The Skylia Prophecy Switch Review – Making It Worse

The Castlevania franchise is now mostly recognized as being an integral part of the metroidvania genre, but initially the series was a difficult action RPG that was a lot more linear than its metroidvania cousins. The Skylia Prophecy follows suit with the original Castlevanias, and it does feel like a trip down nostalgia lane in many ways with its linearity, short-range combat, and brutal difficulty.

But is The Skylia Prophecy a worthy successor to the original Castlevanias? Or is this prophecy better left untold?

The game starts with this long and hard to read story that is written in red with a background with blood on it. Yeah. You can imagine how easy that is on the eyes.

The story is about how the Dark Lord was defeated and brought peace somewhat to the world, but he wasn’t killed out of fear that his death would cause the demons to rampage uncontrollably in wait of a new, even more powerful leader to emerge. Well, our main protagonist, Mirenia, decided to kill the Dark Lord herself despite what the elders feared, and guess what? The elders were right, and the demons are going mad now.

Mirenia continues to be foolish and reads from the Book of Shadows, ignoring the elders and her friends, so that she can draw all the dark power into one spot for her to destroy once and for all.

This is a rather convoluted story that actually paints the protagonist as an idiot. She continues to ignore the wise counsel of her community, and she is taking everything into her own hands. What she ends up doing is endangering everyone and needing to clean everything up herself. It’s not a terrible story, but it just immediately paints a bad picture of Mirenia when she is supposed to be the hero and savior.

The Skylia Prophecy is a linear action RPG similar to that of the original Castlevania games, but instead of a vampire-slaying whip and Dracula, this time we have a shield sword and a Dark Lord. It is not the most original idea, but the formula works… for the most part.

The game is split into a few areas where the handful of villagers spared by the demons continue to migrate to along your journey. Yeah. You read that correctly. Each new village you encounter is occupied by the same villagers you saw and interacted with at the previous village. Very strange, indeed.

There is little-to-no communication about how things work. Even the tutorial at the beginning of the game, if that’s what you even want to call it, explains much of nothing. The Skylia Prophecy is actually a pretty deep action RPG, but most of the mechanics and ideas for the game are left untaught and a massive amount of expectation is left on the player. Certain actions and encounters have the weight of a coin-flip, because again, the game doesn’t really go into detail about much. Lots of trial-and-error, which means lots of death, returning to the main menu, reloading your last save, rinse and repeat.

You can even choose from three difficulty settings, but that honestly does not mean much because even Easy is hard as nails, too. As you progress and gain more health and strength, it does get easier, but from the start, certain enemies can easily kill you in one or two hits.

Boss fights are genuinely a lot of fun and quite varied, but the RNG for some of them is a bit too random. Flying objects and bouncing fireballs, for example, seem to have no rhyme or reason, so getting hit unfairly happens quite often. The same is also true for certain enemies that spam ranged attacks, especially in tight corridors where the bouncing fireballs become completely unavoidable.

I also found that certain dungeons, especially the last one, left me feeling quite aimless. There is an illusion dungeon that is a proper nightmare to navigate, but the final dungeon is simply awful. As stated before, there is not clue as to what you need to do, so you are just trying to figure things out in this giant gauntlet before finally putting things together. Some more information before heading into these types of places would have been very helpful.

A huge issue I ran into numerous times in the game, particularly after obtaining the double-jump ability, was softlocking. For those unfamiliar, a softlock is when you get stuck somewhere with no way to exit and no way to die. The only option is to quit back to the main menu and start back from the previous checkpoint. Because double-jumping uses mana, and mana is limited, you can land in certain areas that need a double-jump to recover with no mana or a potion to recover mana. This is quite the conundrum and honestly a terrible oversight, as this happened to me more times than I can count, especially in the last dungeon.

I know this may sound like I am coming down hard on the game, but it is difficult to ignore the large pile of small problems invading The Skylia Prophecy. Booting up each time forces you to reconnect your controller, shops only allow you to hold one of each item at a time (Including potions and keys, which was vital), and some actions do not overlap, meaning they work one place but don’t work elsewhere.

The game does look awesome, as the pixel art for the most part is beautiful, and the soundtrack is really well put together. I will even praise the large variety of enemy designs that are scattered all throughout, keeping each area feeling fresh and different.

But it is a frustrating experience, too. It had large shoes to fill with being a Castlevania clone of sorts, and sadly, it just doesn’t slay demons as well as a Belmont. It has a lot of promise, though, so my hope is that if 7 Raven Studios decides to continue this franchise, they will patch up the many minor problems that currently plague The Skylia Prophecy. As it is now, it is just very difficult to recommend, unless you really enjoy dying a lot unfairly and getting softlocked.

The Skylia Prophecy Review provided by Nintendo Link
Developer: 7 Raven Studios
Publisher: 7 Raven Studios
Release Date: April 23, 2021
Price: $6.99, £6.29, €6,99
Game Size: 318MB