OH SPELL YEA!
Beginning as a young wizard learning your trade, there is an explosion that blows a hole in the side of your school. Sending Nine Parchments across the enemy ridden world, which you must explore to track them down.
With gameplay reminiscent of the Diablo series with a twist, you aim your spells with the right joystick, then use them with the right Z button. Similar toOH SPELL YEA!
Beginning as a young wizard learning your trade, there is an explosion that blows a hole in the side of your school. Sending Nine Parchments across the enemy ridden world, which you must explore to track them down.
With gameplay reminiscent of the Diablo series with a twist, you aim your spells with the right joystick, then use them with the right Z button. Similar to many twin stick shooters. However, when in the thick of it, it doesn’t feel like a basic twin stick shooter. You rotate between your varying array of spells with the L and R buttons and they have many different uses. Some you throw by tapping RZ, then tap again to have it land in a specific spot, while others such as fireballs you tap RZ for each projectile, then for elemental beams you hold RZ while aiming.
Aside from attack style, each spell also has an elemental class. Lightning, fire, ice, or dark magic, with correspond to enemies. Fighting an ice demon, be sure to use your fireballs, because it will be immune to your ice magic. Which when enemies spawn a mixture of elemental classes you fire yourself strategically plate spinning through your tool kit of spells. When everything flows perfectly you feel like you're conducting an orchestra of magic to clear the battlefield.
As you progress you level up which provides skill points that you can spend to upgrade your skills. You find staffs which can either be used for melee damage using LZ or choose the staff with helpful perks according to your gameplay style. Along with hats which are purely visual candy, but with each parchment you find you have the choice to add one of three spells. They are added to your artillery for that current play through. Also they will be able available with newly unlocked characters in future play through as a beginning spell.
The Switching Hour
When Switching from handheld mode to docked mode playing with a pro controller, there is an issue. While the Switch console recognizes the controller change, Nine Parchments does not. To explain a little further, you can’t move your character, press pause or anything in game. But you can use the HOME button to exit, close the game, then restart with your new controller of choice. Which is the only work around for docking, as I normally play during my commute then play docked when I return home. This caused some issues as I’m still learning the progression and layout of the game and accidentally restarted my playthrough, which is a huge bummer because I was halfway through with my first cornelius run and was having a blast.
They shall not pass!
Nine Parchments was designed as a co-op and multiplayer focused game with the option for a single player game, but that is not the peak experience. However, given that a lot play in handheld mode, where you may not have access to the internet or friends willing to invest the proper amount of time into a grindy RPG. Most of my time was spent in single player mode and while the co-op and multiplayer mode is fun, it doesn’t pick me up on the level I left off when in single player mode. In fact you abandon your progress in single player playthroughs in order to play multiplayer, so if you want twenty minutes of fun multiplayer action, you have to give up on the 5 hours you've already put into your single player game. Which is quite disheartening, when you have to play through the beginning of the campaign again and again and again. I wish I could warp to worlds already cleared by a certain character in order to complete the campaign as each of them.
Nine Parchments is an addictive action RPG, that when in the zone, feels amazing. However some very serious control connection issues, that hopefully will be patched out in near future and a confusing game progression; that constantly bumps you back to square just one for trying a different game mode. Leaves me feeling torn between what I hope the game could be and what it is now. While I will keep an ear to the ground awaiting future updates, the bread and butter of Nine Parchments is so solid. Bouncing from elemental spell to elemental spell, slaying ice, fire, and lightning creatures then leveling up, collecting new spells, and unlocking new characters. This Diablo like will keep my hooked for quite a while longer.
Watch my video review on YouTube channel TheFlannelFox… Expand
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