The Girl from Arkanya

Liked: - Fun characters - Simple, effective core gameplay - Good length Disliked: - Combat can be a bit monotonous - Decent amount of backtracking - Sidequests and exploration can sometimes feel unrewarding

The Girl from Arkanya is an excellent adventure game that calls back to the Zelda games of old with its own flavor of characters and charm! The Game has very little fluff in between dungeons to keep the pace flowing and i never feel like the game is giving me the run around (Marisa might disagree). I could recommend this to any old school adventure game fan and those looking for a charming adventure with cute characters and Capybaras!

A fun little exploration game with zelda like exploration, and more Illusion of Gaia dungeons and combat. Story is straightforward to lead you to the temples/dungeons. Those of which has decent puzzles overall (though a lot is rehashed), and the ability to swap between characters is really only useful for the puzzles in them. Otherwise i ended up using the girl 95% of the time because of the weapon swappability and dances. Exploration is kind of open with the right abilities, it's not too bad to get around, though you might be finding yourself holding a stick down in a direction as you do something on the side. There are teleport locations but you can only teleport from another teleport location, to get to those locations there is no run, just a brisk trot, which neither fast nor slow. Though the world here is fairly open, its better to wait till you complete a dungeon in an area before you really check them through them completely, else you get blocked by a mechanic that you havent unlocked left and have to leave empty handed. That is one issue i found is that though things are clearly marked for if you need to get somewhere, there is no way of marking the map yourself to be reminded of things, because long treks quickly makes you forget what is in an area. Need to take notes. Progression and side quests, kind of suck in a way and only kind of get worse the later you get in the game. It's just fetch quest after fetch quest, going back and forth, back and forth half a dozen times over. That aforementioned trot is why this is a complaint, since most of it is just getting to certain npcs from the closest warp, holding a direction and occationally walking or stunning enemies when fed up with fighting them. Dungeon's i'd say are fun, the music kind of bops so i don't mind their repetition for being in one for so long. They are a long series of puzzles and battle rooms, all of which really makes you use the things you have and find to get through them. There is no dungeon maps so you are kinda on your own for remembering where things are. This leads me to, Combat... Just a classic sword swing, which is easy to overestimate the range when things are running at you, and several secondary weapons you can get. if i'm being real though, im almost always on the hook shot due to it's ability to stun things at a range as you walk up (and almost everything is affected by it). Then the lamp for the reason that it's hard as *** to see in caves and some dungeons without it in hand, though can be replaced with another affliction weapon when you get it. It doesn't light up but's damage in groups is very strong (and can stun). Finally bosses are kind of neat, their tells don't nessessarily make it easy and often times they get faster in spamming them as their hp bar goes down. Humans fights are about reacting to tells that they have to either get out of the way, or run though them to get behind and spam slash, or finding the range/angle where you can spam at them but they cant hit you. Non humans are a series of figuring out how to hurt them and then just spam slashing in between attacks (most you can hook to so its not too bad to use it to go in for damage). Final boss... ngl was a bit of a disappointment, only spamming the same few attacks and not really moving. Does more damage then anything else in the game, but there is no need to save consumables anymore so just spam away. All in all, i like the pixel art, story is silly with a one track minded FL, and recommend it if you like the zelda or illusion of gaia feel.