Yes, of course, gaming in general works a great deal like that and it's going to be hard to pick up any game off the shelf that doesn't build off old ideas. But indie gaming is just "geez" sometimes. The weirdest thing is that the re-iteration is based on perceptions about what things were without really studying why and how they were, so you end up with games like this one, where it says its a metroidvania but it's actually more of a platformer that fails at being a metroid and then I don't care about the vania part.
Platformer slash Simon's Quest? Yes. Deal. There you go.
I got Magicians and Looters, as an aside, from one of the earliest Groupees greenlight bundles. I picked it out because I want to play through Metroidvanias, which as an aside has not thusfar been pleasant. It turns out that if you play games like Super Metroid after Super Metroid, games are worse than Super Metroid at everything.
The game stars Brent, a swordsman with no personality other than snide, his sister Vienna with no personality other than snide and Nyn another swordsman with no personality other than snide.
At the start of the game you play Nyn, who is a swordsman of using two swords or I dunno something with pointy bits in her both hands, but then the game gives you the option to continue playing Nyn or to try the other characters. Shortly after, there's a thing, and your party of girls and a guy are off elsewhere, divided up. There's your special hook! Or something. I forget what I'm talking about.
The game's interesting little hook shows up at about the half hour to hour mark, depending on how good you are the game or whatever, in which your band of miscreants is joined back together. Now you're allowed to switch between characters, and since characters have different abilities they can go to different rooms. When you first look at this, it sounds great, but about ten minutes into fiddling I absolutely hated it. For one thing, each of the characters is slightly different in combat with different dodge, reach, so on. They're not Trine different, they're just a little different, so you end up misplaying them. The other thing is a compounding of how bleh the level design is, you're supposed to switch to discover different secrets, but it's hard to remember where I even am or want to go in this game since everything looks the same.
You'll notice once of the things I talked about as a key point to Super Metroid was the usage of landmarks and visually distinctive room designs to grant the player a sense of location without looking at their map. The map is not the territory, after all, and it works a great deal better if you can mentally shorthand the territory as you go. This game did not learn this lesson in the slightest. While the art style isn't bad, though it isn't great either, very few rooms are all that distinct looking and I find myself wondering where the Hell I am about 90% of the time. Worsening this is the fact the identical monsters tend to be re-used endlessly.
Super Metroid and Metroid do not always have different monsters while visually distinguishing them; looking at the list of mobs in Brinstar or Norfair reveals "dude who crawls around a block". He has the same AI and does the same thing, pardoning his health and damage might be slightly different. Like I said, this helps create a distinction. Think of it in the simplest terms: the golden chamber with the blue enemies, or the red chamber with the green enemies. If you can describe them differently outloud, you'll remember them differently when you go to play.
Magicians and Looters doesn't know this at all. Monsters from the very beginning of the game look identical to monsters halfway into the game, and props / other nonsense are re-used. It makes the game foggy to remember, and to be honest, gives a feeling of cheap mediocre visuals that is hard to shake off. Yes, it's an indie game, but if you can't slightly re-skin statues from zone to zone to help distinguish where the player is, either you're doing a crappy job or you're working at too high a fidelity for your budget.
The game's visuals sharply vary between good and outright unpleasant to look at. The character sprites running around, doing their thing, looks really good. Some of the individual animations really stand out - the fencer girl, Nyn, gains a running slide a bit into the game and it just looks fantastic. I suppose that is a totally weird thing to point out but seriously, it looks great. A little bit more animation is needed in some spots, but the character animations really flow nicely and it makes some of the bizarre aesthetic choices really confuse the mind.
Some of the game weirdly reminds me of Shadow of the Beast, though I'm not certain this is intentional or not. It's a good feeling, and it goes well with the game's music, but it's not a consistent sentiment throughout the game.
Beyond that though the game is ... Largely unpleasant. The enemies are visually decent looking, with good enough animations, but the levels are almost hellishly dull looking. It's not even a question of fidelity or talent, as the backgrounds are nice looking, but everything in the foreground is SO DULL. It reminds me of an old friend ranting about some old MMORPG, where it was all brownity brown brown in brown town. Add on top of that the amount of re-use and the game turns into a blur of boring.
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Oh, and the close up portraits ... Oof. Kinda bad. I've spent years trying to learn how to do sketch work and I'm not saying it's easy, but these are not good. They look strange and I'm not even sure how to describe it. 70s cartoon maybe? Like something that went into syndication. Maybe that's the intention?
The music in the game varies from track to track, but I think I found most of the audio in the game above average or good. There are cheesy, goofy voice overs added to some random stuff but it's very tongue in cheek. One of the bosses has random taunts as you fight him, and they're so tacky it adds nicely to the flavor of the game instead of detracting from the experience. A couple of the music tracks felt a little tonedeaf or off-kilter, but I generally thought they did a good job of setting the mood and sounding like things I would actually want to listen to. Two or three of them were in fact very good, frankly a cut above most triple A gaming music.One thing I did find irritating audio-wise was the stupid clown noises that play when you die. The first time, you go oh that's cute. The third or fourth time when you're working on a boss and it forces you to sit through the full several seconds long comedy routine? It just makes you think the developer is stupid. The game is good at not taking itself seriously, but moments like this remind you the game just isn't very good period.
Combat in the game is ... Ehhh. "Mostly bad". You basically have attack as a button, and enemies have to attack you themselves, there's no touch damage horseshit, which is one perk. There are enemies who do touch damage, mind you, but they're porcupines or something like that. I mean 'like that' literally. I really ran into an issue where trying to remember how to use each character's suite of abilities prevented me from ever really getting good at any of them. When you're expecting to rapidly swap through the cast, which you are, you never really settle into their patterns.
As an aside the game has the strangest bug with its control scheme - it actually switches buttons if you touch the mouse or don't touch the mouse, or something. So abruptly the game's controls are different, which has made learning it even harder than you'd imagine. This might be a bug in how it looks up the xbox one controller, so maybe it only happens to me. It made learning the game really difficult, because it seemed to only happen at the start of the session. I'd think to myself "I must just be hitting the wrong button". Later I realized no, it just seems to randomly pick one or the other scheme.
The boss fights especially can be weird to figure out and not enough mechanics are demonstrated in a good, useful manner. I realize we live in the era of people just looking up walkthroughs, but conveyance is enjoyment by and large, and having to look up a mechanic because it functions in a completely counter-intuitive manner is a design failure. This goes back especially to the sloppiness of the visual design, too little care was taken in why things look a certain way and what it means to the player. You can generally slog your way through or just look things up, but trying to pick up on patterns in the visual design is hopeless. The designer didn't understand this at the start of the game and it only continues to get worse as you go.
Granted, up until the last boss I felt like the game was pretty fair about the boss fights and I enjoyed them. On the other as an example, as an aside, one of the boss fights has an achievement for being done without the shield. I didn't find the fight especially difficult at all and actually quite enjoyed it - it seemed fair, most of the mechanics had good tells and when I died it was my fault - but I have no idea how the shield would have helped. That doesn't seem like a moment that should happen!
Basically while the boss fights can be good, a lot of the enemies just take too long and have too much health. The combat isn't good enough to support extended encounters, meaning if you spend more than 3 seconds fighting something you're thinking about playing other games. You're thinking about playing games where this doesn't suck.
There is also a spell-casting system, though you don't really get much variety out of it and the mana regen system is tedious. You can regenerate naturally, which is slow as molasses, or you can stand still and focus on regeneration which is still slow as molasses. I really don't understand why it takes ages and ages to regenerate mana no matter how you set your gear up, but it takes like a minute to kill three guys with your fireball. It's not a good system. Speaking of which, neither is the health system. You take a lot of incidental damage wandering around, and there's no real way to heal other than going back to camp. Enemies very, very rarely drop food stuffs which heal a small amount of your life bar.
The levels themselves, besides the visuals, are pretty mixed affairs. The platforming, which is the very core of the game, saves the game. If you were just taking these visuals and this combat with the tier of writing, you'd be off playing it ten minutes later. At times the game cuts away from the monotony of combat and actually focuses on its platforming elements, where it briefly becomes good if not great at points. There's a couple mechanics added to each individual character that get showcased and those sections are interesting, but they're way too sparse. Since each character ends up with a different movement scheme, you can't mix it up and really get exciting. The multiple character thing just honestly isn't worth it, they could have done so much more with the game.
On the other hand as a Metroidvania the game is really a total failure. There aren't many "open up area" upgrades, and those that are used are used so rarely you generally forget about them. There's no real sense of exploration or backtracking, because everything looks the same and while secrets are nice they aren't really hidden in interesting ways that often. I did smile at the hidden door hidden behind crappy treasure chests thing. On the other hand you're not going to miss a secret you access with the high jump or the wall jump because they're so visually obvious.
The writing is not good. It does make me laugh here or there, but it falls flat most of the time and the characters don't have much in the way of a distinctive voice, especially from each other. If you took pieces of dialogue and removed references to gender, I don't think I could tell you who is talking. The only real attempt at personality is Vienna owns a cat.
By the end of the game, anyway, Magicians and Looters had mostly worn out its welcome. You run into the missiles issue with Super Metroid, except for the entire inventory screen - upgrades and loot honestly don't feel like they do much. Part of this is psychological, of course, because you're fighting the same enemies from the start of the game but buffed with more health. There's no real sense of progress over the course of the game, just more of the same. Because the visuals are so weak, there isn't even much of a sense you're doing different levels or any sense of an arc within the game. It's just random this, random that, some boring combat, platform platform. The game just doesn't feel like anything happened or changed, and honestly by the end I think the designers intended you to skip combat.
I didn't bother to finish Magicians and Looters. The game ends with a boss that wasn't really mentioned in the story and seems to have completely nothing to do with the plot. I mean, the writing was bad, but it wasn't that bad up until the end. It seems like he is put behind a cutscene and clearing a bunch of trash slash platforming, which coupled with the fact I'm already bored of the game, was enough to get me to hit ye old Delete Local Content button. There aren't many real guides on the game out there, so I have no idea if I missed a save point and frankly the game has gotten boring enough that I can't care. It's not like I care about the plot, or the characters, or want to look at the game anymore, or I'm going to feel anything for beating the last boss other than "I just wasted twenty minutes of my life doing something I don't enjoy". Also, you do the last boss one character at a time, rather than you know actually using each character in a different way, which is so damn low effort.
Anyway, in conclusion, I think they should have made a platformer. Also hired another artist. The controls, other than the bug where they're different half the time I start the game up, were quite solid and the platforming was really good. The animations are good, and the music is quite good, but then everything else is low-effort and honestly kinda terrible. I had enough fun that I don't regret the play time I put in, so if you're looking for a platformer slash skeleton of a metroidvania from people who don't understand metroid, you could do worse when the game is on sale.
But you could do a lot better. Up next in the verge series: Not talking about Cave Story+ because I got bored of that game too, and then talking about another old game on the list of "Metroidvanias" that comes up on google, Wonderboy in Monster world.
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