Quick Look: Narita Boy

Very cool game. It's also on GamePass!

THE CYBER.

at least it didn't lean on synth music

Ah, yes, the Heartagram.

I attended the Funeral of Hearts more than once as a lad.

As a kickstarter backer of this...I'm just glad to see that the final product still has styyyyle and glad that it finally came out! Definitely looking forward to digging into this.

I love the aesthetic of this game but there's no way I can play this game. There are way too many blinking lights like the scene where they talk to the Motherboard. They weren't kidding in the intro where it says this game may induce epilepsy.

I'll be honest, I kinda dismissed this game based on the cheesy Tron knock-off box art, but the game itself actually looks really cool. I'll definitely give this a shot on Game Pass.

I'm still trying to get into the groove of this but I want to chalk a lot of it up to having just come off of completing both Ori games and the pacing of the combat is VERY different. Maybe I missed something, but I haven't found any way to heal between battles other than that move where you build meter and can hold Y to heal one pip.

For reference on my progress, I just got the "yellow powers" but died in the tutorial combat sequence after that since I had completed a boss fight prior and was still sitting at 3 hp.

edit: OK, from the video I guess I should be firing the shotgun more and dashing BEHIND some guys. I was basically 100% melee and those normal guys take 6 sword swings and was using the dodge to go backwards to avoid attacks instead of forwards/through guys.

This game is rad and the incredibly wordy lore will wear you down and you will love it.

This game is like Tron meets Conan the Barbarian meets some trippy Moebius/Jodorowsky shit. I love it.

This...is amazing?

Corrections!

HIM was a Finnish band, not Swedish. But I get it, everything from this part of the globe is ostensibly Swedish.

You’re not in quarantine, Vinny. People who are in quarantine can’t go to the office, or the supermarket or in some cases even for a walk outside.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/quarantine/what-to-expect

At 20:30 the music sounds almost exactly like the Chrono Trigger map theme (600 AD).

Narita Boy is fine but Haneda Boy is much more convenient for travelers

Really visually cool looking.. a little disappointed that the music is more or less a standard synthwave affair, considering all the mentions of techno.

Visuals and atmosphere is very well realized and as they say, rad! But to me, it controls really poorly. Its a bit mushy and imprecise which I forgave it for in the early goings due to the above named reason, the general "rad-ness". Later on though, when the visuals have worn off and there are bunch of enemies at the screen that you have to juggle. I feel that you fight the controls just as much as the enemies, and there is where it stops being fun for me. The game was pretty short, so If you are fine with the controls you are gonna have great evening of 80's retro.

This game looks super cool, but I feel like it's fighting you every step of the way. The swimminess of the controls, the not-obvious ladders, having every door be slightly off from the edge of the map. It kinda makes moving around feel like a chore.

It seems like the character is a little too big to have tight feeling platforming in these environments.

Stopped playing when they thought it'd be a good idea to put a Battle Toads-esque turbo tunnel into the game, which alone already sucks, but it sucks even more with this game's bright visuals going at a fast pace and actually made my eyes hurt.

Ansible is a term for faster-than-light communication devices, created by Ursula K. LeGuin.

I've bene looking for a new side-scrolling platformer/metroidvania to play on Gamepass. Maybe I'll give this a shot, seems sort of neat!

Ringo Starr on time? Because he's a drummer?

Not a fan of the slippery and delayed controls or the backtracking.

The protagonist looks like... Vinny

DIGITAL SHEEP

If there's a techno-key and an techno-sword, why isn't the game called Techno-boy?

@steelknight2000: Incredible. Yes.

I do love the general aesthetics and the satisfying feel of the combat, but when i walked away from the demo of this thing, the aspects that annoyed me kept sticking with me the most.Probably because this would be straight up an amazing game for me, if it didn't have these issues.

This game doesn't dole out the lore at a steady pace, in a way that you still feel like you have a grasp on it. Instead, it smacks you with all kinds of terms from the very first prompt. And the characters don't seem all that interesting neither. Go to this person to get this thing, now go to this other character to get this other thing. They're mostly there to throw more terms at you, give you a reason to move to a new location and create cool visuals with their appearance it feels like. Poor big meditator is just the key-holder for Baba.

Narita boy is also quite a heavy boy which makes the platforming segments harder than they could've been. The environment and level design can get in the way of the platforming as well; Often there's some foreground object that obfuscates you as you're trying to land on a small-ish platform and some of these in-level arrows are positioned in places that make you wonder whether there's something right at the feet of this sign or like.. 20 meters backwards. Especially when it pops up at the edge of a dead-end of the level that's just there to.. be a dead end. The game might not necessarily need a map, but if you are already putting confusing arrows in your levels, and ask the player to backtravel 7+ screens to put a key in a new place, maybe a map would've been a better idea.

My final annoyance is fairly negligible; I don't lik how you move from screen to screen. Instead of running into an open door, you are asked to walk halfway towards a new screen and press up. Probably so you don't accidently run out of a screen during combat, but from my experience i'm more likely to press up during combat than constantly jump/ run too far and exit a screen. I also don't like how you are immediatly transported towards the new screen after the up-press. A nice smooth transistion or scroll sideways that lasts 0,5 seconds would make it feel more like you are moving through a shared world instead of teleporting between screens with every up-press.