The only things that make a good game even better are typos. One of my fondest memories is playing Protect Me Knight with my brother, reading phrases like “rapid fire likes a cat,” the campiness of which seemed to perfectly match the game’s 8-bit artwork and basic premise: save the princess from an evil demon and his minions in a hack-and-slash tower defense RPG. The same campy, uncomplicated heart beats in WAPL Games second title, Adventures of Priestess (quite the leap from their first, Penguin Jump). While it’s more of a strategy game and less of Protect Me Knight’s tower defense elements, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic, especially after reading absurdity like “all world filled with blood and wrapped with war” in the prologue. Unfortunately, despite its charm, playing Adventures of Priestess is as entertaining as,…well, not playing it.
The plot encompasses a single page of text that seems like it was translated from Japanese via Google Translate. Save “most residents” of the “cat tribe” from “the vicious devil” and his “army of devil” as “women priest Stella.” But these details are more charming than criminal, and harken back to famously poor translations of games like Final Fantasy 7, while keeping with the narrative and graphical charm of games like the original Final Fantasy. And other than some curve-balls (as the boss that is a fish head with tiny human legs can attest to), it’s your typical arrangement of witches, slimes, and vaguely menacing eye creatures that fit snugly into the simplicity of this fantasy.
Unfortunately, the gameplay suffers from simplistic design. You don’t control your characters. Instead, you watch as your team fights their way across the screen. The little power you do have as Stella (the abilities Recovery, Protective Film, Lullaby, and Cheer, all with significant cool down) help somewhat, but until too late in the game feels pointless. Which is especially annoying once you realize that this is the mobile equivalent of the DS’ Etrian Odyssey, requiring an absurd amount of grinding to level up your spells, your characters, and their powers.
It’s the grinding that ultimately leads to gameplay that is fundamentally uninteresting. From the rats at the beginning to the zombies at the end, most enemies are interchangeable. The zaniness (do I need to mention the fish-head on legs again?) never really masks what amounts to a failure of the imagination. And the few bosses with unique attack styles vary from pointlessly frustrating to pathetically easy. A gorilla-shaped boss killed me numerous times simply because I failed to see his attack among the swarm of monsters, my phone’s vibration helping only to indicate that, yes, I had lost. A loss that is easily incurred: all it takes is Stella’s death at any point during the 10 waves of enemies in each level.
It would be ridiculous to say that Adventures of Priestess has replayability. However, if you can manage to enjoy it beyond blindly tapping through easy mode, going through the same levels on hard mode is far more satisfying. You will lose instantly, you will lose hard, but it will consistently keep you actively participating. Instead of defeat from ostensibly random changes in difficulty, the defeat feels as earned as victory. It’s unlikely, nonetheless, that the memory of Adventures of Priestess will end how Stella’s story does: “a legend to after ages.”
Is it Hardcore?
Yeah...
Classic controls, graphics, and story don’t make up for the tedium. While it does become moderately challenging, it’s too little too late.