Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King

The humor and charm is there. Graphically it resembles SNES-era Zelda. The world doesn't 'feel' anywhere near as grand as ALttP. It's actually ~40% smaller than even the original Zelda. Despite this, the overworld map you can use in the menu is low-res, so it isn't helpful for anything other than knowing roughly where you are and there aren't any icons to help you locate shops or key locations, nor can you assign your own-- not that such places really need revisiting, anyway. One could make an argument that it makes the player have to think about and truly familiarize themselves with the world, adding difficulty in a game that belongs in an era of "new challenge" in gaming. A bit more on that later.

There is a castle-town in the center, where you begin the game, and then there are four biome-areas spanning the four corners of the world, each with dungeons, including the final boss area. That's the whole game. At least the dungeons are a bit longer than you'd expect. Each has a mid-boss, which is cool. Bosses are easy. Just use bombs, which are basically unlimited. You don't get any more than an item/weapon or two throughout the game that meaningfully changes how you explore or fight, which is my biggest issue when I'm a guy who likes Zelda and Metroidvania largely for that reason. The combat is same-y and enemies are always simple and numerous instead of unique or genuinely challenging. It seemed like half of the overworld map is just crap-tons of one-hit zombies you hack your way through, which got old. Bombs, arrows, boomerang, fire throw, etc are all essentially the same exact thing and use the same 'magic' bar instead of having to collect and count items individually, which lead me to just spamming everything with bombs. The moments where you have to intelligently deploy your items/weapons or use them in combination to solve a problem are scarce, if any. Typically it was extremely obvious (e.g., shoot the arrow through the torch to melt the ice a la Zelda) what needed to happen. The floor & block puzzles are the most stimulating aspect of the game, but there are only a few types, repeated throughout. Aside from this and a couple of the dungeon entrance puzzles, there's nothing in the game where you really have to use your head. I think I died only once, at the very beginning of the game while I was still cavalierly working out how the game functioned and had only 3 hearts.

Pretty much every secret discovery and treasure chest in the game is a coin stash. Booooriiing. If it isn't coins, it's a heart piece, magic bar extension, potion (you never need 'em unless you go full Leeroy Jenkins into everything and don't even try to avoid damage), or one of many collectibles that you don't use other than to give some NPC who in exchange gives-- you guessed it-- coins. That's another big issue: if you're posing proudly as a Zelda clone, why is nothing you collect seemingly very useful? You quickly amass hundreds of coins and then thousands, which you don't really need to use for anything, either.

Overall, very little depth of gameplay or world. It was on sale for about $5 and that's the most I would pay to experience it. I'm a bit disappointed that I hadn't read a single review that pointed any of these things out, and I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means. Every review was positive, gushing about how it handily pulls off classic Zelda, but that has to be chalked up to 'supporting the indies' unless gaming publications have dramatically lowered their standards. Is it worth playing if you're in love with the franchise that inspires it? Perhaps. This all might be too harsh. But again, this game isn't worth $25 or even $15 for what you're getting. I didn't feel especially compelled to 100% it.

If you're hoping this game features the epic sense of adventure, puzzle, and discovery in the Zelda classics, you'll have to lower your standards a bit and accept that this is by comparison an excursion. If you play through it without trying to collect every last heart piece and whatever, you'll be playing for ~6 or 7 hours. At the end of the day I'm left wondering who this game is for. Cloning a certain period in Zelda titles, it seems to be targeting mid-30-somethings' nostalgia. The problem is the game is far too simple to replicate its inspiration and far too easy to be an otherwise better experience. It's like the game itself is made for younger children, but that demographic of gamers won't care about the retro graphics, referential humor, or have the nostalgia to begin with. The good note I'd like to end on is that the game seems to have a nice framework upon which it could improve. Hopefully the upcoming sequel does just that.