The art style is charming and the setting is intriguing. But: - Camera wobble will likely induce motion sickness for some players. - Disabling v-sync instead made everything fuzzy, as if I had instead lowered the resolution. - Large objects regularly obstruct your view for your character and enemies. - Big environments, plus slow movement speed, plus very segmented level design, makes getting from A to B feel needlessly complex. - Subtitles (on by default) have a truly distracting number of grammar and spelling errors. - Default keyboard hotkeys are oddly selected and not at all ergonomic. - Got stuck in world geometry a few times, requiring reload and loss of progress each time.
I felt the first game was a charming mix of Final Fantasy and Zelda, and wanted more of the same. This game turned out to be 80% Mario and 20% everything else the developers could cram into the engine. The writing starts off okay, but after awhile it seems the writers wanted to play Bingo with as many pop culture references as possible, no matter how silly. There are also too many pointless Yes/No dialogue prompts. However, there are minor rewards for exploration through different NPCs having tidbits of moderately interesting, world-building lore. The biggest problem is the various mini-games, where your character is dropped into a wholly different game format, usually without warning. Some are well-chosen in the context of the story. Some of them are even amusing. But most of them lack the basic polish, care, and attention to detail that made their original/template games actually good. The result is enormous difficulty spikes in unexpected places, most of which block progression for the sake of an out-of-context gimmick. The platforming is particularly awful. A better game might let you unlock a double jump, or take less damage from spikes, or think your way around the environment to avoid jumps entirely. But none of those things exist here. And so, practically every other area, you will be forced to make absurdly precise jumps to continue the game. If you are even a pixel too close to spikes or poison or lava or whatever, you die instantly. And for a game that plays up its RPG elements, it makes no sense to frequently have sections where your level, your equipment, and your items are completely useless.
