#IndieSelect: Valentina (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Valentina from publisher QUByte Interactive through #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels.  All words and screenshots of the gameplay unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience.

Valentina is a pixel art-style platformer from indie game developer Luamar Games and published on the Nintendo Switch by QUByte Interactive.  The game was originally developed as a mobile game (Valentina: The Princess Archer) and was released on the Google Play store earlier in the year.  Had I known this before I started playing, I might have gone in with a little more of a forgiving mind and lessened my expectations, and while I seemed to find something that bothered me about the game in terms of game mechanics, behind-the-scene mechanics, translation and localization, and a whole host of other issues, I did finish the game.  Kind of, but I will get to that at the end as I do not want to spoil anything, just yet anyway.

I mean, you can understand what is going on, but there are
just a number of grammatical errors.

Let us start with the translation, presumably from the developer's native Portuguese (from Brazil), not to say that nothing could be understood as I was able to follow along quite well, but it does not look like the dialogue script was run by anyone who reads/writes English.  What it looks like is someone took the original Portuguese script and put it through Google Translate then used that translation.  Sometimes.  I noticed that on some occasions, there was still an "e" in place for an "and" or that the Portuguese had not been translated at all.  This is not to harp on the developer that everything should be in English because 'MURICA!, only that in a game with as much dialogue as this one has, being able to convey the story and the purpose of the character and their motivations is very important.  I did reach out to QUByte Interactive to try to put me in contact with Luamar Games to rewrite the English translation (not that I speak Portuguese, but it was to take the existing English translation and revamp it), but I did not hear back as of this publishing.

The story in the game is more-or-less fine, nothing inspiring.  Like a lot of JRPGs, Valentina is hiding out in a village to keep her royal heritage a secret, and the kingdom is taken over and her parents imprisoned by the Empire of Darkness.  She goes on a quest to rescue her brother João who has attempted to reclaim the throne and save them all by fighting against four generals in four themed worlds.  Each world is made up of about 10 individual areas, which at first sounds exciting, but in reality is about 7 areas per world too many as the platforming becomes very repetitive, especially by the fourth world: jump across floating platforms that sink into water, jump up platforms in a stair-like manner, make blind jumps down into a short S-shaped cave then ride a platform back out to the open-air then, maybe, repeat.  And by that point in the game, I had stopped carrying about enemies and was literally running through them with reckless abandon.  There are towns at the beginning of each new area, and sometimes interspersed in the middle, but there is nothing to do in the towns aside from receiving exposition and not being populated with enemies.  Which brings me to my next criticism.

80 Gold Worth of Potions!

When you kill enemies, they will either drop money (gold=1 and green=5 coins), arrows, or potions.  The game never explains what it is that these loot dropz do, but it might be safe to make assumptions.  You shoot arrows that deplete via a counter, and picking up arrows replenishes that counter.  When you pick up gold, your gold counter goes up, but it was not until I saw a Tweet from Monokuma_V3 that I found out that collecting 100 gold gives you five potions up to a maximum of 25.  Potions will refill your life bar by 1.5 bars out of 5.  For the entire game, unless I missed a well-hidden power-up somewhere, potions will always heal you for 1.5.  Initially this 100 gold to 5 potions sounds like a pretty decent trade-off until I tell you that by halfway through the game, I had over 800 gold, meaning that my potions were maxed out at 25 so frequently, that I just kept on collecting that sweet sweet gold.  And there was no exchange in that if I used a series of potions to prevent dying, gold would not be taken out (of my pouch?) to buy more potions, it just stayed there.  Forever?  The entire game I was hoping that you would come across a merchant who you could buy permanent upgrades from, but this again never happened.

The next thing that bothered me was the animations used for Valentina and a lot of the monsters.  For Valentina, her running animation was more-or-less fine, but her jumping looked as if her back foot lifted off the ground a few pixels, and her ponytails lifted up while her arms stick out.  I guess I'm just focusing on the lack of leg movement.  But speaking of her jumping, the actual mechanics of Valentina jumping bothered me too as it just felt too floaty, as in the character would move just a little bit forward even after you stopped moving and the same happned when you were jumping.  This bad control design made jumping onto moving platforms, especially ones that had short routes, very difficult to judge where you were going to land.  Maybe this was an issue that did not exist in the original mobile game, but for me, it made playing some areas agonizing dying time and time again to what should have been simple jumps.

Speaking of bad mechanics and design, let me take a minute to talk about whatever coding was used for the bosses.  First off, the design of the bosses was great, and if they had functioned normally, they could have been terrifying.  Instead, boss battles consisted of staying still for the majority of the battle while you unloaded arrows into broken pixely meat sponges.  Or a stone sponge in the case of the second boss who would crumble in a death-type-animation, thereby essentially stunning it, giving you another opportunity to attack, causing it damage, thereby stunning it again, and so on and so forth.  There also seemed to be a problem with either the hit detection from the bosses or maybe even Valentina's hitboxes.  In the aforementioned battle (against General #2), I stood my ground while the sprites of the boss went through the player and did not take any damage.  Most of the time I did not take damage although I was hit on a few occasions.  This happened multiple times and with every boss.

And then there was the final boss battle.  You see this boss in the trailer too so I was looking forward to this battle, although not as much as I was before I experienced how the bosses were programmed.  In this battle, you approach the area where you fight the Minotaur and have to jump up onto a ledge to be on the same level.  Except I stayed on the lower embankment.  I jumped, fired an arrow, and hit the boss.  Then I did it again, and again.  The Minotaur could not engage with me because I was on a different plane.  So rather spend the next five minutes sponging arrows, I jumped onto the same level, and that is when it charged me and started swinging its massive tree-sized axe.  And I did not take damage.  So I stood there firing arrow after arrow into the thing.  Then I got bored and moved further to the right and found yet another spot on a different level than the Minotaur so I jumped up there and proceeded to take it down to about 2%-ish health.  I jumped down to be on the same playable area just so that it did not die off screen.

Something else I wanted to touch on was how there were a lot of environmental "gotcha" moments in the game, and by that I mean that you were forced to blindly jump down to an area you could not see.  The second world was particularly bad because it at first taught you that spike pits were a certain distance away from the edge of cliffs/platforms, then have the pit extend further out on a jump you could not see.  What made these hidden hazards so much worse was that the spikes were Mega Man levels of dangerous in that one hit and you are dead, which then takes you back to the beginning of the area (thankfully not the world otherwise I would have never finished) with all of the arrows and potions you had when you started that area.  Add on top of that how I previously said that some of the areas start to feel repetitive, trying to remember where the pit you died and need to jump a little bit further can be difficult to recall.

The last negative thing I wanted to bring up, which is a semi spoiler, is that apparently Valentina is a series?  I think?  Maybe?  Because nowhere in the game description, either on the Google Play Store or Nintendo's eShop make mention of this.  Even events in the game do not hint that there is anything more to your quest than what you are already doing.  You defeat the four generals of the Empire of Darkness, then maybe fight the main boss, then rescue your parents.  But nope, that is not what happens.  After you defeat General number four (the Minotaur), you return to one of the villages where you talk with your brother and friends you have met along the way, which is no different than any other in-between stage.  Then you go to the arrow signpost as you have done a great many times before to head out on your final adventure.

What the Deuce!?

Yup.  You get a "To Be Continued" screen, fade to black, and back to the main menu.  This was a huge letdown to a game I had wanted to like and even though the last level felt like a trudge (as I just stopped caring and found that I could just run through enemies without taking damage, but only if I did not stop in their same space) and I just wanted to see the end.  Now, if there ever is a sequel, I do not know if I will feel compelled to play.  Probably not, but I do not want to rule out that possibility entirely.  Maybe the developer has learned from some / a lot of the rough edges here. 

But not everything about Valentina is bad.  The pixel art for the worlds, the landscapes, the characters, some of the monsters, and especially the bosses are spot on.  They often look just detailed enough to not feel out of place with the rest of the game (think the mobile re-ports of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy VI).  The art is appropriately pixely, blocky where it needs to be, and never looking too crisp for its own good.  The numbers that appear on-screen when you do damage are smooth compared to the rest of the world, but that ended up being something that I did notice, but never bothered me.  The only negative thing I have to say regarding the graphics is that Valentina's bowstring, is just a single line that does not fit in with the rest of the pixel sizes, and considering that firing arrows are her only way to attack, I did notice this anachronism quite often, but that could also just me being picky.

Another thing that I did actually enjoy about Valentina was the music, which I sadly cannot showcase because I could not find any information on the composer, which makes me think that it might have been music that was pre-written and purchased for use in the game.  Since there are no credits to the game, there was no way I could find out (aside from reaching out to the developer and finding them for that matter) if the music was written specifically for the game, or if a music pack was purchased and plugged into the game, and no shame if this was the route because I found the music very suiting for when it was used.

Looking at the reviews that Valentina: The Princess Archer received on the Google Play Store, really makes me wonder who is playing the game, and if the game just works better as a mobile game.  Maybe the bosses are not as wonky in their animations and maybe there is a real challenge.  Maybe that is not the point though.  I feel like there is some potential here, that Valentina on the Switch almost feels like a rough draft after figuring out the outline, but it needs a fair amount of work.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

A Maelstrom of Silvery Light