I’ve just finished playing through Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, the latest title from the wonderful Inti Creates, and it’s an interesting one for sure.

Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE is an open-structure 2D side-scrolling platform game that unfolds in a fantasy universe that is a spinoff to Love Live Sunshine. While the characters that appear in the Yohane the Parhelion universe are based on their Love Live Sunshine counterparts, they’re regarded as distinct and separate characters in their own right. One possible interpretation of the whole thing is that it’s a chuunibyou delusion on the part of the eponymous Yohane, aka Love Live Sunshine character Yoshiko Tsushima.

To be honest, it doesn’t really matter all that much, because plot is not this game’s strong suit. In fact, there are a lot of elements to this game where I feel like it could have gone into quite a bit more depth, but I nonetheless enjoyed my time with the game and would recommend it to fans of this sort of thing. So let’s take a closer look, shall we?

In Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, you take on the role of Yohane. In the Yohane the Parhelion universe, she is a fortune teller-turned-handywoman who struggles to be taken seriously. When a mysterious dungeon appears from beneath the waves and several townspeople — and Yohane’s friends — go missing, she decides to delve into said dungeon in an attempt to rescue them.

What follows is exactly the sort of thing veterans of this sort of game will expect: work your way through several distinct areas to the dungeon as a whole, gradually acquiring new abilities that will help you to access areas that you couldn’t reach before. For the most part, your momentum will be constantly forwards, though there are a number of sections in the game where you’ll need to come back to earlier areas with new abilities to find things.

Let’s say one thing up front: I feel like I’m going to be a tad critical on Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, but I don’t want you to feel like this is a “bad” game. So rest assured that those of you who are in this for Inti Creates’ trademark beautiful pixel art, super-slick performance (yes, on Switch too) and quality soundtracks will find a lot to like here. It’s a beautiful looking, lovely sounding game, and it feels nice to play thanks to its responsive controls and excellent “32-bit” style animations; Yohane herself has the “Castlevania strut” down to a fine art, for example.

Where Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE initially distinguishes itself is in its combat. Rather than using fast-paced hack and slash or run and gun combat, as seen in other examples of the genre, fighting here is a slow and deliberate affair. Initially, Yohane is only able to attack by summoning her wolf companion Lailaps, though in short order she is able to craft weapons for herself and manipulate them with her magical abilities. Nothing has what you’d call “rapid fire”, though; every means of attacking has quite a significant windup, as well as a short cooldown before it can be used again.

The slow pace of combat gives Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE a very distinctive feel. Every swing you take, whether it’s with Lailaps or one of Yohane’s magical weapons, demands a certain amount of commitment, though there are benefits to this, too — most notably the fact that while Yohane is swinging a weapon or summoning Lailaps, she hangs in mid-air if she’s jumping or falling. Getting to grips with this part of the way she handles is important for some encounters later in the game.

Each of the areas in Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE’s complete map plays host to a boss, who in turn guards one of Yohane’s friends. Each friend can be “equipped” in place of Lailaps, and they each have a unique ability that can theoretically be used in combat, but in practice is more useful for the few occasions in the game where their ability allows you to open up a new path.

Herein lies the first of the areas where I feel Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE could have gone a tad deeper. Each friend only has maybe two or three obstacles in the whole game where it’s essential to use them, and making use of them in combat seems to be enormously impractical thanks to their elaborate animations and huge wind-up time before they do anything useful. As such, while you get the usual genre satisfaction of being able to get somewhere that was previously out of reach after acquiring a new friend, there simply isn’t enough of this throughout the game as a whole.

Arguably at the other end of the spectrum is the game’s crafting system, whereby Yohane can use item drops from enemies and breakable objects to create new weapons, armour and accessories for herself. There are many different items to craft, though only a couple of them felt notably useful by the end of the game; I don’t know if I was just getting lucky with drops to be able to craft some of the “best” items, but after a while the crafting system just felt like it was sort of there for the sake of it; it wasn’t bad per se, but it also didn’t really felt like it added much to the experience.

The same is true for one of the game’s tentpole features: the fact that certain areas in the game are randomly generated. The way this is implemented is that each area has a one-way path to get from one point to another, and after entering that one-way path you must progress through a series of rooms that are randomly picked from an available pool for the area. The theory behind this is that it keeps dungeon exploration interesting and provides replayability, but practically speaking you’ll only go through each randomised area once, leaving them, like the crafting system, feeling a bit like they’re just there for the sake of it.

Part of the reason for this is also one of the game’s best, most convenient features, which is that you have the ability to fast travel between save rooms right from the outset of the game. This means that if you need to backtrack somewhere, there’s no carefully working out the best route to take from where you are right now; just zap straight to the nearest save room and progress through the few rooms to your destination.

On the one hand, backtracking in a game like this can be annoying, but on the other, it leaves the dungeon as a whole feeling quite small compared to something like, say, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s castle. It’s convenient, sure, but I feel like a few questions should have been raised about the overall balance of the game — particularly considering teleporting to (or passing through) a save room also heals you fully.

I will add at this point that negotiating the various areas of Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE for the first time is very enjoyable, with some interesting traversal puzzles along the way demanding that you, on a couple of occasions, make creative use of both the passive abilities you unlock with a few items, and the unique skills Yohane’s friends bring to the table. Each area looks great and has an awesome soundtrack. The trouble is there’s just not enough of any of it.

The bosses are a bit of a letdown by Inti Creates standards, too. While they’re all admirably big sprites with some impressive animations and fun attack patterns, every single one of them can be brute-forced with a combination of the most powerful weapons and healing items, which you can purchase any time Yohane returns to her “home base”. The healing items are the main problem here, because they undermine any sort of skill requirement to beat the bosses, but it also feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to require the skills of the various “friend” characters rather than simply getting out your highest power weapon and then spamming it as much as possible.

It’s entirely possible that I was expecting too much out of this game, given its source material. Yohane the Parhelion is a spin-off of an anime that is popular with children, after all — that’s not to say that adults can’t enjoy it, mind — and as such it could well be that Inti Creates decided to make the game more accessible to a younger or less experienced audience. That’s fine, I guess — though it’s not exactly in keeping with the Inti Creates I know.

All told, Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE took me just shy of 7 hours to complete fully, with all treasures acquired and the complete map revealed. That’s a tad on the short side even by genre standards, and there’s not really much replay value beyond “I just want to play this again” — there’s no hard mode, no fully randomised mode, no “postgame”.

I’ll say again: I had a good time with Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, and I don’t regret spending those 7 hours on the game. I just came away from it feeling like if it was twice the length and all its mechanics had been explored in considerably more depth, it would have been a much better game. As such, what we have is simply a good game, and when Inti Creates have made fantastic games in the past, Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE just feels like it falls a bit short of the company’s usual standards.

A “pretty good” Inti Creates game is still one well worth playing, though, so I would still recommend you experience Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE for its magnificent pixel art and excellent soundtrack if nothing else — just don’t expect much from either the plot, which is absolute fluff even by Love Live standards, or the mechanics, which show a lot of potential that is never quite reached.

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