Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

What if the people who made the Zelda CD-i games had ever played a video game before instead of space aliens who once probed a gamer? What if the animations were done by talented people purposefully being weird instead of make-a-wish kids forced to work grueling hours for pennies? What if the voice actors were good at their jobs and were encouraged to be lunatics instead of robots learning about human emotion for the first time? Arzette is what.

The existence of this game is of course, a meme. It's heavily inspired by and takes many cues from the infamously awful Phillips CDI Zelda games. Expect Hotel Mario references thrown at you too. If none of this makes sense to you, then you probably aren't going to enjoy it because the whole game pretty much hinges on this one joke, what if "Wand of Gamelon" but with legally distinct stand-in characters? The one thing they thankfully tried not to copy accurately is the gameplay, much more closely resembling a modern Metroidvania now. That's pretty much why I give it a thumbs up, they took the entertaining aspects of the old and left the frustrating and dated elements behind. The big draw, of course, are the animated cutscenes for almost every NPC interaction. These are a mixed bag, a lot of them do look like they belong in Wand of Gamelon with the strange way characters move, the unsettling facial expressions and camera zooming. But at the same time, a lot of them feel unfinished like you're watching a storyboard, with a much lower frame count and far more rigid "on-model" designs. The voice acting is also hit and miss, the consistency in quality is all over the place. A mix of actors that sound too good to be here, some that perfectly capture the strange delivery and inflections of those old Zelda games, and some that sound like people who have never spoken into a microphone in their life. But all in all, it's alright, a little on the short side but it's paced in such a way that you get a decent feeling of making progress and being rewarded for exploring, with secrets that aren't too cryptic. It's also very easy, there isn't much in the way of challenge. Just a harmless bit of fun, if you're in on the joke.

So a friend of mine recommended this game, despite it's inspiration, and MAN, was I so happy I picked this up!. I even 100% a profile! It's a short experience, and it's satisfying to complete. My only complaint is how difficult it is to track things down, especially with no really good guide online, but otherwise I don't have too much complaints