Ori & The Blind Forest
Anyone who’s still dedicated to my blog for gaming insight
pretty much can cry tears of joy that I’m back and I’m bringing Ori & The
Blind Forest review to revive the blog. For anyone who has played the game can
pretty much understand the hidden meaning of that sentence or you can just read
the story summary below. I wasn’t actually aware of the game’s existence at
first, and then I stumbled upon a guy on Twitch streaming Ori and my interest
was piqued.
STORY (SPOILER ALERT!)
Summary
This game starts off with the forest of Nibel stormed by
a... massive storm that doesn’t show any noticeable damage other than blowing
away a single shiny leaf from a massive tree in the center of the forest called
the Spirit Tree, the leaf that turns out to be Ori lands in the forest and found
by a luckily gentle and herbivorous fat forest inhabitant, Naru and decides to
immediately adopt him. The story skips to possibly a few days after the storm
with Ori living with Naru like parent and child, collecting fruit from trees
around their cave and building a bridge montage. One night when they’re
enjoying fruit in the forest, the Spirit Tree shines its light to call Ori, the
light of the forest to come home, Naru thinking that it’s a forest fire or
something immediately takes Ori back into the cave. A long time has passed and
the forest has dried up, when Naru is hungry and Ori was asleep, they’ve run
out of fruit, so Naru goes out hoping to find a tree still alive and bearing
fruit, Naru found it but the fruit are way too high up and Naru is just too
heavy to climb it up, Naru found a single fruit left in the cave and gave it to
Ori, the thoughtful Ori offers to share but Naru refuses and falls asleep
because drama. So Ori goes out to that tree and shakes off the high fruity tree
branch that Naru failed to climb, Ori picks up all the fruit he can carry and
rushes back seeing flashback of them having fun along the way (cue the feels)
Ori comes back and tries to wake Naru up and let him eat but to no avail. Ori being
all weak and sad, limps into the forest and dies, the flowers suddenly flowers
bloom and that’s that... THE END or at least what I assumed being the first
5-10 minutes of the game.
The Spirit Tree revives Ori to embark on a journey to revive
the blinded forest and restore the water, the wind and the warmth of the forest
which has been taken down by the evil giant owl Kuro. Why Kuro did all that?
Well, halfway through the game we find out that Kuro’s children was killed by
the light from the tree because they’re owls and they dwell in the dark, Kuro
devastated by the death of her children sees that she still has one egg soon to
hatch, and she just wants to create a nice and dark environment for the last
surviving child to survive. And that means drying up the whole forest, freezing
winds and blasting the volcano and killing thousands of the forest’s
inhabitants is the ultimate side effects.
---
The story of this game seems sad at first, I get the feels,
but the drama just feels too forced, especially in the beginning, it’s sad
story 101, an innocent kid goes on an adventure driven by the death of a parent
figure. And with the exposition of why Kuro destroyed the forest actually seems
reasonable to me and makes me feel sorry for her, I like it when the antagonist
isn’t just mindlessly evil who wanna destroy the world or rule it, but when
their cause is like Kuro’s cause, then now I actually feel like Ori is the evil
one here, I know Kuro destroying the forest results in killing the inhabitants,
but Kuro doesn’t mean it, she just wants her child to survive. I seriously
didn’t expect that exposition, I thought being the simple platformer that it
is, the story would be about the spirit of light being the Spirit Tree and Kuro
being the spirit of darkness destined to duke it out for eternity.
GAMEPLAY
2D metroidvania-styled platformer, what else is there to
say? There’s plenty, actually. At first you’re only given a basic jump, run and
Sein, a fairy that can shoot fireballs, from there, you keep going and find
more upgrades like wall jump, double jump, wall climb and others for traversal
and a few combat upgrades like the ground pound and my favorite bash, giving
Ori the ability to use special special objects, enemies and projectiles to
basically zoom into the direction you want and bash them the opposite
direction, it makes great traversal move and a cool parry, it’s quite clunky at
first, but easy to get into. In the first few hours of the game, you might feel
like you’re so vulnerable, but exploration really rewards you with health
upgrades, XP points and soul energy, after a while, you’re gonna be brimming
with health , but the difficulty ramps up along with you so you never feel
really overpowered. You have a soul energy, you can use it to charge an
explosion which destroys specific objects and save your progress almost
anywhere, it’s like a savestate, at first you might conserve it like how you
conserve the ink ribbon in Resident Evil, but it doesn’t take long to raise
your soul energy quarter the size of the screen. Ori has quite a long, yet
straightforward skill tree, there’s combat upgrades which gives you pretty much
more range, firing rate and damage, soul upgrades which allows you to use soul
energy more efficiently for bombs and soul links and traversal upgrades like
showing collectibles on the map, breathing underwater, triple jump, the
quadriple jump with whipped cream. On the challenge department, it certainly
serves pretty well, I died over 200 times on my first playthrough for trying
too much stuff. It’s not something that really puts your platforming skills to
the test, and it also doesn’t hold your hand like an over-protective boyfriend,
it’s fair. You just need to remember to create soul link often so in case you
die, you don’t need to travel all the way back to your last checkpoint. Learnt
that the hard way. I gotta say the most challenging part of the game is in the
platforming after restoring an element, like after restoring the water, water
immediately floods the place and you need to climb up all the way to the top
and remember to be quick about it, it has a bit of trial and error parts
sometimes, but mostly you just need to think fast and do whatever it takes to
escape.
The combat of Ori is quite simple, it’s mostly about getting
in range to shoot fireballs, occasionally you need stomp to destroy armor and
bash to redirect projectiles or parry. There’s no boss battle either, there are
parts when you’re locked in an arena with one of the regular enemies you
encounter but with bigger health bar and slightly more aggressive. I can’t consider
those as boss battles, they’re just some cage fight sections. Enemies don’t
have much variety either, I think the devs embraced the principle of “when in
doubt, make glowing blobs” you have unique-shaped guys like the frog-monkeys, bomb
armadillos, rock rhinos, other than that, spiky glowing blobs, exploding
glowing blobs, large slow spiky glowing blobs that can break apart into smaller
faster glowing blobs, walking glowing blobs that can fire more glowing blobs,
even Sein is a glowing blob. They’re just colored differently, Sein is light
blue, while enemies are more purple, violet and orange. I feel bad for all the
colorblind players out there or some retro guy who still uses black n’ white TV,
they’re gonna have a hard time differentiating enemies and Ori’s turd.
GRAPHICS
Ori & The Blind Forest is a cartoon, perhaps more anime,
reminds me of stuff like Totoro simplified with glow on most of the model
color. Besides that, the game world looks quite simple, the forest, tree,
valley, volcano is pretty cool though. The forest looks pretty dark at first,
but after restoring each of the elements, it gets brighter and lush, I gotta
say the best part is the pure water lake, you can just swim around enjoying the
scenery accompanied by the beautiful music. Cutscenes also have the artistic feel that really hits my soft spot
MUSIC
Most of the tracks in the game are feels-inducing, because
you know, you can’t let an innocent little kid like Ori roam around a big scary
forest with just a flying glowing blob that can shoot fireballs, you need some
sad-sounding soundtrack. But when the game’s atmosphere switches, the music
goes along with it, especially the running away from a restored element part, that’s
a masterpiece.
CONCLUSION
Ori serves as an introduction to a new IP, I actually can’t
see how you can make a sequel from this without bringing someone else to
threaten Nibel, and the ending is just sickening, I was expecting Ori to move
on and embrace his destiny, but they just had to undo that one thing that
drives the whole game make the ending so sickeningly happy. Gameplay could
seriously be better with the combat being boring after a while, exploration is
nice, it really rewards you, just remember to save often so you don’t have to
recollect an upgrade in case you die after grabbing it. It’s also quite
annoying how you can’t access your save file after completing the story, so you
can’t collect all the collectibles you missed, there’s no point anyway, all the
collectibles are health, XP and soul energy upgrades which are used to make
going through the story with more safety net, all the basic skills given
throughout the story is enough to just finish the game. But I’m just speaking
on behalf of all those OCD completionists. One playthrough of this game is
enough for me, this game just passes, the story is passable, and the gameplay
is quite simple that it’s not like something that needs a lot of grinding to
master. Graphically, this game nails it pretty well
I give this game a 6/10
