Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

It’s always a disappointment when a sequel doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, and unfortunately that’s what Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is, an incredibly well-polished but ultimately less interesting follow-up to Ender Lilies that, while still beautiful to watch an play, failed to draw me into its steampunk world. The game is set decades after the previous instalment and follows a completely new set of characters. We play as Lilac, an attuner, part of a caste that can purify artificial life forms called homunculi who have been corrupted by the mists. Lilac calls upon the homunculi she has purified to fight in her place, from the enigmatic Nola to the dual pistol-wielding Yolvan. The environments, characters, and animations are still absolutely breathtaking, with most areas filled with colour and detail. The steampunk aesthetic is used to good effect, with towering factory chimneys, robot assembly lines, and art-deco cities. The game is much more populated this time around too, with dozens of NPCs to interact with, including a handful that will send you out on fetch quests. Unfortunately for me, Lilac and the steampunk biomes just didn’t hit the same way as Ender Lilies. Lily was portrayed as an incredibly vulnerable protagonist and that vulnerability made me care for the character. Watching her stumble and fall when she tried to dodge or flinch every time one of her spirits attacked was heart-wrenching. Lilac still carries some of that innocence, but is way more aggressive and confident. I think I also preferred the general atmosphere of the first game, that was steeped in a dark fantasy melancholia, its biomes ruined remnants of towns destroyed by the Blight. Much like Hollow Knight or Blasphemous, this tragic decrepitude gave a sense of urgency to our protagonist’s quest, a harbinger of things to come if we failed. Combat is still fun and challenging in Ender Magnolia, possible more challenging than in the first game, but I’m not sure some of the changes developers Adglobe & Livewire have implemented really work. I enjoyed hunting down minibosses in Ender Lilies to unlock their spirits, but now you only unlock eight homunculi, and the minibosses you defeat drop upgrade materials. It’s a subtle change, but in my opinion it sucks some of the fun out of collecting new attacks and abilities. Speaking of abilities, you can now equip four instead of three, and while that didn’t bother me initially, I’ll admit it did become a bit finicky towards the end of the game. I ended up gravitating towards a ranged build, with two ranged homunculi, a AoE turret, and a melee attack. For the ranged homunculi to be effective you have to hold down two buttons constantly all while moving, jumping and dodging (so that’s two more buttons). Then the AoE turret is another button, and the melee attack another, for a total of six buttons. If that wasn’t enough, you’ll also need to keep a finger free for your heals, and another couple of fingers to input the combo for your powerful SP attacks once the relative gauge is filled. It’s all a bit frantic and doesn’t always work as well as it should. Maybe it’s just because I’m old and dumb, but on some of the harder late game boss fights I lost once or twice due to not being able to dodge out the way fast enough because my finger was on another button. I’m probably in the minority here, but I think I preferred the slower, more melee-focussed combat of Ender Lilies. Luckily, while the game may falter slightly in its combat, its traversal and exploration are still just as satisfying as before. You unlock a slew of traversal abilities from the get-go, including fast travel, and the map is excellent and clueing you in on unfound pathways and collectibles. Ender Magnolia is larger than the first game too, with several optional zones and bosses you’ll have to fight your way through if you’re gunning for the true ending. Now I should be clear: Ender Magnolia is by no means a bad game, nor a bad soulsvania. It’s fantastic environments, beautiful animations and breezy exploration makes it easy for me to recommend. I wasn’t quite as enamoured with the combat and steampunk atmosphere, but fans of challenging boss battles will still find a lot to like here.

After finishing up both Ender Lilies and Ender Magnolia at 100%, I thought I would give Magnolia a review here to sum up my thoughts. Generally speaking, I think Magnolia is a better game than Lilies, albeit there are a couple of things it doesn't do quote as well as its predecessor. Starting off with the few negatives (or rather, something that it just doesn't live up to compared to Lilies), I think the atmosphere is not quite as good as the first game. While the steampunk-fantasy hybrid world it tries to sell is quite beautiful in its backgrounds, it doesn't feel as immersive as the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is in Lilies. That being said, it's still a really nice setting, it just had the disadvantage of needing to live up to what the last game had to offer. The other problem I had with the game is its attempt to actually provide some amount of narration and dialogue to the story. I think they should have kept the Dark Souls-esque exposition of the first game and not given this much dialogue to everyone. While the conversations between characters may seem nice at first, the way it's carried out feels rather flat at first, as the characters and their interactions are just not interesting whatsoever, even in the exposition that they some times offer. While the story of the game is about as good as Ender Lilies, the way it's presented through these interactions makes it feel inferior to the first game, where you were able to quietly take in the world around you and observe Lily's story. All that aside, however, as I mentioned, this game improves in a lot more aspects than it does not. Gameplay has been polished up - while you have less abilities and slots to use them in, there isn't a disproportionate number of useless abilities as there were in the first game. While the choices are more limited, surprisingly, the (worthwhile) build variety you can create feels a bit more expansive. In addtion to that, there is a lot more variety in enemies and bosses feel more dynamic than in Lilies (Particularly that disappointment of a final boss that was in Lilies) I saw some reviews mention that gameplay in Lilies is better and that just completely baffles me as gameplay is exactly where Magnolia improved the most compared to it. Exploration is probably where the game stands out the most compared to Lilies; you get to make use of all the exploration tools a lot more than you did in Lilies by the time you got them, plus level design overall has been improved dramatically, especially the mid-late game sections. I don't want to make the review too long, so to sum it up: game doesn't quite live up to the last game in terms of atmosphere and story presentation (through the use of dialogues and character interactions), but improves in pretty much all other aspects, except maybe music, which is about as good as in Liliies. If you liked the first game, absolutely play this one.

Other than the balancing being a bit strange (which is somewhat solved through custom difficulty settings), phenomenal game, it adds MANY qol features from Ender Lilies, the art and music also got stepped up. I'm also glad they didn't put items in extremely, annoyingly hidden places haha. It was a great experience, highly recommended.