Legends of Ethernal is a 2D single-player action adventure game with a fairy-tale aesthetic developed by Lucid Dreams Studios and produced by Natsume Inc. You play as Wilfred Van Dervill, a young boy who must embark on a grueling journey to rescue his missing parents, and uncover the mystery of their disappearance. His journey is long, difficult, and filled with heartbreak. However, he perseveres, and finds comfort in the companions he befriends along the way and finds others that share his grief in this epic that mediates on the nature of family and the forces that split them apart.
Legends of Ethernal is a side-scrolling platformer that requires the player to be both quick and clever. As you adventure across Akanys and traverse its diverse environments, you must also face off against each level’s inhabitants, all of which are bent on stopping Wilfred’s journey. From stout, lumbering tree-folk living in the canopies of the Medhun tree, nimble and aggressive frog monsters inhabiting the lake outside Lope village, and giant poison-spitting bugs that live in the dark caverns beneath Arkanys, you constantly face new challenges and must formulate new methods to deal with them.
Each area also provides a new tool or overarching mechanic that you have to master in order to proceed. In the giant tree with the tree-folk, you get access to the sap bomb, which functions like a stun grenade and can knock down certain obstacles. In the frog village, you find the blowdart, which lets you snipe pesky flyers, flip switches out of your reach, and knock down conveniently located ropes or vines so you can climb or jump across chasms.
The platforming in Legends of Ethernal is also challenging, and has a healthy balance between vertical and horizontal exploration. There are many pitfalls and traps that Wilfred must avoid while climbing and jumping off of walls while avoiding enemy projectiles. Some sections are rather punishing, and one slip will send him straight back to the beginning. If you aren’t interested in difficult platforming, you can adjust the difficulty settings to “Assist Mode,” where supplementary platforms will appear, allowing you to travel more easily while still enjoying other aspects of the game. Masochists can also enjoy the game on hardcore mode, where enemies dish out tons of damage and death is permanent, sending the player back to the beginning of the game.
While these tools are necessary for travel, they can also make encounters with monsters significantly easier. However, the resource system Legends makes each of the items feel “too good to use.” I spent about the first half of the game avoiding using darts or any of the different kinds of bombs against monsters because I was constantly worried that I would reach some unbreakable wall or would need to use a bomb to solve a puzzle, and I would be all out. While the game does remedy this by allowing you to collect resources from defeated enemies or bust open random jars and containers a la Zelda, the rate your items consume resources still makes it a bit of a grind. One particularly nasty problem I ran into was I just acquired the firebomb, which you need to burn down walls of webs. The problem is, I was out of the yellow orbs you need to use it. So I was trapped. There was one enemy nearby, so I had to walk in and out of the room where the firebomb was so I could force it to respawn and kill it repeatedly. With a drop rate of about 25% for the yellow orb, it took me roughly a dozen tries before I had enough to use the bomb and leave the area. So I quickly became stingy with my items again. Ironically, once you reach the haunted watch tower, the game starts showering you resources! I couldn’t get rid of my goodies quickly enough!
As you unlock new weapons and abilities, enemies become more challenging, demanding that you make use of your ever growing toolkit. While you start the game with only a fishing rod for a weapon, it isn’t too long before you get a hammer (and upgrade that into a pick axe.) The problem is that as your portfolio of weaponry grows, items you already unlocked lose their usefulness. For example, the hammer, while slow, deals significantly more damage than the fishing rod. So once you get used to the timing of the weapon, it totally outclasses the rod in nearly every situation. When I eventually got the sword, that immediately replaced the hammer as my primary method of attack, as it was almost as fast as the fishing rod, but dealt just as much damage as the hammer. The firebombs quickly replaced the sap bombs because why stun an enemy when you can set it on fire and wait for a couple of seconds for it to turn to dust? The same thing occurs when you get actual bombs, except you don’t have to wait for those few precious seconds for the flames to die.
The boss fights are enjoyable, and holistically employ whatever central mechanic holds a level together with entourages of bad guys, and increasing difficulty as the fight progresses.
Generally speaking, I always went into a boss fight low on resources, and have always struggled against general mobs because they usually don’t have a start-up animation for an attack. That being said, there is a rhythm to the bosses attacks, and once you acclimate to them, the fights feel more like breathing puzzles than “fights.” One boss I enjoyed in particular was the frog matriarch, who rests comfortably with her dart gun, shooting down wood crates on top of you while her legion of cronies mob you, forcing you to keep an eye on her and the general mob at the same time until you can give her a taste of her own medicine.
While Legends of Ethernal has fun boss fights, and the art conjures memories of old fairy tales such as Pinocchio and the Headless Horseman, there were many sections that rubbed me the wrong way, and struggled with balancing issues. With such a wide breadth of mechanics, many get tossed by the wayside and are sort of forgotten about. Sometimes the late game will shoehorn some far away switch you can only reach with a blow dart, or have a wall you can climb using your pickaxe, but otherwise it generally feels like your best options are the ones you acquired most recently. Many sections, especially those in the dark, where you take damage over time, are challenging in a way that overcoming them doesn’t provide any thrill, just relief that you can finally move on.
I give Legends of Ethernal a 6/10.
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For more information, please visit: http://www.natsume.com/
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I live and work in Portland, Oregon. I've been an achievement hunter ever since beating Mario 64 and collecting all the stars at the tender age of four. My most recent gaming achievements include getting all trophies for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and beating Dark Souls 3 without leveling up or using weapon upgrades.
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