Narita boy review8/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Being temporarily transformed into a stag-bot so you can traverse a scared woodland. ![]() Delving through a monochrome wasteland before being assaulted by a nightmarish siren, often only distinguishable by her hugely distorted face panel, flickering between static and trichrome. Conversing with fifty-foot-tall oracles with CRT monitors for a head, cradling their bloated, pregnant stomachs. Galloping at speed through a desert on a robot mount that later transforms into mech-like heavy armour, allowing you to pummel once formidable foes with spiteful indifference. To that end, Narita Boy is never above ridiculous spectacle. They’re often dominated by these three tones, except for when they’re not, wherein Narita Boy does its best to be an LSD-powered heavy metal music video. It’s these three colours that the quasi-religion of the electronic world is based upon, and this is reflected through the game’s pixel-plotted landscapes. He used to be a supervisor program from the Red Beam before he decided that Red was much better than both Yellow and Blue, the three programs that made up the Trichroma which power the console. This isn’t a bit the main antagonist is called HIM. As well as everything else it has going on around it, Narita Boy invests heavily in the ‘chosen one’ trope, granting the sword only to the fated hero who will save all from the twisted disposition of HIM. ![]() You do all this with your Technosword, which you wretch free from an altar like the one true king, because of course you do. Time your dodge dash to either scoot out of the way, or slip straight past them, leaving their undefended backs completely at your mercy. The footsoldiers need little prompting to swing their huge swords at you. Witches might feel safe, lounging about above you, trying to roast you with digital flames, but they can be reached with your new uppercut. Frontal attacks are useless against shields, so you learn a running shoulder barge that can knock armoured opponents off balance just long enough to land a few choice blows. Except you’re given all the tools you need for wholesale slaughter. Cocky guards tap their shields with their blades, mocking your impotence against their airtight defence. Cackling electronic witches pelt across the sky, casting trails of neon napalm. Shuffling digital zombies begat hulking footsoldiers with man-sized blades begat screen-filling behemoths with oversized clubs who, even if they miss you, send dangerous shockwaves racing through the ground. But you’ll also need your constantly evolving moveset to deal with the ever-expanding enemy roster. Learning new moves is often the key to accessing new areas – you learn a leaping uppercut that gives you more air than a regular jump so you can reach higher platforms, or a ground pound attack that can smash through wonky floors. They’re never static nothing stays the same long enough to get stale. But the stages are linear, enclosed and small enough to get from one end to the other without due concern. It flirts with metroidvaniaism, making you backtrack because you’ve discovered a new key or a new ability that lets you circumvent a previously unpassable object. You will spend time wandering around, hoping to stumble across the Techno Algorithm Hall or The Stable of the Servo Horse because you’ve found a digital key with that name on it, and have some memory of a previously bypassed pixel priest mentioning it briefly within several paragraphs of technobabble. It’s not an invitation to get lost within the chaos it’s a promise. In order to avoid that, it props everything up with even more things pseudo-religious undertones that mimic Shinto and tie in with the relaxed flashbacks of the creator’s memories of growing up in the Japanese providence of Narita, juxtaposed against high concept 16bit violence and CRT monitor grain overlays. It’s a lot of things at once, and there’s always the concern that this top heavy atmosphere is going to topple over at any second. A style-heavy combat-slinging platformer drowning in 80’s kitsch and Tron-tinted neon that asks you to battle through the personified innards of a prototypic console in order to unlock the stolen memories of its creator. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |