There is nothing better than a good Metroidvania. Dense mazes to traverse, many types of demons/undead/monsters to slay, new gear to find, hazards to jump over, and most importantly, abilities to acquire that allow you to explore even more. We’ve gotten our fair share of stellar genre entries over the last decade, but now we’ve got another one looking to join the most memorable of them all: Afterimage Aurogon Shanghai. This sweeping, anime-inspired take on the double-jumping and air-running genre features the best of them, though it’s not without its quirks.
Afterimage begins with a vague, Dark Souls-like overview of how his world is falling apart, presented through a series of beautiful, hand-drawn images. We didn’t understand any of it. In fact, the narrative is a convoluted jumble of fantasy pronouns and anime girls; even after ten hours, we still didn’t know what was going on other than that, taking control of a young magical girl named Renee, we had to search for the cloaked girl who stole her master’s soul. Joined by a cheeky spirit called Ifree, we made our way through hand-drawn biome after biome, slashing a vast array of enemies with whips and greatswords as we explored every nook and cranny for treasure and upgrades.
The beautiful art is at the fore here, much more so than the forgotten story. The vivid backgrounds of Rainbow Plains and Ashen Canyon took our eyes away from the action or made us pause to snap a few screenshots. We were excited to move from one area to another to see Aurogon Shanghai in a beautiful display of these fantastic environments; indeed, with the game they quickly became the highlight of our time.
The Switch, however, struggles to do the art justice; when docked, the screen looks blurry and often drops frames. In certain areas, the frame drops were so pronounced that they affected our ability to dodge the knife bandit’s projectiles and aim our counters. Gaming without a dock – and especially on a larger-screen OLED – suffers less from this, and the system’s screen renders art well. If we weren’t reviewing the game, we would have decided to play Afterimage on a more powerful system. We can only imagine how great it would look in 4K and smooth frames per second.
Instead of exploring a dense castle full of secrets, Afterimage presents you with vast natural environments to explore. Sometimes it can seem overwhelming; those areas are not small and have so many secret corners and alternate paths that we don’t believe we’ll ever be able to complete the map 100% without a guide.
Research often resembled banging one’s head against the proverbial wall. We got stuck in the middle of the game: the giant fish needed a way to talk to it in order to cross the lake, and the only paths open to us were the lava area where we almost died in one hit from the fire enemies, and a boss called ‘Auss, the Lunatic Mastermage’ who seemed invulnerable. No one pointed us in the right direction; Unable to best Auss or get through the lava area, Afterimage left us thinking we missed an area or a secret item to cast the magician, which we ended up wasting an hour or two backtracking. It turns out that Aus held the key to talking to the fish and could actually startle after being hit more than you think is reasonable.
Another game in this genre would have a useful character or line of dialogue, even if it’s obscure, to mention how to stun Auss or where a key item is. This was not the case, and it is true for other areas of the game as well. At any given time, you have two to three different paths you can take, delving deep into areas only to find that you don’t have the ability to continue and must return, or that the means to continue are hidden in the merchant’s inventory.
However, superb movement and combat reduce these frustrations. Controlling Renee as she double jumps, bounces off enemies and then dashes into the air to get to the chest works exactly as it should. As you’d expect, you gain more traversal abilities as you explore, giving you the incentive to return to where you can now reach that high platform or slide through that narrow crevice.
A small caveat with this is that fast travel between save points – called Confluence – requires a rare item for most of the game. We later unlocked the ability to fast travel at will, but if we wanted to return to Vacation Town to complete a side quest and buy a new set of armor, we couldn’t do it for most of the game without spending 20 minutes jumping and dashing back to where we came from. Likewise, the map doesn’t update unless you save to Confluence, which is why we often got lost – an odd design choice to not update while we were exploring.
Renee can wield six different types of weapons: sword, blade, greatsword, dual blades, scythe, and whip. Two can be equipped at any time and each has a simple attack with it, though you can unlock a few more techniques for each. We quickly fell in love with the aerial whip attack, where Renee swings it around herself to create a wide, consistent area of damage, and the greatsword, whose raw power we loved. A handful of magic spells, called sub-weapons, can also be equipped, though we’ve mostly ignored them; We’ve rarely found the mana management to cast them so worth it when we could just swing a greatsword instead.
It was a joy to hit a surprisingly diverse group of Afterimage enemies with this. Literal spider monkeys hung from the trees; mushrooms like specks jumped and bounced after us; grape-covered dinosaurs roamed the forests – and dozens of others, all superbly realized. Most of the bosses also captured our interest: the Crystallized Wolf required us to jump and attack at precisely the right time, and the winged birdman made us bounce his sharp feathers back at him. We often encountered boss arenas, which were usually too challenging at first, requiring us to go back and find better gear to survive more hits or deal damage faster.
In fact, whenever we entered a new area, the difficulty increased until we leveled up and explored for more powerful weapons. It can sometimes stray into frustrating territory, going from destroying cat creatures that throw vials of poison at you to getting destroyed by ghostly wizards from one area to another, but overall we enjoyed the character progression; Renee obviously gets stronger as you play and it feels good to find a new, more powerful whip that destroys enemies faster.
Conclusion
While we grew a bit tired of Afterimage’s massive amount of exploration and backtracking, we didn’t tire of beating its wide range of enemies, nor did its gorgeous hand-drawn environments — which the Switch unfortunately struggles to do justice to when docked — always disappoint. It’s best experienced elsewhere if you’re playing on a television, but if you’re primarily playing on your Switch handheld, Afterimage offers a long, nice-looking Metroidvania adventure.
