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20120923
A Journey That Any Archeologist Would Absolutely Love!
Price: 1,000 points
Developer: Nigoro
Publisher: EnjoyUp
Release dates:
EU: 9/20/12
NA: 9/20/12
JP: 2011
La-Mulana is a remake of a 2005 freeware pc title with vastly improved graphics and music as well as other changes. The game saw many delays and the previous publisher even cancelled the North American and European releases, luckily EnjoyUp games picked up the game and now it's finally been released outside of Japan, but is this game worth the long wait? Let's find out!
Story and Gameplay
The story in La-Mulana is fairly important despite how it feels, the story and events often uncover clues to difficult puzzles so the difficulty of the game can vary depending on how well you pay attention to what's going on around you. The game is a platformer that feels alot like an Indiana Jones meets Metroid style game with tricky puzzle, platforming, and treasure hunting this game will never have you bored!
The bosses in the game can be nightmarishly difficult or very easy depending on your weapon choices so be sure to not use up all of a particular sub weapon before fighting the boss of a temple.
A word to the wise collect the item near the start of the game because without it you may need to backtrack or worse yet could end up stuck in a pit or other trap with no way out forcing you to reset the game!
A unique feature in La-Mulana is the .EXE system that grants you power-ups from .EXE files that can be found, but your cpu memory is limited so don't expect to use every good .EXE file you find at the same time.
The game is very long and can easily take more than 40 hours to beat, but can take over 80 hours for completionists to collect every item and fully explore every area in the game!
Graphics and Music
The graphics in the WiiWare remake have been drastically improved from the PC release and are easily some of the best graphics you'll see on a WiiWare game as the details are breath-taking as every single area looks not only beautiful, but also completely unique with so many background objects and enemy designs you'll wonder how Nigoro put so much detail into a game that is under 40 MB!
The soundtrack is quite possibly the most impressive feature of La-Mulana as there are easily 50+ music tracks in the game and every one of them sounds like something straight from a PS1 platformer! How Nigoro managed this I'll never know, but you won't hear better quality music on any other WiiWare game!
Bottom Line
With fun, yet challenging gameplay and unrivaled graphics and music for a WiiWare game this is one game that no Nintendo/Retro gamer should pass up and at 1,000 points it's easily the cheapest WiiWare game with around 60 hours of gameplay!
Score ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 10/10
This review can also be viewed here
Price: 1,000 points
Developer: Nigoro
Publisher: EnjoyUp
Release dates:
EU: 9/20/12
NA: 9/20/12
JP: 2011
La-Mulana is a remake of a 2005 freeware pc title with vastly improved graphics and music as well as other changes. The game saw many delays and the previous publisher even cancelled the North American and European releases, luckily EnjoyUp games picked up the game and now it's finally been released outside of Japan, but is this game worth the long wait? Let's find out!
Story and Gameplay
The story in La-Mulana is fairly important despite how it feels, the story and events often uncover clues to difficult puzzles so the difficulty of the game can vary depending on how well you pay attention to what's going on around you. The game is a platformer that feels alot like an Indiana Jones meets Metroid style game with tricky puzzle, platforming, and treasure hunting this game will never have you bored!
The bosses in the game can be nightmarishly difficult or very easy depending on your weapon choices so be sure to not use up all of a particular sub weapon before fighting the boss of a temple.
A word to the wise collect the item near the start of the game because without it you may need to backtrack or worse yet could end up stuck in a pit or other trap with no way out forcing you to reset the game!
A unique feature in La-Mulana is the .EXE system that grants you power-ups from .EXE files that can be found, but your cpu memory is limited so don't expect to use every good .EXE file you find at the same time.
The game is very long and can easily take more than 40 hours to beat, but can take over 80 hours for completionists to collect every item and fully explore every area in the game!
Graphics and Music
The graphics in the WiiWare remake have been drastically improved from the PC release and are easily some of the best graphics you'll see on a WiiWare game as the details are breath-taking as every single area looks not only beautiful, but also completely unique with so many background objects and enemy designs you'll wonder how Nigoro put so much detail into a game that is under 40 MB!
The soundtrack is quite possibly the most impressive feature of La-Mulana as there are easily 50+ music tracks in the game and every one of them sounds like something straight from a PS1 platformer! How Nigoro managed this I'll never know, but you won't hear better quality music on any other WiiWare game!
Bottom Line
With fun, yet challenging gameplay and unrivaled graphics and music for a WiiWare game this is one game that no Nintendo/Retro gamer should pass up and at 1,000 points it's easily the cheapest WiiWare game with around 60 hours of gameplay!
Score ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 10/10
This review can also be viewed here
Last edited by Reanfan on October 22nd 2018, 1:32 pm; edited 1 time in total
Comments
Re: Review: La-Mulana (WiiWare)
September 26th 2012, 7:27 pmNINTENBRO
Daaaaamn! I gotta get this game!
September 26th 2012, 10:16 pm
Nintenbro wrote:Daaaaamn! I gotta get this game!
September 27th 2012, 12:53 am
unfortunately i have to start over. activated the nasty cruel HARD MODE trap. that's why every room suddenly had new, more and stronger monsters. also, the bosses are a big problem now.
i advise you to not do the same and DO NOT READ "THAT" SIGN TWICE! or at least make a separate save file. i am a fool, like the sign told me.
i advise you to not do the same and DO NOT READ "THAT" SIGN TWICE! or at least make a separate save file. i am a fool, like the sign told me.
September 27th 2012, 12:48 pm
Ouch that sucks.
September 27th 2012, 12:52 pm
I can't believe it, but this review has been mentioned at IGN and Kotaku now!
September 27th 2012, 3:59 pm
This review is very good.
October 1st 2012, 12:10 am
Just a warning to let you all know there is a gamebreaking bug in there.
Read it up below. I messed up there and have to start again, again.
So, you now know not to read that evil sign twice, and now you know how not to mess up your game.
There are other "traps" that don't reset, but these are intended. I wrote about them on Nintendo Life, but I guess people here want to know as well. Actually there are two missables I found out that way, so made a list work-in-progress now to help other players avoiding the nasty traps, glitches, and missables.
If you don't like SPOILERS, I marked the names of the areas, so if you're not there yet, you might as well not read further.
1. When you first enter the Moon Pyramid area a few screens up and to the right, there's a big block at the ceiling. You can bring it down by solving a puzzle and open up a path to the Twin Towers. If you mess up this puzzle the block will fall down all the way so you cannot reach the ladder. Don't worry too much if you messed up this, there's a second way to enter the Twin Towers in the Lava Pit area, but it would be handy to have this shortcut as well.
2. In the Lava Pit, all the way to the left where you can fall down a whole screen between flames that spit out of the walls. There is a hidden passage to the left. It eventually leads to a miniboss, and then to another room to the left, and there is a difficult trap waiting for you. I recommend warping and saving, because if you activate the trap there is a chance you either get instantly killed, or you will miss that item forever. However, this secret item is not important to win the game.
3. BEWARE! In the Giants Coliseum there is a sign in the upper right area that tells you that you should never read it again! Because if you do, the rest of the game is turned into VERY HARD mode: You make more monsters, new monsters and harder monsters appear in almost every screen, and you have to fight much harder and faster bosses!
4. VERY IMPORTANT! In the Graveyard of Giants (an icy area) there is a room with two big ice platforms and two switches. If you press the switches in the wrong order the platform will fall down and you never get a second chance to make a bridge to the "grail point" which is very important to see the ending/final boss of the game. EDIT: Actually there is another way! So this is not a gamebreaking bug!
You cannot reset these, other than loading an earlier save or starting from scratch.
Last edited by SKTTR on December 11th 2012, 3:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
Read it up below. I messed up there and have to start again, again.
So, you now know not to read that evil sign twice, and now you know how not to mess up your game.
There are other "traps" that don't reset, but these are intended. I wrote about them on Nintendo Life, but I guess people here want to know as well. Actually there are two missables I found out that way, so made a list work-in-progress now to help other players avoiding the nasty traps, glitches, and missables.
If you don't like SPOILERS, I marked the names of the areas, so if you're not there yet, you might as well not read further.
1. When you first enter the Moon Pyramid area a few screens up and to the right, there's a big block at the ceiling. You can bring it down by solving a puzzle and open up a path to the Twin Towers. If you mess up this puzzle the block will fall down all the way so you cannot reach the ladder. Don't worry too much if you messed up this, there's a second way to enter the Twin Towers in the Lava Pit area, but it would be handy to have this shortcut as well.
2. In the Lava Pit, all the way to the left where you can fall down a whole screen between flames that spit out of the walls. There is a hidden passage to the left. It eventually leads to a miniboss, and then to another room to the left, and there is a difficult trap waiting for you. I recommend warping and saving, because if you activate the trap there is a chance you either get instantly killed, or you will miss that item forever. However, this secret item is not important to win the game.
3. BEWARE! In the Giants Coliseum there is a sign in the upper right area that tells you that you should never read it again! Because if you do, the rest of the game is turned into VERY HARD mode: You make more monsters, new monsters and harder monsters appear in almost every screen, and you have to fight much harder and faster bosses!
4. VERY IMPORTANT! In the Graveyard of Giants (an icy area) there is a room with two big ice platforms and two switches. If you press the switches in the wrong order the platform will fall down and you never get a second chance to make a bridge to the "grail point" which is very important to see the ending/final boss of the game. EDIT: Actually there is another way! So this is not a gamebreaking bug!
You cannot reset these, other than loading an earlier save or starting from scratch.
Last edited by SKTTR on December 11th 2012, 3:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
December 10th 2012, 11:21 am
Um....the link tries to log me in as an admin
December 10th 2012, 12:33 pm
December 10th 2012, 2:08 pm
The folks at Nigoro did an incredible job developing La Mulana. :3
December 10th 2012, 2:17 pm
TheBlackDragon wrote:The folks at Nigoro did an incredible job developing La Mulana. :3
Indeed. |D
November 7th 2013, 1:58 pm
I finally beat this game yesterday!
Very good review @Rukiafan. =)
Very good review @Rukiafan. =)
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