Aquaria Playthrough Diary 5

Read on for more of my Aquaria experiences! In this exciting episode, I expound on things I like and dislike about the game, while aquiring Phat l00tz

I have started to find some treasures to put in my cave. Found a glowing (and undoubtedly cursed or otherwise infused with evil) Krotite statue, which sits balefully in a small chamber. And more pleasantly, found a giant seed that grew into a gorgeous pink garden thing. Oh yeah, and I found a blue banner from Mithalas last time I swam around there.

As an aside, I'd like to take a moment to express some of the things that I think the game is doing very well right now.

Stuff I Like:
First, I really like the sheer joy of swimming around the lush environments. I really like the various sea-beasts I get to interact with in fun ways. I really like swimming through schools of fish, or clinging to the backs of peaceful leviathans. (Take me away, magic sea turtle!)

I like the amount of variety they've managed to put in the ambient environments. I like how everyplace looks different, and how much obvious care and love went into designing all the areas for me to swim through.

Gameplay wise, I really like the sparse, intuitive interface. (With a possible exception for the menu, which vaguely annoys me for reasons I'll go into later.) The singing is great, and swimming around is easy and fun.

I really like the feeling of exploration. I feel like I can go most anywhere and that there is always a new horizon waiting to be crossed.

I also like the concept of Naija's cave. I've seen it done before, (Suikoden, for example, or Skies of Arcadia or Breath of Fire 2) but the concept of a player base that grows as you adventure is a compelling one. I look forward to seeing how it looks by the end of the game. (Although a minor complaint - I wish I was finding more stuff that actually had a use besides decoration. Decoration is neat, but feeling like you're outfitting a hideout with new verbs is neater.)

I find myself really liking the cooking system here, as well. The idea of recipies that are general is a good one. I like the idea of “any meat + leaf”, and letting you pick whatever you want that is a meat for the first part. The “2 in the field, 3 at a kitchen” rule is nice too. This is one of the nicest crafting systems I've seen in a while and I enjoy it a lot.

Stuff I Dislike:
Things I dislike have to start with the menu. I find it difficult and counter-intuitive in places. Also, dragging food onto Naija's mouth is a little too “cutesy”, and not being able to have the recipe menu up while cooking just feels like an impossible oversight.

I also feel like, while the environments are nice, sometimes I wish they had more “meat”. The fact that swimming and attacking are so easy sometimes works against the game, since getting from point A to point B often just involves swimming in the same direction for a long time, possibly launching homing bullets. And while it's awfully pretty, if you've seen it before, it starts to get old. It's obvious that the designers wanted to address this at least somewhat, since they included the magic warp turtles, but still it feels annoying sometimes

Compounding this issue is that there is a lot of space. There's just a lot of places to go. And while a small percentage of them have new or neat things in them, a lot of them are just there. They do add a nice sense of scope, but they also sometimes feel like a grind to go through. “Oh, ANOTHER lush blue room full of fish to swim to the other end of. Ho hum.”

I realize that I sound inconsistent here. I love the feeling of exploration and space, but feel that the spaces are too big. I think the issue is that they are fun while swimming through the first time, but after that, repeated exposure makes them start to wear thin. And this is a dangerous game for them to get into, since creating a constant stream of new content takes a lot longer for them to make than it does for me to experience.


Back to gameplay:
Anyway, back to today's experiences:

Back in the kelp forest, found a big eel thing I could swim past as a tiny fish, but it lead to a dark cave that I couldn't see much in. All that I found were weird little leaches that for some reason slowly GAVE me health. Still not sure how those worked. But they glowed blue while doing it, so I assume it was intentional.

Naija mused that this place was big, and she was worried she might go feral in it. I guess that's something you worry about when you live in the ocean, maybe? Not sure, but it did amuse me a little.

The leafy sea dragon flew by bombarding me with fire again, but the shield spell let me mostly ignore him, even though he is fairly disconcerting.

I found some sea-slugs with spines though, that feel just downright artful. They are spiky, but they move when you sing their color. And the first batch is positioned next to a bunch of enemies that shoot lots of projectiles. (sea urchins, it looks like, although they remind me of the little crawly things from metroid) And the first batch is colored so that if you sing the shield song, they'll move. Well done! I actually had noticed they moved before I cast shield, but when I renewed my shield later I found myself very impressed with this as a method of tricking the user into discovering a mechanic. Very nice, Bit-Blot! Very nice indeed!

Later, a shark ate me, and I stopped to go play City of Heroes with some friends! Some days you eat the shark, and some days it eats you, I guess.