Everhood Impressions

Welp, Everhood played for a bit. I gotta be honest, it was pretty dull. Bunch of zero personality characters who played slightly above average music at me in a pretty barebones rhythm minigame. The regenerating health works against the game cause it means death only occurs through repeated failures in short sequence. Thus I can totally zone out for 80% of a fight and lose absolutely nothing. But then if I do die I have to do the entire thing over? The heck. Maybe it'd be better if it was a rhythm game, y'know go for Full Combo. But it's not, it thinks it is but it's just a ~~bullet hell~~ dodging game that just so happens to occur on a guitar hero fretboard. You do nothing to any beat or rhythm, and you can dodge so quickly that you basically spend every "tense" moment staring at two lanes you're dodging between and ignoring the entire rest of the arena. Also it's acting like it's being clever but in reality I just have absolutely no idea what is going on. Where I am, where I'm going, who I should care about and why they're there. It has this whole metaphysical dialogue in the same vein as other Mother-likes but it all just meant nothing to me. If it gets charming and interesting later, well it should've frontloaded some of that. Like the Buzz Buzz adventure and seeing a Starman in Earthbound, or the tutorial satirizing in Undertale. There is absolutely zero hook. I played through to a point where I had a boatload of doors, randomly walked a few fights deep in one of them. Even the "wow" fights that I think were meant to be the early sellers were underwhelming. I'm sure they make great music videos, but there's just nothing gameplay wise. I *did* like the fight that was immediately after the furnace, idk what it was but it was the most visually interesting and appealing. In hindsight, probably because it was just geniunely rad visuals with no attempt to be "kooky" TL;DR: Faris is a rhythm game snob who hates Mother-likes.

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