For me, the concept of the metroidvania has always been built around the design philosophy of exploring a place and utterly dominating shitheads with your array of powers, maybe occasionally taking a break to enter and re-enter a room over and over to force a monster to drop some tasty upgrade. Game Boy Castlevanias are, at their core, a COMFY series. This is not to say that they're simple affairs, but even at their most difficult, you never feel as though you're being expressly punished for your bad choices. It was expected that running into a boss for the first time was going to result into you getting batted around like a yarn ball, but careful play would still always tend to result in a win. And even if you died, who cares, because it is CASTLEVANIA LAW that the save point be right next to the boss room.
You see where I'm going with this, right?
Look, I get we're in the midst of "The Metroidvania Renaissance." People won't shut up about it, and it's certainly a truth that it feels like we're getting a critically acclaimed title in the "man walks in contained game world and picks up double jump two hours in" conceptual sphere. I just...can't get into them? I've played a large share of them, and most are technically very good games!* But goddamnit, they just don't feel like muh old castlevanias.
This game to a head with Hollow Knight. Want to hear the gamer confession equivalent of "I murdered my parents?" I stopped playing Hollow Knight with only like four bosses to fight. I know, feel free to take a moment to sit down. Hollow Knight is technically a very, very good game. The problems I have with it lie within myself, not the game, but I had to accept that I just was not having much fun playing it. It's...not a comfy game. This is the case with most modern metroidvanias: fights are no longer brawls where the player is given free reign to smash shit how they see fit, but complicated math problems where the slightest error results in you getting set on the back foot immediately.
I'm saying all this because THANK FUCKING GOD for Touhou Luna Nights for reaffirming my love for the genre.
Luna Nights was developed by Team Ladybug, a small Japanese dev team probably most known prior for "SYNCHRONICITY PROLOGUE," a free metroidvania set in the Shin Megami Tensei universe with what can best be described as the Ikaruga polarity gimmick. It was a good game, though mostly as a proof of concept that the development team clearly understood the dynamics of the genre.
As noted in the full title, Luna Nights is set in the most weeb of weeb universes, Touhou. As someone with basically zero experience in that universe aside from the basic concept of "cute youkai girls shoot each other," I can give you The Yersinia Guarantee that unless you just fundamentally hate wholesome anime women, not understanding the plotline will not detract from the gameplay experience. Suffice it to say the plotline can be boiled down to "you are the touhou in castlevania, get out of the castlevania by fighting the other touhous."
No, what really matters is the gameplay, and Luna Nights here is a glorious parade of "make the player think he's a genius" asskicking. The most immediate difference between Luna Nights and standard castlevanias is that your character attacks primarily by throwing knives. While this makes a lot of combat safer than your average whip boi, the drawback is that any attack drains your standard magic meter, and magic regenerates slow as hell in this game. So what's a gal to do?
Stop time, of course.
Here is the game's big, glorious gimmick. At any time, your character can slow time for a few seconds, or just straight up instantly freeze all action while being able to move normally, although gated to a separate meter that rapidly depletes the more you scoot around. While frozen, getting close to enemies results in them vomiting up magic refills, creating an obvious and satisfying gameplay loop of wildly attacking the bads, stopping time, eating your magic flakes, then wildly attacking some more. The game introduces new wrinkles to this system at the pretty rapid clip via specifically colored platforms and enemies which react to time stop in various delightful ways.
As an advanced technique for TRUE metroidvania aces, Luna Nights references Touhou's shmup origins by allowing you to regain lost life by "grazing" enemies in normal time, which is to say getting real close to them. Unfortunately, if there's a weakness to the core system, it's probably here, since the amount of life regained from grazing is way more generous than it should be, so that you never have to worry about being a low health once you've learned the actual hitbox of certain baddies.
But maybe that's the point? The entire drive of Touhou Luna Nights is to steamroll everything in front of you. There's none of the tense "will i or won't i survive" boy scout roguelike bullshit that every other modern metroidvania wallows in. Who cares what the health meter is at? Just relax and look at that sumptuous sprite work!
And man oh man is this game pretty. I know we're all kind of sick of low-res pixel art, but just look at this, which also serves as a nice reminder that I absolutely cannot explain game mechanics (spoilers for the first few stages of the game if that's a problem):
That protagonist animation is just obvious pandering for Alucard's walk cycle, sure, but holy shit I don't care. Unlike say, I don't know, BLOODSTAINED, there's a clear amount of work put into each and every sprite, even the ones that don't make a whole lot of sense within the game.** The smoothness of movement ties in especially well with this game's predilection for platforming; it's far less grating to be knocked to the bottom of a room by the bog-standard bladed clock gear when you get an infinite kick from how your character looks and moves.
All of this comes together with what is arguably the most important part of any metroidvania:
no, not the VIBRANT WORLD. seriously whoever advanced the concept that what truly defines the best metroidvanias are the "wonder-inducing settings" deserves a tap in the noggin.
It's the bosses. And oh geez, aside from the first boss (who serves as the obvious "do you remember how to do the time stop" training post), every boss in this game is an absolute triumph. The previously mentioned gameplay loop of attack/time stop/graze for more magic is perfectly accounted for in the bosses' rhythms, while their attack patterns do a good job of calling back to Touhou's shooter origins while avoiding the obnoxious bullet hell excesses of certain other platformers.*** Unfortunately, every boss cycles through their attacks in the same pattern; while this isn't a big deal when you're just trying to bonk a witch gal with underhand chainsaws throws without getting bonked yourself, it did lessen the enjoyment a smidge during a subsequent playthrough. Even accounting for that, the boss fights are the crown jewel of this game, and thinking back to them still gives me that aforementioned metroidvania pleasure like when I think back to the fights against Gergoth in Dawn of Sorrow or the first part of the final boss in Portrait of Ruin.
OK, so now it's the point of the review where I tell you the one thing that kind of SUCKS about the game, which for once in my reviewy times I didn't really want to deal with, because ultimately I think Touhou Luna Nights deserves as much support as possible****: this game is short. There's a total of five stages in the game, and assuming you're some kind of degenerate and not rooting around for all the hidden walls, a total of thirty minutes playtime for each stage is a reasonable assumption. I bought the game while it was still in early access and at a reduced price so I have zero regrets, but it's harder to argue that 18 dollars for roughly five hours of gameplay to reach 100% completion is entirely sane if you're operating on any sort of budget.
Don't take this to mean that I buy into any time/value money game judgement bullshit, as anyone that argues that shit like Hollow Knight is better solely because it's constantly 10 dollars for OVER THIRTY HOURS OF WALKING DOWN DARK HALLWAYS instantly registers in my book as an idiot. Still, I can also recognize that times is tough in the nightmare world we're currently living in. On the other hand, for that short time, this game is just a constant cavalcade of new joys.
So fuck it, who needs to save for healthcare coverage? Change into this maid outfit and let's go to town.
*:if you're curious what I consider not to be good, the answer is primarily Axiom Verge, which I may review one day but suffice to say it's The Babadook of metroidvanias: a clunky, unsatisfying experience loved by idiots who want to make it seem like they totally get the genre they're bellyflopping into
**: seriously, is frankenstein canon in the touhou universe? Also yes I saw the bloodstained "art upgrade," but no amount of pristine new paint jobs can hide the fact that 2.5d is a art style that should have ended with the nintendo 64. I'll withhold my actual opinions about the game until I play it, but the obvious guess is "it's going to be order of ecclesia 2, which is to say it'll grindy in the most boring ways possible, have obnoxious boss battles, and be inexplicably in love with its lore"
***: no i don't want to talk about rabi ribi
****: really though a special "fuck off" shoutout to every gaming journalism website that isn't RPS or siliconera who had plenty of time to write articles about people being mean to them in Apex Legends or yet another fucking Overwatch League article but couldn't be bothered to even put out a blurb for a genuinely good modern metroidvania
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