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Review of Enotria: The Last Song

Posted on by angelo
Review of Enotria: The Last Song

Enotria: The Last Song feels a lot like most games inspired by From Software’s action RPG genre. You patiently venture through dungeons, place weapons of various shapes and sizes into monsters, and try not to die horribly in the process. It’s all pretty familiar by now, but everything else around that core is where developer Jyamma Games really tries to spice up this recipe. The ideas that work, like taking the setting out of dank caves and swampy bogs and into the shimmering light of sunlit mountainsides and colorful cities, really do. The things that don’t, like the overwhelming amount of unintuitive things to unlock and equip and the wonky performance issues, keep Entoria’s name from being on the growing list of games that are becoming more than just a Soulslike.

The most striking way Enotria escapes the dark, gloomy shadow of the big games it draws inspiration from is its more vivid setting and art direction. While most Soulslikes are dedicated to the dank caves and dungeons that are the mainstays of the genre, Enotria embraces the sunshine beyond mere praise. Striking skies, rolling fields of golden sunflowers, and clean, sandy shores are front and center. Even places where things move at night still have vibrant colors and radical environmental aspects like enormous twisted trees. Likewise, many enemies and NPC characters are covered in small details that make them stand out, even when the textures can sometimes look flat.

This more vivid world suffers from a dark corruption that has trapped all of its inhabitants in a constant state of monotony and repetition. There are plenty of metaphors surrounding the plays and everyone plays a role like an actor, especially early on, but I found my interest in the plot waned as I progressed. Individual interactions with some characters can be interesting, but in true Souls fashion, much of this story is shrouded in mystery, and I wasn’t very keen on unraveling this one.

Each area is filled with enemies that are very different from each other, but within each region they can become quite repetitive over time. That doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous throughout the course, but I saw most of what I could expect from a given region pretty early on, and it takes about five hours to complete them.

The enemies in one area can get repetitive, but I enjoyed most of the bosses.

I enjoyed most of the bosses I encountered, with the best of them offering unique challenges that interrupted the stealth of dungeons. Not all of them were successes, though: sometimes I fought cool things like a big hermit crab or a golden conquistador that could pass for a Final Fantasy dragon, while other times I fought the same knight with the same sword combos but different colored armor four different times.

All of this is also slightly marred by uneven performance. Even my reliable Intel Core i9-9000 CPU and RTX 3070 GPU combo struggled to maintain a consistent frame rate, usually when entering new areas or fighting outdoors in very sunny locations. It was always disappointing to see such beautiful spaces slow down so dramatically, no matter what combination of settings I tried.

Still, there’s plenty to explore in each of Enotria’s three zones. Areas like the strange but bustling city of Quintia are dense with numerous paths that lead to loot or shortcuts. Sometimes these shortcuts can help you bypass entire sections of a castle or crypt, but very few actually turn out to be paths to new locations. There were plenty of nooks and crannies despite the relative linearity of each zone, but there were a few gimmicks that seemed more important at first and appeared very rarely later, like the white glyphs that can be activated to create temporary platforms and structures to open up new locations.

Red glyphs are much more common throughout the world, and trigger combat challenges that range from simple stunts to outright threats. I was happy to see that they were optional after going to their door and getting kicked in the butt. It was quite strange and jarring, then, when I stumbled into rooms that also included bosses that I would later learn didn’t require beating by simply hanging around without that same type of action to participate in, so to speak. It’s as if Enotria identified surprise bosses as a problem with the semblance souls and created red glyphs to address it, and then in the same game, avoided their own solution. It’s not a huge problem—that kind of resistance is commonplace in these games—but it’s a sobering moment of inconsistency.

Finding new enemies to defeat is always a good experience.

I’m willing to forgive this kind of thing because the combat is pretty solid, so finding new enemies to beat is always a good experience (despite the framerate issues). Anyone familiar with this genre will be comfortable with the basic light and heavy attacks governed by stamina. There’s no blocking, and parrying doesn’t stun enemies directly, but rather builds a gauge that eventually opens up bad guys to big attacks. Entoria’s parry window is more forgiving than in games like Lies of P, which also wraps its defensive strategy around counters, and so it felt much more accessible early on. By the middle of this thirty-hour campaign, expect that deflect button to be tested regularly by enemies with longer attack chains, or encounters with multiple bad guys at once. I liked the gradual approach to this kind of challenge, but sometimes I felt like the claustrophobic camera and mind-of-your-own lock-on seemed to work for enemies.

The risk/reward of the parry system extends to the four status ailments you can inflict on enemies (or be afflicted with), each of which has a dual set of conditions that help and hurt. Stunning opponents lowers their defenses, but also makes them stronger and allows them to recover their stamina faster. Sick is your standard poison that does damage over time, but if you get too close to a sickened enemy, you can become sickened yourself. This sometimes feels counterintuitive or regressive on certain bosses in particular; using the fatuo element against enemies weak to it will do more damage – but it will also give them the villainous status, making all their elemental power much more destructive. Overall, though, I think the ailment system encourages staying vigilant even when you have the advantage.

The four status diseases each have dual conditions that help and harm.

On the other hand, Entoria’s seven weapon types aren’t all that distinct from each other, mechanically. The ultra-large swords and colossal hammers are technically The weapons are different on paper, but in practice I didn’t find the need to dedicate my two weapon slots to these two weapons, where a large stick would suffice. There are about 120 weapons of all these types, and while I didn’t find that many, the ones I did find pretty much covered all the bases possible in terms of the four elemental damage types they could deal, the status ailments they gave, and how they scaled with your stats. Interestingly, different weapons can hide additional abilities that can only be activated when you use the right light/heavy combos. I didn’t spend too much time testing which one did what, but more than once the decision between two similar weapons with similar stats came down to whether one of them did bonus elemental damage when I pressed the right button and the other didn’t, and I appreciated having that opportunity.

When it comes to building your character, masks are as close to classes as Enotria gets. In addition to changing your appearance, they offer passive bonuses like dealing more damage with heavy attacks or increasing stamina and defense. To get an effective build, you need to use their perks as a base and add additional modifications in the form of roles and perks. The former are aspects of the enemies you defeat that modify your stats in positive and negative ways, while also giving you more passive bonuses; I defeated a large crab and its aspect increased three of my stats but decreased two others while increasing my health by a percentage. On top of that, perks can add even more passive quirks to any attacks, dodges, parries, and abilities you use.

The soul-like samba of Jarrett Green

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Mixing and matching lines of masks – Enotria’s version of offensive and defensive skills and spells – can be fun. Most of them have a pretty big impact, though the only real difference between many of them is the special elemental or status effects they cause. They have to be charged by hitting enemies before they can be used, meaning they can’t be used to reactively get you out of tight spots. This isn’t so bad when you’re venturing into dungeons, as you’ll have plenty of opportunities to hit things and refill your gauges. The problem comes when you’re approaching a boss fight, which completely drains your gauges before they even out, meaning you have to prepare for these powerful attacks from scratch against the tough challenges where you’ll probably need them the most. I can understand why the designers wanted to even the playing field, but it always felt unnecessarily punishing to me, and I wish I could have enjoyed preparing for a fight this way. Mask line gauges also empty every time you rest near a campfire, which is more annoying than unpleasant.

There’s a lot of character tuning to do, and perhaps too much for all but the most dedicated builder. I enjoy it myself, but the irritating thing is that none of the impacts of this multi-layered lasagna of RPG systems are well communicated before testing things out live against enemies. A list of all the bonuses applied by each piece of my gear would have done wonders for gauging my build’s potential while still in the menu screen, for example. Line load speeds are in Italian, which is no problem for me and the combined powers of Google Translate, but when “presto” and “vivace” ​​both mean fast, it’s impossible to tell which is faster without figuring it out on the fly. Being able to configure three separate loadouts, each with their own masks, weapons, lines, perks, etc. that you can switch out on the fly means you can be prepared for anything, but after picking two builds I liked, I almost never used the third. In fact, I didn’t need to interact with any of these systems much after finding a good build early on, which highlights both its ineffectiveness at naturally creating diverse playstyles and how strong the combat is without all that noise.