As I stated previously in my Doom Eternal review, “The main goal of a sequel is to expand and improve upon the many problems it’s predecessor has. Some sequels will either succeed and outlive the first game, while others will fail to improve upon the original.” Today we’ll be talking about another sequel that just came out recently, which just so happens to be the follow up to a small indie game I quite liked and another one of my most anticipated games this year. Moon Studios was a very small studio at first. They envisioned an extraordinary idea and eventually partnered up with big budget company Microsoft to make those small dreams come true. They dreamed of making a beautiful artistic metroidvania that would tell an incredible emotional tale about family and loss. This concept would take some time to take form, but eventually it formed into what we know as Ori & The Blind Forest. The development for Ori & The Blind Forest would take almost half a decade, since it was hand drawn animation which takes awhile and Moon Studios wanted their first game to be the best it could.
The game was released exclusively to the Xbox One during March 2015, and should have probably been a huge mistake since the competing Playstation 4 was out selling in numbers and standing taller than the Xbox One due it's strong list of planned exclusives. Plus one of the biggest games of the year, Bloodborne, was coming out around the same time. This didn’t mean that Ori & The Blind Forest was a letdown or failure, because the game ended up being somewhat of a massive success for both Moon Studios and Microsoft. It’s beautiful visuals, calming soundtrack, presentation, and world design proved The Blind Forest to be one the most memorable experiences of 2015. It’s not the best metroidvania I have played as some design choices were odd, but it’s one of the few better ones amongst the genre. I had an amazing time going through The Blind Forest last year. It was an extremely well told story and one of the few occasions that proved video games could be a miraculous art form.
Anyways, Moon Studios created this fine tuned piece of work and I was excited for what they had planned for the future. At E3 2017, Moon Studios announced they were working on a sequel to their smash hit called Ori & The Will of The Wisps. It would be bigger, grander, and more thrilling than their last project. Fans were pumped up for the sequel, but little did they know that much like the first game, Will of The Wisps would spend a long of time in development due to the hand drawn art design and the several changes Moon Studios added to the formula. It wasn’t until several years and delays later that Moon Studios finally released the full version of Ori & The Will of The Wisps in 2020, and luckily it lived up to expectations. It had the charm and presentation of the original and wrapped the story into a little nice bow which wouldn't fall apart with time.
Much like Doom Eternal, I was dying to play this game and when I finally got my hands on it I sat down and plowed straight through within a single weekend. I can safely say this game mostly lived up to my expectations. What do I mean by “mostly”? Forgive me and everything I'm about to say, but in some ways the Will of the Wisps fixes some of the problems The Blind Forest had. While in other ways they introduced new problems that weren't prevalent in The Blind Forest with the new changes and mechanics. Look, Will of The Wisps is a great game and I’m not saying it isn't worth your time. You get a lot of content and it's one of the better metroidvanias in years much like The Blind Forest. However, there was a little bit of disappointment left at the end for me and I started to compare it to other metroidvanis I've played while waiting for Will of The Wisps. You'll be seeing quite a few comparisons in this review more specifically towards one of my most favorite metroidvanias which Will of The Wisps obviously took quite a lot inspiration from. Is this fair? No, but the point of a review is to pick apart a game and find what is right and wrong with it. So today we'll be talking about the pros and cons found within Will of The Wisps, and why in some ways the first game was a little bit better. Now let's glind on down to a mysterious land far far away.
Story
After the events of the last game where Ori brought light back to the forest and reunited with their guardian-parent figure Naru, a new member joins their family. A young hatchling that was once the child of the giant owl of darkness Kuro, who loomed over the forest in the first game but sacrificed her life to save it. The hatchling is named Ku and under the protection of Ori, Naru, and another new addition to the family Gumo who is basically somewhat of a spider, they live together peacefully in the forest. Unlike their mother owl, Ku can’t fly properly due to being born with a shriveled wing. Ku questions more about where they came from and wishes to have some resemblance to the one who once looked after them. Ori, wanting to help out their sibling, fetches a relic that they kept from their previous journey. A detached feather from Kuro that used to hover in the air. Ori and Gumo attach the feather to Ku’s shriveled wing and within seconds Ku and Ori take flight into the skies. Ori and Ku spend some time gliding over the forest and eventually soar above a new land. One full of mysteries unseen before. Suddenly a storm kicks in, Kuro’s feather detaches from Ku’s shriveled wing, and both of the siblings are sent rocketing towards the ground of the unknown land.
Ori wakes up to find Ku missing and ventures off to look for them. While venturing through the unknown land Ori finds that they are trapped in another forest slowly succumbing to darkness. Ferocious beasts roam the lands and the inhabitants are being taken over by an infection. Ori eventually encounters a large toad named Kwolok who tells them that the forest they are in, Niwen, is slowly dying. Much like Ori’s previous journey, the spirit tree that guards Niwen is losing its source of light and another giant owl of Darkness named Shriek looms over Niwen, stopping anybody who tries to bring the light back. For some reason it had to be another giant owl, because the developers must love owls. So it’s up to Ori to bring the light back to Niwen, stop another giant owl of darkness, and find their lost sibling Ku before they too succumb to the darkness. They’ll do whatever it takes to bring their sibling home, and while exploring the forest Ori may even find their true purpose and point of existence.
Gameplay
Ori & The Will of The Wisps is a metroidvania, and much like other games of the same genre you spend a majority of your time platforming your way through open areas, avoiding hazards, discovering secrets, unlocking upgrades that allow you to progress with the game, and becoming more powerful overtime. Ori is a pretty simplistic character to control and they actually maintained a majority of the abilities from the first game. They can double jump, climb on walls, and much more. The upgrades you unlock give you new ways to traverse your surroundings and sometimes need to be used to solve puzzles. Use the Bash ability to reach higher areas and reflect projectiles back at enemies. Dash to launch yourself across huge gaps, use the feather to glide across pits or reach higher areas using gusts of wind, and more. I can tell you more about later abilities you unlock in the game, but the fun from metroidvanias comes from you discovering things on your own, and seeing how powerful you are by the end.
What’s changed this time around is the combat. Unlike the previous game where you have a floating orb of light and all you have to do is mash the X button over and over again to make it fire projectiles, Ori has a barrage of new weapons and spells to fend themselves off from foes. No longer do you have to mash the X button and hope for something to happen. Now you have to get up close and strike the enemy when they are open to attack. You have a magic meter which can be used for powerful spells and when the meter is low you can’t cast another spell. You have to strike certain objects or kill enemies to refill your magic meter. So it’s kind of like Soul from Hollow Knight, but unlike Hollow Knight where you still have to play aggressively but determine whether you want to expend Soul for healing or powerful spells and figure out when to do so, Ori couldn’t really care about how you use it. That's fine for a majority of people, because you shouldn't be forced to play in specific ways. However, Hollow Knight made you utilize every tool in your arsenal and made it so that players who fully understood the abilities would have an easier time. Plus it made them swap between powers and adapt on the fly. Also magic in Ori is harder to regain than Hollow Knight, because the chance of an enemy giving you magic in return is randomized. If you take too much damage you die and respawn at the last checkpoint. This is also fine for a majority of people, but in Hollow Knight there were punishments for dying and refusing to learn from mistakes. Meanwhile, in Will of The Wisps you can keep throwing yourself at a problem and hope by the next dice roll it will be a bit better.
Another new system is Charms, which are perks you can equip at any time to gain special abilities and traits. They can be found throughout the world and purchased from vendors you encounter. Hollow Knight also had charms, but where the two games differ is how the charms affect your playstyle. With the right combination of charms you can come up with new tactics or builds in Hollow Knight. Having Quick Slash will not only make you attack faster, but dish out more damage within a short period of time. Fury of The Fallen is useful during difficult fights where you spend a lot of time with low health, or for players who want to play risky at low health. Quick Focus makes healing a lot easier, Dashmaster makes evading much easier, Shaman Stone greatly improves the power of your spells, etc. Charms actually did something valuable in Hollow Knight, because the perks and benefits they gave you helped. Especially in a game heavily focused around combat. Ori & The Will of The Wisps has combat, but it can be very inconsistent at times because rather than give you a condensed moveset they give you a barrage of tools. Some abilities you may not even end up using because you’d rather stick to the most basic abilities which worked better in the first place. The charms I mentioned earlier don’t even affect the way you fight. Just small benefits.
The more I talk about Ori & The Will of The Wisps the more I realize they almost failed at executing these ideas. Rather than focusing on the strengths you had before you decided to copy someone else's essay, but fail to understand what they did right with it. It’s not an entirely bad thing, just know people are going to make comparisons over which one did what idea better. There are NPCs that you can encounter throughout the world and some of them may offer you side quests with rewards. Most side quests involve you just simply progressing through the game, but they offer something fun to do when you have the free time. I didn’t really find side characters to be memorable in Ori. Unlike Hollow Knight where you slowly become attached to each character due to how they changed as the world changed and played some role in the slowly decaying world. Ori’s characters are just there to offer you some minimal reward. Maybe I should stop comparing this game to Hollow Knight. I want to save it up for the conclusion. With light guiding your way, you should be able to restore peace to Niwen and find Ku.
Thoughts
As I already stated, Ori & The Will of The Wisps is a pretty good game. It does make a few improvements, but these attempts are dragged down by the fact that the changes they made didn't add up and ended up harming the game. If it’s anything personally I think the game took a step back from The Blind Forest. The combat is more thought out than the first game, but it can be unfun at times due to how bloated enemy health can be, if your attacks manage to register, or how much turf you have to fight them on. The combat becomes kind of a slog after a while, because it becomes as button mashie as the first game but now a little more annoying due to large health pools and a wheel of choices that don't really add much. Having variety is great, but if a majority of these choices aren't as good as the basic ones then why bother using them?
Visuals are stunning and environments are more varied than the last game so I’ll give the game a point for that. The presentation is still pretty good, making the player feel emotionally engaged with what the main characters are doing, but I feel the last few moments of the game fail to stick the landing. Learning the tragic past of the giant owl of darkness is cool and all, but they did that in the last game for the last giant owl of darkness. The main villain feels copy and pasted really. I’m not gonna say how the game ends, but what I am going to say most people will find the ending really emotional. I didn’t personally find it emotional and it felt really anticlimactic. It’s not that I’m displeased with what happened. There wasn't enough building up to it.
Soundtrack is still lovely, not one of my favorite video game scores but possibly one of the best soundtracks I’ve listened to. Bosses tend to be annoying at times. They have more attacks than they really need, do more damage than you think, and they have more health than they really should. Basically these guys are bullet sponges. There are like three to for bosses in the game which is good, but the game does a really poor job preparing you for them. Hollow Knight’s bosses came in numbers and sometimes the quality dropped, but they were consistent and you were able to adapt quickly. They had attack patterns that were understandable, they didn’t lag on too long, they actually felt rewarding to conquer, they gave you perfect windows of opportunities to strike andheal, and they were both fun and fair to fight. The level design in Ori & The Will of The Wisps is okay I guess. Unlike Hollow Knight where there were reasons to backtrack through a previous area for either new rewards and pathways there wasn't really a reason to go back to a previous area in Will of The Wisps. Some of you may not experience it like that or will be glad to be done with an area, but that’s how it felt for me.
Finally performance on the Xbox One seems to be lacking, a lot actually. I don’t know if the PC performance for the game is better or if these problems are coming on my end, but the frame rate tanked a lot on the Xbox One. The game lagged during cutscenes, lagged during chase sequences, lagged during boss fights, lagged during fights with more than two enemies, and the game just struggled to load at times. That’s one of the numerous problems I have with Microsoft. They say the Xbox One optimizes every game they have, but when you look at other major home consoles like the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch they run fine because they put framerate caps for their games. Why can’t you run a simple small indie game like Ori & The Will of The Wisps?
Like I stated several times already it feels like this game is copying several good ideas from Hollow Knight, but fails to understand how Team Cherry executed them so well. A lot of you are going to be very defensive right now and claim Hollow Knight didn’t invent half of these ideas which I completely understand your viewpoint. Not every game is original, it’s like saying Dark Souls invented difficulty. What I’m trying to say is that Hollow Knight succeeded in a majority of areas due to good design choices made by the developers. Ori didn’t do a good job figuring out how to balance and execute each idea. Judging as a whole, Ori & The Will of The Wisps is a title I can still recommend to anybody who loved the original. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece like everyone else, but it's still worth your time and it’s one of the few indie metroidvanias that stands out in the crowd due to the artstyle, story, and it's quality. Hopefully by the time I publish this review, Moon Studios can fix half the bugs with future patches and updates. In the end I am going to give Ori & The Will of The Wisps deserves an 8/10 for being pretty good.
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