OCEANHORN GUIDE

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas is developer Cornfox & Bros building a candlelit shrine to The Legend of Zelda series. A more appropriate subtitle for it would be, “The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” It'd be one thing if Oceanhorn achieved a similar level of greatness as its inspirations or riffed on Zelda's core concepts in a meaningful way. But mostly, Oceanhorn's greatest achievement lies in accentuating the brilliance of those inspirations, rather than taking them to exciting, uncharted territory.

Oceanhorn begins strongly enough. Our protagonist's father writes a final letter to his sleeping son before he goes off to face an eldritch beast of the deep, the what so called Oceanhorn. When our hero awakes, he meets up with the local hermit for a quick lore lesson, then sets out on a top-down-perspective adventure across a series of scattered tropical islands to find his father--and maybe take down big bad Oceanhorn himself. 

The story of Oceanhorn is interesting. You play as a boy who wakes to find out that his dad has set out to kill Oceanhorn, a mechanical monster that has terrorized the world they live in. You set sail to find and help him. Thankfully the sailing here is mostly automatic aside from aiming a gun- you can only use on the boat for some reason- at some enemies, and obstacles; a process that is over in no time but quickly grows tiresome thanks to how often the game forces you to do it.

From the beginning, Oceanhorn is simple and intuitive. It's nostalgic and refreshing to set out on a hero's journey, and the only two things you need to know for a stretch are that the analog stick moves you, one button attacks, and one button allows you to move objects. Targeting happens automatically, and you rarely deal with more than one enemy at a time--and 90 percent of that time, flailing wildly with the basic sword is enough. This feels like a blessed side effect of Oceanhorn being ported from mobile--the original having released on iOS in 2013.

There's a decent amount of islands to discover, all of which can be explored to their fullest in around 12 hours. The islands can consist of repetitive beachy overworlds, caves, dungeons, and, of course, a graveyard. Variation is not Oceanhorn's strong suit as nearly every island consists of the same handful of enemies and textures.

Combat is very simple, consisting of swinging your sword, throwing bombs, shooting arrows, and blocking. Thanks to some basic AI most enemies can be taken down quickly just by running up to them and mashing the attack button, which is understandable considering the original version of the game was made for touchscreen devices; that doesn't mean it is all that fun.

Such accessibility is appreciated, but modest aims elsewhere prove to be an issue. Most of Oceanhorn's puzzles are either of the basic, block-moving sort or involve walking around long enough to find the key to the next room. Strangely, when a puzzle deviates from the norm, it often requires an illogical solution, like pushing a box through another physical object. The simple dungeons you explore are padded out by leading you to a certain point only to learn that you must look for an item elsewhere--which just so happens to be located on a whole other island, requiring an amount of backtracking.

 A few other minor annoyances include having to use a menu to switch items when doing so on the fly could have been easily assigned to the shoulder buttons, and checkpoints right before one of the few bosses that force you to watch their introductions each time you die by their hand. Amateur mistakes, if I do say so myself. Worse is that there is a stamina meter for running, swimming, and eventually jumping and rolling. 

This meter takes far too long to refill and runs out quickly, and the same can be said for the mana meter which requires you smash pots or kill enemies to refill. it will takes time. Pots respawn whenever you enter and exit an area, allowing you to easily refill your mana, so having the meter at all is pointless and stamina only serves to slow down the player's progress. Two outdated and not at all fun gameplay elements I hope developers stop using, immediately.

 Disappointment sets in once you realize that all of this effort leads to little payoff. The story doesn't take any major twists and turns, and NPC characters are stock townsfolk who exist purely for the sake of exposition. Journeys between towns and islands are taken by sailboat, a nod to The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. But Oceanhorn's seafaring is even more seldom and uneventful than exploring a village. Voyages transpire automatically once you point your ship toward an island, but sailing on rails robs you of completing the trip by your own efforts, diminishing the world's sense of scale in the process.

 It is allright about how simple most things in Oceanhorn are except for the puzzles, if you can call them that. Most dungeons will have blocks that need to be pushed to specific spots clearly marked on the ground, or levers to be found and swiped to open gates or reveal chests. I seldom feel like I needed to think about what I was doing, which is alright if you're looking for a more casual escape from all the hardcore survival and multiplayer-only titles flooding the market these days.

There are also some issues with voice acting, which is sporadically used in a way that does not mesh well with Oceanhorn's storytelling and a conversation which will start in text, then, suddenly switch to voice-over. Tone and expression also fall flat in the face of dramatic moments: while the exposition from the hermit inhabiting the main island is okay, a bunch other NPCs fail to match the tone set by the script. 

When you save the leader of a race of owl-men, he will expresses his appreciation with zero inflection. Not-Link saves a girl later in the game, and they see the town festival from a hilltop, and her "I want to go off and see the world" speech is hilariously Ben Stein-level deadpan. That tends to be the case across the board, and the more Oceanhorn tries and fails to raise an emotion whatsoever, the more embarrassing it becomes.

Performance-wise, the Nintendo Switch version of Oceanhorn looks a bit dated, but that makes sense considering this is based on the PC version of the game from two years ago. The Switch isn't really known for being a graphical powerhouse. That said, Oceanhorn manages to run at a pretty solid 1080 60fps docked, and 720p 60fps while handheld. While, the wonderful soundtrack was composed by Kalle Ylitalo and has a few tracks by Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito who are known for their work on the scores of Final Fantasy and the Mana series, respectively.

The easy journey is sometimes appreciated, but it defines the entire experience. The only ace in Oceanhorn's pocket is that it's a type of game that typically doesn't see much play outside Nintendo's platforms, and it does stand out in that way. It's still a fundamentally unimaginative example of the genre it's aping, and completely fades out of memory the second you remember there are other fish in the sea.

You can download Oceanhorn here: