GAME REVIEW: Oceanhorn - Monster of Uncharted Seas (2013)

I’m sure the Finnish gamers all know about Oceanhorn, but I wonder, how many of you in other countries have heard of this game? It was released on PC and consoles around 2013 and was made by a Finnish company, Cornfox & Brothers Ltd., pitched as a loving homage to the Legend of Zelda game series and boasting music by Nobuo Uematsu (if that name’s not familiar, he’s the composer of all of your favorite Final Fantasy OSTs), Kenji Ito, and local Kalle Ylitalo. This was recommended to me by quite a few friends who really enjoyed it, so when I saw it on sale on the Switch, I figured it was time to check it out (especially since the Game Music Collective included songs from it on their debut album from this year, “Restart”).

I have to say, after hearing so many good things about this game, I really wanted to like it. In fact, for a brief window of time, I felt like a kid in a candyshop, reliving Phantom Hourglass (I very sadly confess that I obtained a Gamecube years after they were popular, so I never did get around to playing Windwaker, though I hope to someday remedy that), but on a bigger screen. However, as much as I enjoyed a few aspects of the game and found a few tidbits to be clever and innovative, there were so many other parts that became tedious quite quickly, ultimately turning the enjoyment into drudgery after a while.

First of all, there’s something I briefly want to discuss before going into the overall game review, which is the difference between an homage and a knock-off. Throughout my entire experience with this game, I could not make up my mind as to which of these I’d consider this game to be. Truly, I am honestly quite surprised that they got away with making everything so similar to Zelda, because—while I don’t claim to know much about the subject—I would wonder if this game could be sued by Nintendo for copyright infringement. This game is, in essence, turning the Legend of Zelda into its own genre, and strictly speaking, I’m not sure how I feel about that. One one hand, Zelda games are indeed iconic enough to be a genre of their own, yet I also feel like they can be a genre without the need for everything to be copied pixel-by-pixel.

The action/adventure Zelda-style game is, of course, a genre of its own because of its classic status, so it goes without saying that Oceanhorn immediately feels like a Zelda game in style and gameplay. But let’s look briefly at Banjo-Kazooie (N64) and Yooka-Laylee (the latter is the makers’ spiritual successor to the former). Yooka-Laylee does everything more or less exactly the same as Banjo-Kazooie, under a different skin, but also adds/updates a few things, fixes some irritating parts, and much like Banjo-Tooie (the original game’s sequel), Yooka-Laylee is a helluva lot harder than the original BK. However, everything is completely reskinned and redesigned, even if the core concept is identical.

As an homage from different makers, I feel like perhaps Oceanhorn stuck a little too close to the Zelda series. For starters, the character art has the main character looking like a younger version of modern-day Link with his darker blonde hair, in his new blue outfit, while Neeti (an NPC friend, not unlike Malon) looks like a female version of classic Link in his traditional green tunic. Players gather heart pieces to create new hearts to improve health, you fight with a sword and shield, you have bombs, arrows, dash boots, and a fishing rod that can be used from your live inventory, and you have a handful of magic spells. There’s even the wing imagery from the Zelda series fully taken into Oceanhorn’s artwork, but in the context of the sun instead of wings. One way or the other, while I can definitely see this tickling people just right, for me, it felt a bit like there was a bit of a lack of creativity or originality. Part of this may be because I also don’t feel like the game did much to elevate the Zelda series’ mechanics, and in many ways, was inferior to Zelda games. It’s a tricky (and daring) route to take, to do such a straightforward replica, and I’m quite sure that people in general love nostalgia enough that it paid off (I mean, it did get a sequel, after all), but I feel like, in being so very loyal to another extremely iconic series, it loses a bit of its own identity.

That is not to say that there wasn’t anything I liked about this game, or that it didn’t improve on. In fact, I have quite high praise for a few aspects of this game. For example, for a game that doesn’t allow you to have any camera control, I almost never felt like the camera wasn’t where I wanted it to be, and in the rare instances where I was having trouble with it, it was usually my fault because I was doing a really bad job of a puzzle. The same goes for the target-lock system—it wasn’t perfect, by any means, and there were times that it could get irritating to not have much control or idea of what direction you’re aiming in, but on the whole, it was rare that my arrows weren’t going where I wanted them. On the whole I was quite impressed with this.

Even if the artwork and design was a bit too close to the Legend of Zelda, the graphics and music were nevertheless spectacular… though, what do you expect, when you have Nobuo Uematsu on your music team (whaaat? No I’m not a huge fan of his (yes I am!)). Furthermore, one of my favorite parts of the game, and one that I thought was particularly innovative and streamlined, was that there was a slow gaining of experience points that allows the player to level up, which grants different adventuring statuses and gives the player bonuses, like a greater capacity to carry bombs and arrows. Back in the good old Zelda days, getting these bonuses might require hours of grinding through mind-numbing games of chance or bitchy hard-to-aim skill tests. This was a really fun way to save time and programming, and make it more fun for players.

However, there were a lot of things that ultimately made the game quite tedious or frustrating for me. Admittedly, the character’s walking speed might be a me-thing, because I like my game PCs to be able to run or at least move at a reasonably quick pace, and this character was painfully slow for me, which affected my desire to return to islands to get more items and finish collections. If I can’t blast through a space at a good speed when it comes time to collect everything, chances are, I’m not going to bother.

For another example of things that didn’t work for me, there’s a boat mechanic—like in the aforementioned water-based Zelda games—that puts you on a set track between islands and after a handful of quests, you gain a “canon” that can be used to fend off barrels, boxes, bombs, and octoroks (I truly wish they had even changed it to be a squid, not copy the exact monster from the Zelda series). You can also encounter a boat, but unlike the Zelda games (which often had merchants), you don’t seem to be able to stop or interact with other people on the water, leading me to wonder why they bothered to include them at all. I don’t think that you can do anything to them with your canon either. That canon, by the way, looks like a huge musket, but can’t be taken off the boat for some reason. It is cheesy but fun to have infinite ammunition, but the inter-island runs do get boring after a while. I agree with feedback stating that it would have been more fun if you could make your own route. Again, if you’re copying something that another game does, there is still a standard set for what you can do (like interacting with other boats on the water) and if you don’t follow that as strictly as you follow everything else, it’s confusing. I also found it tiresome that, on many occasions, the PC would do up to a 3/4 lap around the destination island before making port, which was exhausting to wait through.

Another big common complaint about this game that I agree with is that, when it comes time to get to the island in the sky, the game doesn’t give you any warning and you can’t get back until you finish the quest once you get there. At that point in the game, the health gap can be around 5-8 hearts and can also mean the difference in having the stronger sword that is definitely coral and totally not the Master Sword. Anyways, as it happened for me, I only had 5 hearts, so the fight against the area boss was very, very annoying.

In fact, let’s get into that [spoilers for the Sky Island boss fight].
This was truly one of the worst boss fights I’ve experienced in a long time. The overall concept isn’t hard to grasp: Shadow Mesmeroth shoots fireballs at you that you have to deflect back at him until he turns into three orbs. You need to find the one with substance and whack it as much as possible until he reforms. As the battle progresses, he’ll eventually start shooting two fireballs and turn into four orbs when he takes enough damage. After two good hits, he’ll start summoning laser turrets, which will pelt you with little laser bullets as you flank the battle map and whack electrical conductors in each corner to shut them down. Not exactly rocket science…

However, first of all, if Mesmeroth is moving even slightly, the fireballs will likely miss him, juuust barely. It helps to let him get close to you, because otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time as he continues to just barely scootch out of the way. Then, after two hits on his exposed form, every time Mesmeroth leaves the screen to be invulnerable, there’s a too-long cutscene as the turrets reactivate. You get about two shots on Mesmeroth before this repeats and I’m not sure if the number of fireballs needed to expose him resets every time the turrets go down or not. Either way, it becomes tedious. Furthermore, Zelda games usually had some sort of mechanism that, when breaking pots, they generally prioritized drops of items you needed; in this battle, you seemed to be most likely to get arrows and bombs, which were almost useless, with hearts being a frustratingly rare find. The character is also so slow, as mentioned, that the time it takes him to pick up a pot and throw it means you can’t really do that while the lasers are active either. If you happen to die in this fight too, you’ll probably restart with fewer hearts than max, and you might need to search the whole island and fight an army of enemies before you get back to full health so you can try again at max.
[end of boss battle spoilers]

Also, while I did understand that not being able to jump, climb, or pull was a core mechanic to a lot of the puzzles in the game, it felt like something was missing. This opportunity to fall into pits and be unable to get out of them resulted in several instances where, through some slight glitch (like a block breaking a grate that leads to a pit within a wall), I had to restart the game and reset my progress because I was unable to escape. This was a rare occasion, but between the slow speed and the lack of familiar options, it again got a bit tedious.

By the time I reached the end of the game, I ultimately didn’t think I had the stamina to complete it, so I hopped on YouTube and watched someone else do it. A couple of final roses and thorns are that, on the whole, the voice acting was too much for what the game was and felt really weird and out of place—I’d have preferred it to have text-only dialogue. On the positive side though, I thought the story ended up being quite good and it played out pretty nicely. It’s nothing too complicated by any means, but it makes for an exciting ending and a nice dramatic finish to the whole experience. Sometimes keeping it simple works and this is a good example of that.

I did have fun for a while, exploring different islands and popping by little places to pick up treasure, but a lot of the game was a bit too familiar, a bit too railroaded, and a bit too boring/repetitive. The most fun I had playing was in the optional dungeon on the Island of Whispers, which was actually quite clever and pretty fun on the whole, with an impressive map. This had a callback to the sages of Ocarina of Time but with its own identity, so this actually felt well-done and well-adapted. Ultimately though, while I’d be curious to see how Oceanhorn 2 holds up, I might need to check out some reviews or videos before committing to another one of these games, since I can’t say I enjoyed this one all that much in the end.