YMMV / The Messenger (2018)

• Anti-Climax Boss: Despite being hyped as a powerful enemy, the Demon King is a very simple fight verging more of a Puzzle Boss than an actual challenge unlike Barma'thazël. He has only one attack and even his second form is nothing spectacular requiring you only to dodge his shots before delivering the sole, finishing blow.
• Awesome Moments:
  • Ending the game on Ninja, Monk, the Blue Robes and Phantom doing the thing to become the Arcane Golem and initiate a Beam-O-War with the Curse to destroy it for good is a spectacular finale.
  • It happens again at the end of Picnic Panic, as Ninja, the Shopkeeper and the Alchemist Do The thing to fight the fusion of Barma'thazël and the Dark Messenger, in a Punch-Out!!-esque bout. The fight ends with the Arcane Golem pummeling their foe, blasting him several times over, spiking him back into the volcano and finishing with a beam from above for good measure.
• Awesome Music: Hell yes. You know the soundtrack is good when the game feels the need to credit the composer, Eric W. Brown (aka Rainbowdragoneyes), on the title screen. Even the Ninja likes it!
  Ninja Elder: Our champion returns! How is adventure treating you?
  Ninja: A little bit harder than I thought, but the music is amazing.
  • "Ninja's Respite", the theme for Ninja Village, gives you the feeling that you're about to start something incredible.
  • "Hills of Destiny", the Autumn Hills theme, is the very first thing you hear once you start your journey. It should be more than enough to let you know this game is going to be amazing.
  • "The Arcane Shoppe", the theme for the shop, is an insanely catchy piece. You'll want to stay in the shop just to dance to it.
  • "Forgotten", the theme for the Forlorn Temple, sounds appropriately mysterious, and has a surprisingly intense, fast-paced part towards the end.
  • "Bamboo Bungaloo", the theme of the Breather Level.
  • "Quillshroom's Horrors", the haunting theme of Quillshroom Marsh. It is so good the mushrooms themselves sing it!
  • "A Home Amongst the Clouds", the Cloud Ruins theme, is a fast-paced song that'll motivate you to keep moving.
  • The themes for the final level, "To Break the Curse" and "A Melody to Break the Curse", are intense songs that really give the feeling that it's all come to this.
  • From the Picnic Panic DLC we have Shoreline Showdown and Tropical Tussle, the 8-bit and 16-bit themes for the Voodkin Shore stage.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Elemental Skylands scenario, especially the boss at the end, feels a little out of place for the rest of the game's tone, with no effort to really explain the Clockwork Concierge's existence. Even the Shopkeeper thinks it sounds utterly ridiculous when you tell her about it, and thinks the lack of oxygen from being at such high altitudes is causing the Ninja to hallucinate.
  • The Leaf Monster, the boss of the first area of the game. It's one of the two 8-bit bosses that don't become relevant during the second half of the game. The other boss — the Emerald Golem — is this too, but not as much due to reappearing for the Picnic Panic DLC. This leaves the Leaf Monster as the only boss who shows up just for the sake of having a boss fight without impacting the story.
• Broken Base: The Genre Shift to a Metroidvania halfway through the game. Some people feel this is a welcome surprise and enhances what is already a great game, while others feel it causes Fake Longevity since there really isn't any new equipment the player gets after the halfway point of the game.
• Complete Monster: The Demon King is the Big Bad and the brutal ruler of the demons. Arriving in the human world from another dimension, the Demon King leads the demons to slaughter the entire Sky Giant civilization before launching attacks against the human civilization. When the leader of the remaining humans, the Phantom, tries to kill the Demon King in revenge, the Demon King, out of anger and pettiness, places a curse on humanity. He turns the Phantom's music box into a tether to the human realm that would enable the demons to return to the human realm. Every 500 years, the Demon King would lead attacks on the remaining population, slaughtering as many humans as possible and repeating the process until the humans surrendered to extinction. In addition, he would force the Phantom to wear a mask that would drive him to insanity and seal him into the music box so that he would be forced to keep the curse alive.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Searing Crags can be a real handful for first-timers since you'll have to get used to the Rope Dart mechanics and the level is filled with inconveniently placed enemies everywhere and has one of the most annoying bosses at its end.
  • And just as you think you're getting into the groove with the game's mechanics, the Tower of Time comes along and smacks you with room after room of Platform Hell, instant death traps that can only be avoided with pinpoint accuracy, and a severe case of Checkpoint Starvation.
• Ending Fatigue: You could be forgiven for thinking that The Underworld is The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and the Demon General is The Dragon, rather than a Disc-One Final Boss who signals the game's Genre Shift and rough halfway point. But much later, after you've collected every item and power-up, made your way through the Demon King's lair, and beaten him, you then find out that you need to travel to an After the End level with an Eldritch Abomination Advancing Boss of Doom, after which you listen to an extended cutscene explaining the world's backstory, and only then do you get to attempt the real The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and final boss. Some players may even be expecting another fake-out at that point. Perhaps amusingly, the developers seemed to anticipate this, as the achievement for getting the credits roll is "I liked the fake ending better".^{On the other hand... (Spoilers!)}While you can certainly be forgiven for expecting the Demon General to lead into a final battle with the Demon King, once the Genre Shift happens the game pretty clearly clues you in to the notion that fighting and killing the Demon King is not your primary objective, instead providing an emphasis on collecting the Music Notes and unlocking the Music Box. In fact, the only thing stopping you from fighting the Demon King immediately once the map opens up is the bridge leading to his fortress being broken, which requires the help of the Phobekins to fix, which only requires acquiring the Lightfoot Tabi to acquire, meaning you can easily access the Demon King long before acquiring any of the Music Notes. The Demon King himself straight up tells you that your quest is not over as long as the curse still persists.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Windmill Shuriken is acquired through destroying all 45 Power Seals, and the Shopkeeper teases its existence as being overpowered. It doesn't seem all that powerful at first glance, but it's incredibly useful. While you can only use three at a time, those uses recharge fairly quickly after you've caught the shuriken, meaning you can use them fairly liberally. While it lacks the range of its normal counterpart, the Windmill Shuriken's ability to not only infinitely pierce anything as long as it's active, including obstacles, not only makes it incredibly useful for hitting enemies and switches from a distance no matter what's in the way, the boomerang gimmick adds a Difficult, but Awesome dimension to using it by basically continuously dodging the shuriken allows you to maintain three projectiles spinning around you and damaging enemies. Even if you don't master that aspect, however, the effectively infinite uses and terrain-piercing properties of the Windmill Shuriken make it an indisputable upgrade by themselves.
  • Two of the most useful abilities you'll ever get from the shop are "Strike of the Ninja" and "Aerobatics Warrior". The former allows you to destroy enemy projectiles and even cloudstep off of them, which is invaluable for not only avoiding damage but also potentially evading death from spikes and pits. The latter allows you to attack downwards while gliding with the wingsuit, which is very handy for attacking enemies below you, but one thing that the description doesn't mention is that you also get cloudstep from wingsuit strikes, which is neat, but then there's one trick that you can do with it that's incredibly useful - using the wingsuit attack to gain height off of lanterns by basically bouncing upwards on them, and then using cloudstep once you're at maximum height, allowing you to gain a lot more vertical height from a single lantern than you would normally be able to otherwise. In fact, two Power Seal puzzles explicitly make use of projectile cloudstep and the wingsuit strike height trick!
• Good Bad Bugs: If you die immediately after collecting the music note from Corrupted Future, you'll respawn at the beginning and won't have to face the instant-kill monster.
• Heartwarming Moments: Upon reaching the Final Boss, Phantom, the Ninja assures him that humanity got his message and never gave up on him.
• The Scrappy: Quarble is immensely annoying, due to being a constant Jerkass, with no heart of gold to make up for it, about your (most likely repeated) deaths and having a rather ugly design on top of it. A very common question on forums is whether or not there's an option to turn him off (there's not, which is something that only makes players hate him more).
• That One Achievement: Star Messenger from Picnic Panic, where you have to beat the Dark Messenger in five rounds of the race without losing once. This is, to say the least, really hard, since you get five specific per-determined "mini-levels" that you need to race through to do that specific run. Rounds 1 & 2 are fairly straightforward, with a little bit of practice. Round 3 is comically easy if you know to wall-jump to scale walls faster and when to drop out of wingsuit mode to descend faster without falling into the spikes - it's rounds 4 & 5 that are the issue. Round 4 is a tricky multi-level set of corridors that force you to deal with enemies and traps to get to the other side as quickly as possible (while your opponent can just bypass them entirely), and thus requires some practice and you need to know when and where to use your rope dart. Round 5 requires near-perfect execution, as it revolves around maintaining your momentum gained from the rope dart hook at the start of the round - and you have to keep that speed going (as in, keep holding right and not touch the ground until the very end no matter what) while using a mix of gliding and cloudstepping to avoid crashing into walls and touching the ground. This is especially difficult to pull off, and what's worse, every time you fail you need to restart the whole race to try again.
• That One Boss:
  • The fight with the brainwashed Manfred at the end of Cloud Ruins is no joke, he's one of the few bosses where you fight on precarious grounding and he will break chunks of it making the fight even more dangerous. Near the end, you'll have to cloudstep your way to him in order to make him vulnerable, and one mistake means being kicked back to the beginning of the fight.
  • Barma'thazël, the Demon General. The Shopkeeper says he's fast and she's not joking. He has a nasty dash attack that he will chain several times the closer he is to being defeated, and he will also make damn sure that you know how to Cloudstep with a flame attack that covers the entire ground for a very long time. If you try to play cute with shurikens, he will simply spin his blades to reflect them.
• That One Level: The race sequence in Picnic Panic where you have to win five rounds before your opponent does. The first three rounds are easy enough, but the ones after that require you to be on top of your game and make few to no errors. It's common to win the first three, only to be completely swept in straight wins by your opponent after that.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Corrupted Future is not really very explored, you're there to collect a Musical Note and then you have to run away. How the demons turned Earth into such abominable landscape and what were the fates of the characters there are never mentioned or even worked on. Even after returning to the Tower of Time there are no real explanations or even any talk about it besides one brief joke at Ninja's expense.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Soldier has a very cool design and promises a refreshing gameplay change from the melee-focused Ninja, leading the player to suspect he might at least have a playable mode. He is unceremoniously Killed Offscreen in a way that makes most Bus Crashes look downright tame, and has absolutely zero relevance to the plot afterwards.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Lightfoot Tabi is not really used much outside the Sunken Shrine. It's needed to get access to the Underworld, but after that, it's easy to forget it even exists due to the lack of water to run on. You'll probably use it just for a few situational puzzles, and nowhere else.

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