The Messenger first playthrough, part 3
1I've uncovered a cool-looking new area, but I was unprepared for how utterly disappointed I would be by some of this game's design decisions.
The first and most glaring disappointment is the boss fight in the Riviera. Firstly, it involves rapid screen flashing, which any designer who hasn't been living under a rock for the past 30 years would know not to subject players to. Second of all, there's an attack that swaps your dpad directions, which would be far more tolerable (1) if it had a sound cue along with the visual indication, and (2) if the indicators were actually in sync with the effect, rather than the stars over The Messenger's head disappearing a full second before the controls actually revert.
What the hell were the developers thinking? Did they perform any QA or user testing whatsoever? Or did some designer have their head stuck up so far their own ass ass that they just ignored all feedback about how absolutely garbage this fight's mechanics are? The fight's only difficulty comes from sheer incompetence with regard to accessibility, and the screen flashes guarantee I never want to replay this game, because that would require putting myself and viewers through that again. (This game better not have refights.)
Unfortunately the disappointments don't stop there. Winning the fight yielded an item that I thought would finally make the world far easier to navigate, but unfortunately it doesn't do what I thought it would do at all. To make matters worse, the subsequent prophecy "hint" has some horribly misleading wording, which led me astray from what would've otherwise been my first guess (which ended up being correct). This is of course compounded by the game's lack of actually-fast "fast" travel and the excessively low-fidelity map, leading me to waste even more time just trying to get from point A to point B. Ironically, upon fulfilling that bit of the prophecy, the next bit actually points to the exact area that I thought the previous bit was pointing to. The order in which these prophecies are presented makes no sense, as so far absolutely nothing has required the item I received in the Riviera.
This game has some really bright spots, but unfortunately beyond the first few hours of gameplay, it exhibits some glaring lapses in design judgment that make it hard for me to recommend it. I'm still hoping it'll have a redemption arc, but for now I can absolutely see why there are categories of the speedrun that just stop after the Tower of Time or the Underworld.
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