Hello everyone. After a long break, I'm finally back. However, since I don't post on this blog very often, this will probably be my last review for a while. Sorry about that.
Timespinner is an action RPG metroidvania released in 2018 for PC and then PS4 and Nintendo Switch later. For my review, I played the switch version, and have nearly completed it 100%. (the equivalent to a platinum if I was playing on PS4) While Timespinner is mechanically sound and very fun to play though, the game suffers majorly from a lack of originality, lost potential, a short length, and terrible writing decisions. Let's begin.
Timespinner starts with some person named Lunalis on her birthday. Lunalis lives on a planet called Winderia, which is currently under to subjugation of the Lanchem Empire. Lunalis is part of a clan of "time guardians," who guard an ancient relic called the "Timespinner" that allows time-travel. However, upon using the Timespinner, the user is erased from history and a new history is born from the point where the "time messenger," the person who uses the Timespinner, travels to. Time Messengers are only supposed to use the Timespinner when something goes terribly wrong, going back in time to warn their clan of disaster so that they can prevent it. The Lanchem empire has been hunting the time guardians for generations, seeking to obtain the Timespinner for themselves. Time Messengers arrive extremely regularly, constantly preaching doom, requiring the time guardians to run away once again.
However, out of nowhere, the Lanchem Empire arrives without a time messenger coming to warn them, and Lunais and then sent to use the Timespinner, which she has been training for her entire life. But this was a different kind of time travel. Lunais would break the traditions the time guardians have had for generations and go further back in time, stopping the Lanchem Empire from ever finding them.
However, due to the interveniance of Vol Trellis, the leader of Lanchem, the Timespinner is destroyed and the time-travel fails, killing Lunais' mother, killing her whole clan, and sending Lunalis drifting though space, ending up on Lanchem's homeworld itself.
Traveling though the dystopian expanse, Lunalis eventually discovers various missing pieces of the timespinner, and uses it to go further back in time. However, the timespinner malfunctions due to it not being fully complete, and sends Lunalis 1000 years into the past. This begins the game proper, where you can freely travel between the past and future to find a way to defeat Vol Trellis and even possibly prevent his rule in the first place.
Now it's time to get to the gameplay. Timespinner is a metroidvania, meaning that the gameplay features you traveling across an open-ended map, collecting power-ups that allow you to travel further into the map and discover secrets. Upon even a glimpse, Timespinner heavily rips-off Igavania-styled Castlevania games such as Symphony of the Night, Aria of Sorrow, and Order of Ecclesia. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as those games were amazing and sadly the developer, Konami, has no intrest in making games anymore to instead profit majorly off gambling machines exploiting their beloved IPs, but that's a but off-topic.
Anyways, since the gameplay boroughs so much from Castlevania, this game is also excellent gameplay-wise, but the Castlevania references are so numerous that the game loses a lot of it's original identity. The menus and familiar system are ripped straight from Symphony of the Night, the two-castle system is ripped straight from Harmony of Dissonance, there's the ability to have multiple weapon loadouts that can easily be switched between like in Dawn of Sorrow, a blatant ripoff of the Den of Evil dungeon from Portrait of Ruin appears in this game as the "Temporal Gire," and all the attacks are magic-based like in Order of Ecclesia, though unlike that game normal attacks don't use up MP which is a relief. Heck, even nearly all the special moves are even ripped straight from Order of Ecclesia!
So, while the gameplay is incredibly solid and fun due to ripping off Castlevania, an already great formula, so heavily, it leaves little originality left when the game had so much potential with it's time-manipulation abilities. Remember Blinx the Time Sweeper? In that game, the protagonist also has time-manipulation powers, but those abilities were fully utilized in the combat and platforming. In Timespinner, the time-stop ability is used only three times in the whole game, and once you get the double jump less than halfway though it's completely useless. The game even rewards you for not using this ability on bosses, but what use is a time-stop ability when you can't even damage most enemies while in the state! Completely wasted potential.
I'm getting a bit mad. Let's get back to the story, shall we? Once Lunalis gets to the past, she meets an alchemist named Nestelle who is one of many quest-givers in the game who offer various side-quests, which are pretty tedious but offer some decent rewards, mainly useful shop-upgrades, but also cringe-inducing dialogue. Let's just say the game tried to appear to Tumblr a little too much.
The only sidequest I would really recommend doing is the "lost tools" sidequest which unlocks crafting, which is near-essential if you want to progress though the game smoothly. Other than that the side-quests give mostly useless rewards, and the ultimate reward for completing them is a crappy assessory that you probably won't need by the time you get it, along with one of the crappiest and insulting cutscenes I've even seen in a video game and a permanent dialogue change that makes me uncomfortable every time I simply want to level up my orbs.
Anyways, Lunalis goes and explores for a bit before obtaining a special relic that allows free travel between the two time-periods at every "transition room" between areas along with general fast-travel, a cute pet dragon who's your first familiar, (unless you somehow die before then which is nearly impossible unless you suck and/or are playing on Nightmare Mode.) and a short cutscene where two demons taunt you before requesting that you face them in the Lanchem Castle in the past, which was previously blocked-off. You go there, kick their butts, and head to the throne room to face their leader, who happens to be a die-hard lesbian and necrophile. Who gets off completely scot-free. Okay. While there, you discover that the side you're seemingly fighting for, Vinelle, is actually not that great either.
Vinelle was the home planet of the people of Lanchem, but they were banished by their despot ruler Vol Teneborus due to unknown reasons. The emperor used Lanchem as a sort of "prison planet," sending anyone who opposed the emperor's rule to die a brutal death from the savage beasts living there along with a deadly illness known as the "bleakness" which affects everyone who enter Lanchem, though to different effects. Some simply have a deep longing for home and more aggressive tendencies, while others feel constant, non-stop pain and are completely bedridden.
In Lunais' time, Vinelle was destroyed by Lanchem using the power of demons, and the demons later manipulated Lanchem into becoming a brutal empire that it is by Lunais' time. So now, Lunalis has a new goal. Defeat the source of the demons, the Maw of Asmodeus who guards the portal between the two worlds, and make peace between Lanchem and Vinelle. After a long series of upgrades and adventuring, Lunalis finally finds the Maw of Asmodeus and defeats it. but the explosion from it's death destroys the portal, making it impossible to return to Vinelle and ending the war for good.
After resolving the issue in the past, Lunais heads beck to her time to get revenge on the emperor once and for all. For altering the past, modern-day Lanchem was made much weaker, allowing Lunais to enter the high-tech castle and take on the emperor. On the way there, she comes across the lead-scientist Genza who reveals that the emperor is Lunais' father, which Lunalis isn't too shocked by. Apparently Lunalis figured as much. Of course.
After defeating Genza Lunalis takes the fight to the emperor and defeats him, resulting in one of two endings. Either Lunalis can ascend the throne as the new ruler of Lanchem in order to improve the people's quality of life as by Lanchem law Lunalis is now the proper heir as she defeated the emperor in single combat, or Lunalis can go back to the past to live life out with her new friends. Either way, Lunalis makes one last trip back to her home of Winderia to say her goodbyes and warn her people of incoming doom before the rest of the ending plays out. These are Ending C (return to the past) and Ending D, (become empress) but there are still four more endings to go though.
Back where you fought Genza, you may notice there's an artificial Timespinner in the background. Well, if you are able to collect the remaining pieces of the Timespinner scattered across the present, you may be able to accomplish your original goal of stopping the empire before they ever found your tribe. After collecting all three pieces, which includes fighting some optional baddies, you will have the choice of going back in time to stop you father while he was still a price, or to go even further back in time to prevent the war of the sisters, the Vinelle VS Lanchem conflict that was fought 1000 years ago, go never happen. Depending on your choice, you are locked into either Ending A and Ending B for the rest of the game with no way back, so if you want to see every ending you will either have to use New Game+ or copy your save in the game files, which is only possible on PC.
After fighting either the prince or Vol Teneborus, time itself will break (which Maynef will warn you about while collecting the Timespinner pieces) and you will be sent to the darkness beyond time. There you learn that all of existence is all a dream of a evil god known as the Sandman, who controls all of time. Now, nothing remains of existence except for the Sandman's domain, the Ancient Pyramid (the final dungeon) and the Temporal Gire, an optional dungeon featuring every enemy from the game along with multiple unique enemies, bosses, and drops. After journeying to the center of the pyramid and defeating all the Sandman's numerous forms, a shape-shifting sand-lion, a mystical hourglass, and a undead draconic being known only as Nightmare, Lunalis absorbs the Sandman's power and becomes the new god of time, the Eternal Mother, who has been foreshadowed throughout the game by various statues and cultists. Using her power, Lunalis ensures a peaceful timeline where everyone is happy, but becomes unable to experiance it herself.
The ending changes depending who you went back in time and killed. If you killed the Emperor of Vinelle, you see a scene where the queen (who died in Lunalis' timeline) and the lesbian necrophile princess making peace between Vinelle and Lanchem. It then cuts to modern-day where Lunalis' former mother is talking with a girl named Lunalis, who is not the same Lunalis we play as and is a completely separate person, with Lunalis 2.0 remarking that she looks a lot like the goddess, in which Lunalis 1.0's former mother tells Lunalis 2.0 that she was probably made in her image. Then Lunalis 1.0, now the eternal mother, gives some monologue about how she "created a future that I could have never had" which is tragic and stuff, and then the game ends. That's it? No Smash? Lunalis for Smash 2021? But in all seriousness the ending is really good, though I know some people would perfer a more happy ending but in that case Ending C (the one where Lunalis returns to the past but modern-day Lanchem is left in chaos) is the most "happy" out of all the endings, so there's that.
There is an alternate version if you killed the prince, but since I'm not playing on PC and I'll have to play the game all over again to get it, I can't exactly recall what happens in it, but I can say that the same overall events occur. However, there are two MORE endings, which are more-so alternate versions of Endings C and D but are somewhat different, and since the majority of the endings of this game are clones of one another for the most part, I consider them seperate.
Ending E and Ending F and obtained by achieving the same requirements as Endings C and D, but you have to fight Lunalis' father AFTER you use the Timespinner to go into the past and kill someone important. I haven't obtained these endings yet either, but I can confirm they're the bad endings of the game from the TV Tropes page, so there's that.
So, overall, the same seems pretty good, right? The gameplay is incredibly solid, if very unoriginal, and the story is pretty good as well, much better than most Castlevania stories. Then where does the game falter other than unoriginality? Well, I hinted at this a few times throughout this review, but I'll just spell it out for all you you. This was one of my most infamous lines on my history on the internet that may get me cancelled in the future if I even get popular, but I will repeat it again just because I can. This game features E X T R E M E G A Y N E S S, and it's not pretty. Let me explain.
First off, the game may seem innocent enough. Striking pixel art, great music, a decent story, good gameplay, ect. However, one thing stuck me as odd throughout the first 5 or so hours of gameplay. I couldn't tell the main character's gender! When a character design is made, their design must be striking, memorable, and easily recognizable. Take for example Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, or even other RPG characters like Cloud from FF7. However, Lunalis' design is quite strange, as I couldn't actually tell Lunalis' gender. For one, Lunalis is a gender-neutral name, I think. Luna is a very feminine composition, while "is" when put at the end of a name is usually reserved for male characters. Therefore, "Lunalis" is a very gender-neutral name.
Secondly, while Lunalis has long hair, many male characters have long hair as well, so that doesn't really change anything. Lunalis' face also doesn't show any sort of feminine features, such as lashes or feminine lips, and the face composition is quite androgynous. Even though the game has voice clips, I couldn't even tell from those, as Lunalis has an either very deep female voice, or a soft male voice. I was really hard to tell. She also doesn't have any other typically feminine features, such as a waistline or boobs. She's completely flat.
It wasn't until 5 hours in when Lunalis was referred to with She/Her pronouns that I came to the conclusion that she was a girl. No game should actually take that long to confirm a character's gender unless it's a plot element or twist, like Naoto from Persona 4. Even Naoto is more obviously female than Lunalis, and everyone thought she was a guy for 50% of the game! If Lunalis was referred to with they/them pronouns, which I wouldn't put past this game, I would have never known her gender at all!
However, you never really experience the full amount of the EXTREME GAYNESS unless you delve in the sidequests, and oh, they're a doozy. Remember the first NPC you meet, Nestille? Yeah, she's trans and a lesbian, and you're forced in a sexual female-on-female relationship with her no matter what you do. Luckily there's no sex scenes like in TLOU2, since there's only so much you can get away with with a T rating, and this isn't an H-Game, but it's still quite explicit. Then there's the ultra-buff warrior girl, who I think is the only non-gay non-villain character in the game, but for most of the game she's racist and blood-thirsty, so it's not looking good for the common folk. Even then, she's confirmed aesexual, so she's still part of the LGBT. Still, she's completely okay being cheated on by her bisexual boyfriend who's currently dating a disabled gay guy, claiming it's "polyamory" or some crap. At least it's a man doing it this time. Equality!
Even Lunalis herself is bisexual, which is evidenced by her having implied sex with Nestille (who probably still has a penis, we are in the "middle ages" after all) and hitting on both men and women, so they'res that. So in total, we have a bisexual protagonist, a lesbian transgender alchemist, a gay guard, a bisexual polyamorous medic, and an aesexual polyamorous buff warrior woman, not to mention the lesbian necrophile queen who is somehow the only villain to be redeemed. (the rest are all straight men) Are you happy now, Tumblr?
Not only that, but sex and relationships is seemingly the only thing these characters talk about, and they're overly complicated sexualities is one of the few things we know about these characters, in a game with a lot more dialogue than most metroidvanias. It's sad really. Another studio dedicating more time in pandering to the far-left rather than craft interesting stories and characters. Same goes for The Last of Us 2, it's already crappy story (which was done 100x better by No More Heroes 2) made even worse by bad representation, bad writing, forced LGBT inclusion, and incredibly uncomflodible torture-porn and gay sex scenes. How was this game rated M for mature again? The same rating as Persona 4, a light-hearted murder-mystery JRPG/Social Sim with minor swearing, a dildo monster, and that's it? Heck, Timespinner mentions sex around 4 times, the same amount as Persona 4, and Persona 4 gets marked for that with "Sexual Themes" (maybe helped by the clean strip club dungeon and vaguely sexual symbolism) and an M rating while Timespinner gets a low-T? What the frick? Even the PS Vita (2012) and Steam (2020) versions still had the M rating, the same rating as TLOU2 and literal H-games like Gal Gun and Segan Kagura.
Just to make it clear, I'm fine with LGBT characters in games. Fire Emblem Three Houses did this extremely well, letting you CHOOSE if you wanted to do gay romances or not, though I and many others wished there were more LGBT options (in spite of me not being gay in the slightest) since a lot of characters a canonically bi but aren't romancible. (Petra, Dimitri, Dedue, Felix, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Claude all come to mind) I also have a decent amount of LGBT characters in my own games, not because I wanted "representation" or to appeal to the Tumblr/Twitter mobs, I did it to enhance the characters and make them more interesting. Some examples include Jeht (Gay) from Meteo Chronices, Serrah (transgender and lesbian) and Blessing (bisexual) from Ebony Chronicles, and Tobias from Boltman Chronicles (Genderfluid) being some examples.
It's just when companies shoe-horn LGBT representation pointlessly into a game or over-saturate it so either the entire character's personality is "I'm gay" or "I'm trans" or even worse, nearly every character is gay for nearly no explainable reason. Having "every character is bi" in your game enforces the toxic mindset that "Oh, everyone is bisexual deep down" which is now true. People are straight, people are gay, and people are bisexual. I'm straight, but that doesn't make any of my opinions less valid.
Overall, timespinner is a really great game, hampered however with poor writing choices and unoriginal gameplay. However, the game is still solid overall, and defently worth checking out if you're a fan of Igavania-era Castlevania. Overall, Timespinner is a 7.9/10
Timespinner: 7.9/10
- Fun gameplay
- Great story
- Amazing sprite work
- Awe-inspiring music
- Extremely easy
- Unoriginal gameplay
- Wasted potential
- Cringe-worthy sidequests
