"Enotria: The Last Song" Review - Spaghetti Souls

Publisher: Jyamma Games

Developer: Jyamma Games

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

I'm what one might call a "wannabe" Italophile. What I mean by this is that I'm not the kind of person who is actively obsessed with or knowledgeable about Italian culture or anything (my favorite food is Fettuccini Alfredo, and if I dared to claim that as an Italian thing I'd end up crucified), but it seems like 9 times out of 10 if I find that I like something, it'll turn out to be Italian in origin. My favorite band, Ancient Bards, hails from Rimini. I generally tend to like the architecture. I legitimately find the language beautiful. Things like that. It's not a love so great that I would be absolutely jumping at the chance to leave my home to travel there, but there's clearly something within me that draws me to Europe's boot. So, it should come as no surprise that I was eager to dig into Enotria: The Last Song, a soulslike based on Italian folklore. Everything I've already said is what steered me in this game's direction...and it's entirely possible that it's the reason I feel the way I do. 

If I could level with you, dear reader, though the pool of candidates for this is likely pretty slim, I think I'm probably Enotria's biggest fan...or at least, I'd put money on me liking it more than you will, and it's not even close. Something about that aforementioned x-factor seems to just make me more forgiving of things that would otherwise annoy me or make me enjoy things I'd already enjoy more. The eagle-eyed reader with a penchant for reading between the lines will have noticed the hidden truth of these statements: that Enotria, objectively speaking, isn't very good...but that I like it an awful lot. So the plain truth for you will likely be what everyone else is saying: that if you play this game, you probably won't think about it ever again. But I encourage you to read on to try and judge for yourself before you subscribe to that belief.

Like in all soulslikes, in Enotria you play as some lore-significant nobody in a story of cosmic proportions beyond your comprehension. And as such, I won't get too deep into it. You are the "maskless one": an oddity in a world ruled by theatre and music and the like. At the behest of a seemingly omnipotent cantor named Pulcinella, you set out on a journey to take down a cast of colorful characters seemingly taken from Commedia Dell'arte (I was a theatre kid, if you can't tell), and from there, we have our story. I never really pay that kind of thing any mind in non-FS soulslikes (unless they're Lies of P), so let's move on!

Just like with the story, if you're familiar with soulslikes, you'll be familiar with the building blocks of Enotria's combat: a system of light and heavy weapon attacks with an emphasis on timing and stamina management. As for what makes Enotria unique in the genre, the clear starting point for discussion is in how it handles its RPG mechanics. Like in any soulslike, you use a specific experience-like currency to level up various stats for your character, and your choices end up determining things like your maximum health, maximum stamina, overall damage output, etc. However, while most games in this genre operate on a class system wherein you choose a set stat loadout at the beginning (i.e. a knight might have higher strength while a mage has higher intelligence) that you build off of through the game's runtime, in Enotria your stat spread starts off totally equal. Then, you manually apply various class-like buffs and effects at will to adapt to different challenges. 

For instance, the most immediately recognizable of these buffs are the various "aspects" you can equip. You start out with just a handful: one "aspect" for each stat that adds a bonus of 5 points into that stat, but you unlock more as you defeat bosses and complete side quests that have more drastic stat effects (for instance, going into NG+ you get access to an aspect that grants a whopping 20 points to each stat in exchange for you taking slightly greater damage in combat). So if you don't have a lot of points in health, for instance, and you find that you need a bit more wiggle room in a pinch, you might equip an aspect that increases your health before you go into your next battle. Pretty straightforward as far as I'm concerned. 

Adding onto the aspects are the game's many masks. These masks serve as Enotria's armor system, but rather than add to your defenses, each mask has a unique effect on gameplay. Like with the aspects, you start out the game with just a handful of masks in a collection that grows as the hours go by. For example, an early mask might make your spells more powerful while a later mask might give you one extra health flask or cause your weapon to gain a status effect infusion after a critical hit. So you'll typically choose a mask and an aspect to complement each other in some way. 

To end the discussion of Enotria's RPG systems, the last bit of equippable buffing is the collection of perks you can equip. Perks are unlocked via a secondary currency acquired mainly through boss battles, and you can mix and match them at will to create entirely different playstyles. I, for instance, always kept a perk to restore a bit of health when I parried an attack, a perk to restore a bit of health when I cast a spell, and a perk to deal chip damage to an enemy whenever they damaged me. There were a couple other perks I always kept on hand, but ultimately my goal was to create the ultimate survivalist character (a package that temporarily included a perk to restore a healing flask use when I landed a fatal blow...until I realized that this perk was bugged and didn't work....more on that later). And the kicker for all of this is that you can have three separate loadouts equipped at a given time and switch between them at will as the situation demands....in theory. I personally found this to only be useful when I needed to switch masks for side quest purposes. Other than that, I didn't give this feature a second thought.

So, now that we've covered what goes into your character build, let's discuss how your build actually gets put to work. As you deal damage, parry attacks, and (if you have the correct perk) dodge attacks, you'll build up a stagger meter (here called an "unraveling" meter). Once this meter is all the way built up, the enemy becomes staggered and you get the opportunity to unleash a critical hit for massive damage. As you do all these things, you also build up your spells (here called "lines"), with each of the four slots you can fill charging at varying rates. And that bit is probably self-explanatory. There are several lines you can use, but if you'd like my advice, I'd only use the ones that act as ranged attacks. There are no bows or other ranged weapons (despite the fact that several enemies have them), so your only hope of hitting distant targets is to use lines that summon bows or the like...and also, I feel no shame whatsoever in spoiling that the secret final boss takes away your ability to use lines, so you'll not want to rely on them too much. 

On that subject, while there are several lines you can use, there are kinda several weapons you can use...but it's really more like 5 or 6. There are many, many individual weapons, for sure, each with different scaling and some with better elemental damage than others...but all of them play the exact same way, so there's not really much to choosing a weapon: the best one in its category is the best one in its category. You won't find one greatsword that swings slightly faster than the others, for instance. So, there really isn't much variety in the weapons at all, and the unfortunate fact of the matter is that there is a correct type of weapon to use. In my first playthrough, I used polearms. That was not the correct type. I made it through all the way, clearly, but I noticed that in Act 2 it was almost 100% impossible to land hits. Enemies simply start attacking far too frequently, never get staggered, and never stop attacking. So, in that first playthrough, I defeated every enemy I came across by building up that stagger gauge and nothing else. It was relatively quick work because constant attacking means constant parries and constant parries means constant stagger build-up, but it was more than a little frustrating to never be able to swing my polearm all the way without getting interrupted. Again, it's doable...and it may be more doable now because of a massive patch that came out recently, but I still wouldn't recommend it. After beating the game the first time, I started a new game (not NG+) using just longswords, and that was far better. I could deal damage in act 2 and have the animation end early enough to parry attacks at the last minute. But for an extra bit of advice, if you go down this route, it also pays to keep a massively powerful big weapon with you and upgrade it as you go along. Switching to that bigger weapon and using it to land the critical hit on a staggered enemy just makes the amount of damage you deal even more ridiculous! So, that's basically the weapon discussion.

But before I move on to talking about bosses and other difficulty concepts, I mentioned elemental damage earlier and I intend to explain what I mean. In this game, there are 4 types of non-standard elemental damage, each with its own status condition that is applied when a meter for the element is filled. Firstly, there's "vis" damage, which inflicts "dizzy" upon proc. Secondly, there's "malammo" damage, which inflicts "sickness". Thirdly, there's "gratia" damage, which inflicts "radiant." Finally, there's "fatuo" damage, which inflicts "wicked." Now, I know what you're thinking: ".....................what?" That feeling just gets worse when you realize that there's a sort of Pokemon-esque type chart to take into account here. For instance, certain enemies have inherent "gratia" defense, which means they take less normal damage, are immune to "gratia" damage, but take more damage from "malammo" sources. Thankfully, the type chart is on the screen at all times, so this isn't something you have to memorize. I don't believe that it needed to be this ridiculous, though. Could it not just be sickness damage dealing the sickness status, for example? But an interesting thing the game does with the statuses that can be inflicted is their secondary effects. "Dizzy" increases the target's attack but lowers defense. "Sickness" causes constant health loss, but while this is happening, anything standing too close to the afflicted target also has a sickness gauge build up. "Radiant" causes the target to start healing, but if it gets hit by another attack, it creates an explosion that deals large amounts of damage and ends the healing effect. "Wicked," to end things off, increases the target's elemental damage, but anything that attacks the target heals itself. You'll notice I've been talking about "targets" and not "enemies." This is because the effects apply to both you and your foes. So if you get inflicted with the "wicked" status effect, your enemies will heal themselves if they hit you. And you will have these statuses proc'd on you more than a few times, so playing around these effects is a mandatory part of surviving....but that really, really, really makes it sound more complicated than it is. I mean, to use the wicked status effect as an example again, if you're parrying and dodging like you're supposed to, your enemies can't heal themselves, now can they? So, there's a lot to consider, but you can really get through the whole game without being conscious of all the effects. I had to look up the wicked condition for this review just to be sure, after all!

So now we come to a discussion of bosses, and this is going to feed directly into the segment about technical integrity for reasons that'll become apparent. The first thing to bring up is the demo: if you're like me and you played the demo of Enotria before the game came out, the first thing you'll notice is that everything is tremendously easier than it was. The demo was borderline unbeatable in my case, so this is undoubtedly an improvement. However, there are still parts that clearly haven't received a lot of love. A recent patch has fixed a lot of the complaints I had, but this game came out in mid-September and it took until October to fix some of them, so I'm going to be judging things based on how they were when I was playing for the first, second, and third times. One boss that needed some extra time in the oven was the "High Priestess of Velka," which was a literally unbeatable fight unless the AI glitched out. The priestess in question had three smaller priestesses with her that all acted of their own accord, which would result in the player getting killed within three seconds of the fight starting because of the sheer chaos. Then there was an automaton boss fight right before chapter 3 whose damage output was simply too insane with the added ability to proc the sickness condition. He was not an unbeatable fight, but if you wanted to do it in a decent amount of time, you'd need to hope his AI glitched out. Then, there was the secret hidden final boss, which was a literally unbeatable fight unless their AI glitched out. Are you noticing a pattern, here? And you know what the real kicker is? I beat all of these bosses before the patch came out, and the secret final boss was the only one that I didn't beat multiple times because the patch came out literally the night that I fought it for the second time. Does that mean I'm some kind of god at Enotria? Of course not! It means that the AI glitching out was such a reliable win condition that it was kind of a foregone conclusion that it would happen eventually. For that priestess boss, I eventually won when I was able to lure the smaller priestesses out one-by-one (and even then it took a couple tries doing that). With the patch, the priestesses coordinate their attacks in a much more manageable way, but it's still just a bad fight, period. For that hidden secret boss, I eventually won when he refused to use one of his attacks for a whole attempt. With the patch, I think they just turned all the dials on him down a bit, because he was somehow a first try victory that second time. For the automaton fight, I was getting sick of fighting him (the runback includes waiting on an elevator and then taking the elevator back down, because there's a bug that makes the "roll off the elevator as you send it back up" soulslike routine impossible), so I looked at the little overhang about his height that was jutting out from a building, thought "I bet i can get him stuck in there," and proceeded to 100% get him stuck under there like I thought...and then the next playthrough where I fought him, he just jumped off into the nearby ocean for no reason. With the patch, I'm guessing they just turned the dials down a little bit too, but they also took that overhang I used away, which makes me feel sorry for new players going forward. Beyond these bosses, there are also plenty of times where bosses will just stop moving entirely and you'll be able to kill them just by standing there and swinging away. There's a lot wrong with the bosses even now.

And just like with the bosses, even with a massive patch out, there's a lot wrong here. So I'm just going to list some of these things in no particular order. If you want to go for the true ending or just completing storylines or you just...want to talk to multiple characters in the hub area...you're going to have to shut down and restart the game several times, because there's a tendency for all of your controller buttons to freeze when you move from one character's dialogue to the next. This was a constant issue that still hasn't been addressed. There are also plenty of times where directional buttons will freeze and you'll have to restart to be able to scroll through your inventory. My actual first playthrough was destroyed because I exited out during the introductory cutscene, and when I reloaded the save file, the cutscene kept getting interrupted with "you died" messages. Why did I exit out of the introductory cutscene in the first place, you might ask? Because (at least in the Italian language version) there isn't any actual voice in that cutscene....neither is there any voice for 99% of the speaking characters...and to this day I still don't know if that's a bug or not. There have been times where interactable glyphs have been invisible (but still functional). There have also been a couple times where I've had to use this game's equivalent of the dark sign from Dark Souls to escape from being trapped in textures. Then there's the camera issues....every soulslike has them, but this is by far the soulslike with the worst camera problems. It seems like the camera gets caught in every door you ever walk through, and the result is a frequent back-and-forth jiggling that can cause headaches. You may also recall that I mentioned one of the perks being bugged entirely and just not working....in addition to that one, there were a rare handful of times where I'd find that my parry health restoration perk wasn't working despite getting the right sound effect to indicate I'd parried perfectly. That's a bit of a rarer one, but to have at least one perk just not work for as long as several weeks after launch (I haven't tried since the recent patch) is...not great.

Finally, let's discuss the technical positives. The graphics are beautiful, with each biome being more beautiful than the last in at least some ways. The soundtrack, likewise, really slaps sometimes. And though I had to restart the game several times, I never had any hard crashes, and I don't recall there being any lags in texture pop-in. Not exactly the best report card of all time, but it's still a good thing that the report card isn't all negative.

So, there you have it. I can't exactly describe why I liked this game enough to play it nearly 4 times (I've gotten about halfway through the final act in run #4), but I can quite effectively describe why you might not like it. It's as I said: if you look at things from a purely objective standpoint, it's hard not to write Enotria: The Last Song off as mediocre, if not outright bad. There's a lot not to like, there's a lot that's still wrong even if you don't mind, and there's a lot that still hasn't been addressed nearly a month after release. This appears to be the first "major" release from these developers, but that only gets one so far.

Let us review:

Needlessly complicated elemental system - 0.3

No actual weapon variety - 1.0

Boss issues - 1.0

Technical woes - 1.0

The final score for Enotria: The Last Song is...

6.7/10 - Almost Good

Bel Tentativo, Jyamma Games, bel tentativo