Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist
Feb. 26th, 2025 07:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI really love Ender Lilies, a 2021 Soulslike Metroidvania about a small girl making her way through a rainy and fungus-infested postapocalyptic kingdom with the help of her monstrously mutated zombie companions. The art design is spectacular, the writing and translation are both fantastic, and the game is a lot of fun to play but doesn't drag on for too long.
The sequel, Ender Magnolia, was released in January, and I don't like it.
The aesthetic of Ender Magnolia seems to be aiming for "Final Fantasy VI meets Transistor," and the story is something along those lines as well. Unfortunately, the colors are very muddy, and everything looks the same. The plot never develops. A villain is introduced at the tail end of the game, but his actions have no context. The text is bland. The game mechanics are limited and don't do anything interesting.
Ender Magnolia isn't fun to play. It suffers from Blasphemous II's disease, wherein every enemy has 40% too much health. You can use the game's difficulty sliders to squeeze out the HP sponges a bit, but then you don't get trophies... and also the enemy HP is still too high. You can't upgrade most of your attacks until the end of the game, so you're always doing chip damage.
What Ender Magnolia seems to expect the player to do is level grind. This is unfortunate, as enemies don't drop much EXP. You can buy a few minor upgrades, but then you're going to have to grind for money. It's tedious beyond belief.
I don't want to say that Ender Magnolia isn't worth playing. Still, it feels uncomfortably bloated, and the artificial linearity of its progression doesn't have any benefits for its nonexistent story. Maybe I'm not upset that Ender Magnolia is "bad," necessarily; but rather, I'm disappointed that it doesn't meet its potential.
The sequel, Ender Magnolia, was released in January, and I don't like it.
The aesthetic of Ender Magnolia seems to be aiming for "Final Fantasy VI meets Transistor," and the story is something along those lines as well. Unfortunately, the colors are very muddy, and everything looks the same. The plot never develops. A villain is introduced at the tail end of the game, but his actions have no context. The text is bland. The game mechanics are limited and don't do anything interesting.
Ender Magnolia isn't fun to play. It suffers from Blasphemous II's disease, wherein every enemy has 40% too much health. You can use the game's difficulty sliders to squeeze out the HP sponges a bit, but then you don't get trophies... and also the enemy HP is still too high. You can't upgrade most of your attacks until the end of the game, so you're always doing chip damage.
What Ender Magnolia seems to expect the player to do is level grind. This is unfortunate, as enemies don't drop much EXP. You can buy a few minor upgrades, but then you're going to have to grind for money. It's tedious beyond belief.
I don't want to say that Ender Magnolia isn't worth playing. Still, it feels uncomfortably bloated, and the artificial linearity of its progression doesn't have any benefits for its nonexistent story. Maybe I'm not upset that Ender Magnolia is "bad," necessarily; but rather, I'm disappointed that it doesn't meet its potential.
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Date: 2025-03-24 06:34 pm (UTC)There are a lot of gaps in the lore, especially in terms of the timeline. It seems that everything happened in perhaps three decades or so, which is horrifically quick. I assume that the refugee king who authorized the forbidden wizard science hermit-crabbed his way into a pre-existing structure, only to be immediately confronted with a pre-existing crisis.
Everyone had good intentions, but they were also human and flawed, and all the odds were against them. I feel like Ender Lilies is just an appetizer compared to the full-course meal provided by FF Tactics, but I'm always happy for more food with this particular flavor.
But something I love about Ender Lilies is that you can finish the game after the Stockade. If the goal is to travel from the left end of the map to the right end of the map, you can do that and then just leave! The "Ending A" is very sweet...
...but then if you go back and keep going deeper, there's more wizard science. The best sort of wizard science! by which I mean wizard science gone horribly wrong.
Anyway I also aspire to become an ancient magical sword ghost.