Ary and The Secret of Seasons - Playthrough Part 9 (Ending)

With all 4 fragments with her Ary went to the desert to form the Cartographer and stop the evil mage. Before heading there though I had extra money so I bought her old haircut so that she doesn't look too stupid. In any case Crocus tried to stop Ary from forming completing her task warning her of a disaster, but she had no reason to trust this prick the evil mage appeared and it turns out that the Cartographer was the key for this ancient robot which could travel trough time and he planted the legend of it so that somebody could collect the fragments for him. Battling the robot was weird - it was more of a puzzle really. Initially I thought that I should shoot a sphere are one of its legs and then activate a different one as it's stepping down and spheres can't overlap it would trip it. This of course wasn't the solution. You just use the winter core and create platforms on its legs so that you can climb and disable them. Then you go into the robot and solve puzzles there to depower it. Disappointingly you don't use much of your season powers except for activating a couple of hard to spot switches. The mage plan was seemingly stopped and then the legendary warrior comes to the scene to battle him. In a weird plot twist it turns out that the mage is an older version of Crocus, which is why he was shocked when he freed him. The younger one chooses to be imprisoned instead of his older self. The old Crocus reveals to Ary that her brother is lost in time before he escapes. I'm not sure why we're supposed to have sympathy for either Crocus here - the young one uses child slave labour and betrayed the Guardians and the older one planned world domination. In what's obviously meant as sequel bait, the legendary warrior turns out to be an older version of Ary. You have the option to clean up the rest of the quest and visit the guardians in their respective realms, but I didn't bother. I returned to Ary's home and nothing was changed despite her whole adventure.

Ary and The Secret of Seasons is a mess. The main character models look great and cartoony, but every other NPC and enemy look like they are from the PS2 era. The combat is functional, but nothing special. The idea of the season switching is great and could've lent itself to many interesting puzzles, but they do so little that they are barely needed (including the solstice powers in combat). Then there are the bugs and crashes, which happened often enough to be noticeable. The story is all over the place switching between tragic and funny on a whim. The entire game feels unfinished and untested. From a software point i'd guess that it fell victim to feature creep and being overly ambitious. It's the worst game I've played all year. Avoid it and play find better puzzle platformers to play.