You tend to be pushed through a door to find a thing, and then backtrack through the door once you’ve got that thing. The exploration is surprisingly weak: for a game whose world is so rich, Studio Koba never feels comfortable with letting you off the leash to explore it. While not pitched at the same high difficulty, Dark Souls is again a good comparison for how often bosses are layered on, and how much they require of you.Īll that’s left for you to do in Narita Boy is to explore and solve puzzles. We died, we got better, we eventually beat them all. There are bucketloads of them, from Glaucoma to the Black Rainbow, and they have attack patterns and weaknesses that reward you for working them out.
#NARITA BOY PLAYSTATION FREE#
Just as Narita Boy is generous with its enemies, it’s free with its bosses too. If we had complaints, it’s that the LB dodge and RB slam were a crutch that we leaned on too much, and would have loved more opportunities to get out of the attack-dodge-attack sequence. It’s not as intricate as a Souls-like or Nioh, but it’s as intuitive and fluid. We always felt like we were more powerful than the Stallions we were facing, and soon got into a rhythm that made death pretty rare. Luckily you have an evolving list of attacks, gained at a fair rattle from the safe havens on your journey. It’s half the problem in remembering what each mob does, and the best strategy of taking them down. They’re all animated with panache, as there’s clearly a lot of talent on Studio Koba’s books. But the inventiveness and generosity in the enemies is welcome nonetheless, as Red Barons follow Warlocks follow Jumpers. In all honesty, we weren’t bored with the ones we already had, and had barely mastered the old ones. Narita boy has a fantastic habit of assuming you’re bored with the enemies it’s offered up to this point, and chucks new ones at you relentlessly, introduced with a cool swoosh and floppy disk title screen. Still, checkpointing is pretty generous, so you’re never more than thirty seconds away from your previous personal best.Ĭombat takes it up a notch. This is no Prince of Persia: there’s no gripping hold of ledges with your fingers, so you have to be precise, yet we never felt like that precision was available to us. We found Narita Boy to be a slippy little character, happy to fall off a pixel and tumble off platforms. The platforming is okay, and there’s likely a good reason why it’s kept to a minimum. It’s here that you’ll put your newly acquired combat abilities to use, and defeating them all will allow you to progress. Occasionally, the screen will lock, stopping your progress, and you’ll be thrown into a pitched battle with waves of Stallions, the enemies of Narita Boy’s world. You move from friendly safe havens into sections that have lightweight platforming. To play it, Narita Boy lands somewhere between a Shantae game and a Castlevania. If you weren’t constantly being ripped out by the writing, all of these fantastic touches would layer on each other to create an immersive romp around a deteriorating hard drive. The CRT-stuff is so well-done that it feels like you’re playing a relic from a few decades back.
All of the Quantum Meditators and Legendary Trichroma Dudes of the world are huge, looming over you, making you feel insignificant and small. You never feel comfortable wandering the world as it is oppressive, dense, and unfriendly. It captures a mood that works extremely well. It’s incredibly generic, and the sludge of gobbledygook doesn’t hide it. It’s about a hero defeating an invading baddy, gathering weirdly named keys as you go, so that you can get through even weirder named doors. Yet if you strip away all the Trifurcations and ‘Synth-sensei’s, the story is just Emperor’s New Clothes. It might seem odd to start a review by slapping Narita Boy across the wrist for its dialogue and story, when it’s an action-platformer that skirts on the edges of a Dark Souls-like, but Narita Boy is so dense with writing and character interactions that it’s in your face, all the time, and it’s so incredibly proud of itself. It’s just a tsunami of blah-blah-blah, like reading The Silmarillion without reading Lord of the Rings first. We eventually switched off and started ignoring anything that wasn’t pointing to an objective or giving us a new ability.
#NARITA BOY PLAYSTATION SERIES#
Not since the Halo series has a game tossed around so many proper nouns that amount to pretty much nothing (sorry, Halo fans – we still love actually playing Halo), yet wanted you to step back and marvel at its world-building. This is how it feels to play Narita Boy all the time. If the start of this review has left you bewildered, drowning in a sea of technobabble, then treat it as a warning.