Rainbow Moon: An exhaustive list of the things I don't like

 

 

43 hours, level 40. My Baldren Solo Run—because yes, I'm now officially luxuriating in a Baldren Solo Run, without fear of jinxing the game by being too bold—is going stronger than ever and treating me to tons and tons of fun. I was afraid I had been too cocky a couple of hours ago, when I hit a difficulty spike of sorts upon entering Shadow Wall Mountains and found myself roughed up by local foes; fortunately, a bit of grinding and a couple of extra levels took care of that issue neatly and smoothly. Rainbow Moon is undoubtedly the type of game in which a few levels makes a huge difference—which makes total sense, since levels are so hard to gain to begin with. Anyway, after pimping up my little Baldren with overpowered gear, feeding him every single stat-increasing items I found and boosting his stats with Rainbow Pearls, I've reached a point where I'm virtually unstoppable and can single-handedly dispose of trash mobs as well as bosses without breaking a sweat. I also curbed my roaring obsession with the game to more manageable levels, and I don't feel anymore like my heart is being ripped out when I lay down my Vita.

In a nutshell, everything is fine and dandy and I'm enjoying myself tremendously. I'm actually planning to write a massive list of all the things I like in Rainbow Moon; but first, I want to get the few things I don't like so much about the game out of the way so as to keep le meilleur pour la fin, as they say in France. Without further ado, here are the Rainbow Moon features that I would gladly do without:

—No stackable items and no automatic item sortering in the inventory: items just pile up as they come, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. There is an semi-automatic sortering option that even lets you choose the type of sortering you want—by name, type and so on—but it has to be activated manually from the inventory menu and reactivated every time you get some new stuff. Tedious doesn't even begin to describe how annoying this is, especially in a game so rich in loot.

 

 

—Battles can't be sped up and battle animations can't be skipped at all. Being the grindy game par excellence, Rainbow Moon would really, really need both of these options. I fortunately got used to the long, drawn-out battles over time and even came to appreciate them to some extent; but that doesn't change the fact that Rainbow Moon forces the player to spend waaaaay too much time watching friends and foes do their thing and strut their stuff. I really hope SideQuest Studio will fix this issue in the upcoming Rainbow Skies and mercifully allow players to indulge in faster battles.

—The hunger factor. To be fair, I don't really dislike it; a part of me even appreciate this throwback to classic rogueliking. But one must admit that apart from paying homage to a 35-years-old gaming subgenre, the hunger factor serves no purpose at all in Rainbow Moon—apart from needlessly cluttering your already tight inventory, that is. The whole hunger thing is designed to keep you on your toes in roguelikes, and it works beautifully; but it makes absolutely no sense to implement a hunger factor in a game where food can be purchased every ten meters and found in harvesting points on a regular basis.

 

 

—Allies. Now, your mileage may vary on that one, but I found extra party members to be giant liabilities. The whole game is designed to accommodate a single character, from the size of the inventory to the Rainbow Pearls feature to the story itself (a man stranded in a foreign world trying to go back home, locked up in an endless pursuit of his nemesis), so why throw extra characters into the mix? They make battles a nightmarish slog, they are a chore to manage from the menu, they must be protected like fragile sprouts during their levelling-up process, they eat up your precious food and monetary resources and, last but not least, they ruin the glorious feeling of being a lone ranger in a unknown world. Sure, I do not doubt that they bring some variety to the gameplay if you can tolerate all these inconveniences; but there were other ways to achieve that goal. Give Baldren more skills, more weapons or even the possibility to change classes, but don't bother me with extra characters that requires tons of pampering. And if extra party members are required for safely navigating postgame territory like it's the case in some games, then let me recruit them in postgame—and properly levelled-up while you're at it. Don't just drag down my whole main game experience with those boulders when I can just as smoothly run solo.

—The dungeons are all a bit samey. This didn't bother me so much in the early stages, when dungeons were few and far between; but now that they are getting larger and more abundant, I would like to see a bit more variety when it comes to dungeon design and decoration.

—Boosting up HP in the Attribute Shop requires a ludicrous number of Rainbow Pearls. We're talking about 15 Pearls for each extra point, and that's 10 or 12 too many given how much extra HP is available. Granted, this mountain of complimentary HP is by no means necessary to progress smoothly, but it's galling to be unable to get my greedy paws on it without an insane amount of Pearl farming. My theory is that this absurd situation is the result of a glitch or an oversight by the developers, who may have initially planned to implement less extra HP or to make each point cost less Pearls.

That's the entirety of the things I don't like in Rainbow Moon so far; and as you can see, there are quite few of them and none of them are deal-breakers. Mark my words, my upcoming list of the things I like in Rainbow Moon is going to be much longer than that. It's going to have to wait a tad longer though, because I'm holydaying abroad for a couple of days starting tomorrow. I'll come back with a refreshed mind and (fingers crossed) some good gaming loot! Until then, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!