[NSW/PC] Overlord: Escape From Nazarick

[briareos_kerensky]

Hot on the heels of Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth, comes a Metroidvania tie-in of the novel/anime/manga Overlord, in which you don't play the titular Overlod, but a secondary character who got bumped off during the first anime season.
It's quite the choice, considering there will be a fourth season coming soon, and considering how popular the original work is, the choice of doing the bare minimum is even more puzzling.

First, there's no voice acting, if not for a few one-liners when activating some abilties, which are probably taken from the anime series. One of the collectibles are Lost Memories, and each one unlocks a still from the anime. The spritework is decent but inferior to many other games in the genre, from Deedlit, to Elder Lilies, and even Lost Ruins...and those are games made by small developers, while this one bears the name of a very well known franchise and has Kadokawa as a publisher.
The game is not free of hiccups: on Switch, during the first hour of play I witnessed controls freezing for a second a couple of times, switching between handheld and docked locks the game up for a couple of seconds, in one area the framerate suddenly dropped, and the game even crashed once. Not the best impression, really.

As for the game...well, the base system is Symphony Of The Night with traversal abilties very similar to Metroid. You have two basic weapons you can't unequip, a stiletto and a morning star, and you can switch the stiletto for one of the many secondary weapons you find around (lances, swords, rapiers, hammers). So far I've unlocked one magic source, fire, and judging by the interface, there are three in total. Equipping a magic source makes you invulnerable to damage of that kind, and you can activate the magic source to fire ranged attacks of the corresponding time for a short while.
You get all the typical traversal options for this kind of game: morph ball, grapple beam, wall jump, varia suit...I'm using Metroid names but that's exactly what they are.

The control layout could have been better, ZR is used to dash and grab onto things, so if you are running and you pass over a chain you can climb on, you'll latch onto the chain. I really wish for the dash to be mapped to double-tapping the d-pad, or even just keep the dash always on, and I've never stopped holding down the button.

Combat is very basic and disappointingly easy, at least in normal mode. You basic stiletto has a short reach but it's fast and you get a ton of upgrade tokens (mana, in this case) and within the first hour it'll be already at max power. The game hints that different kinds of weapon are more effective against certain types of enemies (strike for skeletons, thrust for slimes), but every normal enemy seems to die in two hits of your baisc weapon, and so far I've only switched to secondary weapons for boss fights.
Even mid bosses or larger enemies aren't a problem: activate magic and spam the attack button while sitting on the other side of the room and everything dies.
Boss patterns are very basic and a lot are immune to magic, forcing you to use physical weapons, but considering how many health and defence upgrades during the first two hours, you can almost sit in front of them hammering the attack button no matter what they throw at you.

Not that great of an effort, Escape From Nazarick.

[briareos_kerensky]

A couple more things...there's no music for what I feel is half of the game. You might get into an area with music only for it to stop the next room, and that room is neither before a boss fight or any story segment.

Also encountered a very strange bug: I was climbing a set of stairs to a new room and the moment I entered it, controls reversed and found myself in the previous room, and the character wouldn't stop walking until I shook the controller. I though that the controller lost connection to the console but the bug presented itself every time, no matter how close the controller was to the console, and even after restarting the game.
Never encountered something like that before or after. Weird.

[briareos_kerensky]

It's a bit disappointing that this thread has become more of a bug report than anything...
First the game crashed a second time.
Then in a closed room when I had to fight a bunch of enemies, one of said enemies decided to bury itself into the ground and never come out, forcing to reset the game.
And lastly (for now), in a room with falling spikes, I got caught by the spikes and respawned at the beginning of the sequence...only that I got caught while jumping, so the game respawned me right on the spikes for five times consecutively before putting me in the right place.

Escape From Nazarick continues to be incredibly easy, today alone I brought down three bosses. All bosses are invulnerable to magic, which cuts down your options considerably, but without even exploring too much you come across fast weapons with a ranged attack, and these have actually two hitboxes, the weapon itself and the ranged effect, which increases damage by 50%. Plus, with the jumping downward attack, you can stay in the air indefenitely if you hit an enemy with the weapon, as the combo limit for weapons is ignored.
One boss in particular felt more like something out of Shovel Knight, only not funny and not challenging.

This low challenge value doesn't really entice you to explore the Tomb Of Nazarick, also because most of the updates are out in the open, weapons and memory fragments are the hidden items. And once you have either the Assassin Dagger or the Zephyr Blade you don't really need anything else.
You collect Clementine's stilettos, but more stilettos don't mean more attack power or a longer combo, and those quickly become unused in combat.

[briareos_kerensky]

Fourth bug report start with the third crash in less four hours of game, not exactly the most flattering of statistics.
Also completed the game (I don't really know the completion percentage, the game doesn't recap that, if not for the memory fragments) in around 4 hours and a half. The last section was downright boring,

->Open Spoiler<-

first you have to clear three small sub-stages using the same tileset as previous areas, then you have to fight all the bosses once again....because that's always a good idea, especially when you have endgame equipment and abilities.
Like the one to slow down time, which basically allows you to breeze through those fights by just hammering the attack button. These repeated fights do give three extra weapons, at least there's some kind of reward...

And the lack of rewards is one of the game's faults. Exploration is very basic, most obstacles are about either running on a wall and jumping off to a ledge, or wall-jump your way throw some crevices, or a combination of those. Only a few traps make use of some of the advanced abilties and it's very demoralising when you end in a room full of mana pickups and nothing. Coupled with the memory fragments being stills from the anime with no text description or an audio snippet, and I was totally uninterested in pursuing any kind of exploration.

The final boss fight is, as you might have guessed, easy and I think the weapons you find before it further trivialise the fight.
Bosses being invulnerable to magic is a big error for me, as magic could have worked some special effects or given bosses more fights or attacks to give players a reason to switch between magic sources...Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth was easy, but at least the developers put some effort in boss encounters and mechanics, and designed the game to be interesting to explore.

There is no NG+ option, at least there is none when completing the game with all unlockables, and you can see the what happens at the end...well, pretty much when you begin the game.

Escape From Nazarick is a mediocre search-action game.