The first time I booted up Pandora’s Tower, I was
immediately taken in by the lonely, haunting atmosphere of the title screen. A
mysterious structure hangs suspended by massive chains over a vast chasm as a
mysterious, reverberating wind resonates just barely within earshot. After the
camera pans back, revealing more of this bizarre environment, the game’s logo
materializes into view. No music. Nothing else. Prior to playing the game, I
had only maybe seen one or two trailers for Pandora’s Tower and I knew the
basic nature of the plot. But that was it. I almost didn’t even buy the game,
but ended up getting it merely to complete the “Operation Rainfall” trilogy of
Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower. For those who don’t
know, Operation Rainfall was a fan-driven campaign to get Nintendo to bring
these three games to the US, where Nintendo Wii owners were hungry for games
during the console’s sparse final years. It would have been a real shame if I had
passed this game up, because it turned out to be something quite special.
After a brief introductory cut-scene
breezes through some confusing events and introduces the game’s three main
characters while bringing them to the game’s main setting, the game starts.
Despite the entire situation not being quite clear at first, the goal of the
game’s protagonist is made very clear from the start. The basic plot is this:
you play as Aeron, a young solider whose girlfriend, Elena, has been afflicted
with a horrifying curse. This curse is slowly turning Elena into a hideous
monster and the only way to break this curse, according to a mysterious old
woman named Mavda that accompanies the couple on their journey, is by having
Elena eat disgusting purple flesh from beasts that inhabit what is known as the
Thirteen Towers. The Thirteen Towers are, well, thirteen towers that combine to
form a single massive fortress that is suspended via several gigantic chains
over The Scar, which is a vast chasm in the middle of a barren wasteland. Aeron’s
main goal is to defeat the twelve “Masters” of the towers and bring back their
flesh for Elena to eat so the curse can be lifted and her terrible fate
averted. If you’ve played Shadow of the Colossus, you might understand the
parallels here as the ultimate goal of both games is to best a number of unique
bosses to save a loved one’s life. The game’s quiet, isolated atmosphere also
gives me ICO and Shadow of the Colossus vibes.
Pandora’s
Tower revolves entirely around the bond between Aeron and Elena. Aeron is a
taciturn young man (he’s almost a silent protagonist and has very little spoken
dialogue; just something worth mentioning because it stuck out to me) that is
clearly willing to do anything for Elena, even if it means sacrificing his own
life. Elena, likewise, cares very deeply for Aeron and feels guilty for putting
him through such danger for her sake. The couple’s relationship is the axis
around which the entire plot spins and therefore it’s crucial that the player
care about Elena and want to save her. The game mostly succeeds on this front.
The story puts the player in Aeron’s shoes and goes to a lot of effort to make
Elena a likable character that we want to help. I pitied Elena’s terrible fate
and I really did care about helping her and I also really wanted the couple to
have a happy future. Elena’s urgent situation makes for great motivation for
the player. Aeron isn’t fulfilling his destiny as some kind of great hero or he
isn’t saving the world from some big evil force, he’s just trying to save the
life of the woman he loves. This is a personal story. The urgency of the
situation isn’t merely imposed on players in cut-scenes either, but is actually
constantly on the player’s mind because of an in-game timer that is constantly
depleting while Aeron explores the towers.
The game contains two main environments:
the Observatory, which is a structure on the outskirts of The Scar that acts as
the player’s home base, and the Thirteen Towers, where all the action takes
place. Aeron must explore the towers and acquire beast flesh from the various
monsters that roam the towers. This flesh curbs Elena’s curse, but only
temporarily. While in the towers, the clock is constantly ticking, and if Aeron
takes too long, Elena will slowly undergo the transformation into a hideous
beast. In order to prevent this, Aeron must bring beast flesh back to Elena.
Eating this flesh will buy the couple some time, but in order to fully destroy
to curse, all twelve pieces of “master flesh”, which can only be acquired from
the twelve bosses of the towers, must be consumed.
The time limit imposed on Aeron while he is in the towers forces the player to manage their time effectively and to consistently return to the Observatory, and it also makes sure the player is always keeping Elena first in their thoughts. It’s downright heartbreaking to return to the Observatory just a little too late and to find Elena half-transformed into a beast and to hear her apologize for the purple goop that spills onto the floor when this transformation happens. It’s also physically nauseating to watch her reluctantly take a piece of pulsating, goopy monster flesh and bite into it, practically gagging on the meat she is forced to eat and then nearly coughing it up. Oh yeah, and Elena is also a vegetarian because of her religion, so the experience is doubly unpleasant for her.
While in the Observatory, Aeron can
rest up to heal himself, find old documents lying around that Elena can
translate, buy and sell items at a shop that Mavda runs, as well as use the
wide variety of strange materials that Aeron finds in the towers to upgrade his
weapons and also fuse these items together to create new items. Aeron can also
talk to Elena and give her gifts like plants and decorations that make the Observatory
more homey, as well as jewelry such as bracelets and necklaces. The whole
aspect of Elena waiting around for her boyfriend to help her and the process of
giving her new clothes and jewelry to make her like you more feels a little bit
like old-fashioned sexism, but Elena’s not exactly a fighter like Aeron is, and
most of the couple’s bonding moments come from talking and sharing personal moments
rather than from Aeron peppering her with gifts. I like the feeling of having a
“home base” in an adventure game, a place that is always there for the player
no matter how dangerous their adventure becomes. Naturally, I enjoyed the back
and forth between the towers and the Observatory, despite the process becoming
very routine and repetitive as the game went on. While in the Observatory, an
affinity gauge is visible. Over the course of the game, the player can raise
the affinity between Aeron and Elena by talking to Elena, giving her gifts, and
by successfully curbing her curse. If the player allows Elena to begin her
transformation or gives her a gift that she doesn’t like, the couple’s affinity
is negatively affected. I cannot stress the importance of this affinity gauge
enough, as it will directly affect the ending of the game, which varies wildly depending
on your affinity.
Essentially,
Pandora’s Tower is an action-adventure reminiscent of games like the Legend of
Zelda and Castlevania series. Aeron starts out with a sword and acquires a few
more weapons in the towers to use in battle. Each weapon features unique attack
animations and each one can be upgraded to gain more attacking abilities. The
basic combat is simple, featuring standard light and heavy attacks depending on
how long the player holds the attack button down, and whether or not they press
the button at the right time to unleash stronger combos. The combat could have
been deeper in the department of basic attacks, but it’s still satisfying, if
not repetitive, to nail a successful combo chain and dig into an enemy. There’s
a nice sense of connection when you strike a monster head on, although the game
could have benefited from a lock-on feature. Also, unless multiple foes gang up
on you, the regular enemy battles in the game are usually fairly simplistic. Once
you knock an enemy down for the first time, they’re basically stunned and it’s
only a matter of continuously combo-ing them until they fall for good.
The game’s main gameplay hook comes in the
form of the Oraclos Chain, which is a mystical artifact that Mavda bestows upon
Aeron. Much of the game’s unique, elegant design revolves around this chain.
Aeron can use the chain for a wide variety of purposes, from combat to
navigating the towers. In combat, the chain can be used to bind enemies to
restrict their movement, swing them around by shaking the Nunchuk, and rip out
their flesh by flicking the Wii Remote, among other actions. Outside of combat,
the chain can be used for everything from grappling to ledges, swinging across
pits, picking up items from afar, pulling boxes around, pulling levers and
doing all manner of actions to solve puzzles. Aeron can also use a magnifying-glass-like
ability to zoom in and spot objects from afar and can also zoom in on a monster
to watch them in slow motion and target a specific part of their body with the
chain. You might target an enemy’s helmet for example and rip it off with the
chain so you can do more damage. Or you can target an enemy’s weapon and rip it
out of their hand, toning down their offensive capabilities. Combining the
chain’s abilities with normal attacks is often crucial in combat, especially
with large groups of monsters, and although you may find yourself using a lot
of the same tactics over and over again, it’s still a unique and fun system.
One might think of Pandora’s Tower as a Zelda
game that revolves around the use of a single, multi-faceted item. Instead of
acquiring several tools to progress in your adventure, the player uses one
extremely useful tool for a variety of different actions throughout the game. The
Oraclos Chain is basically The Legend of Zelda’s Hookshot with a ton of
different uses. I love this concept and it’s executed very well here. The
Oraclos Chain is very fun to use and the controls are very intuitive as well.
Players need only to use the Wii pointer to aim at anything in the environment
(the game can also be played with a Wii Classic Controller, but I never tried
it). If the chain can be used to interact with an object, a cursor will light
up and the chain can be fired at it (if you’ve played Super Mario Galaxy 2, the
chain works exactly like Yoshi’s tongue in that game). The pointer controls are
very intuitive and mostly work great, except for a few occasions when I meant
to fire the chain at something, but it didn’t work for some reason. I can’t
really explain these mishaps and they were rare, but it’s worth noting that
motion control like this, while beneficial in a lot of ways, still can irritate
when I mean to do an action and, due to my own ineptness or not, fail at that
action. Conventional button controls don’t have this problem and never will.
When I mean to do a specific action, I can always count on a specific button or
combination of buttons to perform that action. This said, I don’t think this
game would be as fun or work as well without the pointer control, despite these
rare instances of unreliability.
The game’s many towers serve as dungeons
full of enemies to conquer and problems to solve. The earlier towers are more
linear, but later ones open up and can become quiet confusing. It’s necessary to
explore multiple paths and memorize a tower’s spatial layout, especially
because escaping quickly to return to Elena and give her flesh is important.
The towers’ designs take this into account and feature many shortcuts that lead
back to the entrance that can be opened as the player explores (additionally,
an item that instantly warps Aeron back to the Observatory can be acquired in
the game). The ultimate goal in each tower is to destroy a certain number of
chains (the number of chains vary in each tower, with later towers adding on
more chains than earlier ones) that serve as a lock on the massive door that
leads to the boss’s chamber. One end of these chains is attached to the boss
door and the other end is anchored to the ground, and it is this point of
connection, hidden in special rooms throughout the towers, which must be
destroyed. After defeating the boss and acquiring its “master flesh”, it’s back
to the Observatory to give the flesh to Elena and then on to the next tower.
The bosses in the game are very
creative (in terms of both visual and gameplay design) and each one requires a different strategy in order to defeat it.
These bosses are unique as far as adventure games go because the ultimate goal
isn’t to continuously attack the boss until it falls, but instead the goal is
to use the Oraclos Chain to rip out the beast’s glowing master flesh (which
comes in the form of a glowing orb of sorts located somewhere on the boss’s
body). While some bosses require you to attack them in conventional ways in
order to stun them, these bosses mainly require the player to think in a
different way. The goal isn’t to destroy them with a barrage of attacks, but to
locate and slowly rip this master flesh out. This process requires the player
to latch onto the flesh with their chain, charge the chain’s power by slowly
pulling it, and then rip at the flesh. Fully excavating the flesh will require
several charged pulls with the chain, with more fully charged ones doing more
“damage” and bringing the player closer to fully tearing the flesh out of the
creature’s body. It’s very satisfying when you finally wear a boss down and rip
their master flesh out with one final yank of the Wii Remote (although,
watching the poor things scream and finally perish made me feel a bit guilty
for killing these creatures, which were minding their own business before I came
along. This aspect is another element that Pandora’s Tower has in common with
Shadow of the Colossus, although it isn’t quite as moving or pronounced as in
Team ICO’s masterpiece). The design of having to locate and figure out how to
access a boss’s master flesh makes each boss more of a puzzle than anything (I
hate to keep drawing parallels with Shadow of the Colossus, but…), and I quite
like this approach. These creatures will do everything in their power to protect
this flesh, however, and some of these bosses can be quite frustrating.
Sometimes, I felt things could have been a little clearer as to what I should
be doing and for some of these creatures, I felt like I defeated them in the
wrong way, and like there would have been a more efficient way to deal with
them. As I said, I like having to figure out how to ultimately solve each boss,
but if the game still allows me to beat them without ever having that “Aha!”
moment, it can make for lengthy, frustrating fights that aren’t very satisfying
to complete. For the most part though, the bosses were a lot of fun to fight
and each one involved figuring out how to get to the master flesh and then the
process of latching onto it and ripping it out while avoiding the creature’s
attacks.
Pandora’s Tower isn’t incredibly
technically impressive on a graphical level, but the art direction is decent
enough, and shines brightly in some areas, such as boss designs. Some towers’
visual designs certainly stand out more than others, with the eleventh and
twelfth towers deserving special mention, but overall all the towers, despite
having unique themes, contain a lot of the same art assets and I feel that more
could have been achieved artistically to make these areas more visually distinct.
To use another Zelda comparison, if you play any of the 3D Zelda games, every
single dungeon is painstakingly crafted down to the finest detail, with every
one having a unique theme, visual design, and accompanying musical piece. This
sort of variety is important in a lengthy adventure game (and Pandora’s Tower
is surprisingly lengthy). Pandora’s towers possess different themes, but
visually they still all have the same sort of generic-looking metallic/stone
architecture. The most stunning sight in the game is actually the view of the
Thirteen Towers from the Observatory, which I never got tired of looking at
(basically, the view seen at the title screen). Musically, things are also a
bit on the redundant side. While I do think the game possesses a fair deal of
good atmosphere, there are only about three musical tracks that will play in
every single tower for the entire game. These tracks manage to never become
annoying because they’re mainly environmental and are akin to background noise.
Oftentimes there’s no music at all playing in Pandora’s Tower. Again, this
supports the game’s quiet atmosphere, but a game can still have this kind of
atmosphere and also possess varied and beautiful music. Just look at the
Metroid series, and again, the dungeon music from the Zelda series. The
orchestrated music that plays during boss battles and cut-scenes is high
quality, if not very memorable. The exception (as far as memorability goes) is the
game’s main theme and also the music that plays during the final boss (which
incorporates the main theme), which I quite enjoyed. I’ve heard that a lot of
the music in the game is based on real-life classical music, so that’s pretty nifty.
The simple structure of going to
the towers and then returning to give Elena flesh, rest, and buy and create
items works well enough, and the player is rewarded with more information about
the layered mystery of the story after giving Elena master flesh. There’s actually
a lot more going on in Pandora’s Tower than you might think. The game contains
a rich narrative that slowly unravels over the course of the game and as the
player progresses onward, more and more of a detailed, well-realized world is
unveiled. Pandora’s Tower is primarily an action-adventure game, but it
contains an RPG-sized level of lore and mythology for its universe. I was
surprised by the level of details and lore that the game contained, as I was
expecting a simplistic action game.
In addition to its detailed lore,
much of which is revealed to the player through countless documents they can
find in the towers and in the Observatory, the game also features armor and
accessories for Aeron to equip, a leveling system, and various strange items to
collect for fusing and upgrading. In this way, the game features quite a number
of traditional RPG elements. There’s even a New Game+ option after finishing
the game and achieving one of its multiple endings, in which the player retains
all of their stats and equipment and new areas can be accessed in the towers
and new items can be found. The item fusing system in the game is very robust
and there are tons of materials to experiment with and tons of unique items to
create. There are healing items, items that enhance Aeron’s attributes like
attack and defense, items that damage enemies, and items that can be given to
Elena as gifts. It’s fun to strategize and plan whether to buy a needed item
for a high price or use found items to fuse the item instead. Oftentimes,
fusing is smarter because money is scarce until the later portions of the game.
I actually found this to be unbalanced because early in the game I was
struggling to cope with Mavda’s high prices and my limited funds, but by the
later portions of the game I had more money than I knew what to do with. Part
of the reason for this is that Mavda pays Aeron for the various documents and
notes he finds and pays more for those found later in the game. As I mentioned before,
each weapon can also be upgraded up to ten times by finding certain items.
After reaching certain levels, these weapons gain new attacking abilities and
combos can be lengthened to tear through the beasts in the towers more
efficiently.
The overall structure of Pandora’s
Tower is very repetitive and although early on in the game I truly felt
terrible for Elena, watching her choke down horrible flesh from beasts, as the
game goes on, this process becomes routine, and although the narrative addresses
this, my sympathy for Elena did begin to wane and the experience started to
feel more like a video game. In addition, the process of raising the couple’s
affinity also becomes routine and after its novelty wears off, it begins to
feel more like just another game mechanic. I never stopped caring about the
plot, and I was satisfied with the resolution, but it’s a shame that the novelty
of the experience begins to wear thin the longer the game goes on. This issue
highlights one of my main problems with the game and that is that it simply
goes on for too long. I already mentioned how the game has many RPG elements,
but it’s still a fairly straightforward action-adventure game. The experience
is pretty cut and dry: thirteen dungeons, thirteen bosses: Go.
I don’t think a game with such a simple concept like this should last up to
almost 40 hours, which it did for me. I’ll again compare the game to Shadow of
the Colossus, an experience that stripped all the filler out and focused on a
simple, straightforward goal. The player is free to take the experience in at
their leisure in that game, taking the time to explore the world if they choose,
or plow straight through the game’s 16 amazing colossus encounters. Filler
shouldn’t be anywhere near a focused emotional story like Shadow of the
Colossus or Pandora’s Tower, but unfortunately the latter half of Pandora’s Tower
feels like it could have been trimmed in favor of a more condensed experience.
Minor spoilers ahead, not for the game’s story, but simply for the way the game progresses. After finishing the game’s first five towers in a linear order (finish one tower, another one is unlocked and so on), the next five towers are all simultaneously unlocked and the player is free to choose any of these they wish and complete them in any order they want to. The problem is that these next five towers mirror the first five, both in terms of level design and their themes. You see, twelve of the game’s thirteen towers represent the twelve gods of the prominent religion in the game’s story, the way of Aios. As I said, everything in the game revolves around Aeron and Elena’s relationship, and there is a huge theme of duality in the game. There are six male gods and six female goddesses. There are six elements in the game’s religion and these elements serve as the themes for each tower (wood, earth, water and so on). So basically, after exploring all the male versions of these elements (except for one element, which is saved for the eleventh and twelfth towers), Aeron ventures to their female counterparts. This is an intriguing concept and it serves the story in the game, but the game doesn’t do much interesting with it until the eleventh and twelfth towers which are unlocked after completing the second set of five. These last two use the duality concept in a clever, if not entirely original, way and manage to be the best-designed levels in the game. So the first five towers are unique, and the last two are unique (Spoiler alert again here, but the thirteenth tower is more of a set-piece than a full level, but it achieves what it’s going for well), but those five in the middle definitely end up feeling like padding. Although the goddess towers still feature unique problems to conquer and altered layouts from their male counterparts, they also feature familiar aesthetics, design elements, and themes. These towers are well-designed and they are still satisfying to complete; they just feel like retreading the same ground, instead of wholly unique new environments. Something good that can be said about these familiarly-designed levels though is that by revisiting design elements that the player learned in the earlier towers, they build upon those elements and introduce more complicated design to the player that is ultimately more satisfying to solve than the earlier towers. I suppose it could be said that the main problem with the goddess towers then isn't one of level design, but one of familiar, uninteresting themes, and also that these levels stretch the game out a little too much. All this said, none of this ruins the experience, only hampers it.
Luckily, the towers’ bosses remain
unique throughout. Looking forward to each big boss encounter was an aspect of
the game that kept me engaged, as it was a lot of fun just to find out what
each new master was going to be like. This aspect is strengthened by notes that
can be found in each tower that explain elements of the bosses and serve to
“hype” them up in a sense. Again, I’m reminded of Shadow of the Colossus, where
I also found a lot of pleasure in anticipating each new boss.
If the whole game was set up like the last two towers are (which I don’t want to spoil), the experience might have been more interesting and the mirrored nature of the towers might have worked better. Or, with some adjustments to the story, I wouldn’t have minded exploring the Eight Towers instead of the Thirteen. They could have just made these eight a little bit meatier and added more content to them. Ultimately, a game that relies so much on maintaining a strong emotional attachment with the player just doesn’t benefit from this kind of padding. A more focused, condensed experience is best in this case.
Before wrapping up, I feel it’s
necessary for me to mention one very annoying glitch in the NTSC version of the
game (not sure if it’s in other versions). I researched it online and it seems
to be a glitch that many encountered. When I reached the eleventh tower and
tried to return to it after a visit to the Observatory, the game froze on the tower’s
loading screen and made an odd buzzing noise. Only by turning off the console
(resetting would not work for me) and booting it back up again could I
continue. Luckily I’d always save in the Observatory before my game froze, so I
never lost any progress because of this glitch. This freezing happened to me
without fail every time I would try to re-enter the eleventh tower after a
single visit to the Observatory in a specific play session. I’ve heard this
also happens with the twelfth tower as well, and I’ve heard about different
variations of the glitch, such as not being able to return to the eleventh and
twelfth towers after unlocking the thirteenth one. I never tried to re-enter
them so I can’t confirm this aspect, but apparently, only by going to the thirteenth
tower and back again can you go back to the eleventh and twelfth towers without
them freezing. More about the glitch can be found here on Destructoid.com,
although the editor who writes about it there seems to have not encountered my situation,
but the latter situation mentioned above about not being able to return to the
eleventh and twelfth towers after unlocking the thirteenth one. While not
game-breaking by any means, this glitch is still annoying and a pretty big
oversight. Consider this a warning if you plan on playing the game.
