It's been many, many years since a game has made me rage like this. Specially a metroidvana. This game has beautiful art and decent music and the saint seiya influence is great too. But the gameplay has to be one of the worst I've seen in any metroidvana game.

- You have a combined HP/mana bar. Shooting takes away from this bar. You can heal by hugging the floating teddy bear but it takes *forever*. If you get hit with this bar depleted, you will lose a life. Lose 2 or 3 (depending on upgrades) and it's game over. This wouldn't be so terrible if it wasn't for bosses that require you to shoot them. It's very easy to miss and end up with an empty bar, only to get hammered.
- You think upgrading and getting a bigger bar will help? Almost everything that touches you takes the *entire* bar away in one hit.
- There's barely any increase in strength or defenses as you progress through the game. Low level enemies keep taking multiple hits, and you keep losing all your health in one hit from most.
- Enemies respawn every time you re-enter a screen. All of them. Even if you get knocked back into a previous screen, you will have to deal with all of them.
- DId I mention there's about a dozen different enemies, and what you in every area are recolorings? The ones that shoot, shoot slightly different things but that's it.
- There's no quick travel system. Yup, a metroidvana without a fast travel. SOTN had this 30 years ago!! You have to walk back through the entire map to get from one place to another. I can only imagine they decided not to have one so the game would feel longer since the map is somewhat small.
- There's no way to skip dialogs/presentations on bosses. So you end up getting hit by some random projectile while you were trying to heal, and now you have to walk several screens, defeating the same enemies again (some which take many, many hits) and then see the entire boss intro again. Only to make some other stupid mistake and do the same thing over and over again

I'm uninstalling and hiding this game. I'm not wasting any more valuable free time trying to find the fun in it.
I wish I had played this in the 2 week window so I could at least get my money back.

You know, I was having a pretty good time with this one for a while. The gameplay, while not perfect, was mostly fun. There were a lot of creative ideas that mostly worked. The game is gorgeous, and the soundtrack is pretty solid. But wow, once you get the 4th armor, the boss fights just get worse and worse. Heart of Talos was my breaking point, due to the absolute lack of any kind of safe space or time to heal once you get far enough in the fight. Projectiles just cover nearly every inch of the screen almost constantly, and with how long it takes to heal if you mess up the rapid heal (which you only get one shot at), I just wasn't having fun anymore.

There's also some other issues. Big enemies and bosses are far too tanky. It doesn't make them more difficult in general, just makes them take forever to fight. The heal takes absolutely ages to pull off. In the earlier boss fights, you were consistently given good openings to heal, which is good, since you'll be healing a lot, as it only takes a couple of hits to deplete your shield. On later bosses, those openings are few and far between. On Heart of Talos, there were eventually no sufficient openings. Bosses attack faster and with bigger or more complex attacks as they get more damaged, and late in the Heart of Talos fight, some of the attacks (the blue lasers) are so fast it's impossible to dodge, and all of the attacks start coming out so frequently and in such high numbers that I literally couldn't find a place to get the heal even halfway charged. Pure BS.

That was the worst, but the bosses started trending downward starting with Shadow of Demise. That uses the hover ability for pretty much the entire fight, and it feels pretty bad. I think they could fix that by giving you the ability to fall faster by holding down on the D-pad, as the main issue is that it feels way too slow to dodge if you need to move downward. You can drop faster by shutting of the hover, but that also feels not great.

The Horned God was also a pretty miserable fight. I'm not sure who programmed the AI on that thing, but once it gained the ability to fire out the two large homing spheres, he spammed that move constantly, leaving very little time to actually damage him without getting hit for about 2/3rds of your shield.

Finally, there's one massive QOL thing that needs to be added. There's a bit of a cutscene introducing every single boss in the game. They're all unskippable as far as I can tell, and it makes refights after a death just that bit more miserable. Please, make them skippable. For the folks who don't end up giving up on this game. As for me, I'm out unless I see that some of the issues I mentioned get patched.

Just some odd choices here that so far make the game not that enjoyable. Combat feels pretty stiff and most enemies have weak animations so far. The main character is animated fantastically tho. piano save spots kinda annoying having to restart all progress (collectible items and all). Just makes for boring unneeded backtracking.