I like to think I'm an open-minded individual (and yes, I know how many alarm bells it sets off when starting a review with a sentence like that). I've long tolerated this very site's insistence in shoe-horning wrestling into every conversation, despite actively wanting to escape from the planet every time it pops up. I guess it's not just so much that I'm not into the whole tights and fights business, just that I'm paranoid that hearing all the in-depth trivia about the Wolfpack or the Road Warriors or how not to work one's way into a shoot is pushing information out of my brain that I might actually want to keep. Like, I have no idea when I'll need to know that Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan, but it'd be nice to have it in my pocket regardless, right? And now, more recently, a new contender to poke the "Not In My Back Brain, Yo" bugbear has emerged with Jess and Jan's frequent conversations about musical theater and musicals in a more general sense. I have to mentally check out before any show tunes worm their way in.

All this is to say that going into Songs for a Hero, an action-platformer fashioned as a peppy sing-a-long of mildly comical musical numbers, my expectations were not high. Released last year in its new Definitive Edition form, Songs for a Hero has a stage-based format in which seven different worlds - each broken up into three levels, or "acts" - are accompanied by the protagonist's own endless singing about whatever piques his interest like Randy Newman in that one early episode of Family Guy when it was still good, be it some weird monster that just appeared for the first time (or, occasionally, the hundredth), or the physical irrationality of a floating platform, or the way the background keeps changing the time of day between levels with no apparent rhyme or reason. The game is very much going for that fourth-wall-breaking meta humor with every step, filling its interstitial tooltip loading screens with jokes that may or may not also rhyme,

Suffice it to say, it's even worse than it sounds. Few of the lines scan well due to mismatching syllable counts, it's full of couplets that aren't even half-rhymes, and the protagonist's singing voice is not fit for the task at hand. Not to knock anyone else's singing - lord knows my lyrical prowess is less "Baka Mitai" and more "Baka! Urusai!"- but the voice is too nasally and its owner's command of English isn't quite good enough. (Of course, I'm going to look like a jerk if it's a professional singer, but I suspect they are not.) The meta jokes are cute but there's far too many, the quality of them wildly fluctuating throughout the game, and it's not like anyone's out here breaking new ground calling out disembodied platforms and monster slimes with faces for being kinda goofy. About ten minutes in I turned the voice volume down to zero and just kinda tried to ignore that the gimmick existed at all.

It's heartening, then, that the game beneath all this caterwauling is actually fairly decent though not without its own issues. It starts you off with some incredibly basic controls and obstacles, mostly just jump and slash with a shield block for projectiles (though it's picky about what counts), but you'll soon procure a host of traversal upgrades that the game efficiently tutorializes for you first and then factors into the repertoire you've already built, creating situations where you might need a combo of a hookshot launch followed by a double-jump and an air-dash to make it to the next platform, and not have any of its mechanics feel unintuitive or under-rehearsed. Its levels also have no shortage of secrets: each level has three musical notes, used to open up the well-hidden boss fight portals when enough have been aggregated, as well as chests that contain money and permanent health and stamina upgrades (the latter needed for the air dash and a few projectile attacks you pick up). Money can go towards other upgrades, or can be spent on consumable potions which provide a quick health fix if you're in a pinch. Despite being a game from 2021 Songs for a Hero also has an extra lives system that is instantly made moot by how quickly and effortlessly you can accrue dozens of the things; pretty much the same issue with lives as a concept going back as far as Super Mario World (1990), if not further.

The traversal upgrades present an opportunity for backtracking for the casual explormer enthusiast. However, the issue is that the level design isn't also built for exploration, since they're all pretty long (five to ten minutes) and decidedly linear. Chances are, you're going to have to repeat whole swathes if you're looking for the one chest or secret boss portal you passed by on the first visit because you lacked the means to reach it: retracing all those steps is simply more annoying an ordeal than some gaggle of upgrades deserve, though I'd almost say the effort might be worth it for those special boss fights were they not so well hidden that you'd have to scour all three acts of every world to find them. I've garnered by their number that there's almost certainly one squirreled away somewhere in each of the first six worlds, but I've only found three while exploring normally and I'm not sure how committed I am to hunting the rest down.

For as much as I've bashed the music, I want to make it clear that the BGM - of the non-lyrical kind - is very well done. It has an operatic quality to it, given the amount of real instrumentation involved, and so it produces a similar effect as when a philharmonic orchestra covers a bunch of old Zelda and Mario music (if not quite that high-budget). Listening to the music without the concomitant cat-strangling singing has been decidedly pleasant, and I particularly like those rare times when they throw some electric guitar and heavier rock percussion into the mix. Graphically, it is what it is; which is to say, a 16-bit pixel throwback with incongruously attractive backgrounds. Certainly not bad, if that's a video game art style you can't get enough of (though the Indie game industry is certainly trying its darnedest to find our collective hypothetical limit).

I realize the tone of this review is somewhat incendiary but I think Songs for a Hero has its heart in the right place and attends to what matters: the moment-to-moment platforming and exploration, the challenging but fair boss fights each with their own tactics to deduce, plenty of traversal trickery when you have the tools unlocked, and a genial and light sense of humor about video game norms and itself. I think I'm approaching its end-game - and it's taken some wild narrative swings in its final chapter - and I'll probably tap out right afterwards without concerning myself with completion % or the obnoxious number of no-damage boss clears it has in its achievement list. I don't think I'm anywhere near its wavelength when it comes to its particular, well-worn irreverent takes on game clichés nor its irritating rhapsodic aspirations, but you really can't go wrong with any 16-bit throwback platformer when it has a bedrock of mechanics as solid as this.

But seriously, extra lives?

Rating: 3 out of 5.