We found Narita Boy to be a slippy little character, happy to fall off a pixel and tumble off platforms. The platforming is okay, and there’s likely a good reason why it’s kept to a minimum. It’s here that you’ll put your newly acquired combat abilities to use, and defeating them all will allow you to progress. Occasionally, the screen will lock, stopping your progress, and you’ll be thrown into a pitched battle with waves of Stallions, the enemies of Narita Boy’s world. You move from friendly safe havens into sections that have lightweight platforming. To play it, Narita Boy lands somewhere between a Shantae game and a Castlevania. If you weren’t constantly being ripped out by the writing, all of these fantastic touches would layer on each other to create an immersive romp around a deteriorating hard drive. The CRT-stuff is so well-done that it feels like you’re playing a relic from a few decades back. All of the Quantum Meditators and Legendary Trichroma Dudes of the world are huge, looming over you, making you feel insignificant and small. You never feel comfortable wandering the world as it is oppressive, dense, and unfriendly. It captures a mood that works extremely well. It’s incredibly generic, and the sludge of gobbledygook doesn’t hide it. It’s about a hero defeating an invading baddy, gathering weirdly named keys as you go, so that you can get through even weirder named doors. Yet if you strip away all the Trifurcations and ‘Synth-sensei’s, the story is just Emperor’s New Clothes. It might seem odd to start a review by slapping Narita Boy across the wrist for its dialogue and story, when it’s an action-platformer that skirts on the edges of a Dark Souls-like, but Narita Boy is so dense with writing and character interactions that it’s in your face, all the time, and it’s so incredibly proud of itself.
It’s just a tsunami of blah-blah-blah, like reading The Silmarillion without reading Lord of the Rings first. We eventually switched off and started ignoring anything that wasn’t pointing to an objective or giving us a new ability.
Narita boy switch review series#
Not since the Halo series has a game tossed around so many proper nouns that amount to pretty much nothing (sorry, Halo fans – we still love actually playing Halo), yet wanted you to step back and marvel at its world-building. This is how it feels to play Narita Boy all the time. If the start of this review has left you bewildered, drowning in a sea of technobabble, then treat it as a warning.
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