Sparklite (Switch) review "The Legend of Preparing for Bosses"

I'd like to get one point out of the way: Sparklite borrows from The Legend of Zelda. No, I wouldn't call it a "Zelda clone," per se, because it doesn't stick strictly to its inspiration's formula. I wanted to dispense of this notion right away because it hardly factors into the reasons this game succeeds and fails. More than anything, it features a bit of the aesthetic and some plot beats from Nintendo's hit adventure series, but it takes the concept in a different direction.

You see, Sparklite's main features consist of a procedurally generated, 2D, grid-based overworld and an upgradable hub town. Sadly, elaborate, puzzle-based dungeons don't even crop up in this affair. Its moniker comes from the currency you harvest while exploring, fighting adorable foes, plundering hidden caves, or crushing breakable parts of the environment. You then take the money back to the city, called "The Refuge," and spend it on beefing up shops or on perks you can equip called "patches." These things bump up your stats, especially bolstering your defense, damage output, and hit points. What's more is you can combine like patches to create more powerful versions of them. This is key to advancing your character, because you can only place so many patches on your patch board, and you can only expand its size twice.

For a long while, this game proves to be a simple, carefree, addictive little engagement. You venture to the first area, a colorful land dotted with the occasional muddy splotch or rift in the ground, and beat the tar out of blobs, hogs, and turret-like monsters. Now and then, you come across various other challenges that either fatten your wallet or grant you new patches, such as segments where you negotiate moving platforms or areas that involve shooting switches or bombing through blocks.



Among those special events, you eventually locate vaults that hold new items for you to test out. All you need to do is survive a few rudimentary puzzles and the protagonist, Ada, "reverse engineers" the device. You can then return to town and build it at a particular store for later use, but until then the apparatus remains locked.

Combat proves as simple and breezy as anyone could want it to be. Mostly, it revolves around bashing things with your wrench or landing charged attacks, while occasionally using your special inventions for range. In some cases, you have to know when to hold off on nailing an enemy, lest you leave yourself open to blows. Honestly, you can survive without the aforementioned inventions, as they hardly come handy against tougher monsters. The one thing you shouldn't neglect, though, is your dash ability. This gets you out of trouble almost as often as the roll in Dark Souls, especially if you time it just right.

So yeah, Sparklite hits a lot of the proper notes early on. It gives you reasons to keep going back into the fray to obsessively amass cash by providing handy bonuses on which to spend money, it softens the blow of death by not deducting cash after you fall, and pretty much ignores most definitive Zelda concepts, such as elaborate levels or a vast, open overworld, in the hopes of establishing its own unique identity.

It's when you advance towards the end of the whole thing that you start to see its cracks...



You build up Ada, you scotch the first boss, you gain a new ability that gives you access to the next region, and you commence the process anew. The only differences this time lie in the environmental cosmetics and enemies you face. However, you're running through the same story as you did before, earning cash to build yourself up so you can prevail against the next boss. Here's the thing: bosses aren't all that tough, and Ada's transformation isn't exactly complex.

You could argue that the patches allow you to check out different builds, but honestly the only effective way to deck out Ada is to slap down the most basic statistic boosters and forsake goods that don't factor into inflicting harm or mitigating injury to you. Seriously, by the time I reached the end of the game, my patch board MO spelled out nothing more than "hit hard and take it like a champ."

That's the thing with games of this nature: they don't emphasize stage design (as evidence by the presence of procedural generation) and special events because their main focus remains on bosses--and especially in prepping for them. However, prep work in this game renders you so overpowered that the bosses come across as little more than afterthoughts. Yeah, challenging them is still mildly entertaining because they're very pattern-oriented like any good faux-retro game villain ought to be. However, even the main antagonist struggled against my rad collection of patches. Even fighting him with all the care of an Octorok on ice skates, he only managed to shave off about one-fifth of my heath.



Most of the evidence points towards bosses being the centerpiece of this outing, if you think about it. You only upgrade the shops so many times so you can earn new patches or sub-weapons to use. Only a couple of side quests crop up during the campaign, and they mostly reward you with reinforcing patches. Hell, one of the NPCs even tells you that in order to emerge victorious, you need to be "as powerful as" one of the bosses. Everything you do is merely put there to make you stronger so you can withstand the boss that's supposed to be the main attraction, and yet you can easily become so powerful that your encounters with them come across a tad anticlimactic.

Ultimately, I enjoyed my time with Sparklite, but I would have dug it more it offered content that wasn't simply put there as "boss prep" material. Some other quests, hidden areas, sub-plots, or even a bigger Refuge with additional goodies in which to invest would have improved this adventure greatly. The game didn't need to borrow all of Zelda's work note for note (I actually laud it for going in a divergent direction), and it certainly didn't need to be super tough. More than anything, it would benefited from not coming off almost entirely as a boss-focused piece and sporting a bit of variety.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (March 25, 2022) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.