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thesffcorner · 2 years

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Dark Parables: The Final Cinderella

The Final Cinderella is the fifth game in the series, and it was the first game that I actively disliked while playing for the first time. Having now replayed it, I was probably too harsh, but it’s still one of my least favourite games in the series, with a banger opening, a really convoluted middle, and an incredibly disappointing ending.

More than any of the other games, including TRRHS, this one feels rushed. Blue Tea’s desire to mix and match fairy tales never really worked for me, but here it especially doesn’t as the tales they chose are more incompatible than ever before.

We open with a cutscene of a woman stepping out of a mirror to look over a ball. She is searching for a Cinderella, a maiden of pure heart, and she thinks she’s found it in the form of Cyrilla. At the stroke of midnight, the poor girl turns to glass and her sister disappears in the crowd.

You arrive that same night, in a palace in Italy. Your mission is to find and protect Cyrilla’s stepsister Katherine from this evil Godmother and figure out how to stop her. As soon as you enter the castle you see the Godmother poofing in and out of existence and in the yard, you see a second glass maiden. Before you can help her, a massive, wooden Golem grabs her, and she disappears.

Inside the palace you find yet another glass maiden who gets kidnapped, as well as Katherine herself. She tells you she saw the Godmother go through the mirror and wants to go after her. You find a balcony that overlooks the ballroom, from which the Godmother had been spying on the dancers. She also has a dressing room where we find something new for this game: small figurines of the previous Cinderellas.

In this version of the tale, Cinderellas are magical girls who are pure of heart and soul. They are born every few decades, all over the world, which is a neat way of explaining why so many disparate cultures have a version of this very fairytale. The dressing room has Agnes Koch, the second Cinderella, who, we later learn, is the Cinderella who married the Frog Prince, James.

With Katherine’s help, you activate the mirror. The Godmother grabs Katherine who tosses her purse to you, with all the clues she found, including a map of the gardens, and poisonous smoke, as well as the Golem knock you out of the ballroom.

Outside you can unlock the garden gate and find the Golem searching for someone. You also find the carriage that the first Cinderella, Ella Bloom, used to get to the ball, as well as an explanation of the 6 traits a girl must have to be a Cinderella.

One thing I will give this game props for is that it doesn’t rely on the parables to tell the story, like TRRHS did. The story of the Godmother, handmaidens and the Maiden Goddess are much more organically woven into the plot, and you can figure out exactly what happened without having to collect and read the parables.

Once you complete the mural in the garden you find Pinocchio cowering from the Golem. You use a crossbow with a javelin you set on fire to chase the Golem away. Pinocchio tells you to use the mirror in the fallen tree to enter the dream realm, which is where the Godmother has taken Katherine.

Inside the mirror world, we find the skeletal remnants of a pirate crew who were all executed for attempting to steal the piles of treasure littering the world. We also see Katherine trapped in a tree. She reacts strangely when we set her free, not at all like the Katherine we met in the castle, which brings me to my main gripe here.

In TRRHS, I will admit, the first time I played the game, I didn’t realize Eldra was the Wolf Queen so her betraying me and taking Ruth was genuinely surprising. On replay, it’s pretty telegraphed, but still, it did get me the first time.

Here, this Katherine acts nothing like the Katherine you met; you immediately can tell something is wrong, and yet the game forces you to be stupid, and go along with the deception. You HAVE to hand her the glass slippers, or you can’t progress. I’d buy this in a roleplaying sense, but even there, it just makes the Detective character dense as a brick, if she’s so easily fooled.

Regardless, Katherine gives you a series of tasks that require you to find a pair of glass slippers. During all this you get separated from Pinocchio and are surprised to see the inert Golem, as well as a grove full of corrupt logs and branches blocking your way.

Katherine takes you to the glass wasteland, where you find dozens of girls, all turned to glass. You give ‘Katherine’ the shoes like a dumbass, and she turns into a puppet and drugs you. You wake up in a wooden cottage with Pinocchio, who lies that he has no idea who the Godmother is.

Inside the cottage you realize that Geppetto was the Godmother’s husband and Pinocchio's father. He has become consumed with trying to create a doll just like Pinocchio and has died; the Godmother blames Pinocchio for his death. You find a letter that apparently psychic Geppetto wrote to Pinocchio, telling him his death wasn’t Pinocchio's fault and Pinocchio agrees to let you out of the cottage and save Katherine.

You sneak into the castle where you learn that Geppetto has gone mad; he is trying to raise an army of puppets and take over the world, going so far as to create a puppet assembly line. The visuals are quite creepy, as we see discarded dolls hanging on hooks and a giant incinerator burning them. Inside the workshop we also learn that Pinocchio has a built-in Cinderella detector, which mimics the Godmothers’ soul detectors and tracks down Cinderellas.

Each Godmother has a different type of magic, and Amelia, the Godmother’s, is clothes. She tricked Katherine and Cyrilla into coming to the ball, by gifting them new clothes. Kathrine was saved from becoming glass, because their uncle stole Cyrilla’s clothes and Katherine gave her her own.

On the tower roof, Pinocchio runs to free the bound Katherine, only for his heart to glow. Amelia appears yet again, throws Pinocchio through a hole in the roof, ignoring his pleas to stop her madness. She blocks your way with crystals, which leaves enough time to see a life-like doll of Geppetto lying in a tomb next to the crystals.

Once you break the crystal you get to see Katherine turn to glass, and her soul be swapped for Geppetto’s. The doll of him awakes and he steals Amelia’s soul detector, Without the gem, Amelia is weakened, and we follow her to her sewing room and back to the ballroom, as Geppetto sends his army of puppets after us.

Inside the ballroom Cyrilla wakes up and gives you a bowtie, while asking you to save Katherine. You enter another balcony where you find more puppets which Amelia used to spy on the girls at the dances. In her changing room, she has hidden herself in her wardrobe and before she dies, she tells the Detective to find the magic wand and stop Geppetto.

This series has always tried to redeem the villains in their games, and I’d say for Snow and James specifically, has done a decent job. Eldra never really got redeemed, more like she just died, but here, I hate how the game tries to redeem Amelia.

She was so in love with Geppetto and so desperate to bring him back that even though she’s a centuries old magical person, she was wilfully blinded by what she was doing in killing girls to find the right Cinderella. She also HATES Pinocchio; she blames him for Geppetto’s death (even though it was Geppetto’s own idiocy that got him killed, and it was Amelia herself that brought him the wood from the Sacred Grove). Even when she’s dying and no longer under evil Geppetto's influence, she shows no concern for her son, and I simply hate that.

You set off to the gardens yet again, where you open the Maiden Goddess temple and find Pinocchio. He is determined to save Katherine, and you indeed find the glass wand there, as well as an explanation as to who Godmother is, and how she lost it.

The Maiden Goddess picks a handmaiden, a magical helper for the Cinderellas, and when one dies, another one inherits the mantle. Amelia is the latest and final Godmother, because once the Maiden Goddess saw how evil Amelia had become, she refused to anoint another. Like I already explained, Amelia was desperate to get Geppetto back after he was killed by the villagers. The reason he was killed, was because Geppetto, in an attempt to make another Pinocchio, spent too much time in the Sacred Grove, an got possessed by the souls of the murdered pirates. He then started raising his army of sentient puppets, and built Pinocchio a giant, dangerous Golem. So, what I’m saying is, the villagers had valid reasons to be afraid of him, and no, Pinocchio did nothing to him.

Armed with this mess, you find a way to the pumpkin carriage and head back to the mirror world. Inside, Geppetto sends more puppets after you, and you realize the only way to defeat him is to burn down all the trees. One of the areas in the Grove you find is a beanstalk leading up into the heavens, a hint to the next game.

You set the grove on fire, and with it, so dies Pinocchio, since he was made from the same wood. You race back to the tower, defeat the Golem with an insultingly simple puzzle and then kill the Puppet master with the glass wand. Geppetto’s spirit, purged of the pirate influence, questions what he’s done, and then Amelia shows up comforting him that everything turned out fine in the end. LADY, YOU ALMOST KILLED ME 3 TIMES. What do you mean everything turned out fine?

Katherine, no longer a glass statue, brings Pinocchio and Amelia and Geppetto use their souls to revive Pinocchio, Star Wars style and he turns into a real boy. The best (best, derogatory) part of the game is that much like Anakin, even though Pinocchio appears to be about 10 and Katherine at least 16, she agrees to take care of him, and in the epilogue, they are shown to be a couple. What?

I don’t like this game, if you couldn’t tell. There are good parts. Like always, I love the clothes, designs and art direction. I like the collectable element of dressing the other 4 Cinderellas, I liked some of the locations, and the idea that the pirates’ souls corrupted the trees in the grove with their hatred.

However, the Puppet master Geppetto twist, Amelia’s entire motivation being not just reviewing her evil dead husband, but then being surprised that he’s evil, I hated. I hated the evil-Katherine bit, I found Pinocchio rather annoying, an especially pale comparison to Kay or Gerda, and found myself not caring about any of the characters or what happened. Hell, the two things I was most excited for were the Crooked Man and the Crooked Cat stinger and the teaser for the next game!

Like the previous 2 games, there is no secret room or bonus for playing on hardmode, so let’s talk about the bonus adventure.

Bonus Game: The Oriental Cinderella

That title. Yikes.

I didn’t think racial politics would become a part of this retrospective, but here we are. For what is worth, Blue Tea is a Hong Kong-based studio, and I sure won’t police them on what they will call a Chinese variant of Cinderella, but still.

In this bonus game we play as a prince who has come to marry Princess Shan Mao. Shan is a Cinderella, but she has been kidnapped by her stepsister Chi, who wants you, the prince for herself. In the parable it’s explained that she’s the daughter of a powerful spider witch and you are part of a powerful Tang dynasty who knows the secret to immortality, but in the game, I guess you are just that hot.

You head to Shan’s grandmother’s house, except it’s not really her grandmother; it’s Amelia, Shan’s godmother. She tells you that if you want to marry Shan you must save her (I’d like to think Amelia is just messing with you and could kill Chi with a finger snap), and to do that you first have to find Shan. You end up finding Geppetto instead, wrapped in a web, and after freeing him, he tells you he has created a fan that could extinguish the eternal lava river that leads to the Blazing Mountain.

You find the fan and Amelia beats you to the mountain, where Shan, turned into a kitsune, is trapped in a cage. You end up having to face Chi, who is now a spider-human hybrid and to do so you have to forge a sacred sword. So, you let Shan free, you forge the sword, and you kill Chi, and Amelia and Geppetto get married. Hooray.

There is nothing wrong with this bonus story, but it’s just not very good. I was hyped to play a Chinese version of Cinderella, but it’s just the regular version with spiders. It’s almost shocking to me that an Asian studio would be better at retelling the European versions of fairytales than their own, and yet here we are.

The only funny thing about this tale was realizing that Amelia’s house is literally just Geppetto’s cottage painted red.

Overall, I would genuinely say that out of the 7 Blue Tea games, this one is my least favourite, rivalling for the last spot with CoBR. Luckily, things pick up with the next game, which is:

Jack and the Sky Kingdom

Introduction

#dark parables #dark parables: the final cinderella #moni talks #video games #casual games

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thesffcorner · 2 years

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Dark Parables: The Red Riding Hood Sisters

This is the fourth game in the series, and I have mixed feelings about it. If I had to describe it, I’d say that it’s ambitious, but not entirely successful.

I remember liking the game a lot, especially the first half which I found to be very strong, but being severely let down by the ending. Now, having replayed it for this retrospective, I actually found it to be quite underwhelming. It’s shorter than RotSQ and TEP, which is weird because it covers so much lore and introduces so many characters. Unfortunately, nothing that it introduces feels fleshed out, and the parables which in RotSQ were a fun bonus feature, are really used as a crutch here.

So let’s get into it. Our opening cutscene shows a little girl being chased by wolves. She gets saved by a Red Riding Hood Sister, Theresa. Before the girl’s eyes, the Wolf Queen appears and slashes Theresa across the back.

You start the game 3 days later in France. You are sent to investigate who the Wolf Queen is and how to stop her; to assist you this time, are the Red Riding Hood Sisters who guard the forest. Immediately, a wolf attacks you, and no sooner have you gotten up, you are attacked again, but saved by Ruth.

Now look, I don’t want to harp on Ruth too much. She has a neat design, and a really good voice actress, but her character is legitimately the most incompetent person in these games, and that’s saying something when you’re playing a character who gets captured about 8 times per game. Nothing she does ever goes well for anyone, and in this game alone she needs to be rescued twice. Her introduction is her failing to kill the wolf and getting poisoned so YOU have to find her an antidote.

The antidote needs moonflower, which you learned in the previous game, is a rare, gentle, flower that blooms in moonlight. You have to fandangle some branches to get it to bloom. There is a really good moment here, as you run around the forest, Ruth gets progressively weaker and sicker, putting pressure on you to get the flower faster.

Once Ruth is cured, she’ll give you a key to the Sisters’ hideout, which is at the top of a hollow tree.

The hideout was built by the Hunter, who saved the first Red Riding Hood, Isabela from a wolf attack that killed her grandmother. Isabella decided to train with the Huntsman and after he was killed (also by wolves) she started training other orphan girls to become Sisters themselves and protect the forest and the surrounding region.

Ruth takes you inside the hideout, explaining that she was scouting the forest looking for the wolves, which is why she is as shocked as you are to find the hideout destroyed and the sisters gone.

This is where we get to my first big pet peeve of the game. This series is light on the gameplay; that’s why the genre is called casual game. You mostly solve puzzles and even the very brief and generously titled ‘combat’ scenes are disguised puzzles. So obviously, you don’t need the NPCs to do much. The way RotSQ got around this was by having most of the NPCs be children, and the only adult character keeps dropping in and out of the game, handing you objects to help you when he’s there. The kids helped, sure, but they mostly hid, and let you, the adult, deal with the threats.

Here, Ruth and all the other Sisters are trained hunters; even the non-Sister character Rafael is the last surviving member of a long line of master hunters. And yet, as soon as Ruth sees that the hideout has been attacked she tells you, the Detective, to go around and search for clues while she waits for you. She doesn’t come with you, she just stands in one room, waiting for you to do all the work.

When you met her, she at least had the excuse of being poisoned, but here, she’s completely healthy, yet you have to be the one who talks to the Mirror, you have to collect all the orbs, you have to venture into the Mist Kingdom BY YOURSELF, and Ruth just waits. They don’t even give her a lame excuse like oh, there must always be a Sister in the hideout, she’s just like, K, here’s a cape, go fight some wolves.

So, winging notwithstanding, you explore the hideout and learn more about the sisters. Theresa, the sister you saw at the start was the Eldest Sister; the leader of the Order. She was tied neck in neck with her friend, Eldra, according to the scoreboards. You also find out that the Truth Mirror is in the possession of the sisters, because Snow White gave it to them as a gift for saving her son from a wolf attack.

I presume Snow had done this before Gwyn was injured, since the statue they have of him appears to be the same age as Gwyn when you rescue him, which is kind of ironic; James’ guards must’ve been the most incompetent in this universe and Gwyn the unluckiest prince if he was almost killed by wolves, TWICE.

The Mirror tells you that the same time you were attacked, the Wolf Queen appeared in the hideout via some kind of portal and kidnapped all the sisters. She took them to the Mist Kingdom, which is a fabled Kingdom that hasn’t been seen for centuries (5 centuries as we later learn). Ruth explains that the Kingdom appears when there is a moon phase, and the orb we have been carrying around can be used to activate a machine the Moon Goddess left to the Sisters to call the Kingdom from the lake in which it has been sunk.

So I have a question. How in hell can the characters breathe underwater? The Wolf Queen and the Wolf King, fine, but Eldra? Rafael? The kidnapped sisters? Also, speaking of, if you have the orb and the sisters didn’t, how did Eldra or Rafael get inside the Kingdom?

You call upon the Kingdom from the lake and go in. You immediately see a man watching you, but before you can follow him, you see the wolves take the sisters inside the castle and raise the moat. You end up going to the town square; all the citizens seem to have perished at once, and judging by the goodbye note you find in a sculptor’s workshop, in an agonizing wolf attack.

In the townhall you end up meeting Rafael. He asks you who you are since you aren’t a Sister, but you are wearing a Sister’s robe (Ruth gives it to you so the wolves can’t track your scent). He explains that he has been searching for his friend Eldra who too was a Sister but has been gone inside the Mist Kingdom for years. He agrees to help you translate a cypher that can bring the moat down, since his family was originally from the Mist Kingdom.

Inside the castle grounds, Rafael leaves you to find the other sisters, while he looks for Eldra.

Rafael is a mixed bag. At first I was put off by his unnecessary hostility, and I also didn’t understand why he wasn’t more useful; outside of killing a wolf (which you have to find an arrow for) and translating the cypher he really doesn’t do anything. He has potential; he’s the last member of a long dead, but proud family, his family protected the royal house and monarch which led to the Mist Kingdom’s demise, he lost his best friend. He has reasons to be glib, but he’s just not interesting enough for me to care.

You find the sisters in the prison, but Jessica tells you they are too weak to go through the gate; they will definitely attract attention. She tells you there is a way to open a portal right next to the hideout. You soon find the fountain through which you can open the portal and also Theresa's dead body.

I have to say, when I first played this game, finding Theresa shook me. This series has done death before, but never like this. The thief isn’t a named PoV character, but Theresa is; we saw the opening through her eyes. She’s succumbed to the poison, but has left you a recipe on opening the portal. You follow it and right before you close the portal, Rafael and Eldra come through.

Eldra tells you that she had been captured and tortured by the Wolf Queen. Ruth mentions a moon temple in the woods that the Elder Sister had access to. You find it and learn about the moon prism you have been carrying.

The Moon Goddess left mankind 7 moonstones with which they can control the length of night. However, if the 7 moonstones are joined they can plunge the world into eternal darkness. You find a moon prism in the temple, and shockingly, shady Eldra is in fact the Wolf Queen and steals it. Rafael and Ruth attack her, but ofc, Ruth is useless and gets captured, just as you get reinforcements; Briar Rose herself who has now become a Sister.

Her vines destroy several of the wolves, but Eldra easily stops them from harming her and takes Ruth. Once again, you, the Detective, have to bring the last stone to the Kingdom if you want to see her alive.

Rafael is shocked that Eldra would betray him (which, uh, she didn’t. She betrayed her sisters, and he isn’t one) and Briar Rose tells you to find the Centaur Bow, which can destroy the Queen. So off you go, into the Mist Kingdom again, this time alone. You find the anvil to forge the bow in the chapel, and test it on a guard wolf in the castle.

This is a good time to talk about why this game is so underwhelming for me. If you haven’t been paying attention, I talked about 3 separate characters who are all full of potential. I already covered Rafael, but we also have Eldra and Theresa. As we find out in the castle, Eldra and Theresa were childhood friends, who always had a friendly rivalry, until it became clear that Theresa was going to be the Elder Sister. To prove herself, Eldra went into the Mist Kingdom alone and killed the Wolf King, but before she could destroy his talisman it possessed her, using her ambitions and insecurities against her, turning her into the Wolf Queen. But unlike in RotSQ or even TEP, we don’t learn any of this organically, through dialogue or even notes in the world. We learn this through the parables, which once again, are optional, collector pieces.

What we have instead is a truly uninteresting focus on the Mist Kingdom and the Greedy King who brought the Wolf King into the world. This is absolutely not the interesting part of this story; the King was rich and greedy, and he wanted more loot. The only semi-notable part of this story is the Queen’s chamber, where we see the Queen herself, locked inside, lying on her bed, alone, dead and miserable. The fact that Eldra slept in that room and never considered like… moving the Queen’s skeleton is quite disconcerting.

Inside the castle we get many hints about the next game: Cinderella. Like RotSQ this game doesn’t have a secret room on hardmode, nor the really clever tie-in like CoBR or TEP did; it’s just a carriage and a glass slipper and I’m still not sure how they ended up in the Greedy King’s treasury.

Eventually, you end up lifting the barrier from the throne room, and through the portal you enter the Wolf King’s realm. It’s beautiful and entirely magical, like the mirror realm in RotSQ, and you find Ruth held in a cage. As soon as you free her, Eldra appears and steals the moonstone (WHY WOULD YOU BRING IT WITH YOU??) and all the sisters gather for one last stand.

The final puzzle requires you to move bridges to shoot wolves according to colour, and then we get an unnecessarily flashy action cutscene during which the wolves clash with the Sisters, and before you can shoot Eldra with the bow, a wolf knocks you out. Raphael takes the bow and shoots the prism from Eldra’s hand and the world starts collapsing.

For whatever dumb reason, Eldra can’t simply escape with the others, even though she isn’t wounded, and for an even stupider reason, Rafael decides to stay with her. If I had a better grasp on these two’s relationship, like if Rafael felt guilty that he didn’t succeed in finding Eldra before she was cursed, or if he reciprocated her romantic feelings, this scene might have had an impact. As is, when Eldra says I’m glad you are here with me, all I could do was scream “you mean you’re glad he’s pointlessly dying with you even though you both have functioning legs?? Fuck you, lady!”

The game ends with Ruth getting elected as the new Elder Sister (WHY, when she’s so BAD at this) and the sisters deciding to adopt some wolf pups to raise them as allies rather than enemies.

Bonus Game: The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Weirdly enough, this bonus level made me care about the Mist Kingdom even less than I did in the main game, and it takes place on the day the Kingdom was destroyed. It’s a twist on the boy who cried wolf, but it’s a weak one. At no point in this game does the moral make sense, since the kid you play as could have been the most obedient child in the world, who never lied and the Mist Kingdom would have still been destroyed.

We start with the dad locking his son in the basement for playing pranks on the villagers. When you open the trap door, you see your father passing out from being beaten by the King’s knights for not disclosing the location of the wolf talisman. The father asks you to get help and you set off, using a secret passage behind a shelf to get out.

I find it imminently hilarious that this child lives next to a witch and has just never noticed, but he sees a mermaid trapped in a pond in the witch’s yard. The mermaid promises to help you if you set her free, so you do. At the same time, to distract the guards from your house, you blow a hole in the King’s palace, and free a griffin.

You use the orb the mermaid gave you to knock the guard out and then make a potion to rouse your father, but as soon as you do, the King returns and demands you give the talisman over. You can’t, since the talisman has bonded to you, so the King kidnaps both of you to get you to open the portal. As you do, your father apologizes for being an absent father. The wolves attack, and kill the King, while the griffin swoops in, saves you and your father and you watch the Mist Kingdom disappear into the lake.

Much like Hansel and Gretel, this level is fine, but not very memorable. The character you play is cute; he’s funny and also has the same questions I do, like how is the mermaid going to escape from a pond. The King is as uninteresting as a villain as he was in the base game, and I do not care at all about the ‘absent’ dad.

I feel like had I not replayed RotSQ and this back to back, I would have been kinder to this game. It still has gorgeous art direction and puzzles, and in this one especially, they really did their best to have different models for at least 5 of the sisters. But I think the money that they spent on the 2 action cutscenes would have been better spent on shorter scenes fleshing out the trio of Rafael, Eldra and Ruth, and on crafting a tighter story. The Mist Kingdom is just an accidental backdrop; nothing about its history is actually relevant to the present story, the wolves could’ve attacked from anywhere and the end result would’ve been the same. Ironically, by making the Detective a more active player in the story, the Sisters suffer because they end up being superfluous or just incompetent, when you alone have to do all the work.

It’s a case of too much and not enough; too many disparate ideas, and not enough focus. 4 games in, and we are already recycling things, like having Briar Rose appear, having Gwyn and the Truth Mirror as part of Red Riding Hood lore, and having yet another villain controlled by an evil artefact.

Unfortunately, the next instalment makes most of these missteps, even more.

The Final Cinderella

Introduction

#dark parables #dark parables: the final cinderella #video games #casual games #moni talks

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