Child of Light Mini Review

A couple of weeks ago I beat Child of Light so I'm going to do that thing I always do a write a little bit about it.  I made a post previously talking about how the combat was basically a poor mans Grandia and used it as a basis for the idea that games are getting dumber and dumber but I actually quite enjoyed Child of Light.

The game follows Princess Aurora who kinda, maybe but didn't really die and was sent to the land of Leumeria.  There she is thrust into an adventure to rid the world of a dark queen by gathering the sun, the moon and the stars and then shoving a sword into her big ugly face.

You spend the whole game exploring 2D environments and fighting monsters for EXP.  Once you reach the end of an area you will fight a boss and once that's all said and done you get some story.  The exploration is fun since Aurora can fly freely around the map and there is quite a lot to find in each area.  Some areas even have little sub areas that involve traps that could potentially kill you or a special enemy that will drop a nice prize if you manage to kill it.

The combat, while simplistic, is fast and never I never really got bored with it.  You level up at a stupidly fast rate but the monsters remain challenging as long as you keep moving forward.  You could hang back and grind a little but I feel that if you did that then the fun behind the challenge of combat would be diminished somewhat.  Just as a note, I played the game on hard so I can't speak for the lower difficulty levels, but for a game like this playing on anything less than hard is just a bit embarrassing, quite frankly.

I was told going in that the story, while not bad, is annoying because almost all the dialogue is delivered in rhyme.  It would be really annoying if it was voiced but only a small number of key scenes have any voice work and the rest of the story is delivered in text, so I don't really know what people are moaning about.  The story is pretty basic but it's driven by some pretty good characters with well fleshed out personalities.  You get to know your squad pretty well over the course of the game and since each one has a unique function in combat then it's rare for any one character to get truly sidelined and forgotten.

I would recommend Child of Light to fans of the RPG genre.  It's a lighthearted little adventure with some nice characters, interesting art direction and fun game play.  While some of it's features feel underdeveloped such as the skill tree and Oculi stat boost stuff, it's not intrusive enough to ruin the whole experience.  It's also just the right length for this kind of thing wrapping everything up before things start to get stale.

Go give it a go.