Strathy's Child of Light Review: Squandered Beauty
Like so many who played this game, I find myself sadly one of the same. For I too, wish I liked this more than I do.
Child of light is almost unfathomably beautiful to look at and listen to, and I want to like it, I really do (I'll stop the ironic rhyming now). But the bad elements of that game are so agressively forced that I find myself hating it instead for squandering such beauty. The writing is bad, and the forced rhyming is abysmal, but if you simply click through it all the allready etherial story dissolves entirely into nothing and you find yourself just moving to one screen to another until something happens without any real idea what's supposed to be going on. These issues I could excuse however, I have played through plenty of games with bad stories and writing because they were fun. The mechanics of Child of Light are simply not fun to play. The problem with is the bizzarely juxtaposed nature of the core gameplay that constantly feels at odds with itself. Flying around the world and maniuplating things with the firefly is cool and has a satisfying momentum to it, but once combat begins you are dumped out of that world and shoved into a slow and clunky JRPG battle system which isn't compelling in the slightest. The thing is, there are many quite well implimented ways to avoid enemies and doing so feels fun and skillful, so much more so than fighting, which is banal and tedius. But avoiding an enemy gets no XP and no items, so if you make a habit of it you are eventually punished with a boss you can't kill. This is where it all finally falls appart for me and I go from dissapointed to angry at the whole experience because I want to see all the lovely art and design, but all the game is forcing me to see the same repeated combat screen again and again. The whole ruinously forced dual nature of the world design vs combat makes me think this was a very early bad idea by a lead on the design team that for whatever reason was never evolved out of the game like it should have been. I feel a little QA in the core design process could have fixed this; and I'm really bummed that didn't happen.
