Makes for a great first impression, but can't hang with the best.
Momodora is a game i thought i would like way more than i did. At first i was like okay, this seems really good. It has a nice style, i like the character design and the water reflections and blood red moon make for some great visuals. Sadly, the more i played, the more faults i saw. When you get hit you have give or take a second of invulnerability. Which means that if three damaging obstacles are placed next to eachother, it might look quite scary, but you will only receive the damage from one of these traps. If the game can't handle three damage sources hitting you at a split second, why even put such situations in the game? Very strange. Another quirk is that the enemies will be positioned in exactly the same way whenever you enter a screen. This means that if you walk from the other side, you get to kill all these enemies before they get to turn around. They're also very prone to getting stunned, even to your (infinite) arrows. This skeleton man with a big sword seems quite scary, so let me just pump five arrows in him which prevent him from closing the distance! It's the smart way to play, but in a game with a snappy melee combo & an effective dodge roll it feels like you're robbing yourself of the fun that the game is trying to give you. In general, by shooting in front of your character, you will stay safe most of the time.
There's also a very big overlap in enemies that sort of behave the same way. The red enemy wielding a club at the start of the game probably doesn't deal as much damage as the skeletons with swords you encounter later on, but you go about beating them the exact same way. At the start of the game the tutorial prepares you for enemies that require a different approach in the combat. One enemy requires you to dodge & hit them in the back. But it turns out that's pretty much the only enemy where that is needed. The bossbattles are nothing to write about neither. It seems like certain attacks deal a lot of damage to you, while walking into the boss' character model often results in a slight sliver of damage. Because all damage instances give you more or less a second of invulnerability, i often just went through these bosses on my first try by accidentally walking into them while mashing the attack & dodging the big damaging attacks.
They give you too much health regen items too. At some point i received an item that would fully heal me, but i never needed it because i already had seven estus flask-esque items, which can be drank at quite a fast rate. I had some hopes for the final boss, but that was also a push over that initially fired off two different attacks at you. At the end the boss finally adds one extra attack to the pattern, but that is so obviously dodged by standing underneath the boss for a while that it hardly adds difficulty.
Don't get me wrong, controlling this game is great and it does look & sound pretty good too. It's just that the game design doesn't hold up if you compare it to other games in this genre. The story throws some interesting looking characters at you that hint towards Bloodborne, but you probably get two lines of dialogue out of them that mostly tells you that the world is fucked up and that you should beat the big bad. It feels like a missed opportunity to do so little.
