3.5/5 ★ – usagichann's review of 9 Years of Shadows.

I got this game as part of Humble's Metrodvania bundle, but its been a game that I've had on my wish list for some time. I'm a fan of the metrodvania genre, and have played most of the major hits in the genre over the years. Unlike some folks, I'm mostly a fan of the "vania" part of metroidvania having bounced off pretty hard off Metroid in my early years of video gaming. I can safely say that the first Metroidvanias that really captured me were both Symphony of the Night as well as the GBA games Circle of the Moon and the like. All that background just to say why I really wanted to play 9 years of Shadow. Just a look on the store page shows you beautiful background and pixel art that evokes the type of gaming I used to thoroughly enjoy in my misbegotten youth. Then I got the actual game and started playing it. The best thing I have to say is that, its mostly a competent MetrodVania. The combat is quite tight, the various unlocks you get isn't bad, there's a mini map and the boss fights are also quite servicable. As I said, competent. The highlight is that the art is very good, and the animations that pop up once in a while are all quite well done. However, if I have to balance the bad with the competent, the bad mostly wins out. The first of which is that there's only one weapon with not much modification to it. There's probably nothing wrong with that, as some of the more memorable Metrodvanias over the year also had that (Ori and Guacamelee to name a few), but there's also no real modifications to the weapon. You can't make it longer, and whatever power you add to it is barely noticable. Then there's the lack of fast travel. If you found out you missed a section on the map, you're gonna be slow traveling to that location. Sure, you can skip fights, but you're still going over a lot of ground for probably the last upgrade shard or something. Then the upgrades themselves. They're extremely unnoticeable except for maybe the health upgrades. Each time I upgraded my Halberd, I couldn't really tell that I was doing more damage. I'm sure it was, but given that the normal enemies were no challenge with no upgrades and the bosses were damage sponges, i'm not sure doing 10% more damage made any difference in the game. Then that the entirety of the game's challenge comes from the bosses. There's no challenge from your normal traversal of the castle, and the only challenges comes during the boss fights. There's also a huge unevenness of how difficult the bosses are. Some bosses are ludicriously easy, and others require you to die and restart multiple times to even get a sense of their patterns. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, but when you hit 5 bosses within 10 minutes (and its not an Arena), it does get tiring. There's also changing how you play the game in the last 5% differently from how you've played it the previous 95%, but given that its mostly just 2 bosses you fight, you get the hang of it after a while. All this to say that this is one of those games where a thumbs up/thumbs down isn't good. I need a thumb sideways to represent this game, but given that it doesn't exist, I'll have to say, only pick it up on a really good sale.