Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King (2017)

I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I bought it heard ago and it just sat in my backlog, but I’ve been going through my small games lately, so I gave this one a go.

It was super fun! Quite easy, but just the right amount of content, with secrets to find all over the place. As far as indie Zelda clones go, this is about as good as you could get.

My only minor gripe is the puzzles and platforming are a bit repetitive, but they did a good job of ramping up their difficulty throughout the game.

I thought the dungeon design was quite good, and I loved the art style.

I especially loved the little grandpa telling the story. It was such a nice touch.

Definitely recommend!

Having completely run out of Metroidvanias and horror games, I’ve been trying to explore some other genres I haven’t played as much. Zelda-likes… a genre I’ve had mixed feelings on. Specifically the 2D style. There are some exceptions that I really love - Kharon’s Crypt, Death’s Door, Tunic and Master Key. But I have not clicked with many others and usually abandon them halfway.

Blossom Tales is one I managed to finish, which is saying a lot. It has some pretty fun puzzles, decent exploration, and a pretty good feel to the player controls. But it also reeks of mediocrity that I just couldn’t get past.

Both in the overworld and the dungeons, you’ll find many mindless moments of repeated combat, fruitless exploration, boring dialogue, and just nothing you haven’t seen a million times before.

But, it’s competent. Some puzzles are lots of fun. Some moments in the dungeons and the overworld exploration were great. It does just enough to warrant a modest recommendation, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to play it.

Action RPG that notably pays tribute to classic Legend of Zelda games (A Link To The Past, in particular). Sleepy ol' grandpa tells a story to his two grandchildren about one of them being a knight, set on a quest to lift the curse of her king and save the kingdom from his wicked brother. If you're expecting some kind of original story, you won't find much of it here though it plays on some familiarities by its own twist.

Nostalgia fans will still find the game appealling on the gameplay part, because the action adventure elements take after the aforementioned A Link To The Past, including collecting 4 artifacts and important equipment along the way. There are moments where you'll be given options to lay out what kind of enemies and obstacles you'll face in the coming areas (ninjas or pirates etc), which adds to the replay value to some degree. Even gathering collectibles have its rewards, as you can sell to the NPC's for gold and useful items.

The two main gripes I have with the game, one of them being the 4-pillar puzzles that test your memory skills. It was fun the first few times when I get to repeat the patterns randomly generated to unlock treasures; also for the variety it brings to the puzzle elements overall. But when you find new treasure caves with the same puzzle type and it gets increasingly difficult, failing time and again has made it worn out and frustrating for me enough to have considerations about leaving it. Besides, it's even compulsory for progress at a certain point in the main quest. The other gripe, which is a design flaw, is the travelling salesman who is only available during day hours in real-time (without any solid info about it), which left me, a night owl, confused.

My feelings are generally lukewarm about Blossom Tales; it's a fun trip for fans of nostalgia and early Zelda games, which includes its own story-telling twists (with plenty of easter eggs) both inherently and by your own interactive choices. Just expect a derivative story in its own rights, and certain puzzles that overstay their welcome.

After modding my Joycon earlier this month, I found myself looking for something brief, 2D, and action-oriented to break in my newly installed D-pad. Since the indie Zelda-like game, Blossom Tales, had recently been getting a lot of buzz on Twitter, I decided to pick it up on the eShop. Here are my thoughts on this little retro-style adventure now that I’ve finished the campaign:

• Right off the bat, Blossom Tales makes it very clear that it’s inspired by The Legend of Zelda series, especially A Link to the Past. Anyone with prior 2D Zelda experience will immediately be familiar with the move set, items, structure, and overall visual language of Blossom Tales.

• If you’re gonna copy A Link to the Past, one of the most revered video games of all time, you better get it right. To studio Castle Pixel’s credit, they got it right. Blossom Tales legitimately feels like a Zelda game and I occasionally had to remind myself that it wasn’t one.

• When exploring the overworld in Blossom Tales, I kept finding myself getting sidetracked. I’d be on the way to the next quest objective, only to find myself asking “I wonder what’s over there?”. Thirty minutes and several heart pieces later, I would suddenly remember that I was on a quest to save the kingdom and get back on the path. This is a sign of good Zelda design.

• The dungeons in Blossom Tales are a little more straight-forward than A Link to the Past dungeons, more like NES or Gameboy Zelda dungeons. Each of the game’s four dungeons are a single-story maze of rooms and halls with enemies to fight, switches to flip, and puzzles to solve but the progression is mostly linear. I never got lost or stuck in a Blossom Tales dungeon, so the challenge mostly came from individual puzzles and enemies or navigating precarious platforms rather than the overall structure of a dungeon.

• There are only three or four basic types of puzzles in Blossom Tales and the player is introduced to all of them fairly early in the game. The puzzles scale well in difficulty as the game progresses but I think they would feel too repetitive if the game was much longer.

• Blossom Tales’ bosses depart from the Zelda formula in that they rely less on puzzle-solving and more on avoiding a bullet hell-style barrage of attacks. As someone who enjoys bullet hell games and has been finding the Zelda’s “expose the weakness” format to be a little stale, this was a welcome change.

• Regarding combat, the game starts off moderately difficult, probably a step above the 2D Zelda games. However, as the adventure progresses there are ample opportunities get heart pieces, healing items, and weapon upgrades that can take the edge off. In my case, I may have gone overboard with scouring the map for upgrades and ended up making the endgame easier that it was supposed to be.

• I had a few minor nits to pick with the game’s user interface. While you can remap the controls, the game forces you to map the “accept” and “sword” commands to the same button. In A Link to the Past, the “sword” command shares a button with “cancel”. Since Blossom Tales is otherwise so closely mirrors Zelda, it took me a while to get used to this difference. It also would’ve been nice if the game’s inventory screen provided a description of what each item does (it gets explained once when you get the item, and that’s it). I forgot what several of the non-Zelda-based items did and underutilized them as a result.

• With so many aspects of the game that emulate Zelda, Blossom Tales uses its writing to set itself apart from its inspiration. The game begins with a grandfather telling a story of knights and magic to his grandchildren; the player plays through this story as its told. As a result, the grandfather’s narration and the interjections of his grandkids (in the form of text boxes) both provide the player with direction as well amusing commentary. In addition to the frame story, NPC’s also sometimes say surprising and humorous things. I really appreciated this little bit of extra personality.

• For Blossom Tale’s music, they went for a Gameboyish sound that fits well with the game’s mood even though the sound is more retro than the game looks. However, like most modern chiptune soundtracks the audio features embellishments beyond what classic sound hardware could output.

• While at first glance, the graphics might look pretty similar to a retro Zelda game, Blossom Tales uses a wider color pallet and modern effects (lighting, particles, etc) to give it a little extra pop. While some of the character sprites look almost too geometric for my taste, I really like how vibrant the world looks. Little features like butterflies and flowers are a nice touch.

The bottom line: If you’ve been craving a new 2D Zelda game, you owe it to yourself to check out Blossom Tales. It may not hit the lofty heights of its inspiration, but it certainly does an admirable job of capturing the spirit.

For more content like this, check out my blog: Tales from the Backlog

To note: I was given a copy of Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King to review by FDG Entertainment, the producers of the game.

If you love old school 2D Zelda games then I’ve got a treat for you today! Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is a beautiful homage to classic top down Zelda games, with its own unique story.

The Story

The story is narrated to the player through a Grandfather telling a bedtime tale to his two grandchildren, Lily and Chrys. His bedtime tale is based in the Blossom Kingdom, where an evil Wizard has put a curse on his brother the valiant King. The curse makes the him fall into a deep sleep. Whilst the King is sleeping, the Wizard uses the time to build an evil army and plans to conquer the Kingdom by force. With the King asleep and all hope lost, a young hero steps forward to push back the evil Wizard and save the Kingdom.

You play as Lily, a new recruit to the Knights of the Rose, a royal guard sworn to protect the king. The new recruit is tasked with going to the very corners of the Kingdom to look for three magical flowers. These flowers can be used together to create a powerful spell that can awaken the King. However, finding these flowers will not be easy. Each is locked in a huge, dangerous dungeon. Lily will have to use all her might and cunning to firstly find the dungeons and then battle her way through them.

The delivery of the story in Blossom Tales is very charming. The Grandfather and children narrate the tale to you as the story progresses. Sometimes the kids will even complain when there are boring parts and the Grandfather will add more enemies or harder puzzles to the game, to spice it up a little. In addition, when you die a funny dialogue will appear between the Grandfather and the children. They protest that the main characters can’t die to ‘an old wizard’ or that the story ‘can’t end like this’. It always made me chuckle when I read it because it made me feel like the game was prodding me a little bit for dying. These small features really add a lot of character and humour to the game, which I really enjoyed.

The Game

Almost exactly like 2D Zelda games, Blossom Tales has you starting out wielding a sword and shield. With every victory over a new boss, Lily gains a brand new shiny weapon. Weapons that appear in her armoury include: bombs, a bow, a boomerang and a variety of magical spells. The variation of weapons makes combat great! Combat is tight, making you feel like you’re in total control. If an enemy hits you, you know it is your mistake and not the game’s. Some enemies are weak against specific weapons, so matching weapons against their weakened enemies is always fun. Learning the enemies weaknesses makes you feel extremely powerful later in the game. You can fly past a group of once challenging enemies because you know to use a bomb against them or a bow. Linking this with Blossom Tales’s Zelda-like progression system, where the game rewards you with heart containers and other upgrades, you manage to overcome tasks you never would have dreamed of at the start of the game.

The dungeons are the core of the Blossom Tales’s gameplay. Each one is well designed with a good balance of puzzles and combat. They are also quite large! The last two dungeons in the game took me well over an hour each to beat. This is because I was searching in every corner trying to find secrets. If you like secrets, the game is full of them! Blowing up rocks will unlock hidden puzzle caves. Here you can find upgrades, gold or even Elissa’s scrolls, which offer background story and lore to the Kingdom. I love this type of indirect world building in games, so I was sure to seek out all of Elissa’s scrolls!

The dungeon bosses are also fun to fight against, but maybe a little too easy. Each dungeon has two bosses, one in the middle and one at the end. There was only one I had to fight multiple times, the rest I beat on the first try. I would have liked more of a challenge from the bosses. Nevertheless, I can understand why they were’t overly difficult as the game may be for younger players too. Enemies in each individual dungeon are varied with their own skill moves and sprites. However, if you do spend a lot of time in one dungeon (like I did), then you will get bored of killing the same enemies over and over again. On the other hand, enemies drop items that can be traded in for goodies. So the more of the same enemy type you kill, the more goodies you get. Therefore, killing one hundred of the same enemy can be rewarding.

Art and Music

The art looks so simple but beautiful in this game. The diversity of the world map really shows how good this game looks. From snowy mountains, to deep lava pits and stinking bogs, the vibrant world looks fantastic and invites the player to explore. The music compliments the game wonderfully. It sent me back to days on my Game Boy Advance playing Pokemon. The music composed by Visager had a very relaxing effect on me. It was a joy to listen to and made me want to spend more time exploring Blossom Tales’s world. I think it’s one of my favourite soundtracks I’ve heard in 2017!

Problems

I have to say I really enjoyed this game and did’t have any technical issues at all. It ran well in both handheld and docked mode. I didn’t suffer any crashes or bugs. It was a perfect example of an indie game.

Gameplay wise I also really enjoyed the game. I never found myself bored or wanting to play anything else in my 11 hour play through. My only criticism is that I found some of the puzzles in the end game repetitive. They were repeats of older puzzles I’d already seen. However, they were made much harder because enemies would attack you whilst you tried to do it. It felt like a lack of creativity as the difficulty wasn’t in the puzzles but in the annoying enemies trying to knock you off platforms. This lead to frustration because I knew I could beat the puzzle (because I’d beat one similar before) but would keep failing because an enemy would kill me. Nevertheless, this is just a small criticism in an otherwise fantastic game.

Summary

After playing The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild you might have an urge to go back and play some classic, old school Zelda. However, with Nintendo’s silence on the Virtual Console, and their inability to produce enough SNES and NES mini consoles, classic Zelda games aren’t that easy to come by on modern consoles.

Blossom Tales is the perfect game to scratch that itch. With its vibrant colours, whimsical soundtrack and lovely story, this game will keep you entertained for hours. Its dungeons are challenging and its secrets are all fun and rewarding to look for, enhancing the world the game is based in. I highly recommend it for Zelda fans!

That’s why I give Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King by Castle Pixel my rating of 9/10

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