Yohane The Parhelion: Blaze in the Deepblue

Before this one gives you anything a metroidvania fan would call a toy, it asks for an hour of errands. Walk to the edge of town, talk to a friend, gather three of a plant, turn the plant into something warm, walk back. My patience got tested early, and I suspect that opening stretch is where most of the people who bounce off it bounce. Stick around and the real shape shows up: a small, handmade side-scroller about a girl named Yohane leaving her hometown, collecting her friends one at a time, and using each of them as a key to a door she walked past twenty minutes ago. Companion swapping is the whole engine. Every friend you recruit rides along as a single active partner with one ability attached, and that ability doubles as your combat option and your traversal key. One clears a blocked path, one gets you across a gap you had written off, one deals with the specific hazard that has been chewing through your health in a specific room. Combat itself is light. Yohane swings, the partner does their trick on a cooldown, and most enemies ask you to keep moving rather than to learn a parry window. Bosses are the exception and the highlight. They are pattern-based in the old-fashioned way, telegraphed clearly, and usually beatable on the second or third attempt once you stop flailing and start reading the tells. Inti Creates has been building 2D action games for a very long time, and that experience shows up most in those fights. The other half of the loop is gathering and cooking. Ingredients drop constantly, recipes turn them into healing and stat food, and the game actually wants you to use the kitchen instead of leaving it as a box for completionists to tick. It works mainly because the maps are compact and the walk back is never punishing. The sprite art carries a lot of weight too. Character animation is expressive, backgrounds have genuine depth, and everything reads at a glance, which matters when you are mid-jump with a partner ability queued. It plays cleanly on a controller and is comfortable to sit with for two or three hours at a time. Where it disappoints depends entirely on what you came for. Anyone who has been mainlining the harder end of the genre should know up front that this is a soft ride. Ability gates open in roughly the order you expect, the map rarely folds back on itself in a way that makes you gasp, and death costs you very little. There is real fetch-quest padding in the first third, and a couple of those errands exist to introduce a character rather than to give you something to do. The story also assumes a baseline familiarity with the anime cast. If you know these characters already, the reunions land and the banter has weight. If you do not, you will still follow the plot fine, but a chunk of the emotional payload will sail past you, and the writing is not strong enough on its own to convert a stranger into a fan. It is short, too. Finishing over a weekend is realistic, and the post-credits pull to go back for collectibles is mild. That said, I would rather have a small game that knows exactly what it is than a bloated one that does not. This is doing one thing exceptionally well: it makes a gentle, good-looking, low-stress exploration game that a total newcomer to the genre can finish without ever feeling talked down to. Beginner-friendly is a phrase that usually means watered down, and here it mostly means considerate. The ability gates teach you what they want, the bosses are fair, and nothing in it is designed to waste your evening. So: if you watch the anime, or you have been curious about metroidvanias but every recommendation you get is a punishment simulator, this is a genuinely good landing spot. If your last playthrough was a hardcore genre staple and you want something to fight back, look elsewhere, because this one will hand you the win and offer you a snack.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Yohane The Parhelion: Blaze in the Deepblue.