I know, I know, a bit late to comment on this one, but like... I got unreasonably frustrated at trying to play Henry Hatsworth, and my posts in the thread when lead aloud sound like Trump-level eclectic rambling.
I've had time to gather my thoughts a little bit better than I did when I was shutting my 3DS off in anger and flying to the forum to let the raw salt flow. Really, that's the key ingredient that I feel Hatsworth is missing.
Flow.
Henry's jump arch is protracted and floaty. his movement speed is plodding. most of his melee attacks and even some of his ranged attacks seem to lock him into animations. he doesn't feel agile, and that becomes exacerbated by tea time, a mech that makes the jumping even floatier and makes Henry Hatsworth an invincible but unwieldly mess to control. If the game was better designed around this lack of pace, it could still flow well together. Mutant Mudds is a laboriously paced game where most of the enemies are more agile than your character and still, that game has a rhythm to it that was deliberate and methodical.
Henry Hatsworth's design does not support any sort of real flow to it. There are large section of level that are just "here's a bunch of small platforms with no height difference between them but they start falling when you get on them so just hold right and hit jump a bunch to win" and leaps of faith with no real mitigating factors like in games that have similar problems like Shantae on the Gameboy. That game I'm willing to forgive because there was at least an effort to properly signpost lower platforms to jump down to individually along with the float muffin item that made leaps of faith ones you could take in comfort knowing that Shantae could bounce up out of a bottomless pit a few times. Also, in that game, you'd get checkpoints every time you went through a screen transition. There's also at least one instance in Henry Hatsworth of a moving platform not coming back if you accidentally trigger it and fail to get on.
bosses are wait and dodge affairs that in addition to their difficulty, feel as if they drag on and on, especially since they posess kill room elements to give you enemies to fuel the puzzle with. It's tedious, especially considering that the enemies are at best distracting juggle fodder and at worst hyper-durable menaces wo stand at a distance hucking projectiles from behind the safety of a projectile blocking shield. sometimes this is set up so that these bullet sponge enemies camp ledges where melee attacks are ineffectual and often times you are playing the waiting game to shoot them. Even at it's most assholish, I cannot think of a single Megaman game that has ever perched a Sniper joe on your only platform forward without any room for Megaman to platform around him without facing instant death from a pit. Further, the frequency of enemy spawns in the kill rooms in The Puzzling Adventure tends to make the fights hard to handle because Hatsworth lacks the proper swiftness or effective crowd control without seriously leveraging the puzzle.
Which is the worst part of the pace-breaking thing in this game; the puzzle. I can't help but mess around with it to top off energy or clear blocks in an OCD sort of manner. Even still, as a Tetris Attack clone, it fails to keep the Panel De Pon frenetic feeling thanks to the fact that when you pause the game, the puzzle doesn't go invisible. This lets you do any of what normally would be mental gymnastics to figure out what active chains I can and cannot perform given the current state of the board.hiding power ups in there is nice and all, but overall, it's pace breaking over... y'know, picking up a power up and just getting instant use right then and there as you find it.
Mix all of this with the steep money grind to improve so many small little bits of the character in any hope that the melee or bullet damage up stuff will expedite the exploration of a normal stage, and... no. Henry Hatsworth is a disjointed mess with bad checkpointing to boot.
Topic: Episode 575: Henry Hatsworth in the Trip to the Shadow Realm (Read 3415 times)
