Game Review: ケイデンス・オブ・ハイラル: クリプト・オブ・ネクロダンサー feat. ゼルダの伝説
2024-Aug-31, Saturday 21:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
A while ago, I read about a game called Crypt of the NecroDancer on Rock Paper Shotgun (of course), and it sounded intriguing. A rhythm-based roguelike, with all of the base characteristics of a roguelike but with the important caveat that you have to move on the beat or you lose your turn. It's like an inverse Superhot, "the smash-hit FPS where time moves only when you move," where the beat moves even if you do not move and so if you don't move you lose. That came out in most of the reviews, which tended to describe it as punishingly hard even for people who had beaten Angband or Nethack--which makes sense, because those games do not require fast reflexes--so I skipped it. Years later though, I heard that the same people had teamed up with Nintendo to make a game they called Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda, which sure is a title, and I heard that it was much easier than the brutal difficulty of Crypt of the NecroDancer. And hey, I am trying to play all the Legend of Zelda games, even the spin-offs and non-canon ones. Time for some beats.
The title is just a transliteration of the English title.
At last, the Legend of ZELDA.
When you start the game, you are playing Cadence and you are isekaied to Hyrule. Like some kind of Cadence...of Hyrule...get it? Get it? Anyway, this lasts a very short amount of time. You do a quick tutorial about moving on the beat, attacking, and items, and then you find Zelda and Link both asleep together and get to choose one of them and the other, and Cadence and the character you don't pick both vanish off somewhere.
I was not expecting this. It's a consistent joke that the Legend of Zelda never has playable Zelda--see all the jokes about how Echoes of Wisdom, which has Zelda as the protagonist, should have been called "The Legend of Link"--so when I saw that I could pick Zelda, of course I did. This has very little gameplay effect, since both Link and Zelda use equipment for most of their capabilities, but each of them does have different special abilities. Link can do a spin attack and can raise his shield to block projectiles, and Zelda can cast Nayru's Love to put a shield around herself or Din's Fire to hit enemies at a distance. I never once got Nayru's Love to work, probably because my timing was off, but Din's Fire is basically a portable bomb that you can control, so as long as I was far enough away from enemies I could fire it off and kill entire groups...a couple times. The magic meter is not very large and a lot of abilities are competing for it, but Legend of Zelda never gives you the feeling of playing a wizard, so it was nice for those few moments.
Once you pick your character, you're released onto the overworld near Hyrule Castle and then set free to explore. Much like the original Legend of Zelda, it's up to you to find out where to go, though there is a fortune teller you can talk to who will point out the four dungeons with the magical instruments that you need to get past the seal locking off Hyrule Castle. Everything in between, you're on your own, and especially because of the biggest difference from every other Legend of Zelda game out there--the layout is randomly generated.
It's like some kind of fire temple
That's right. Cadence of Hyrule has an innate randomizer.
I had no idea this was the case until I went to the first dungeon, died, respawned, went back and the dungeon had a completely different layout, with different enemies, different rooms, etc. This was pretty jarring because one of the single most-talked-about elements of the Legend of Zelda games are the hand-crafted dungeons with puzzles that require looking through the environments or using particular weapons or items. The lack of those dungeons was one of the most-criticized elements of Breath of the Wild! On the other hand, the popularity of the Link to the Past randomizer shows that there's a big audience for randomness in a Zelda game, but on the third hand those dungeons are still handcrafted even if you find random items in random places.
Anyway, the dungeons and items are why I gave this post the roguelike tag. There is a bewildering variety of random items, though they mostly fall into several categories. There are shovels to dig out dirt tiles, there are torches that provide light to varying degrees--the torch of wisdom shows what items are inside walls and chests, glass torches light almost the entire screen but break immediately on taking damage, and so on--there are rings of protection or charisma or blasting, there are flails and dagges and spears, each with their own capabilities. Spears can target enemies two squares away, flails hit in a knight formation (forward and to the side), swords hit enemies diagonally as you sweep them in arc, and you have to keep each of their capabilities in mind as you're moving to the beat. I ended up going with spears most of the time in the overworld because there was plenty of room to dance away from enemies, dashing in to strike and then retreating, and letting the enemies group up so I could hit them with Din's Fire. In dungeons that wasn't possible because the room and corridor design was too constrained, but I was used to using spears, so the end results was mostly that I died.
There was a lot of death. While you lose most of your gear on death except weapons and heart container upgrades, you can collect diamonds for defeating every enemy on a screen and then spend those diamonds at a shop that appears on death to gain a few more upgrades before you throw yourself back into the fray. But while unlike other Legend of Zelda games enemies do not normally respawn, like Dark Souls dying triggers a full map reset--non-boss treasure chests are refilled, enemies respawn, and the entire world resets. Unlike Dark Souls, though, you also have rupees that you can grind and spend at shops around the map, so there's none of Dark Souls' tension of when to use a bonfire.
It's kind of an odd design decision because it means that hurling yourself at a challenge over and over again is a fine way to clear it. Even if you have a thousand rupees they all vanish on death and you can't get them back, so after you die once, dying fifty more times doesn't cost you anything. And spoiler, that's what I did on one of the bosses.
Moving to the beat.
The tension in Cadence of Hyrule instead is between the handcrafted elements of the Legend of Zelda and the randomized roguelike of Crypt of the NecroDancer. The randomizer is very popular but it doesn't change the fundamental mechancs of Legend of Zelda. You still have temples you need to clear, an overworld, collecting the various items, and so on. Cadence of Hyrule has a randomized overworld--partway through when trying to figure something out I learned that I could get the power glove in the Gerudo Village, but I also learned that it's impossible to determine where Gerudo Village was because it's in a random location. I'd repeatedly clear some overworld map square and find a classic Zelda item in a chest that appeared like the bow or the ice rod, things that would have been dungeon loot in other games. I never found the deku leaf or the pegasus anklet or the fire rod and did not even know they were in the game until I checked the wiki right now. I only found two bottles. The end result of this is that many puzzles have multiple solutions--maybe you can throw a block and climb on it, maybe you can hookshot over to a neighboring ledge, or maybe you can freeze a monster and push them into the water to make a path. But the end result of that is that no puzzles are handcrafted. They can't be, because the game cannot assume that you have any particular item when you reach a particular area.
Also, remember that everything is happening on a beat, so you don't get any time to think. Legend of Zelda can be frantic at some points, but Cadence of Hyrule is frantic basically any moment that enemies are on the screen. This comes to a head in boss battles, especially in the latter part of the game. I breezed through most of the early game, dying a few times early on but defeating the first two bosses on the first try, but when I got to the third boss I was dying dozens of times and kept having to leave to go put fairies in bottles (that timeless Zelda tradition) to get more hearts to finish it off. When I went online to figure out what was going on, it turns out each boss has two separate versions depending on when in the game you fight them. The first two bosses, whichever those are, are on easy mode and the second two are on hard mode. I learned this from a post where someone was like "I'm fighting Gleeokenspiel and keep dying, I'm watching videos and other people aren't having nearly as much trouble" and the replies were like "Are its eyes red?"
After you beat four bosses, the game goes full Crypt of the NecroDancer as you have a five-level random dungeon that you have to pass entirely in a single run in order to move on to the secret final location and that is where I understood why people talked about NecroDancer being so difficult. The earlier dungeons with bosses were smaller, with breaks where you could take a moment to breathe, flip a switch, and then head into the next area of the dungeon. This final dungeon was continuous and unrelenting, much like the NecroDancer, and I tried a couple dozen times to get through, occasionally reaching the final floor but not beating it, so I did the thing I never thought I would do.
I can see why they didn't try to translate this one.
I activated no-beat mode.
I've talked repeatedly about staying on the beat, about having to move in time, about losing your turns if you take too long to decide what to do, and that is all true but I should also mention that you don't have to do that. The game includes a mechanic called ノービートモード ("No Beat Mode", Eng: "Fixed-Beat Mode") where just like Superhot, time only moves when you move. This turns Cadence of Hyrule into more of a traditional turn-based roguelike affair. It also makes the game significantly easier--I was able to clear that five-floor dungeon the first try once timing the beat was no longer a consideration--so that's an important factor to remember. Cadence of Hyrule doesn't have nearly as many mechanics as a traditional roguelike, and especially not as many gotcha mechanics as something like Angband ("It breathes on you! You die...). Monsters generally change appearance to warn you that they're going to attack so you can get out of the way, and if you can pause and look at all monsters to pick the most optimal tile to jump to, easily seeing everyone who's going to attack, the whole reflex aspect just vanishes.
I mean, I'm in my forties and while I used to pwn n00bs in Unreal Tournament matches, my reflexes are not what they once were. A whole room of enemies chasing me was a lot.
There were a lot of DLC characters you could play, including Octavo--the nominal enemy, at least until he summons Ganon like they all do--Cadence, and a whole separate campaign where you play Skull Kid, but while I bet the gameplay changes I can't imagine the story does. Cadence of Hyrule barely has a story as it is. I played it in Japanese and I did way more reading of item names and descriptions trying to figure out which ring was better than I did reading character dialogue. Looking it up, it looks like Skull Kid uses a bunch of masks that determines his attacks and the whole game takes place in the future world that you reach after the end-game dungeon. If you were really into the move-on-the-beat mechanic, well, there's more game to play, but I had enough.
By our powers combined.
I'm not entirely sure who this game is for. Like I mentioned above, the draw of Legend of Zelda games for so many people is their handcrafted nature, and Cadence of Hyrule deliberately avoids that to the point that the entire overworld is randomized. It's not much harder than a standard Zelda game until the dungeon before the final boss, which is punishingly difficult and liable to drive away Zelda players who picked the game up. And on the other hand, the overworld is much easier to the point that anyone who liked how frantic NecroDancer is will probably find Cadence extremely easy. People complained about the lack of story in Breath of the Wild and Cadence of Hyrule has even less to the point that you can beat the game without even discovering big chunks of it--while writing this review I learned that there's a Deku village filled with Deku Nuts that I never found. Obviously, they're not critical to the story, but really, no one is.
The real reason to play this game is the music and the spritework. They're big and lush, bop to the beat, and what a beat it is. If you don't like roguelikes, you can get nearly everything great from the game just by listening to the soundtrack.
The title is just a transliteration of the English title.
At last, the Legend of ZELDA.
When you start the game, you are playing Cadence and you are isekaied to Hyrule. Like some kind of Cadence...of Hyrule...get it? Get it? Anyway, this lasts a very short amount of time. You do a quick tutorial about moving on the beat, attacking, and items, and then you find Zelda and Link both asleep together and get to choose one of them and the other, and Cadence and the character you don't pick both vanish off somewhere.
I was not expecting this. It's a consistent joke that the Legend of Zelda never has playable Zelda--see all the jokes about how Echoes of Wisdom, which has Zelda as the protagonist, should have been called "The Legend of Link"--so when I saw that I could pick Zelda, of course I did. This has very little gameplay effect, since both Link and Zelda use equipment for most of their capabilities, but each of them does have different special abilities. Link can do a spin attack and can raise his shield to block projectiles, and Zelda can cast Nayru's Love to put a shield around herself or Din's Fire to hit enemies at a distance. I never once got Nayru's Love to work, probably because my timing was off, but Din's Fire is basically a portable bomb that you can control, so as long as I was far enough away from enemies I could fire it off and kill entire groups...a couple times. The magic meter is not very large and a lot of abilities are competing for it, but Legend of Zelda never gives you the feeling of playing a wizard, so it was nice for those few moments.
Once you pick your character, you're released onto the overworld near Hyrule Castle and then set free to explore. Much like the original Legend of Zelda, it's up to you to find out where to go, though there is a fortune teller you can talk to who will point out the four dungeons with the magical instruments that you need to get past the seal locking off Hyrule Castle. Everything in between, you're on your own, and especially because of the biggest difference from every other Legend of Zelda game out there--the layout is randomly generated.
It's like some kind of fire temple
That's right. Cadence of Hyrule has an innate randomizer.
I had no idea this was the case until I went to the first dungeon, died, respawned, went back and the dungeon had a completely different layout, with different enemies, different rooms, etc. This was pretty jarring because one of the single most-talked-about elements of the Legend of Zelda games are the hand-crafted dungeons with puzzles that require looking through the environments or using particular weapons or items. The lack of those dungeons was one of the most-criticized elements of Breath of the Wild! On the other hand, the popularity of the Link to the Past randomizer shows that there's a big audience for randomness in a Zelda game, but on the third hand those dungeons are still handcrafted even if you find random items in random places.
Anyway, the dungeons and items are why I gave this post the roguelike tag. There is a bewildering variety of random items, though they mostly fall into several categories. There are shovels to dig out dirt tiles, there are torches that provide light to varying degrees--the torch of wisdom shows what items are inside walls and chests, glass torches light almost the entire screen but break immediately on taking damage, and so on--there are rings of protection or charisma or blasting, there are flails and dagges and spears, each with their own capabilities. Spears can target enemies two squares away, flails hit in a knight formation (forward and to the side), swords hit enemies diagonally as you sweep them in arc, and you have to keep each of their capabilities in mind as you're moving to the beat. I ended up going with spears most of the time in the overworld because there was plenty of room to dance away from enemies, dashing in to strike and then retreating, and letting the enemies group up so I could hit them with Din's Fire. In dungeons that wasn't possible because the room and corridor design was too constrained, but I was used to using spears, so the end results was mostly that I died.
There was a lot of death. While you lose most of your gear on death except weapons and heart container upgrades, you can collect diamonds for defeating every enemy on a screen and then spend those diamonds at a shop that appears on death to gain a few more upgrades before you throw yourself back into the fray. But while unlike other Legend of Zelda games enemies do not normally respawn, like Dark Souls dying triggers a full map reset--non-boss treasure chests are refilled, enemies respawn, and the entire world resets. Unlike Dark Souls, though, you also have rupees that you can grind and spend at shops around the map, so there's none of Dark Souls' tension of when to use a bonfire.
It's kind of an odd design decision because it means that hurling yourself at a challenge over and over again is a fine way to clear it. Even if you have a thousand rupees they all vanish on death and you can't get them back, so after you die once, dying fifty more times doesn't cost you anything. And spoiler, that's what I did on one of the bosses.
Moving to the beat.
The tension in Cadence of Hyrule instead is between the handcrafted elements of the Legend of Zelda and the randomized roguelike of Crypt of the NecroDancer. The randomizer is very popular but it doesn't change the fundamental mechancs of Legend of Zelda. You still have temples you need to clear, an overworld, collecting the various items, and so on. Cadence of Hyrule has a randomized overworld--partway through when trying to figure something out I learned that I could get the power glove in the Gerudo Village, but I also learned that it's impossible to determine where Gerudo Village was because it's in a random location. I'd repeatedly clear some overworld map square and find a classic Zelda item in a chest that appeared like the bow or the ice rod, things that would have been dungeon loot in other games. I never found the deku leaf or the pegasus anklet or the fire rod and did not even know they were in the game until I checked the wiki right now. I only found two bottles. The end result of this is that many puzzles have multiple solutions--maybe you can throw a block and climb on it, maybe you can hookshot over to a neighboring ledge, or maybe you can freeze a monster and push them into the water to make a path. But the end result of that is that no puzzles are handcrafted. They can't be, because the game cannot assume that you have any particular item when you reach a particular area.
Also, remember that everything is happening on a beat, so you don't get any time to think. Legend of Zelda can be frantic at some points, but Cadence of Hyrule is frantic basically any moment that enemies are on the screen. This comes to a head in boss battles, especially in the latter part of the game. I breezed through most of the early game, dying a few times early on but defeating the first two bosses on the first try, but when I got to the third boss I was dying dozens of times and kept having to leave to go put fairies in bottles (that timeless Zelda tradition) to get more hearts to finish it off. When I went online to figure out what was going on, it turns out each boss has two separate versions depending on when in the game you fight them. The first two bosses, whichever those are, are on easy mode and the second two are on hard mode. I learned this from a post where someone was like "I'm fighting Gleeokenspiel and keep dying, I'm watching videos and other people aren't having nearly as much trouble" and the replies were like "Are its eyes red?"
After you beat four bosses, the game goes full Crypt of the NecroDancer as you have a five-level random dungeon that you have to pass entirely in a single run in order to move on to the secret final location and that is where I understood why people talked about NecroDancer being so difficult. The earlier dungeons with bosses were smaller, with breaks where you could take a moment to breathe, flip a switch, and then head into the next area of the dungeon. This final dungeon was continuous and unrelenting, much like the NecroDancer, and I tried a couple dozen times to get through, occasionally reaching the final floor but not beating it, so I did the thing I never thought I would do.
I can see why they didn't try to translate this one.
I activated no-beat mode.
I've talked repeatedly about staying on the beat, about having to move in time, about losing your turns if you take too long to decide what to do, and that is all true but I should also mention that you don't have to do that. The game includes a mechanic called ノービートモード ("No Beat Mode", Eng: "Fixed-Beat Mode") where just like Superhot, time only moves when you move. This turns Cadence of Hyrule into more of a traditional turn-based roguelike affair. It also makes the game significantly easier--I was able to clear that five-floor dungeon the first try once timing the beat was no longer a consideration--so that's an important factor to remember. Cadence of Hyrule doesn't have nearly as many mechanics as a traditional roguelike, and especially not as many gotcha mechanics as something like Angband ("It breathes on you! You die...). Monsters generally change appearance to warn you that they're going to attack so you can get out of the way, and if you can pause and look at all monsters to pick the most optimal tile to jump to, easily seeing everyone who's going to attack, the whole reflex aspect just vanishes.
I mean, I'm in my forties and while I used to pwn n00bs in Unreal Tournament matches, my reflexes are not what they once were. A whole room of enemies chasing me was a lot.
There were a lot of DLC characters you could play, including Octavo--the nominal enemy, at least until he summons Ganon like they all do--Cadence, and a whole separate campaign where you play Skull Kid, but while I bet the gameplay changes I can't imagine the story does. Cadence of Hyrule barely has a story as it is. I played it in Japanese and I did way more reading of item names and descriptions trying to figure out which ring was better than I did reading character dialogue. Looking it up, it looks like Skull Kid uses a bunch of masks that determines his attacks and the whole game takes place in the future world that you reach after the end-game dungeon. If you were really into the move-on-the-beat mechanic, well, there's more game to play, but I had enough.
By our powers combined.
I'm not entirely sure who this game is for. Like I mentioned above, the draw of Legend of Zelda games for so many people is their handcrafted nature, and Cadence of Hyrule deliberately avoids that to the point that the entire overworld is randomized. It's not much harder than a standard Zelda game until the dungeon before the final boss, which is punishingly difficult and liable to drive away Zelda players who picked the game up. And on the other hand, the overworld is much easier to the point that anyone who liked how frantic NecroDancer is will probably find Cadence extremely easy. People complained about the lack of story in Breath of the Wild and Cadence of Hyrule has even less to the point that you can beat the game without even discovering big chunks of it--while writing this review I learned that there's a Deku village filled with Deku Nuts that I never found. Obviously, they're not critical to the story, but really, no one is.
The real reason to play this game is the music and the spritework. They're big and lush, bop to the beat, and what a beat it is. If you don't like roguelikes, you can get nearly everything great from the game just by listening to the soundtrack.
