The Legend of Mulida
Old school, 8-bit Zelda. It's like a refreshing glass of cold lemonade on a warm day. Simple graphics, easy-to-learn gameplay, and great characters keep you returning to it again and again. With this in mind, many developers have designed fitting odes to this classic, but none quite like Nora Shishi of Noragames, with his latest side-scrolling Flixel offering, The Legend of Mulida.
When you first start this game with its familiar pixel art, you immediately notice something is amiss. Yes, as usual it's dangerous to go alone, but this time around there's no sword for you. Instead, you find yourself dropped in a world that feels like Super Mario Bros., grabbing powerups while dodging endless waves of the very swords you felt entitled to. Strangest of all is the control scheme, which requires you to move your character left and right with the mouse (your character follows the cursor) while clicking to jump. Some players will immediately decry this as unnecessarily difficult, but those who can make it to the end despite the pokey controls will be rewarded with a bonus quest containing more robust gameplay and some new surprises.
The Legend of Mulida is a game with classic charm, a nice amount of challenge, and old-school fun. The graphics, while not an exact pixel reproduction of Nintendo's masterpiece, effectively evokes the past while you play. Your sense of nostalgia gets further heightened by chip-tune melodies that loop in your ears, accompanied by familiar sound effects. Yes, gameplay is short, and I agree that getting the hang of the mouse control is tricky, but I urge you to play through the game with it in order to unlock the second quest and the surprises that await. All told, with The Legend of Mulida, Noragames taps into the essence of a classic title and gives you something fun and different to try on your next break. So, brave adventurer, why not click the Link and give it a try?
Ugh, if you don't get through on the first time the power ups disappear, so there really isn't a point to having "Lives".
Also I kept clicking out of the REALLY small screen.
Worst control scheme ever!
Ok, somehow the game glitched and I got to the second quest, until I refreshed the game. The quests seem reversed.....The first one is MUCH harder and more obnoxious. I would have preferred to have played the second one first, as it is more attuned to a web-game.
Right now it's just too difficult. "Play through hell and rage-quit multiple times, but if you are stubborn enough to curse your way though the first part, only then will we give you the actual FUN part of the game.
MisterThou, that's because the powerups are permanent. On your second life, your heart meter is extended by the number of heart containers collected in the previous life.
(1) Yes, the control scheme is lousy. Keyboard controls would improve this game greatly.
(2) At MisterThou points out, it appears that the health bonuses disappear after your first life. This must be a bug of some sort.
(3) No checkpoints? Really?!?
This is a better game than I at first thought. As the comments above demonstrate, the designer would have been better off making one thing more clear:
The collectible hearts do not refill your life force. Rather, they grant you an additional (and already-filled) life container.
This is why the hearts you have already collected are missing on subsequent play-throughs (until you run out of lives). You have already been granted their power! You've started off with that many additional heart containers!
This makes for a somewhat more nuanced risk/reward system. It might be worth getting hit a few times during an early life in order to grab some of those trickier to obtain heart containers. Then on a later life, you'll be able withstand more damage.
Once I realized this, I got to the princess (but dies just before touching her!) on the subsequent play-through.
This game is the pinnacle of frustration, if you ask me.
Hm. So this really is like hot lemonade on a warm day -- the last thing you might possibly want.
Seriously. Go back and reread the second sentence of the review. Who makes hot lemonade?
Wait, the game is a platformer? The screenshot deceives!
Went back to this after doing some work and got through to the princess on the first try.
My only complaint now: if you close the window and come back, it doesn't remember that you've already completed the first quest.
Wow this is infuriating. I'm on my 3rd laptop; I've tossed the other two across the room.
I don't get the multiple people complaining about the disappearing powerups. Why would you want to have to collect them again? How much MORE frustrating would that be?
This second quest better be friggin amazing.
God that was frustrating.
This was pretty rough. I agree that the controls (if you could call it that) were counter-intuitive, and at least for me glitchy- it kept randomly pausing for me and the volume control wouldn't work.
And I don't understand the world: why do the swords fly unaffected through everything except the character? You can't find shelter under blocks, you can only get knocked around.
Interesting idea, but the execution left a bit to be desired.
Second quest, not too bad!
In hindsight, not sure if it was worth it though. They should really separate the two games. Or change the order.
It gets a WHOLE lot more bearable if you manually zoom your window in. Simply having a larger game screen makes it less frustrating.
You realise there's an option to have the game bigger, makes it a lot easier.
Making the game window triple size made it a lot easier.
Because all the powerups are at the beginning, In general the first 30 seconds defines your game, so if you don't get all the powerups on your first life just reset.
I also found a trick for second quest.
The boots let you double jump, so you can run along the top of the Noragames letters and the swords don't often hit you.
I did NOT realize that...
If I resize, do I have to start over?
I'm not exactly sure what happened, but i think i finished it.
Don't touch the mouse, use asdw and youn instant win. After this, the game restart with keyboard controls
I then died 3-4 times and it told me i finished the game. Again, no clue how did that, didn't even get to the second hearth.
Yeah, there's totally a cheat combo. I'll bet the designer figured no one would ever guess that, but I was just trying to figure out how to use my sword! Still, useful for starting again later on level 2 if you've already beaten level 1 and don't want to do it again...
Hold down A, S and D at the same time to beat either level instantly.
The game is interesting - harder than I am willing to keep trying at the moment, but still cool. (I like the difficulty of each run-through; I wish you had more lives though). I get that the mouse controls are meant to be hard, but I do wish standing still was easier. Maybe if the middle third of the screen meant stand still, or at least not just the tiny bit slightly off-center of where it looks to me like it should be. :D
I also would really appreciate it if there were occasional blocks that the swords couldn't go through, just to let me catch my breath - and practice with my sword.
The latter of which wouldn't be as important if my biggest wish were granted: an explanation of the items and controls. If every time you got an item it popped up a screen that paused the game and told you what that item did for you and how... oh, so much better! (The first heart should do this too).
Items I know...
I know that the hearts are permanent.
I don't know what that face does for you.
I know the sword works by pressing down.
I know the shield means you aren't injured by swords you jump into with the shield - although they knock you back.
I have no idea what the tunic does for you - possibly lets you get hurt less by each hit, although the game is too frantic to watch carefully for that.
I know the boots allow double jump.
Oh, and another suggestion - make x2 or x3 screen the default, as a large portion of the people who gave up right away were probably turned off by how much harder a mouse-based game is on a tiny screen.
Cheers!
Face = extra life
Got to the end, then somehow goofed up the final jump >_<
Then got mad at the "with 16 health you won't die normally unless you're an idiot, but if you mess up any of your jumps thanks to bad luck then you're DEAD." mentality.
Found the Sonic-style death rather amusing, though.
And the tunic means you only lose half a heart instead of a full heart.
Hmmm... "Murida"...
Some Japanese vocabulary:
"Muri": excessively difficult; impossible
"Da": (it) is
I agree to the "worst control scheme ever" comment.
It's not enough that it artificially makes the game harder then it should be, it's the fact that it's horribly easy to click outside the screen - I did it five-six times in the first game alone. And ok, the game mercifully pauses when you do that, but it brakes your concentration completely and makes playing it that much more frustrating.
All in all, me hate.
Also, the random nature is infuriating. You can't control how high you jump, and whenever the level forces you to move at the upper portion of the screen whenever you jump it's pure luck whether you will get hit or not. It's somewhat akin to playing a shmup in which the game forces you to keep your ship stuck on the top of the screen. Not fun.
The game does have a slightly addictive nature, I'll give it that. But it still is crap.
"Murida" literally means "impossible", so I'm not surprised a lot of you are frustrated. Sounds like that's the whole point of the game.
Well you can make a game hard by making it challenging with a steep learning curve, and you can make it hard by putting in sucky controls. Guess which takes actual effort and creative thinking.
Imagine playing Super Mario Bros with gloves on. Having fun?
depends. boxing gloves or normal?
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