The Clan of the Cave Bague

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was stuck in the fiendishly annoying Machine Tower. Or I was until I remembered I could whirl the whip around by holding the attack button. I also discovered an incredibly handy save point right at the top, too – one would almost think Castlevania games were designed by real gaming engineers with a talent for it

Anyhoo, Machine Tower has been dutifully explored and I thwacked the Iron Golem boss, who has to be one of the easiest Castlevania bosses ever. The Cerberus (no, not the encryption system, the three headed woofy thing) was much harder than this. So – I now have special jumpy boots to allow me to leap off walls (while resisting the temptation to go “Woohoo!” Mario style) which opens up five other areas of the map. So onwards and upwards.

Oh yes indeedy – it is c0mpl3t0rat0red! I can’t really say much about the ending without giving spoilers, but I will say that this is one of the best and more entertaining RPGs I’ve played. Sure, it’s a little (lot) on the easy side, but it’s funny and clever and never gets dull. The closing titles rolled at a little over 25 hours and everything in the story was neatly wrapped up with a huge gaping space where several sequels can fit.

Hopefully we’re seeing the beginning of a series here because the DS needs games like this – interesting RPGs that don’t stretch into a hundred hours of levelling drudgery. Top marks!

There’s no doubt at all in my mind that deKay is going to love this game. I have just, while crossing a bridge, been accosted by a dancing fruit which ran up to me, yelled “A-splode!” and ran off while a huge explosion rocked the screen. Moments later, a gang of around thirty dancing fruits rocketed past me yelling “Aiiieee!”.

Just around the corner was the universe’s most annoying hermit. Who. Only. Spoke. With. One. Or. Two. Words. At. A. Time. Meaning. I. Had. To. Initiate. About. Thirty. Conversations. To. hear. What. He. Had. To. Say. Then the obnoxious git had the cheek to call me persistant.

Anyway, I found a massive gang of dwarves, all named after various sauces, with a habit of repeating each other, who led me to a big hole which we all ran away from for no apparent reason. Then we went back to the city where the entire ensemble cast of the game has turned up to “Help Out” for interpretations of “Help Out” equating to “be really annoying.” Fortunately, king Gorgonzola of the Spiny Moles appeared with a cry of “Forsoothe!” and helpfully dug a regal tunnel into the light queen’s castle, much to the glee of all around.

So, I’m in the castle and it turns out there are actually TWO planets in the heart of the sun and I’m just about to head to the other one to kill the worm.

At last! I’m on the fabled Nova, planet of Light, in the heart of the sun where, any day now, a giant worm is going to eat the sun and give birth to a new one. Or something. That’s if the rampaging hordes of carnivorous robots don’t destroy the universe first. Or the pirates. Or the police. There’s a lot of bad guys in this game. Anyway, while on Razen, I fought a bazillion pirates and about the same number of space police. Then I fought a giant cyborg which was half Tyrannosaur and half UFO, before being insulted by a giant magical chicken (in the pay of the space police) and whisked back to where I started. Fortunately, by this point, the work on etherealising my ship had been completed and I was able to zip off to Nova.

At exactly 19 hours and 58 minutes into the game, a father and daughter were reunited at last and the final Millenium Gummy was all mine. So, without further ado, it’s back to Razen to see the dwarf engineers. It appears that they need to make my ship a bit more ethereal because I need to – well – fly it into the sun to reach Nova – the light planet – which lies in the middle.

This does not, to my mind, sound like a good plan. Anyway, things have been a little bit complicated because while waiting for the ship to be modified, the town has been invaded by both the Evil Space Police(tm) and some mad Otter Pirates. So I guess I’m going to have to fight them off or something. Anyway, the end is in sight, I think.

Earth Gummy GET! After a pretty long battle and a very poignant scene (in FMV no less) with the Stone Giant – accompanied by a rather awesome bit of synthy guitar soloing) the gummy is mine. I’ve now been summoned back to Puffoon, conveniently enough, where the final gummy awaits.

This game is really strange – it manages to retain its cuteness and just-plain-silly-ness even though there’s a pretty epic tale being woven around it. The magical system is pretty good too, if a little repetitive, with new spells and abilities still being added fairly regularly, despite all my characters being level 40+ (do they get mounts? ). It’s in the daft little details, though, that these things shine. For example, the place I’ve just been was full of these little cubey things called Pyrites. One asked if it could come with me, which prompted a yes/no dialog box. Needless to say I said yes. Then another asked me. Then another. And the requests became stranger and more obscure each time. Finally, I selected a pyrite to speak to it and the dialog box popped before it had even finished asking.

So anyway – next stop Puffoon!

….I’m mucking about with templates – things may go briefly awry.

Well, Wood Gummy GET! and Space Police boss GOT! So, without further ado it was off to Erd where, against all the odds, the plot has taken a rather surprising turn in a sinister direction. It appears that everything isn’t as random as it seemed and there’s a much broader story-arc been going on under my nose and I didn’t realise. So it looks like I’m going to have to save the universe as well as my teacher.

In my quest to find the Earth Gummy I had to fight a rather creepy “The Ring”-esque gummy girl, the details of which I won’t go into as it’ll provide nasty plot spoilers for those likely to play the game. Needless to say, the sustained cuteness made the sudden realisation of deeper things happen all the more sinister. I don’t have the Earth Gummy just yet, but I’m currently riding about on top of a stone giant (actually, I WAS riding about on it – I’m now clambering about in its innards).

Can’t recommend this game highly enough – particularly for those of you who want an RPG without the massive amount of time required to get through it. I’ve clocked about seventeen and a half hours so far – I think it’s going to be a twenty five hour game.

Right. So, I stormed an incredibly difficult to navigate pyramid (in which I kept getting lost cos I’m a bit thick, me) and kicked the bottom of the boss, so I now have two of the required millenium gummies.

I promptly headed off to Gren where the chief’s daughter is going a bit nuts and setting fire to everything. With the application, though, of copious quantities of wild magic, I managed to get them all put out. Then I went and battered some pirates only to discover that the third millenium gummy has become one with the World-Tree (just like the little book of calm did with Bill Bailey).

Well that was kinda half-expected. Technically, Magical Starsign has just jumped the shark. At about 12 hours in I thought “hang on – there can’t be much to go now because the story is almost done. But I’ve only just got a full team.” All of a sudden, I have a big long contrived “pad the game out” quest to collect five elemental gummies (yup – magical haribo) which involves visiting each of the worlds again.  It’s a deliberate “oh shit – the game’s too short – we need to pad it” mechanic but… well, it doesn’t matter. There were unexplored bits of the other worlds, and the story and characters themselves are involving enough to survive a bit of shark jumping. It’s still ACE, but I can’t help thinking that a bit of forward planning would have allowed them to weave the fetch quests into the plot a bit better.