Legend of the Ragequit

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everybody! You are watching yet another Broken Controller Club review, my name is Ed and I’m your host. I hope you all were able to get some time off and recharge your batteries, so that we can all be bright eyed and bushy tailed when we see what fresh and exciting misery awaits us in 2021.

Speaking of misery, I played a new-ish game that released in October on the Switch called The Legend Of The Blue Warrior. This little retro-styled scrolling shooter is about as fun as having my colon liquify from food poisoning after a delightfully trashy Sunday lunch at Golden Corral. Do you like bats? Like, a lot? Well, you’ll fucking hate them after you play this. They make the bats and medusa heads in old-school Castlevania look like the goomba on my baseball hat.

The game actually looks promising at first with the hand drawn artwork on the eshop page and also on the menu screens, but don’t let that fool you because just like getting the number of that really hot drunk girl you met at the bar who was suspiciously by herself, there’s a lot of baggage underneath the surface that you won’t know about until it’s far too late.

The story is, in a word – crap. The main character in the game is a guy named Popolon, who is also a character from the game Parodius, published in Japan by Konami back in 1988. That game itself was supposed to be a parody of the shooter classic series Gradius. His wife Aphrodite’s been kidnapped and the army’s been slaughtered by 8 demons. Thaaaaaat’s basically it and then you’re on your way to get her back. I don’t know how a god gets kidnapped but then maybe my condescending and self-important Humanities teacher went over that during all the times I slept through his class. The only difference in characters that you choose is that the dialogue changes a little bit whenever you start a game. It probably changes when you beat it as well but honestly I just didn’t get far enough to beat it, nor did I care to after attempting it enough times. Some of that opening dialogue is actually kinda funny, though I found myself laughing more at the bad spelling and grammar instead of the actual writing. The dialogue reads like someone that works for the Wish app wrote it.

The art style looks good at first. The characters and backgrounds are colorful, the enemies are crisp and clear, and it does have this feeling of an older style arcade game, just with sharper visuals. After awhile though you’ll notice that everybody has 2-3 frames of animation at most, the backgrounds also lack any real depth or character, and the whole thing starts to feel like you’re playing a shareware game from the early 90’s, back when those were included on cd-roms in PC gaming magazines.

The music is of similar quality and has an arcade-y feel to it. It’s your basic little synth-sounding background music and is in some levels decent, and in others it actually kinda grates a little, especially after repeated deaths where the music starts over. The sound effects, like middle management at most corporations, don’t really do anything and are just there…hoping you’ll ignore them and not realize how crummy and worthless they are.

In classic arcade-y fashion you get a quick look at all the bosses you’ll go up against on your way to complete the story, which is a cute little reminder of Ghosts N Goblins even without the world map to show how far your journey is, then you’re dropped into the level. As I said earlier it’s a vertical scrolling shooter where you, you know, move around and avoid obstacles and enormous amounts of bats while shooting these flaccid little arrows at everything trying to murder you. You can shoot these gray tiles that mostly just have some points in each one, and sometimes there’s power ups like a lightning bolt that kills everything, or a 1up, or an hourglass that stops time temporarily. Some of the tiles are hidden as well and you’ll actually need to hit these in order to unlock a way forward, or else you’ll die. Keep in mind there’s no way to actually see these other than to start shooting at everything in sight. If that sounds like a bunch of dog crap, it’s because it is.

Sometimes there’s barely any enemies that show up, and then suddenly you’re swarmed with them to a point where the game actually slows down, just like old NES or arcade games that this plays like. Except it’s 2020, so it’s irritating.

Hitting anything means you’ll die, see the boss layout for each stage again, then get dropped back at a checkpoint. Each level has 2 main characteristics. One being monotony because the stage doesn’t really ever change much, and the other being the overall theme of level you’re in whether it’s a forest, another forest, or a volcano, things like that. There’s also some obstacles like fences or rocks that’ll bottleneck your path and test your patience. The pacing of each level is really uneven as well. Sometimes there’s barely any enemies that show up, and then suddenly you’re swarmed with them to a point where the game actually slows down, just like old NES or arcade games that this plays like. Except it’s 2020, so it’s irritating.

It wouldn’t be a shooter without power ups, though, and you get several. The first is a letter P that you can shoot to change colors and that’ll alter what it does, like make you faster or make you invulnerable. Picking it up when its blue gets you a little shield that forms in front and if something hits you from the side you still die, and getting hit from the front by something large will also kill you as if it’s not even there. So don’t bother with that because it’s stupid.

Occasionally through each level there’s also a flashing empty box, that once you shoot it will turn into different types of weapons to fire as well. Like instead of one crappy arrow, you can get two crappy arrows. Or a boomerang that’s really slow and takes so long to come back you’ll leave yourself open and die. Or a trident which is also slow and gets you killed. Your only safe bet is the fireball or shuriken, which spread in multiple directions. Basically the only viable weapons are ones that shoot diagonally. You will not be excited to see any of these weapons when available though.

In addition to the army of bats and these weird spikey BDSM-looking ball things that fly at you, there’s also bosses. Bosses can totally redeem a crummy game if done well, however these have zero personality to add onto their 2-3 frames of animation, and mostly just fly from one side of the screen to the other and shoot something at you.

If this all sounds boring, it would be if it weren’t so frustratingly hard at times. As I said earlier, you can choose the look of your character when starting the game but then no matter what, you’re stuck with someone who’s slow, doesn’t shoot quickly, and dies in one hit which sets you backward in the level. There’s not only limited lives but limited continues, which is totally fine and I’d expect that from a game like this, but it also means you have to really love this game to see it through to the very end, which I did not. Most of the times I died was because my own impatience got the better of me and I’d move toward the upper half of the screen to either shoot things or collect power ups, which got me killed. But then there’s other times where I’d try to learn from that, be patient and hang back, then get killed by bats that would fly up from the bottom.

So you could take a wild guess at this point that I did not really care for this game and am glad I only spent $4 on it. It looked like it could be a fun time at first, I even set my expectations low, but alas because of the boring-at-best gameplay, way-too simplistic graphics and animation, sub-par bosses, and being bombarded with what felt like thousands of murderous bats because they didn’t know what other enemies to make for this game, I did not have fun and regret buying it. But the game does work, and that’s more than I can say for Cyberpunk presently.

And, clubmembers, that last bit of trolling is all I have for today – I hope you enjoyed it, would love you to subscribe after watching the review if you want to see more. Here’s to a better year than 2020.