Vernal Edge

Where the ♥♥♥♥ am I? Where the ♥♥♥♥ am I going? Where are the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ maps?

A hidden gem I stumbled upon while looking for cheap games this summer sale. Lovely spritework, great soundtrack, fun movement, and good lord, the combat. The fighting is actually so good and varied. You get to deal really sick combos, get new spells to do even cooler stuff, get new ways to defend. If you like metroidvanias, get it. It's really good.

Vernal Edge is a mediocre Metroidvania with poor direction. Gave up on it 1.8 hours in. I like the premise and 2d graphics, and the ability to go to different floating worlds. But I hated the need to hunt down maps in unusual and sometimes impossible locations, the need to visit a harder island to get a powerup so you can leave it and explore an easier island, the PS1 graphics of the overworld, the controls in general, and how there's not much variance in the enemies. Kept dying and wandering blindly until it was no longer fun. Might give a second chance in the future when I'm more masochistic.

Horrendous map. This is what kills the game for me. The combat is also just not that great. Normal attacks deal no damage, only spending meter does. So most of the fighting just has you tickle the enemy until you can press the "mildly awesome" button. Relatively quickly enemies start having stagger bars; how do you deal damage to it? Do your charge attack over and over or you're not allowed to deal damage. You don't even fight that much in the game. For some reason areas are huge and wide and also just really empty because enemies don't really roam around, they just spawn on occasion and you get locked into an arena. Well at least the art and music are awesome, but the exploration feels like banging your head against a wall. Seems like no one even bothered to make a guide for this.

The overwhelming emotion you will get from playing this game is frustration. Why do I have to do so much combat? Why do the enemies all take 4 or 5 full combos to kill? Why do most attacks kill me in to hits? Why is the healing so bad? Why is the map as awful as it is? Why is the exploration so confusing and directionless? It's another one of those games where every decision was made against the player. It's a game like Dark Souls without really understanding what made Dark Souls special. Enemy hurtboxes are huge, they can 180 in a single frame so dodging behind is impossible, they continue attacks through being stunned, and all enemies have a massively inflated health pool but you die in 2 hits. Regular attacks do basically no damage and don't stagger, so as far as I can tell, there's literally no reason to use them ever. Charged attacks charge in like 1 second, do like 5x the damage, and take one of the enemies' 2 or 3 or 5 stagger points. The combat more or less amounts to running around and spamming the charge attack. Some magic is ok and may be useful, but the Vernal Edge attacks leave you wide open and cannot be canceled out of. They're so long that even if you use one imm…

I have attempted playing this game several times and each time It just doesn't capture me in the slightest. To me a big thing about metroidvanias is movement, combat, and exploration and this game fails on the first two. The movement is ok at best. It's just serviceable enough to get around and there's probably more funner movement options later on, but when I got the worst double jump I have ever seen it went from a bad game to god awful. If I recall it only works in specific situations, like hugging a wall or on special torches. I can't recall too well cause I memory holed it since it was just not fun to use. The combat is pure bonk simulator. The hits feel like doo doo, the sound effects are BONK - as in the hit sound would be more appropriate for a hammer or club type weapon. It may sound like I'm nitpicking but when the game revolves heavily around BORING combat arenas where you have to deeply involve yourself with the combat mechanics to properly deal with the enemies it really shows just how BONKerific the game is. Beyond that the hits feel like a wet noodle. Total snoozefest. The exploration from what I saw was actually extremely good! When the flow state hits the wo…