In Defense: La-Mulana

FINALLY! I have returned from the depths of the Earth so that I can tell you about a game ABOUT entering the depths of the Earth...La-Mulana!

I had heard about La-Mulana a long while ago...maybe a couple of years, but had never had the ability to play it. For some reason my computers just wouldn't run it correctly and the graphics and everything looked all messed up, rendering it unplayable (get it? RENDERING? GRAPHICS? Ah whatever...). This drove me fucking insane, because from what I had heard, La-Mulana was one of the longest open world sidescrollers (MetroidVania style) to come out recently. I'd heard it was tough, with some very complex puzzle solving and confusion about where to go next, and to top it all off the entire game is created in the image of an 8-bit MSX game. Pretty awesome but alas, it was not to be. I got screwed out of it time and time again and just couldn't get it working...but FINALLY as of about 3 months ago, I found a way to play it and I did not come away disappointed.

Actually the only disappointing thing was that the game crashed right at the ending, so I couldn't see my completion time...but I'm certain it must have been around 25 hours if not more. For a sidescroller...that's damn amazing!

So what's La-Mulana all about, you ask? Well sit down and let me tell you a tale of a lost and ancient ruin that's rumoured to contain a valuable treasure. You play as Dr. Lemeza Kosugi, an archaeologist from Japan who just happens to wear a fedora and use a whip like another certain famous explorer/badass. He's traveled to La-Mulana, a gigantic ancient ruin in search of its secrets, and the point of the game is to work your way through these vast ruins to figure out the mystery of life, the universe, and everything! Pretty vague, but that's actually pretty much the idea...and no, the answer is NOT 42.

Let the hair-tearing commence!

As I've already stated, La-Mulana is a very large, MetroidVania-styled sidescroller. Your objective will never be entirely clear as you probe the depths (heh) and try to figure out just where the heck you need to go. You can tackle the game in many different ways, I'm sure, and I bet that no person's first playthrough will ever be even remotely similar to another's. Getting around the ruins is done in typical sidescroller fashion, with jumping and climbing ladders and such, but to actually FIND your way around is the real task. You need to be observant of your surroundings and it's even a good idea to take notes when you play through, because you may forget an important clue that you need for a puzzle WAY later on.

In general, making your way further into the ruins means you have to locate items that help you out. These items can usually be found in stores or treasure chests, both of which require you to have certain items on you. Stores are obviously going to drain you for cash, so thankfully there are gold pieces around the ruins that're dropped by enemies or await in pots for you to smash open with your BRUTE STRENGTH. Treasure chests, however, are a bit different. You can't just walk in front of a chest and open it, and almost every one requires you to solve a puzzle. In some cases, these can be as simple as placing a weight on a dais in a different screen...weights are the other item you can stock up on, and you'd better have a lot of them on you at all times. However, La-Mulana is a devious, devious game, and in some cases you'll place a weight on a switch only to find yourself suddenly trapped with spikes descending toward you. Nasty!

The ruins are split up into multiple different areas...and by multiple, I mean maybe 20. That's a lot for a sidescrolling game of this style, particularly when each area is so massive, convoluted, and filled with puzzles that you'll potentially wind up spending hours in one region. At first, it only appears that there are 10 or so areas, but you later find out that number will at least double. I won't go into much more detail than that, but suffice to say that this game just never seems to end. Luckily, areas are linked via various warps and with the right directions you can access any area pretty quickly...but it takes some work to find all of these warps and, in some cases, unlock them. In addition, you later gain the ability to warp to any area you have visited and found a warp tablet in which is extremely handy...especially since you can only save your game back at the Surface area and will want to warp there and back quickly.

The areas themselves are all pretty cool, and clearly inspired by different ruins around the world. You will find areas dedicated to Mayan, Egyptian, Sumatran and Chinese cultures throughout the game, each with their own distinct flair to them. For example, the Egyptian-themed area will have the Eye of Ra visible at various points in the level, as well as a sphinx that threatens to blast you off of a platform. The main goal of each area is to make your way through, find key items, and take out the boss (providing there is one), but to accomplish all of these tasks is no easy feat. Every area is loaded with puzzles and traps that make getting around especially complicated, so you have to be prepared and tread carefully throughout each and every part of La-Mulana. There's even a super-difficult secret area in the game that you can only access a certain way, involving multiple steps to unlock. Have fun finding it...and then getting out of it alive!

R.I.P. Morbid Blue Giant, brother of Jolly Green.

Also standing in your way are various critters and enemies that are hell-bent on making your life difficult. These consist of simple things such as hawks and snakes that roam the surface, to ancient guards and lizard men carrying shields later on. At first, enemies are truly a threat as you have a small health bar that maybe provides you with 10 hits...so you really need to be careful. Later on, you can expand your health bar by collecting Life Jewels that are hidden around the game, and so these enemies become a little less lethal...but that doesn't mean they won't piss you off. If there's one thing I can say about the enemy placement in this game, it's that it's devious. Riding an elevator upward 3 screens? You can bet your ass there are going to be bats flying around that'll try to knock you back down to the bottom (taking a hit will knock Lemeza backward and off of the platform, of course). Trying to reach a difficult ledge? Well be sure to avoid the 5 shots at once being fired at you from a teleporting wizard! I personally had no issues with this type of punishment, as it makes you think about how you approach certain screens and you begin to learn the layout of the game a bit better...but I can see how it would frustrate some people and put them off. Destroying enemies will also fill up your Experience meter...and although you don't gain levels per se, when this meter is filled it will fully restore all of your health on the spot. In a pinch, it may be a good idea to go and smack down some simple, weak enemies just to get a full life bar back.

Luckily, you can take out that frustration on your rivals with a veritable armory of weapons. There are 5 primary weapons that you collect throughout the game, and also secondary weapons that serve as projectiles. Lemeza enters the tomb with his standard whip, which can later be upgraded to a chain whip and then a morning star (in true Castlevania fashion...but more on that later...), and you also find a knife, axe, keyblade, and katana. These all have different attack ranges, so using certain ones in certain situations is key. For example, the axe swings vertically over Lemeza's head, which is great for covering him during a jump, whereas the knife is quick and close range, making it good for quickly taking out enemies that need to get close to hit you. Secondary weapons consist of shuriken, kunai (which...function very unlike any kunai I've ever seen), spears, flares, bombs, and a pistol. Again, these all have their uses, with bombs being used to destroy strong walls and kunai able to follow strange paths to reach a difficult target, so learning their abilities is extremely important.

Weapons are not your only items, however. There are TONS of pickups in this game, many of which help you solve puzzles (sometimes without you even realizing it), and others that give you passive abilities that will aid you. For example, early in the game you can acquire a helmet that allows you to jump through a waterfall without being shunted downward into a basin, and therefore allowing you to explore further in the game. Later, you can acquire an Ice Cape that shields you from heat and actually lets you swim in lava and a Feather that grants you a double jump. At some point, you get a pepper shaker that you need to solve a puzzle, and even later you find a model plane that reveals a secret if you're in the right place. Life Jewels are hidden around the ruins as well, and will increase your maximum health...and trust me, you will need all the health you can get for later. Finding items is obviously a task, which is a good reason for making strong mental notes or writing actual notes about where things are. Luckily, computers these days make it easy to write things down and so you have that available to you as you play the game with a simple Alt+Tab.

Now that we're on the topic of note-taking...I should mention the almighty Hand Scanner. At the beginning of the game, you will find epitaphs, tablets or inscriptions that you can check out, but for the most part they will be unreadable. To translate the ancient text, you need to purchase an item called the Hand Scanner using coins that you gather from destroying various items in the environment and from smashing enemies open. Having this equipped as your secondary item and examining a tablet or some poor sap's remains will display their secrets, and a lot of the time these are crucial hints for completing certain puzzles and, therefore, the entire game. Not only this, but certain tablets will reveal plot information so you can try to unravel just exactly what the heck is going on with La-Mulana. Snagging the Scanner should be one of your first goals.

Behold, the creepiest 8-bit version of Egypt you'll ever see.

Another of your first goals should be to locate a couple of MSX cartridges. The computer that Lemeza carries around (which keeps track of your things and functions as your item screen) is the MSX, and you can load 2 cartridges into it at once that grant you certain abilities. For example...that Hand Scanner I just mentioned? Equip the Glyph Reader cartridge and those unreadable tablets I previously mentioned will become crystal clear, revealing their hints to you. Need a map? You should try and find the 8K Map cartridge...or its biggerr brother, the 16K. And what the heck, if you need an even better one, equip both of these map cartridges at the same time to make a 24K map system! You even need a certain cartridge to save your game...but luckily it doesn't cost you much and is very near the beginning of the game.

The insanity with cartridges doesn't stop there, either. Many of the MSX cartridges you find are named after actual real-life video games, and although you can't play them or anything like that, if you put them in your cartridge slots they will often grant you some cool abilities. For example, remember how I mentioned I would talk more about Castlevania? Well, if you find the Castlevania ROM and equip that, your whip will gain strength and do twice as much damage! Equipping Cabbage Patch Kids along with Antarctic Adventure (check) will increase the amount of invulnerability you have after taking a hit. There are tons of combinations, since there are around 60 ROMs to gather up, and so having the right ones equipped can certainly make the difference in many situations. You'll find nods to classics such as Metal Gear, Gradius, Salamander, and Defender from picking these up, and the nostalgia from seeing those names pop up is almost worth it on its own.

So yeah, this game is deep and complex, and the world itself is convoluted. As I mentioned, you need many of these items to progress. Certain walls will make a noise when you attack them, signifying they can be broken down...but you need to be using the right weapon. Some ROMs will open paths for you as you make your way through the ruin, but you need to be using them in the right combination. And sometimes there will just be a plain old invisible ladder hanging around that you need to discover from reading a nearby clue. These are the simple puzzles...there are much more complicated ones. For example, in a relatively early area of the game, you encounter a room with 3 symbols that change when you strike them. Obviously these need to be switch to the right combinations, at which point you hear a noise...but the actual changes created by this are elsewhere on the map. When I figured this puzzle out I was very impressed, and it wasn't even one of the more difficult ones...so there is reward there for people willing to grind their way through this game.

In true video game fashion...there are bosses. The bosses in this game are awesome, and where the standard enemies later just become a nuisance, the bosses remain a constant threat. In order to access the boss of an area, you need to figure out puzzles until you discover an Ankh Jewel. Once you have this jewel, you can place it on an altar found in each area (well...almost each area, sort of...you will see). Sometimes you need to do stuff to unlock the altar too, so don't think you're in the clear as soon as you find the Ankh Jewel! Anyway, placing the jewel on the altar will summon the boss of that area, and these battles are awesome and extremely satisfying once you figure them out. From the two-headed snake Amphisbaena to the massive cycloptic giant Viy, each encounter remains remarkably different from the last and no boss will test you the same way as any other one. Defeating these guardians is a requirement to complete the game in its entirety, so don't wuss out!

No, Dennis Nedry is NOT a hidden playable character.

The style of music and sound matches up with the graphical imagery as well. Accompanying the 8-bit visual aesthetic is a superb 8-bit chiptuney soundtrack with music that accompanies every area of the game almost perfectly. Starting your adventure on the surface comes with a catchy soundtrack that embodies the spirit of beginning a grand adventure, while the Temple of the Sun possesses an Egyptian-styled musical theme to accompany its distinct look and feel. Boss music is tense and heated, and various musical fanfares are played from solving puzzles or triggering traps, letting you know when you've done something good...or fucked up royally! In addition, you can even change the musical style to emulate different types of computer music processors, so if you don't like the music in one format you can change it around and see if you like it better! It's a nice option to have.

The sound effects are also suitably 8-bit, and will take you back to classic games of old. Cracking your whip sounds like...how an 8-bit whip crack should sound like in Castlevania, for example. Enemy death explosions remind me of the sounds in Sunsoft games such as Blaster Master or Journey to Silius, and still other noises remind me of Mega Man or Bionic Commando. It's awesome to see a retro-styled game done with so much authenticity and accuracy in this day and age.

All of this comes together in one gigantic, cohesive package. The scope of this game, especially considering it's an 8-bit styled open-ended platformer, is absolutely massive. The fact that everything is so intertwined with everything else really makes you feel like the ruins of La-Mulana are a twisted labyrinth hell-bent on destroying not only your in-game body, but your brain as well. You'll get physically stuck due to repeated death at the hands of your foes, and also mentally stuck because you're damn well having trouble figuring out what you need to do next. This game is definitely not for everyone, I admit that...but for those that it IS catered to, La-Mulana is an absolute dream that provides classic game mechanics, solid difficulty, and a massive game world to work your way through.

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The Bottom Line

La-Mulana is a great example of an open-ended sidescroller. It's absolutely gigantic with tons of areas and secrets to explore, a slough of items and abilities to gain, and spectacular enemies and bosses to take down. It will take you a long time to get through, and it's extremely rewarding to figure out how to beat a boss after figuring out its pattern or how to solve a puzzle after piece together multiple tidbits of important information you'd gathered throughout the game. Some may be put off by the massive scale and length of the game, but for those willing to make their way through the entirety of the game, the real treasure of the ruins of La-Mulana can be found: an extreme feeling of satisfaction and completion unlike just about anything else you can find these days.

And hopefully you'll find your clear time out without the game crashing :P

9/10

(P.S. I was hoping to get this review up before La-Mulana's revamp was released for download via WiiWare...but it seems I had nothing to worry about in that regard. The long-awaited do-over of the game has now been dropped by Nicalis (the North American publisher for the game) and won't be released on the system :( However, it should appear for the PC at some point and I imagine you'll be able to get it via Steam. I know I'll definitely be checking it out...but I was really looking forward to playing it on my TV with a controller in my hand.

Although Nicalis has claimed that Nigoro (the producing company) is to blame for all this, I've been following Nigoro's La-Mulana site for a while now and from reading into certain events, I'm pretty sure Nicalis is just too busy focusing on porting Cave Story and VVVVVV (both great games) to every system in existence to give La-Mulana a decent shot in North America and Europe. They are bum bum doodie-heads and I hope someone steals their lunch money and pushes them collectively into a puddle big enough for a publishing company to fit into. My regrets go out to Nigoro for this unforeseen complication and to anyone outside of Japan who was looking forward to the Wii version...I know I sure as hell was.)