Save me Mr Tako: Tasukete Tako-San

Don't get this game if you want a Kirby or Mario type experience.
Get this if you want a Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be The Guy experience.

The flaw of this game is it's simply too hard, and the difficulty doesn't come from great places. First and foremost, you have no health bar. One hit and you're dead. There are some hats that let you take an extra hit, but even then you have no invincibility frames if you fall down on spikes, so you'll lose both your hits before you can get out of there. If you lose a life by any means, you lose your hat and may not be able to get it back in the stage. Also, bosses straight up ignore the extra hit point your hats would give you.

On Normal mode you start with 3 lives and your max is 9. While this is nowhere near enough once you approach the second act, it also creates the problem where the platforming is boring because there's no collectables. There's lives which you may cap out on quickly, there's crystals which just turn into a life at 100, and there's ink for your ammunition. Once the game gets hard enough around the second act, you won't be needing the ink refills as much because you get a full meter every time you die. Which is gonna be often. So play on Easy mode, which starts you with 20 lives and your max is higher than I ever got to. You'll need all those lives and more.

As a Game Boy tribute, the game smartly lets you crop off the edges of the screen so as to emulate the resolution of the Game Boy. However, this just means enemies will react to you a lot sooner than you can react to them and you'll constantly be ambushed by their projectiles. So play in the standard widescreen mode.

To prevent ambushes and blind jumps, the game smartly lets you scroll the screen by holding down. However, even though there's an animation for looking up, you cannot scroll the camera upwards. This did result in me getting killed by falling projectiles at some points, and it felt cheap.

The camera has another major, glaring issue. Whenever you hit a button to open a door or change something in the environment, the camera pans over to show what you affected. But while the camera is moving, everything else in the game is active. Enemies can and will kill you while you can't see where you are. In some situations the button stays pressed for such a short time that you have to move while the camera is away to make it through the door in time.

Also I frequently ran into a bug where entering the overworld would make the screen go black. I would pause the game, not see the options menu, but hit down and confirm and exit to the main menu, reload the save and it'd be fine again.
Another possible bug is the fact that projectile noises can be heard throughout the whole level. If there's drippy drops or tree-climbing enemies throwing nuts, they're on a global timer and the things will all hit the ground at the same time, making it UNBEARABLY SUPER LOUD.


The game is just as heavily focused on story as it is on platforming. It does a great job of setting up memorable locations and scenes and character motivations. Unfortunately, any time a text box appears and there's multiple characters on screen, there's no way of telling who said that. Characters don't have a unique "voice" in writing, they don't get separate beeps and boops for the message box, and it's not like a speech bubble that points to the talker. Sometimes it's easily figured out that it's the last person to change their experssion that's talking, but often there's conversations where the people just don't animate.

I was interested in the story at first when it was about the octopus faction, three human factions and the people who didn't fit ideologically with their country. It seemed like there was gonna be moral ambiguity, hard choices and tragedy. But ultimately, a true villain is introduced last minute and everybody gets a happy ending.

To the game's credit, the pixel art is gorgeous, being able to swap color palettes is very nice, the music is great, there's lots of enemy variety and many forms of platforming, and there's a ton of sidequest content and hat collecting that I barely scratched the surface of. And most importantly, since I played it a Definitive Edition has released which supposedly fixes many of my complaints.