Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune Review

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s a minimalist approach to storytelling that a lot of metroidvania games traditionally take, letting their world speak for itself and typically telling the rest of the story through text boxes and an occasional character sprite. Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune aims for loftier narrative goals with a load of fully animated cutscenes that place the characters and their adventures on equal footing with the importance of the side-scrolling exploration and action. Unfortunately, these moments are so rough and shoddy that they ultimately bring an otherwise decent gaming experience down several notches.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a mish-mash of fantasy and sci-fi tropes run through an anime filter, and that grab bag honestly leads to some interesting ideas. Your protagonist is Erza, an Imperial Hunter aboard a cruising skyship heading to an unexplored region. Despite her calm & cool appearance, her introductory cutscene has her livestreaming from her bedroom about planet ecology to her fans and getting embarrassed when her dad shows up in the stream chat. Alongside her, you also get to play as minigun-wielding and Erza-obsessed fangirl Ciara as well as masked fighter Nia.

Hot-swapping between three playable characters at any time adds a lot of fun new layers to the metroidvania action that I was really impressed by. Each character has their own specialisation, and plenty of new weapons to equip and abilities to unlock that help diversify their playstyles even more.

I struggled to lose myself in the fun of these characters and the multi-biome sprawling map they explore, though, because of how frequently the game comes to a halt to dish out an unremarkable cutscene. While character models in Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune look fine enough from afar, they’re much less impressive to look at in dynamic, close-up cutscenes, and their animation is distractingly robotic. It’s hard enough to care about these moments when they look so rough,