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    Shieldmaiden

    Game » consists of 0 releases. Released Mar 12, 2020

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    Indie Game of the Week 295: Shieldmaiden

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    Mento

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    One major gap in my video gaming history, which becomes all the more apparent with each passing episode of Arcade Pit, are the Mega Man X series and the Zeroes and ZXs beyond. I was a huge fan of the NES originals and the Mega Man Legends quasi-RPG dungeon-crawlers, yet I've never taken the plunge into the longest and certainly most lore-intensive of the many Mega Man spin-offs. My goal is to pick up those remastered Legacy Collection compilations at some point, running the series as a much delayed mea culpa, but I keep getting distracted by newer games or those I already have in my backlog that probably deserve more attention. Reason I'm bringing up the adventures of X and Zero is that you get many Indie platformers, this week's game Shieldmaiden included, that are very much riffing on using its repertoire of charge shots, slides, air-dashes, and wall-jumps to quickly and smoothly get through levels filled with pitfalls and enemies until you take on the tough boss fights at their termini. Another game from Brazilian developers Dumativa—we last saw them here with Songs for a Hero (IGotW #277)—it has a similar combination of an exceptional pixel art presentation and a comparatively more troubled gameplay core.

    In Shieldmaiden, the player assumes the role of Asta, a survivor of a near-future cataclysm that has rendered most cities unliveable and the population either dead and gone or long escaped to safer pastures. Asta, however, refuses to leave until she's found her missing sister Roza, who vanished on the day of the cataclysm after leaving Asta with an ancient bracelet containing a mysterious defensive power. Asta can use this bracelet to absorb certain types of energy and redirect it as a special screen-clearing attack; it's also useful for throwing at enemies Captain America-style. Using a combination of this absorption mechanic, directing the shield's angle to catch enemy fire from any direction, and traversal mechanics like the aforementioned wall-jumps and air-dashes, Asta moves through the game's series of linear levels to dig deeper into the mystery behind her sister's disappearance and strange, masked beings that attempt to deter her at every turn.

    As soon as you get used to absorbing yellow energy projectiles, the game starts throwing these red ones at you. You can deflect them, but they'll knock you on your ass for a while; instead, you're better off attacking or dodging them.
    As soon as you get used to absorbing yellow energy projectiles, the game starts throwing these red ones at you. You can deflect them, but they'll knock you on your ass for a while; instead, you're better off attacking or dodging them.

    The game's first and most immediately apparent strength is the gorgeous pixel art, rendering the dilapidated future city of Modigard in a visually striking style with its parallax background vistas and highly detailed environments, lending a similar personality to its menagerie of mostly robotic foes that have been corrupted by whatever bizarre energy poured out of the cataclysm's many energy "domes" that have formed since the initial impact. Asta travels across the city via the subway after each chapter, conversing with her AI companion (and one of the few electronic entities to have been spared the cataclysm's effects) Romir, dropping off in a hub of sorts where the collectibles Asta finds while exploring are gathered.

    The game doesn't do much in the way of upgrades like a Mega Man X might, giving you the same selection of abilities throughout, so these collectibles are pretty much the only reason to wander off the main path. While there are times where you're forced into a little arena of sorts to defeat enemies until the path opens again, most of the time you're free to just dash past everything to reach the end quickly. Avoiding enemies is generally beneficial as they don't drop anything besides the occasional health pack, which you'd only need if you stuck around to fight them and took the occasional hit. You have infinite continues and the game checkpoints semi-frequently—it's oddly capricious about how far between it feels like sticking these payphone-esque respawn points—so death isn't that much of a deterrent. The big obstacles are the boss fights, but they're so regimented with regard to patterns that it doesn't take long to master them.

    A curious late-game mechanical feature is using the shield to pogo across beams of light like this. In this case, you're sort of deflecting yourself than the energy.
    A curious late-game mechanical feature is using the shield to pogo across beams of light like this. In this case, you're sort of deflecting yourself than the energy.

    This, in tandem with the game's surprisingly short length, means you could just dash through the whole thing in a couple of hours if you felt so inclined. The story's compelling as it builds a mystery around the cataclysm, its source, and what your bracelet might have to do with it, but these story beats are few and far between and don't really fit a twitch-action platformer like this that never wants to slow down. The chief issue I ran into, playing on a less-than-stellar system, is that the last level—which takes place inside one of these mysterious domes—has some kind of environmental visual effect that causes the game to lag considerably, and of course trying to fight the game's final and hardest boss when the framerate regularly dips to single figures is an exercise in frustration. I eventually had to quit—something I hate doing in any game I'm enjoying, especially so close to the end—because making progress in the battle was entirely untenable with its combination of screen shaking, stuttering, and danmaku bullet patterns to absorb, evade, or strike physically (the late-game starts introducing color-coded bullets to help you make sense of which is the intended way to stop them). It'd be harsh to demerit a game for a failing on my end—I swear I'm upgrading to a system made in this decade when Black Friday rolls around—but the fact that the rest of the game ran fine up until this point just sticks in the craw somewhat.

    What is Shieldmaiden's biggest weakness—that for all its fluid controls, great visuals, and (I almost neglected to mention) excellent synthwave soundtrack—might also be another strength to some, and that's how soon it bows out. The game is broken up into five areas: the initial tutorial zone, an arboreal park area, the city's grubby downtown, a mostly destroyed hospital, and the dome itself. Each takes about thirty minutes at most to complete, excepting the shorter first and last areas, and only offer a tiny smattering of collectibles to find. Otherwise you're just powering (or dashing) through all the enemy encounters as you follow each stage's linear path to the end. With no opportunity to learn new skills or, say, have a reason to backtrack to earlier areas for upgrades, the game feels superficially light. I suppose it's not wholly a negative to say you wanted more of a game if it controls well and looks good enough, but I was hoping for a bit more depth even if it doesn't necessarily have to be yet another one of my beloved Indie explormers (even a besotted fanatic like me can recognize we probably have too many of those floating around). I could recommend giving it a shot if you want a well-made platformer that you can comfortably squeeze into an afternoon between bigger games and would probably cost you less than a cup of coffee. I can't help but want a little more out of it (and to beat that final boss without technical issues making it impossible, dagnabbit).

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

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