Some Thoughts About… Itorah (Patreon)

I knew almost nothing about this game going in. It looked like a Wonder Boy style game, it had great art, and it was affordable, so that seemed like a winning combination. This game is beautiful. The art, the colors, and the lighting! The animation is nice and smooth. The music is tranquil without being boring. It tells a good story and it’s dramatic when it needs to be but funny when it needs to be. It’s lovely to just exist in this game’s world.

The bad… man, this game does not control great. Movement isn’t fluid. It’s really hard to make fine adjustments in the air. Your character keeps trying to drop down platforms when you don’t want to her to. Sometimes you just...don’t dodge when you press the button. Sometimes she grabs onto rings in the environment and other times she just falls right through them. Sometimes you bounce off bouncy things and other times you pass through them. Sometimes you can grab platforms and sometimes you fall through them. The game has a problem with your character falling through the ground. You might just pass through a moving platform, causing you to fall into a pit, and then when you respawn, your character falls through the spot you respawned on and you have to respawn again. Your health can drop very quickly through no fault of your own.

Either the tutorial for sliding on ramps is wrong or it just rarely works (I can do it when landing on the ramp from a jump but that’s it, but the tutorial just says you have to press Down+R2).

You can’t use the Dpad to move so it’s a finicky platformer and you’re trying to control it with an analogue stuck.

There’s a delay from when you press the button and when the character attacks, and if an enemy hits you, it cancels your attack. So there are a lot of cases where you press the button, you expect to have hit the enemy but it keeps moving, so it bumps into you, you try to attack again, but it bumps into you again and you take extra hits. Plus, every so often your character does a critical hit, but it’s even slower so you’re just more likely to get hit by the enemy. I never found the crits useful since you can’t control them so I just wanted a way to turn them off.

The camera doesn’t move smoothly. It’s very juttery so turning around and jumping quickly are very unpleasant due to how the camera stutters. The camera moves out ahead as you run and then moves back to your when you stop, but that means the camera is almost always in a state of moving out or coming back and since it doesn’t move smoothly, it’s bad. Real bad. Like, strain your eyes and you need to take breaks bad.

The camera is in so close that you regularly can’t see enemies you’re trying to fight, coupled with flying enemies being designed to run away off-screen when hit, or you’re doing a lot of leaps of faith because you can’t see platforms under you. If you have to give the player manual control of the camera in a 2D platformer, your camera is too close.

Almost all of the tutorial messages are broken and don’t display the buttons for your new moves. So you’ll get a new ability and then just have to press every button to figure out how to actually use it. If you get stuck in the fire dungeon, the uppercut is Up+Triangle while in the air. Would have saved a whole lot of frustration if you game could tell you that because the move’s description does not make it sound like it’s an uppercut so you don’t have any clues about what the new move does or how to activate it.

You can’t mark your map and roadblocks don’t get symbols on the map. This makes it hard to tell where you’ve been/what routes are now open to you after getting a new power to find upgrade collectibles. There isn’t a fast travel system either, so if you missed an item, well, have fun running through the entire area all over again (hint: don’t do that, it’s not worth it).

The title screen has a version number on it, but it’s not even 1.0.0. Maybe the game is just... unfinished and that’s why all the control and camera issues are here?

The upgrade system is a bit half baked. To unlock an upgrade, you need currency and a unique collectible for that type (one item can be used to either give you more healing charges or stronger healing and the other can get you more health or more stamina). However, currency isn’t an issue until you’re about two-thirds of the way through the game. The good news is that chests give you enough currency that you probably don’t really have to fight most enemies because they drop really piddly amounts of monies. The bad news is that finding chests winds up being a disappointment for most of them. Oh hey, more money, that I already have thousands of but I need some collectibles so stop giving me crystals and give me a danged feather already! But once you hit the tipping point, you suddenly find yourself having collectibles but needing thousands more currency and no way to get it outside of grinding the piddly amounts enemies drop. I finished the game several thousand monies short for the final upgrades and your typical enemy drops 2-4 money.

Itorah is what modern platformers have become, but it’s not a good one of those. It’s mostly linear since you’re being guided to a set location and if you stray too far, your path is blocked by an ability you don’t have yet, but there are still little nooks and crannies to explore that award currencies used to upgrade your character. It’s less grandiose than your Symphony of the Nights but far more interesting than your New Super Marios.

I could only play it for an hour or so a day. Any more than that and the bad camera started to hurt my eyes and all the control problem just made me too frustrated to have fun. I think the slower pace helps the game actually. Just take your time, take in the sights, and enjoy inhabiting that world for a bit.

I’d say wait for fixes for the control and camera problems, but the developers put up an announcement before the game even came out on consoles that they were closing the studio, so who knows if any updates are going to come. I really, really want to encourage people to play the game for the art and atmosphere, but in it’s current state, it’s just not fun to play. It’s a real bummer to say it because I want to like this game, but I recommend people just stay away from Itorah.