Indie Game of the Week 417: Vernal Edge

Well, we still have a website for the time being so I'm going to keep posting game reviews on it. You're welcome and/or apologies to all affected, whichever you feel is most applicable to you. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this game's name—maybe the movie star Ernest and his oft-mentioned-but-heretofore-unseen friend Vern are taking their relationship to the next level?—but I was, at least, pretty sure of its genre being enough of a reason to check it out. That is to say, we're back in exploration platformer land for the... third time this month? (Is that all? I must be losing my touch.) Vernal Edge follows the eponymous heroine Vernal (man, she must hate her parents) who is seeking to revenge-kill her father (called it) for initially undisclosed reasons. However, her father happens to be the mad scientist Asphodel—that one that had some hand in lifting half the local landmass into flying chunks of rock that you need an airship to visit and is currently working on creating portals to the "Unreality" that surrounds this world—which makes him that much more elusive to pin down. With her enigmatic Pulse Blade and her new robot pal Chervil, who once worked with Asphodel when he was still human but has forgotten most of his past since transferring to his android body, Vernal hops from one island to the next in pursuit of her absent pappy's trail.

Vernal Edge is largely a typical example of the 2D explormer with its traversal tools and well-hidden health and mana upgrades, or at least pieces of same, to find under various rocks and behind various walls. However, it's also a more combat-focused type, frequently dropping you into little contained arenas to fight one or several waves of enemies. Vernal has a few basic strikes via combinations of the attack and directional buttons that include air juggles and the like, as well as charged hits that can eliminate an enemy's poise and leave them vulnerable to further combos with no fear of interruption, and she can even acquire spells that have long cooldowns but can make or break a perilous encounter. The most important tool in her combat arsenal is one intrinsic to her blade: Pulse. By attaching the Pulse marker to an enemy, she can then fire off strong special attacks with the same button (plus a direction; hitting it again when neutral just undoes the marker, one of the game's many irksome aspects) that not only causes a lot of damage but can transmute that damage into healing for herself. This is, in fact, the only way to heal short of finding a checkpoint (which are far more infrequent than you might prefer). To use Pulse effectively requires you to keep up your aggression against enemies, since it operates off a gauge that builds with normal hits, so this is kind of following the Bloodborne bible—the game design one, that is, not the in-game one about bloodletting giant monsters to become werewolves or whatever that business was about—in incentivizing offense over defense. That said, your guard is pretty handy even if it has a short window, as it opens enemies up to counter ripostes that also drop their poise. There are plenty of enemy types to be dealt with using ideal strategies for each, though of course things get more complicated when several of them gang up on you at once.

The combat is pretty involved but at the same time doesn't really shift a whole lot while playing. Most upgrades you find (which the game calls memories: the idea being that you're remembering someone else's acquired expertise) are the traversal kind, so while it does help in backtracking or reaching new islands—some of which just plop some barrier right at the start to let you know you won't be doing much there until you find the right upgrade somewhere else—it won't affect the combat much. You can learn new techniques and spells and some combat stuff from lesser memories, of which you can only equip so many since they run on a points system, but their influence is relatively immaterial compared to the standard tactic of using heavy hits to quickly eliminate the most annoying enemy's poise and go to town on them while avoiding their friends, possibly setting up situations where you can send enemies flying into other enemies to knock out their poise too. Fun for the first few battles but, as you might surmise, the repetition gets less enjoyable just about right around the time the game decides to make each of those arenas last twice as long with twice as many enemy waves.

I wish I could say the platforming was better. While she's not floaty at all, Vernal does run and jump with a certain amount of determination and that can often have you flying off the sides of platforms because you underestimated the momentum and sensitivity behind her every movement. Most spikes and pits only do a tiny amount of damage and deposit you at the nearest piece of stable ground at least, but actually dying will cause you to lose all the progress you'd made since the last checkpoint including any collectibles you may have found or arenas you may have cleared which can be a big progress wiper if it's an island where the checkpoints are inexplicably rare. It also does the annoying thing a few of these games do, Hollow Knight being a famous example, where you won't have a map until you're fortunate enough to run into it while exploring and some of the smaller isles don't have maps at all. You do have a mini-map, but you need to find and equip the right lesser memory to see it. Naturally, these maps won't retain information beyond places you've already been but there is a side-quest chain fairly late into the game that'll give you an upgrade that tells you how many treasures and items there are to find in any given location for those of us overly conscious of our completion percentages. The former of those findables, acquired from chests, tend to be better hidden but conversely aren't as integral as the upgrades, spells, or memories since all those chests contain is cash for the game's handful of vendors, and you can get rich from killing enemies too. The big gets are the "major" memories that confer the progress-enabling traversal skills and the stat upgrades: everything else tends to be of comparatively minimal use.

There's certainly plenty of smaller touches I like about Vernal Edge. The overworld where you move from island to island, though it really only exists as a map screen, has a 3D Skies of Arcadia affectation that I approve of as one of many hoping Sega either remasters that game again or finally gives us a sequel (best we can hope for right now is for its enhanced GameCube port to hit the premium NSO tier on the Switch 2—now that would be worth a $500 console plus a $50 sub). Visually it kinda looks like an Amiga platformer with how busy even basic environments can be, though it's not too objectionable—my bigger issue is more in how every island looks the same, barring the small amount that incorporate ruins or other manmade fixtures instead of the same green and beige clods of earth everywhere. I will say the soundtrack is remarkable, alternating between the chill lo-fi ambience of something like Islets with more peppy tracks incorporating jungle/drum'n'bass that musically makes it feel like it time-travelled here from the late '90s. That includes the most relaxing overworld music I think I've heard since Krater (or Final Fantasy IX going further back). Yet the game's many valuable parts never really come together holistically as a commendable game: it's irritating and player-unfriendly in ways it doesn't strictly need to be, as evinced by how it can be so lenient in others, and the aspect it puts front and center (combat) still feels underbaked and occasionally brutally tough or punitively exacting. It's almost like the game was designed by two people who alternatively thought it was too hard and too easy, and fought each other every step of the way to make the adjustments they felt were warranted. Even the story, which explores some intriguing sci-fi angles behind its trippy Unreality concept and adds a dollop of mystery regarding Asphodel's motivations and his relationship with the enigmatic and strongly antagonistic henchperson Alstroemeria is offset by all these hard-to-remember names and Vernal's own obnoxiously coarse personality, threatening the helpful Chervil with violence for speaking his mind every other sentence. It's certainly a game I wanted to like for its quirks but all too often there's some other quirk that pushes me away. Maybe I'm just being too vernally retentive though.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Between a godawful penultimate boss that could two-shot me and an equally trash two-part ultimate boss fight I was thoroughly done with this game, its many foibles not improved in the slightest with the stakes towards the end. Every enemy is more of a sponge than Patrick Star's best friend, hitboxes are a butterfly's fleeting dream, and trying to find anything is like a needle in a haystack given how large one "screen" is given how few area transitions there are (which would normally be impressive, were it not cancerous for completionists). Vernal Edge has some strong qualities from the outside but it doesn't take long before you realize the game design horrors lurking right beneath the surface. That 3 out of 5 is generous, believe me.