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Momodara: Moonlit Farewell‘s love of bells got me thinking. I’ve lived my whole life in a moderately-sized English town. As a result, I’ve never been far away from a church. My childhood was full of the sound of bells, ringing out the hour or announcing celebrations. They were something joyous, or comforting at the least. These days, though, I don’t hear them much at all. They’ve slipped from comforting to something almost eerie, spurred along by numerous films and games, no doubt.
Momodara: Moonlit Farewell doesn’t help matters either. It’s the ringing of a large black bell that summons hordes of demons into an otherwise peaceful world. Actually, come to think of it, the bell is a nice summary of my feelings for Momodara: Moonlit Farewell. Like the tolling of a bell, it’s very alluring. It looks and sounds wonderful. Once it dies down though, things do ring somewhat hollow. It’s a pretty package of a metroidvania, but falls into pretty much all the traps of the genre.
It Tolls For Thee
Momodara: Moonlit Farewell is actually the fifth game in the Momodara series. I’d not heard of the series before, so take my retelling of the plot with a big grain of complete ignorance. Moonlit Farewell begins with the tolling of the Black Bell, a mysteriously magical object, which opens the door to a host of demons. These begin to threaten the village of Koho, so recurring protagonist Momo Reinol sets out to send them packing. Along the way, it quickly becomes clear that the bell is not the key factor. Turns out a couple of gods are having a family squabble.
The story is a bit of a light touch throughout, but it does a good job of fleshing out its characters. I imagine that’s helped by four prior games of character building, but Momodara: Moonlit Farewell works hard to bring across personalities. There’s even a neat mechanic where you can sit down for a snack with one of your support NPCs. It also helps that the characters all have pretty decent designs, including most of the bosses you encounter. It’s clear a lot of thought has gone into the world and that really shines through. An important point in a metroidvania, where you’ll spend a lot of time slogging through it.
Speaking of which, let’s take a moment to appreciate the art. Once you beat the game, you can stumble across a dev room, and chat to the new animation artist, Paul. He worries that his animations won’t be up to snuff. Worry no more, Paul. Momodara: Moonlit Farewell is gorgeous. The pixel art is bright and colourful, and the animations are silky smooth. Design is great too, with a wealth of unique enemy designs. Music’s also rather excellent. In terms of immediate appeal, Moonlit Farewell is downright charming.
Invasion Of The Bugbears
We need to dig a little deeper though. There was a slight feeling of apathy towards Momodara: Moonlit Farewell, that I need to reverse-engineer. Let’s start with the combat. Momo is armed with two main weapons: a leaf and a bow. Funnily enough, the leaf is the stronger one. You can also find equippable sigils, which change the stats around a bit. The combat is largely dodge focused, avoiding telegraphed attacks and dealing some hits on the backside. It’s serviceable, but feels a little floaty, particularly in the boss fights, and never really evolves. You start and end with the same three-hit combo. Enemies, especially bosses, all have very predictable patterns too.
Exploration puts in a better showing. In true metroidvania fare, there are hidden rooms everywhere. It has a reasonable map too, which kindly highlights rooms with collectibles in. It’s nice to be rewarded for grinding my face against every wall. It also does a reasonable job of letting you explore without guiding you too much, even if there is a clear linear thread running through. The actual movement is more of a mixed bag. Dodging feels great, but jumping feels a touch floaty. Momo appears to have springs in her shoes at times, often jumping higher than I expected.
So Momodara: Moonlit Farewell fares reasonably well on the two main pillars of metroidvanias, but it seems to fall prey to some of the traps of the genre. For one, the balance is massively skewed towards the player. Health, attack and magic upgrades are absolutely everywhere. Even the last level showers you with them, turning the final boss into an absolute joke, even excluding the bizarrely simple attack patterns. The map is also quite small, making it a rather short game overall. I achieved 108% completion (somehow) in about ten hours of play. For a metroidvania, that’s a little on the skinny side.
Momodara: Moonlit Farewell – Pleasantly Shallow
Other nit-picks include enemies respawning when you leave the room instead of at checkpoints (which is admittedly a very subjective gripe) and individual levels not feeling like they have much backstory to them. We go from one forest zone to another, then to a seaside zone. I don’t really feel like I learned much about any of them, or how this world all pieces together. They were all visually interesting zones, but I wasn’t about to go digging through the lore on the wiki.
The end result is that Momodara: Moonlit Farewell was a perfectly pleasant game to play, but I don’t think it has great amounts of staying power. It’s extraordinarily pretty, but a lot of it feels rather skin deep. That’s not to say it’s bad, absolutely not. You’ll have fun, but it’s the type of game that’s hard to pick back up once you’ve put it down. If it had stretched itself out a bit, and given its bosses some teeth, then it would’ve been great. As it is, it’s a bit like visiting an art gallery and seeing a beautiful painting. Gorgeous, but threatens to slide right out of your brain as soon you’ve looked away.
