Indie Game of the Week 456: Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

I think we were all a little perplexed when the first trailers arrived for Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore—a game in which someone took great pains to recreate both the uncanny animations and generally ramshackle game design of the CD-i Zelda games (happy anniversary to the land of Hyrule, incidentally)—because our first instinct was to think "but wait, didn't those games royally suck octorok?". The goal when creating Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, it seemed, was to somehow rehabilitate the bad reputation of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Link: The Faces of Evil by taking the general gameplay structure of those games—tough 2D platforming levels and a minor adventure game aspect where you'd often have to backtrack to earlier areas with the right key items to make progress or defeat a boss—and improving on it to the extent that you could even call it a competently-made game. The developers of Arzette gave themselves two challenging and contradictory tasks here: Accurately recreate a nostalgic throwback based on a set of games that have already been meme'd half to death, while evolving its formula enough that players would want to check it out for reasons beyond morbid curiosity. Somehow, the fine folks at Seedy Eye Games (nice work) actually pulled it off. A truly remarkable gambit.

The titular Arzette is the princess of the kingdom of Faramore, a place that regularly has to deal with the revival of the demon Daimur and his sinister minions who quickly plunge the land in a form of toxic darkness that requires Arzette light beacons in order to push it back. While gifted with both sword and magic, Arzette's greatest strength is the patience she shows to her kingdom's many eccentric personalities, many of whom she endeavors to help with their petty requests while saving the land from certain doom. In-game, this typically involves talking to NPCs (with appropriately overwrought cutscenes) to glean some information about what they want, then deliver it to them for various rewards ranging from a handful of currency—needed to restock items with finite carrying limits, like bombs—to upgrades and other vital abilities. The action stages are typically a handful of screens long with a few roaming enemies and collectibles to find, like secret coins that don't seem to do anything or bonus levels that reference a few other notorious CD-i games, and at the end you'll either reach one of the game's boss fights, a beacon that lets you access more of the world map, or nothing until you've acquired the right upgrade to move further in. In fact, between the many barriers and traversal upgrades, it starts to resemble a stage-based exploraction game (like, say, a Demon's Crest or an Order of Ecclesia) before too long, which starts prompting uncomfortable questions in your head about how many similarities the Zelda series as a whole might have to that subgenre.

Germanely disquieting.

As such, this is probably the sort of game you'd want to play with a notepad open next to you. There's at least three different types of color-coded barrier, the usual double-jump and air glide for areas and items out of your reach, and NPCs that are milling around still waiting for the items you promised them. The game is helpful enough to indicate all of this via a level's overview when perusing it on the world map, and is even considerate enough to add exclamation marks when you have what you need to complete a side-quest there, as if anticipating that players might not necessarily have the wherewithal or physical means to keep jotting down notes while playing. The knock-on effect of this is that you start getting used to playing through the same stages over and over, returning for one requisite item while still leaving others on the table without yet the means to access them. Fortunately for this process, if perhaps unfortunately for the challenge curve overall, the game gets considerably easier once you have a few big upgrades under your belt like the defensive boost or the game's handful of HP increases. That said, the game doesn't penalize you for dying either, barring a small amount of wiped progress: the alternative would be to incorporate a lives system which would probably push the difficulty slider from "too easy" to "obnoxiously tough" (though I believe at least one of the post-game rewards is such a difficulty mode).

The star here, as you might have already gathered, is the fidelity with which the developers sought to replicate the almost-eerie presentation of those two particular Zelda CD-i games (the third going for a live-action role-play angle of FMVs with actors in poorly-fitting costumes which might be even more uncanny, and a pretty compelling source for an Arzette sequel). Every cutscene is overanimated in a similar way, zooming in on NPC mouths and eyes in a disconcerting manner that adds little to the content of the scene beyond feeling like you're a mosquito, and the game's ineffectual Link equivalent has had his obnoxiousness dialled up to heretofore unexplored new levels. All of this is played with a knowing wink, of course, and Arzette remains one of the few straight men (ironically, as she flirts with women a few times) as she gamely responds to the weirdos in her midst in the most undeservedly accommodating manner as she can muster. The game even has some genuine pathos to it at times, which feels even more discordant than all the overexpressiveness combined, so there are definitely points where you're unsure if the developers felt those Zelda games were ripe for parody or that they genuinely felt a significant degree of affection for what they were trying to accomplish with whatever limited budget Philips gave them after spending the rest to convince Nintendo to let them borrow their characters for a while. Either way, they unmistakably made a great deal of effort here to transform that strange, half-cocked model of a platformer-adventure game into something viable.

You know what they say: "All Hotel Mario references reference references."

Arzette's chief problems relate, unsurprisingly, to still being "one of those Zelda CD-i" games despite their many positive tweaks to the format. You spend far too long backtracking, the combat is weak due to some poor hitbox detection and overlong enemy invulnerability between hits (giving them plenty of time to walk right into you and harm you), and identifying what is and isn't a platform from the static paintings that constitute the levels can involve a lot of guesswork. The music and voice acting are perfect for the replication they're going for at least. The achievement set also sucks—and yes, it's as important as anything else—requiring at least three full playthroughs to unlock everything and assigning interesting challenges like ignoring the health upgrades and Arzette's ranged weapon (normally needed to remove barriers, but there's a workaround) as secret achievements to make them that much easier to overlook. That's the sort of problem design you can't really blame on the game's roots as a parody of notoriously terrible games. Overall, though, it's almost magic how they were able to transform what has been a long-running joke at the expense of Nintendo and its most consistently acclaimed franchise into something far beyond simply "adequate" (which would itself already be a massive step up from the CD-i games) and my conical green hat goes off to them for managing it. Here's hoping Nintendo takes notice and actually gives them the license to play around with next time, like they've done before for the NecroDancer devs. If nothing else, it's left me curious what a Link's Crossbow Training glow-up might look like.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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