Homura Hime is frustratingly close to being a great game. It has deep and satisfying combat, and the movement can feel pretty good when you get into the more lengthy platforming sections, allowing you to get into a nice flow state. However, it constantly brings the action to a screeching halt with constant cutscenes and story segments that go on for way too long and, frankly, aren’t very good. The power struggle between these two aspects of Homura Hime pulled me back and forth throughout my experience, leaving me exhausted.
Who Decides What Is Evil?
The story of Homura Hime revolves around an order of exorcists who maintain the balance between demons and the rest of the world. As the titular Homura Hime, you are tasked with killing five archdemons, which are just people who have died while under extreme duress or sadness, that threaten this balance. Accompanying you is Ann, a shrine maiden who feels the need to constantly chime in at every opportunity and acts as a sort of sidekick to Homura Hime. Together you travel across five stages, slicing through demons and platforming, culminating with a boss fight against one of the archdemon threats. As you kill each archdemon, you get a small glimpse into their past and why they were corrupted. From here, the story starts to question whether you are truly doing the right thing by killing these archdemons, or whether Homura Hime even has the free will to stop.
While the story wasn’t offensively bad, it doesn’t do enough to justify just how much they cram it down your throat. At least when other character action games stop for cutscenes or story segments, it is accompanied by cinematic action scenes that keep the hype and intensity going. In Homura Hime, you are just forced to sit through constant scenes of dialogue spread throughout levels, which just have you clicking through text boxes. Why am I spending so much time after every other encounter moving through dialogue that is just reiterating what we’ve already been told twenty times before, instead of just keeping the momentum going? And why, even in gameplay, do the characters just keep talking nonstop? It really is frustrating because the few times when the game actually lets the game speak for itself without interruption, it really shines.
A Cut Above
Combat is extremely smooth and responsive in Homura Hime. Comboing an enemy into oblivion and then shooting off towards another without missing a beat feels fantastic, and as you unlock new combos and skills, it just gets better. Homura Hime takes some cues from recent character action games, using bullet hell mechanics in its combat, forcing you to keep on your toes to avoid stray projectiles. Enemies will also relentlessly come after you, offering very little time in between assaults. One of my favorite innovations in modern action games is allowing the enemy AI to swarm the player rather than standing around waiting for their turn to attack, and Homura Hime has some of the more aggressive enemies in recent memory. Thankfully, Homura Hime is equipped with a rather powerful parry mechanic, and you will need to abuse it to survive. Almost every enemy attack is parryable, outside of moves that flash yellow, which you’ll have to dodge. Parrying not only prevents damage, but wears down enemy stamina meters, which, when depleted, stun them, opening up opportunities to really lay on the damage.
While in the early game, most of the enemies are easy to read, the game ramps up its difficulty significantly with the bosses. Boss fights combine the relentless attack AI of other encounters with some absolutely insane bullet patterns to move through, making them the standout moments of the Homura Hime. Memorizing these patterns and knowing when to move in for your attacks or to go on the offensive will be paramount for your success in these fights. However, Homura Hime suffers from making the rematches with these bosses in the second half of the game ultimately redundant. Outside of one fight that changes things up, all the other rematches with the archdemons are just a rehash of the same fight over again.
Limping to the Finish
Homura Hime only clocked in at around 10 hours upon completion, but it felt like so much longer than that. About halfway through, the game attempts a rug-pull moment that sends you back through the same five levels you just completed, just condensed down slightly and with harder enemy variants. This could have been a great idea to remix stages and make you approach each level differently, but instead, the changes are so minimal that I quickly started feeling the repetition wear on me. This makes the latter half of the game feel more like padding, causing it to drag the pacing down. That being said, the final boss fight gauntlet manages to redeem Homura Hime somewhat.
I really think trimming down the latter half of the game to just the boss fights would have only benefited the game here. Retreading old levels can be fun when done right, but you have to really change how they play or throw in some sort of curveball to make them feel somewhat fresh. Homura Hime just adds a couple short cuts and calls it a day. It is an odd choice, and I wonder if the developer was worried about the game’s length and added these sections in later to stretch it out.
For Those Who Need Their Fix
In the end, I enjoyed my time with Homura Hime, but there were too many stumbles along the way for me to fully recommend it to everyone. The story is not very good, and no characters stand out as particularly interesting or memorable, but the combat saves it by offering a large array of fun combos and skills to slice through demons with. It also overstays its welcome by having you play through old levels without making it worthwhile at all. I really wanted to like this game more than I did, because you can tell there was a lot of heart and thought put into Homura Hime. Sadly, the fantastic combat and great art are let down by some questionable design choices and a lackluster story. I can only recommend Homura Hime to the diehard character action game fans out there who are looking for a decent game to blast through on a weekend.
Disclaimer: PLAYISM provided a PC (Steam) copy of Homura Hime for review purposes.
