[NintendoEverything Review] Fractured Soul, 3DS

Platforming Fans: You have a new game to buy. I’m not kidding either.

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MegaMan 2 was a game I grew up on. I never beat it as a kid- it would be ten years until that accomplishment- but I played it more than any other NES title I owned, plowing through the harrowing platforming puzzles, dodging beams of light on FlashMan’s stage, and cursing (as good as any 6 year old could, anyhow) at the frustrating spikes scattered about BubbleMan’s underwater fortress. By age 8 I had beaten every robot master thirty times over, and though I never defeated Wily himself, I got as close as anyone else my age.

I was- and still consider myself to be- a very skilled platformer.

It is with great consideration, then, that I concede (temporary) defeat in front of the latest game I have had the pleasure of reviewing. That game is ‘Fractured Soul’, a dual-screen platformer from the makers of nothing you’ve likely heard of. If you want to know more about the developer, you can read my interview with them here. If you want to know more about my concession to ‘Fractured Soul’?

Simply hit the break and I’ll tell you all about it.

Like I said, I’m a pretty experienced platformer. It’s easily my favorite genre, and anytime a new one comes out I bounce on the opportunity to play it– so of course I was quite happy when an EndGame Studios representative emailed me asking me if I had any interest in ‘Fractured Soul’. A few days later, I was playing the game constantly.

I’ll be honest: My expectations for the game weren’t high. I wasn’t expecting it to be terrible, but I was prepared for something on the level of Chronos Twins (which I did not enjoy) or some other fairly average downloadable platformer. I didn’t expect it to be a challenge, I didn’t expect it to be so clearly influenced by games I loved in my childhood, and above all I didn’t expect it to be terribly memorable.

All things considered, I expected something average and I got something awesome.

The premise of ‘Fractured Soul’ is interesting in and of itself: It’s a left-to-right platformer as you’d gather, but your character is on the top and bottom screens simultaneously. The shoulder buttons allow you to transfer back and forth between the two “dimensions”, creating some unique puzzles and situations and blah blah. If you want to know what the game is actually like, check out this trailer. I’m just gonna tell you whether or not the things in the trailer are good or bad.

The game eases you into this flip-flopping mechanic as easily as anyone could expect, but even the first few levels aren’t without lapses in logic (from the player) and fuckups (pardon the language) abound. You cannot use your regular platforming skills- ones you gathered by playing, say, Mario or Mutant Mudds– in this game.

This is old school. This is pattern recognition. This is no-holds barred, unforgiving, memorization-required platforming as it used to be before 1995.

You can take five hits before you die, one tiny slip can equal two or more hits, you could fall into a pit (or out the ceiling, actually), through a laser field, or get disintegrated by the wall of fire behind you. The bottom line here is that the instances in which you pass a level without dying are very, very few and far between. There were times when I’d play a level for twenty minutes and die every ten or fifteen seconds. Multiply that out and it means I died 80-120 times in a twenty minute period, and I STILL didn’t beat the level.

Fractured Soul isn’t unfair and it’s not angering though. It’s fun. It’s satisfying. You will yell and laugh at yourself, you will probably swear a ton, and you will leave not feeling disheartened and defeated- but enthusiastic about coming back in twenty minutes and trying again. It is, as best as I can describe it, the exact feeling of playing an old MegaMan game.

That being said, it’s not as good as those old MegaMan games. The gameplay is there in its near-flawless design, but it’s missing one very important element: the charm. Enemies are completely forgettable, characters (the few there are, anyhow) aren’t particularly unique, and you will rarely remember a level for its aesthetics. Not to say there aren’t memorable levels- there absolutely are- but you remember them for their incredibly tight and challenging construction, rather than for their visual or artistic finesse.

(I do want to make a shout out to whoever did the art though, because there are a few levels in particular- mostly early ones- that have some really breathtaking backgrounds. They aren’t terribly unique or charming, but damn do they look good.)

One element of the game that actually does have some charm in it is the story.

Or rather, the way they tell the story.

There are no bits of narration or cutscenes, but the loading screens before each level contain a sentence or two– often slightly cryptic– about what’s going on. It’s hard to discern the specifics sometimes, but the gist of it seems to be that you’re an experiment of some sort attempting to escape a space station that’s gradually slipping into chaos. The environments are slightly Metroid-Prime-ish (devoid of the atmospheric qualities, but in principle they’re similar), the duality of worlds always interesting to look at, and they certainly don’t take away from the overall experience.

But again, the perfection of ‘Fractured Soul’ comes purely in the gameplay.

It’s worth noting that the game isn’t entirely platforming though. There are various levels (maybe ten throughout the game) that are sidescrolling shmups a la Gradius, with quite a bit of inspiration taken from games like Ikaruga. These levels are equally as fun and challenging as the platformers, but I would have liked to have a better sense of speed when playing through them. Backgrounds move painfully slowly, and while the actual gameplay of the speed worked great, I didn’t FEEL like I was in a spaceship flying through space. I felt like I was in a wheelchair moving through molasses. Sort of.

Though, I should clarify something: Simply beating the game– making it through every level, that is– is not impossible. For someone familiar with the genre it will take around six hours to traverse every course and overcome every obstacle, and though you’re very likely to die hundreds of times (I wish they had a death counter so I could give you an exact number), you can make it through the basic game without ever throwing your 3DS across the room.

But GUESS WHAT? There’s a par time on every level, there’s a star rating for every level, and there are “secrets” (they aren’t terribly hard to find most of the time) to gather in each level. If you want to get a five star rating on any particular level, you have to hit the par time, get every secret, die zero times, AND avoid taking a single hit throughout the entire level. In my first playthrough of the game, I got entirely 1 or 2 stars (a vast majority of 1, however) on each platforming level, most of them leaving my jaw agape when I saw just how quick the par time was in comparison to my fifteen minute run.

To give you an idea of exactly how tough (and fun) the game is, I made this video of myself attempting to “speed run” and get five stars on the first level.

A few more things of note: Aside from the main game, there are bonus levels that are unlocked by collecting the stars you get at the end of every level. At the end of my first playthrough I had around 35 stars and I had unlocked two bonus levels out of five or ten. I can’t remember the exact amount and I accidentally started a new game so all my data is gone, but I’d guess there are maybe 120 stars in total you can get and perhaps ten bonus levels to unlock. It could be five though so don’t kill me if it’s five.

Oh yea, and these bonus levels are easily the most difficult thing the game has to offer. I beat the first one with relative ease, but the second one? I couldn’t even grasp the patterns much less execute them properly. If you’re someone who liked punishing yourself, this is the way to go without a doubt.

So what’s the verdict? Click here to see the bottom line.

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