izigame.me

Remember A Link to the Past? Remember Link’s Awakening? Blossom Tales hopes you remember them fondly, but not so well that you can spot the blatant cribbing. There’s being inspired by and there’s being a barefaced clone, and outside of the Princess Bride style framing this really is just 2D Zelda with the serial numbers filed off.
What works in Blossom Tale’s favour is how rare Zeldalikes are on Steam, despite their stablemate the Metroidvania being absurdly oversaturated. I suspect the main reason for this is that they’re actually very hard to design – puzzles need to be difficult enough that the player feels smart for solving them, but not so obscure that they’re reaching for a guide. That’s in addition to a compelling world, strong environmental design and getting the balance of combat and bosses right.
Blossom Tales 2 follows the Zelda blueprint pretty rigorously, making it a solid if over-familiar adventure. Fans of the original Blossom Tales, which I suspect is basically anyone considering this game, might be wondering how much of an improvement it is over the original. Sadly it’s pretty much a level pack, to the point where irritating QoL issues from the original are still present. The inventory still ends up being a mess, you have to switch tools constantly in menus (in spite of having more than enough buttons), and the fact that nothing is marked on the map makes it very irritating to find caves, dungeons and sidequests that you couldn’t complete when you initially stumbled on them. Even allowing you to mark stuff on the map yourself would have improved the game enormously.
However, if you still managed to enjoy the first one despite these issues, you’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy this one as well. It’s a familiar structure – go to three dungeons, collect three thingies (as well as gadgets that open up more of the world), then use the three thingies to open up the final dungeon. Like the first game there’s an enormous amount of side content, and if you want anything more than a token increase in health from the bosses of the main dungeons you’ll want to take on at least some of it. World exploration is generally a lot of fun – the map is nice and compact, and you won’t have to go far to stumble onto something interesting to do.
The main dungeon design is also really solid, but suffers from some very boring tools and upgrades. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before in a dozen Zelda games, and while it might be a sincere form of flattery imitation doesn’t make for particularly novel puzzles. Even if they’re overfamiliar they’re tightly designed though, and I still enjoyed my time with them.
There’s a good reason why the design worked so well to begin with and honestly there isn’t much in the way of competition. There have been a couple of decent Zeldalikes in the last few years - Death’s Door was fine, if more combat heavy than I’d like, and Tunic really nailed the exploration and atmosphere even if the puzzle design was lacking. Blossom Tales 2 is more low-rent than both of those games, but it’s probably got the strongest core design.