3.5/5 ★ – Sefferson's review of Momodora: Moonlit Farewell.

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is a mixed bag. There were aspects of it I really loved, but overall the experience left me feeling pretty underwhelmed. Visually and sonically, the game is really great. The player and NPCs are both a treat to look at and are animated in a really nice way. While the world isn’t terribly memorable, the visuals are pretty and the exploration is pretty solid. Discovering secrets is a lot of fun and easy to do because of the map basically telling you outright if there’s a secret in the tile you’re on. Getting to these secrets though is sometimes tough and requires you to do some pretty cumbersome platforming challenges. Sonically though, I can’t think of a single flaw. I don’t really see myself going out of my way to listen to this soundtrack outside of the game, but it does the job and sets the tone of the different locales really well. Sound effects, whether it be from your attacks or enemies attacks, are always really chunky in a good way. Everything feels like it’s hitting really hard and it creates a satisfying feedback loop for the player. Unfortunately, that’s where the positives kind of end for me. I haven’t played all the Momodora games, but I did play Moonlight Reverie. Maybe I would have enjoyed the story more here if I had, but after looking up how people felt about the ending (singular, this is important to note), I just think it feels incomplete. I spent the whole game waiting for the combat to get more engaging. I even chose the highest difficulty mode you can select right out the gate. Early on, I died a lot, but it wasn’t due to the challenge of the fights. Instead, it was because of how clunky everything feels. Momo has a dodge, a sprint, a weak projectile attack and a main attack in her kit. There’s some other minor upgrades that kind of enhance the combat, but man it stinks overall. Towards the end of the game, I was only dying when I didn’t understand what was happening. I died twice to the final boss. Once because after the first phase there’s a part where you have to stand in a bubble to avoid damage; I thought I was in the bubble, I was not in fact in the bubble. The other death was because I accidentally rolled off the edge. The multi-phase final boss has some good cinematic flair, but the actual fight is a snooze fest that can be won by just mashing attack and occasionally healing. There’s a way to equip passive skills and I guess I can see how that would encourage relatability, but most the skills suck. They either make it so it’s easier to stay alive, or turn you into a glass cannon. Neither of these are particularly fun ways to play the game, and I genuinely don’t know how else you could feasibly build Momo. Don’t even get me started on the companion system! You can find companions around the world, each with different abilities, I think. Companions so infrequently use their ability, all have similar abilities being either “generate some money/healing” or “sometimes attack very weakly”. On top of that, they don’t even work in boss fights. The only reason why they are here it feels like is to have cute little sprites follow Momo around. They are effectively vanity items here. Between waiting for combat to actually do something interesting, having sloppily put together systems that don’t create any interesting synergies or strategies and having one of the more underwhelming endings to a story I can think of…I genuinely don’t think I can recommend this game. I don’t regret playing it, I had fun at times, but man I left way more underwhelmed than I wanted to be. It sure is a Metroidvania.