In all the excitement of Game of the Year season I forgot I still had a regular column to maintain. Make sure to keep your columns regular, everyone, especially with all that high-in-carbs Christmas food. Anyway, Record of Lodoss War is something I've bumped into a few times over the years: like the many novels of Ed Greenword or R. A. Salvatore set in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign setting, Ryo Mizuno created the stories of Record of Lodoss War based on the default setting of Forcelia in the Japanese table-top game he helped create, Sword World RPG. There's a few Sword World games with their own bespoke stories (I added the SFC one to the Giant Bomb wiki called, pragmatically enough, Sword World SFC) but most game adaptations of Sword World seem to be based specifically on Record of Lodoss War and its established party of legendary heroes, including lovers Parm the Knight and Deedlit the High Elf.

Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth is an original story that follows said elf as she attempts to figure out where she is and why she keeps meeting old friends and enemies (including those she swore were dead) while exploring this strange maze. The wheres and whys and whos are integral to the game's plotting, so I won't go too deep into it here, except to say that some knowledge of these characters and this setting is advantageous but not required. You usually gather from their little boss introductions (mercifully auto-skipped on rematches) what sort of role they played in Deedlit's life prior. I'll admit to playing the Dreamcast loot RPG they made with the Record of Lodoss War license but I'll be darned if I remember who anyone in that game was (and watching the Record of Lodoss War OVA series beforehand is the type of busywork I reserve for a completely different feature of mine).

Naturally, because this is me we're talking about, we're knee-deep in explormer territory here—it's been almost two weeks since I last played one, to be fair—and in particular we're very beholden to Symphony of the Night: one of the major trendsetters for getting your exploration platforming on. The game makes no effort to hide its inspirational sources either: you even have the option of giving Deedlit an afterimage that follows her around just like Alucard, though I'm not sure why you'd turn it off. However, Wonder Labyrinth isn't content in just making a RoLW game with Symphony's style and structure: we have a rare case of a polarity explormer. I've seen just two of these before now—DrinkBox's Guacamelee and Housemarque's Outland—though Wonder Labyrinth doesn't quite match Outland in following that chain of thought to its natural conclusion and including a bunch of danmaku boss fights (there's a few cases, though). As the two polarities are elements—fire and air—they also factor into the exploration by neutralizing traps like lava (with the fire element) or being able to float in the air albeit only a few feet off the ground (with the air element). You might have to quickly switch polarities to get through a field of barriers too, and those sorts of set-ups. Enemies all have elements they're strong and weak to, including those besides the fire and air to which you have unlimited access: if you wanted to switch to, say, the water element you'd either have to use a spell or a piece of equipment that carries an inherent water elemental trait (which always overrides your fire and air). Last, there's Deedlit's archery skills: bows require mana to shoot but not so much that you should ever really worry about missing too many shots if you're trying to activate a distant button. That limitation is really just there so you don't cheese every enemy and boss at a distance like a coward. The bow factors into a few of the other barriers, like ricocheting arrows off metal walls to hit a rope that will lower a drawbridge: these can be kinda fun to solve, and there's a real challenge later on with a shooting range bonus game that lets you show off every trick shot you've learned.

Otherwise, the game is more or less zealously beholden to Symphony of the Night's blueprint, albeit with less interesting level design in general (arrow puzzles notwithstanding) and almost as many ways to break the game as Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night thanks to the overpowered magic and bow, or really any melee weapon with a fast enough attack speed. It's remarkable how often the tactic of "duck and stab the guy's kneecaps at ten buttonclicks a second" seems to work wonders. That you gain some regenerative power once you've maxed out either element (hitting enemies with one lets you gain strength with the other, encouraging you to keep mixing things up) also helps considerably to survive, as Deedlit's max HP isn't all that impressive even after a few upgrades. The bosses at least look very cool, especially the series of chromatic dragons with whom Deedlit is somehow acquainted if not quite on friendly terms. At around six or seven hours long it's a little on the short side also, but whether that's a pro or a con is up to the player and how much time they feel like investing in exploring a big map tile by tile. Before we finish up here, I do want to shout out Wonder Labyrinth's excellent soundtrack (credited to the mysterious "Peposoft") with its mix of orchestral and synth-y rock: this particular track feels like it fell off a truck heading to the next Touhou shmup. Overall, an explormer that gets the action feel and 2D pixel art style right but doesn't really do enough interesting with the license or the genre norms to be truly exceptional. Still, I wouldn't mind another dozen like it, but that's just me and my increasingly worrisome explormer addiction. (There'll be many more explormers on IGotW next year too, don't you worry.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.