La-Mulana 2

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in La-Mulana 1 & 2 Bundle, along with La-Mulana.)

La-Mulana 2 is a Metroidvania originally released in 2018 on PC, with a port to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game sees players take the role of Lumisa, the daughter of the first game’s Indiana Jones-esque protagonist, who enters the titular ruins of La-Mulana after her father goes missing and locals near the ruins put out a request to investigate monsters that have started appearing at the ruins.

In many ways, La-Mulana 2 is cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. The game has all of the usual trappings of a Metroidvania, but with a focus on puzzles… though this time around boss fights are much more prominent early into the game – in the first few hours of the original game I fought maybe one boss, but here I fought three. La-Mulana 2 also still has issues with stiff platforming, which is better this time around, but still pretty frustrating.

What’s changed this time around is that now I feel like I’m playing the worst sort of troll game. To be fair, traps existed in La-Mulana 1, but it was usually fairly clear that something funny was going on, or else the trap’s repercussions weren’t too serious, at least until later in the game. Here, the traps start early, are extremely frequent, almost always give the player little or no warning they’re present, and are frequently lethal. I realized, as I was playing through the first area after this game’s tutorial section and I had to memorize multiple spaces I needed to jump over to get from point A to point B just a few screens away because they would plunge me to my doom if I didn’t, that this felt like one of those “kaizo” games created only for the most dedicated and masochistic players. And in a game whose difficulty is already high starts playing cheap tricks like this, I start losing my patience.

Where I outright lost my patience was around a particularly challenging boss fight. On my way there, I would have to run an aforementioned invisible obstacle course, and the boss itself could kill me in a few hits. However, it had a clear, simple pattern, meaning that if I was absolutely precise in my timing and movements, I just needed to be persistent to win.

So I’d trudge my way there, making sure not to fall into the multiple traps on the way, take another try, and more often than not get killed and have to start over. Sometimes I would slip up on the way and fall into a trap. Sometimes the boss would knock me off a ledge into a pit, forcing me to restart the battle over again with less health, sometimes the poor controls and stiff movement would force me to slip up and the boss would kill me. But I was sure I could manage it. I could see how to beat him, I just had to keep at it.

Maybe the tenth time I was fighting him, I saw it. The game would freeze for a fraction of a second during the boss fight, mess up my timing, and force me to die. And from that point on, I realized it had been happening in every fight with the guy. I did ultimately end up beating him, only by accounting for these game freezes (no idea if this is a Nintendo Switch thing, or if it’s in all versions), and immediately went back to save. Then, I ventured on to the new area, and on the very next screen fell into a trap and died.

I really wanted to like La-Mulana 2. I liked the first game, and in many ways this seemed like an improvement. Beyond the slightly better (but still terrible) movement controls, the localization was better, making it easier to understand where to go and what to do. And the rest of the presentation got a boost too, with some pretty good pixel art visuals and a decent synthesized soundtrack. But after going through that needlessly frustrating boss fight only to get killed by yet another aggravating trick deliberately put into the game to mess with players, I decided I was done with this.

If you liked La-Mulana and you enjoy sadistic “kaizo” games, you may find La-Mulana 2 to be to your liking. But after the high level of challenge in the first game wasn’t enough for the series’ developers and they opted to just deliberately frustrate players with what I can only describe as intentionally bad game design… well, at that point the game isn’t just hard, it’s just a bad game. And tragically, it’s a bad game constructed out of the parts for a good game.

tl;dr – La-Mulana 2 is a Metroidvania about the daughter of an Indiana Jones-style character exploring an ancient ruin, and this game follows its predecessor in numerous ways, even improving on some. Unfortunately, it has also added overly sadistic level design and poor performance, resulting in a game that goes over the top with its challenge level into “just plain bad”, which is a shame because parts of this game are so very good. However, in the end, I cannot recommend this game to anyone.

Grade: C-

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