforming segments, but that really isn’t a whole lot. There’s even a switch riddle where the switches you hit have to correspond to an obscure background detail in the room (and once again, your only in-game hint for what to do is in the journal). This level also only has one enemy type, which not only has all the worst qualities from other enemies (waiting, sudden attacks), but can also parry your attacks and also trigger a faster attack as soon as you hit the button to do your fastest attack, damaging you and cancelling your attack. I still can’t say how to defeat these guys reliably, let alone defeat them unscathed.

Bosses in the game try to mix the platforming side with the combat side, but these are two things that don’t mix well. The first boss is in the air and attacks slowly even though it only attacks outside of ATB mode, so once again, most of it is just you waiting for the boss to be vulnerable, then you attack, wait for your gauge to fill up, then try to attack some more before you get booted out and the cycle starts over again. The second boss is always on the ground, but since you have to touch an enemy to go into combat mode, there’s still quite a bit of trial and error before you know what’s an opening and what is something you just need to run away from. I died on my first attempt because there were several times where I was just like “he’s standing there doing nothing! That’s an opening!” only to run forward and suddenly get hit, not even entering ATB mode. Boss 3 has a wide arena and is clearly placed in the background, so it isn’t too hard to avoid attacks just by running in one direction and jumping. Once again, you just have to bide your time until the boss does a specific move that lets you damage it. Boss 4 is the best one since it doesn’t use ATB mode at all nor does it have any animation attacks; everything that can hurt you is a projectile, and to damage the boss, you have to bait it to charge into the blatant harmful spots. My one issue is that it’s hard to see the thin lasers behind the water’s semi-transparent texture.

The final boss is the only boss besides the miniboss to attack you during ATB mode, and as such, it has the same “sudden attacks you can’t react to” problems as the vast majority of the other enemies. The worst is a charge attack where once you’re hit, you have to wait for the boss to run all the way to the other side of the arena before you can move again. The boss’s second phase is a spotlight that moves along in the background while you have to go around hitting switches, but its position in the background has no bearing on where it’ll suddenly appear in the foreground (and if you’re caught, of course you take damage). The third phase changes up some of its attacks, so what was once just “standing frame -> leg raised frame -> kick attack frame -> leg raised frame -> standing frame” now adds a second kick attack frame where it would have gone back to the standing frame, and due to the limited animation, you once again won’t know about the change until after you get attacked. When you’re not in ATB mode, the boss shoots projectiles, and this wouldn’t be so bad if they couldn’t still hit you after you go into ATB mode and can’t dodge them anymore due to their vertical movement (and weren’t spawned so quickly that there’s no way you can enter ATB mode without another one lined up to hit you). Before the final phase, you have to go through this long, empty hall, then you have to avoid attacks for a bit too long before getting one of those “‘oh no we can’t win’ but suddenly everyone believes in us and now we can win” cut-scenes; then, the game introduces a new mechanic where you have to pick up and put down platforms so you can reach the boss and attack it. The boss can also drop bombs that have a large explosion radius, and if you think you can attack them to stop their explosion, you can’t because they have contact damage.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this one. The platforming is kinda bland and the combat manages to combine the worst aspects of “wait for stuff to happen” and “stuff happens too quickly.”