The best Metroidvania games always make you feel like you have no idea if you are even going the right way, but always allow you to have the feeling like there is more that you can explore. Mix in a plentiful number of areas and power-ups that are just out of reach and you have a winning formula that has been repeated throughout time. Moonlight Farewell is the fifth title in the well-established Momodora series, so the question never becomes if they pull of the balancing act; the question is how well they do it.
The easy answer is simply, yes. The game balances progression and exploration extremely well. There are always new places to go, places to backtrack to for the observant, and additional challenges to face. The game is open-ended enough that it is very possible to battle bosses out of order, even though most of them will be entirely too difficult with the progression the character has made at that point in the game.
This is also one of the major obstacles of the game, the challenge. On the normal difficulty the game becomes rather hard after a couple of hours. Shortly after that it becomes impressively difficult. The game has an option to put on an adaptive difficulty, the problem with this choice is that it seems this requires the game to drop the difficult to the lowest settings before ratcheting them back up a little. Not only does this cause difficulty whiplash, but it breaks the flow of the game. Most people will lower the difficulty because of a boss that they are having problems dealing with. When it is changed that boss instantly becomes much, much easier to defeat. This means that only time that the change should actually be made is when starting the game.
The 2D pixel graphics also need to be called out, as they are absolutely impressive. The sprites are fluid in their movement, pixels are sharp, but not overly large, and the world itself feels cohesive. While detailed sprites are becoming more and more common in games, the real challenge is always to have the world feel like it is connected, and that one area isn’t jarring and entirely unlike those that are directly connected to it. Moonlight Farewell manages that.
This game is a great title for anyone who has enjoyed a Metroid style game in the past. Aside from the odd difficulty issues it is hard to not recommend it. The game is normally well under 20 dollars, but Playism is constantly putting their titles on sale, so if that is something you need to wait for, it won’t be long. Anyone who has enjoyed a Metroidvania in the past will find something that they are sure to love about this title.
RATING
OUR SCORE - 8.5
8.5
SCORE
A quality Metroidvania with gorgeous art... just be aware of the difficulty that sneaks up on you.
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