The Cuphead RIP-OFF That Gets EVERYTHING Wrong

so this is not a video I expected to be making like ever 2023 has truly been the year of twists and turns for this silly little YouTube channel and that looks like it isn't stopping anytime soon with today's video topic [Music] of something called cuphead before cuphead is genuinely one of my favorite games of all time it easily cracks my top 10 and maybe even cracks my top five it's that good the fast-paced beautifully animated Boss Rush slash Run and Gun hybrid released back in 2017 and seriously took the Internet by storm for a long period of time there it was even a prime subject for Content Farms to milk believe it or not if you remember my three-lane video from earlier in the year he was obsessed with making cuphead animations but this video really doesn't have anything to do with that in fact we aren't even going to be talking about cuphead specifically no this time we're going to be taking an in-depth look at a game I legitimately never thought would see the light of day ever since it was announced back in 2019 and quietly stayed in production for almost four years that game is Enchanted portals and if you don't recognize the name you might recognize what it looks like Yep this is the infamous cuphead copy rip off whatever you want to call call it when this thing was announced all those years ago it was torn to shreds by the community for very obvious reasons I mean just look at this damn thing it screams cuphead from pretty much every single angle I was pretty heavily into cuphead when this game was announced so I actually remember what it was like to see this thing get destroyed by the internet in real time truthfully though I was actually kind of pumped for this game like even if it's just cuphead at home it's still essentially just more cuphead which at the time would have nicely filled a gap in content the cuphead's own DLC would fill up later I was really really hoping Enchanted portals would be a Smash Hit and would prove all the naysayers wrong but that is far from what actually ended up happening all of a sudden almost like a shadow drop but not actually the game was released on Steam for the world to play by the time I finally noticed it was out it had a majority negative reviews already maybe people were just blindly hating on it though I had to play for myself to truly find out so I did I I bought the game which cost the same amount of money as cuphead by the way and jumped into the world of Enchanted portals so what are my thoughts surprise surprise it's garbage [Music] but the full story here is a lot more complicated than what it probably seems like on a surface level so strap in everyone as I take you through a look at the entire game this is a story of controversy poor decision making failed kickstarters and two people trying to make the best cuphead clone they could and sadly failing miserably this is a deep dive on Enchanted portals all right to start off we have to go all the way back to when this thing was announced Enchanted portals created by the two-person team of zizo games was officially revealed to the World on October 8th of 2019. almost four years ago at this point considering the amount of work done in this trailer we can safely say this game had a minimum four years of total Dev time from beginning to release but it realistically could have been in development for five years or six years and I wouldn't even be shocked looking back at this trailer now I can see why I was personally so optimistic about it at the time it doesn't even look that bad from everything shown off here animations while very clearly done completely digitally unlike cuphead still look impressive and smooth sure most of the boss is shown off look a little Bare Bones but it's a Kickstarter trailer surely by the time the game is out these will all be fixed up to be better right right since this is well a Kickstarter trailer you'd probably guess correctly that there was indeed a Kickstarter page set up for enchanted portals there are tons of extra details here about the game and even some stretch goals were any of the metho nope not only that they didn't even make it halfway to their goal it was really just a bad mix of things that led to Enchanted portals Kickstarter failure as I kind of said earlier the internet had a serious Hape owner for this project and even if the stuff shown off here is kinda neat most people probably saw no use in funding something so controversial and at this point pretty repetitive why even play the game when you can just play cuphead even if it turned out alright at the end of the day it still would have been a worse game than cuphead most likely so yeah the kickstarter flopped and the future of Enchanted portals was uncertain to say the least the devs stated they were going to find alternative ways to fund the project and that was the last we heard about it until it was announced years later that the team had been given money by epic games through their Epic Mega Grant recipient program apparently the amount of money given through these grants can range from five thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars so it's hard to say how much money they really got to finish the game finally just this year it was announced that perf games would be publishing the project and bringing it to Major consoles with a physical release as well I find it very funny that on the perp game site they have an article about Enchanted portals that says Enchanted portals which has been favorably compared to cuphead as if 95 of the attention the game had gotten wasn't it being compared unfavorably to cuphead that's pretty much all the build up Enchanted portals had from announcement to release it was apparently shown off at some E3 like event earlier this year but I don't remember seeing or hearing about that at all what was going on and just like that after many years of trouble development Enchanted portals was finally released to the world in the time between the game being announced and the game dropping the cuphead DLC had also come out which just brought into question the purpose of Enchanted portals even more because if you wanted more more cuphead now you had it just go play the DLC that DLC is insanely good I highly recommend it anyway now that you have a better understanding of the game and its Rocky development timeline it's finally time we dive head first into the final released version of the game Enchanted portals is different from cuphead in the way you progress throughout the game it features no world map and instead uses a linear World system that is accessed through a menu unlike cuphead you can't choose the order you go to bosses in so I'll be going over this game in the linear order that it's presented in enough yapping let's get into it Enchanted portal starts with an intro cutscene showing off the plot to the game these two wizard kids are [ __ ] around their laboratory or something and accidentally knock over a purple book that I guess is full of spells the two come to an agreement that the only course of action in this situation is a sound off a random stuff in the book but whoops it makes a big ass portal that sucks both the kids their cat and the book into it now cuphead is a Boss Rush game first with Run and Gun levels As an X extra bonus I enjoy the Run and Gun levels in cuphead for how creative and level designs and enemies are but they're still probably my least favorite part of that entire game Enchanted portals is like if you took those running gun stages from cuphead turn them into the main content of the game and removed any unique aspects about them that's how the game starts off as your player character falls out of the portal in the sky and onto the ground of the very first run and Gun stage the book also falls out and has a face now for some reason I don't even know don't even question it the book with a very surprised look on its new face flies away into the level and it's our job to chase after it since this game doesn't have any world map and follows a linear structure this is the very first part of gameplay Enchanted portals has to offer the player cuphead has kind of simple controls but given the difficulty level of that game the tutorial at the beginning is a great way to make sure the player is aware of the entire move set and how to move around certain situations Enchanted portal says [ __ ] all that nonsense here's two random pngs in the first level that don't even say what buttons do what good luck there is an optional moveset sheet you can look at but a good game should either tell the player how to play the damn game or be simple enough that you can just figure it out on your own maybe you're thinking on being a little harsh here most people who are playing this game have likely played cuphead before they'll know what to do nope that's where you're dead wrong the main gimmick of this level and many other levels in the game is switching bullet types to kill certain colored enemies blue enemies need the blue bullets green ones need the green bullets and red ones need the red bullets pretty simple stuff in theory but for some insane reason these bullet types are mapped to the d-pad of all things and require you to hit a different d-pad direction to change bullet types not only does the game not tell you this not only is it nowhere near intuitive for any game to do this but it is essentially a mandatory aspect of this first level almost every single enemy here is glowing in one of the three colors and if you don't know how to switch you'll be able to kill nothing but the red enemies since the red one is the default weapon this is such a core aspect of not only certain level gimmicks but just the entire game it should 100 tell you how to change bullet Styles without having to look at a [ __ ] PNG with all the controls on it this isn't an NES game guys we can ditch the manuals while we're at it let's talk about these different bullet types The Red Bullet is a fireball that does medium damage at a fast fire rate this is probably the best bullet type in the game and can deal with a majority of situations the blue bullets have a very slow fire rate but do more damage per shot making them good for some specific situations but they're usually just worse to use compared to the fire the final bolt type is the green bullets these work the same way as the red three-way shot from cuphead except it has longer range and is the least amount of damage of all three bullet Types on their own all three of these are fine but the game really does suffer from not having any other bullet types you can buy or unlock whatsoever however the main issue with the bolt types in this game is not the bullet types themselves but changing between them not only is it extremely awkward taking your thumb off the joystick to press down on the d-pad leaving you vulnerable when you try to switch weapon types but for some reason they made the bullet changing system the most clunky and unresponsive thing ever to change bull types you have to be on the ground and not moving at all running away from something can't change bullets in the air can't change bullets doing pretty much anything can't change bullets stack this on top of the mandatory switching to kill some enemies and you have yourself a recipe for a clunky and unfun bullet system the rest of the moveset here isn't really much better you have access to a shield which is really just a less interesting version of the Parry from cuphead that has an insane cooldown on it making it almost useless in a majority of situations the dash from cuphead is also in the game but that also falls flat in cuphead the dash acts as a safe option of traversal that jolts you across a predetermined amount of space so you can easily get over certain gaps or Dodge Boss attacks in Enchanted portals the dash is almost identical except for the fact that it keeps your momentum when using it for some reason leading to the dash sending the player way farther than they probably wanted to go the workaround to this is that the player character has a double jump to make certain situations easier to Traverse but that just really opens up an entirely different can of worms being the physics I don't even know how to exactly describe how bad they are the jump feels like [ __ ] the Dash feels like [ __ ] Everything feels like [ __ ] the double jump sends you too high movement is somehow too fast and also too slow at the same time it is a far cry from the pinpoint perfect physics scene in cuphead that gracefully complement the levels and bosses in the top left corner of the screen the player has a circle meter that goes around their health bar this meter builds up the more damage you do to enemies or bosses and once full you can press a button to activate a power mode the only difference in power mode is that it makes your Attack stronger and it also has the same issue that swapping bullets has where you have to be on the ground doing nothing to activate it this makes the entire thing clunky and a pain in the ass to use on the topic of the health bar let's bring that up for a second I actually have no idea how many hits the game gives you until you die the icon at the top goes from green to Orange to Red depending on how close you are to dying and you definitely have way more than the three hits cuphead gives you at first you just think this makes the game easier but thanks to shitty level layouts and enemy placements you will be getting hit a lot not only that this game just doesn't have invincibility frames so you can get hit a million times over within the span of like 2 seconds during multiple parts of the game don't think we're done here because I saved the very best for last the melee attack press a button to swing your wand doing close range damage other than the couple times the game literally forces you to do this for progression this is the most useless move in the entire kit it is almost never worth going up close and personal with a boss to do melee damage when the guns are both safer and more effective in pretty much every way there's a reason that one melee weapon in cuphead wheystone is like the most useless charm in that entire game overall Enchanted portals has characters with move sets that are borderline not even explained feel like [ __ ] to play with and are incredibly embarrassing considering how strong the moveset and physics they are trying to copy are if they just copy the cuphead moves at one to one sure it'd be even more Shameless but at least it'd feel good to play the damn game okay that's enough complaining about the move set you get the picture at this point visually Enchanted portals is both strong and weak at the same time it's a very odd set of Graphics to all be in one game smushed together the 1930s style stuff is so hit or miss it's crazy some animations genuinely look pretty good but others are blurry lack enough frames to be smooth or just straight up look out of place the hotel Mansion thing you visit after the four section in the first world has a very good example of this the Knight background enemies are very obviously not done frame in by frame and stick out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the enemies in the same level it'd be such a minor detail if the Knight didn't appear literally every two seconds in the level making it pretty hard to excuse on the topic of visuals after the first cutscene there is not a single other animated cutscene in the entire game instead the game uses pngs with no Dialogue on them to try to piece together the story it's not the worst thing in the world but sometimes this will happen mid-boss fight multiple times and you just have to sit there and look at them over and over as you try to kill the boss some enemies don't even look remotely animated such as these rolling monkey pngs later in the game that just despawn after they reach a certain set point cuphead does a little bit of this stuff as well but it's significantly more subtle and looks much less jarring like you can so obviously tell these are just rotating in engine it's not even remotely trying to hide it it looks so bad the backgrounds well a bit generic and repetitive actually look quite nice most the time and are probably the most consistently decent part of the entire game surprise surprisingly I can't really think of a single background that made me think wow this looks like [ __ ] a lot of enemies in this game are designed to just slide across the screen with a preset animation playing over and over again and it always looks super cheap without question I'd imagine it'd be a lot of work to give everything better movement animations but as it is right now it's pretty lacking the player characters have pretty decent animations and Sprites but the standout worst part of their Sprite sheet is the death animations whoever's idea was to make the death animation in a game where you will probably be dying in the air a lot the character flopping onto the ground and dying really didn't think about that one too hard I have countless clips of my character just flopping over onto invisible ground in the air and it looks stupid every single time the visuals are a far cry from cuphead and kind of even look worse than they did in the trailers in some aspects but aside from a few key examples I'm going to bring up later the game looks fine besides a few outliers the way Enchanted portals world are set up is two Run and Gun levels followed by a single boss fight at the end each with checkpoint at the start of the respective section for world 1 that takes us through the dark scary woods which is just a straight line with a bunch of bats and a haunted mansion which is also just a straight line follow a bunch of different enemies looping over and over again huh I'm sure that means nothing let's talk about the first boss of the game The Witch after being kicked out of the Haunted Mansion by a million ghost Maids the player is sent through another portal back outside to fight a witch who rides the Moon while throwing cats downwards along the bottom of the Arena are three different tombstones with hammers they'll try to hit you if you walk in front of them with that in mind this phase serves a decent challenge that is Until you realize you can just stay in the corner and spam jump and shoot the whole time whoops not only is this phase boring gameplay wise everything also just feels a little too empty and big for its own good bosses and cuphead look to keep everything pretty compact for the most part while also still providing enough room to move around safely here the area just feels too empty for how little is actually going on the second and third phases of this fight is when [ __ ] gets weird upon beating the first phase a smoke transition takes over the screen that then reveals an entire art style change both the player character and the witch take on a Tim Burton style appearance which is kind of cool until you realize how obviously this was done to save time and money not only is the animation worse here if you're going to commit to this bit commit to it fully the background not changing along with everything else just makes the whole thing stand out in a bad way originally this fight's second and third phases were supposed to be done in the game's original 1930s art style but it was likely cut for the reasons I already mentioned it sucks too because these concept drawings look really clean and make this whole section go from oh this is kind of a cool art style change to oh wow yeah yeah this is this is just cutting Corners isn't it this art style change [ __ ] does not happen again until the very end of the game as well just adding more fuel to my theory but we'll get to that when we get to that phase two is [ __ ] as a first boss I'm just gonna come out and say it not only are you fighting against the attacks from the witch you're also fighting against the awful controls here if you copy pasted this exact boss over to cuphead it would be substantially easier I am positive of that when I went back to replay this boss to get footage for it it wasn't that hard but at that point I was already used to the janky controls in physics one of the worst parts of this phase transition in particular is this insane glitch I think basically when the screen transitions from one phase to the next for some reason you lose all the power charge you had been building up not only that but you can still take damage during these transitions I have no idea how either of these things made it into the final game genuinely archaic game design phase three is just garbage it looks ugly has bad animation and is just a Spam of bullets to dodge until the fight is over with little to no cohesion thankfully it doesn't last very long and we can finally kill this witch for good the shed our cost saving Tim Burton appearance and move on to world two wow so much already said so much left to say and we're only on world two God help me world 2 finds their Wizards abducted by aliens and put on a spaceship for some reason this world features a level where you need to escape from said spaceship and another level where you get put inside a machine and need to destroy it from within while avoiding viruses and [ __ ] sounds kinda cool on paper but both of these running guns are some of the worst the game has to offer sadly not the worst but we're getting up there at this point you've seen bits and pieces of around four different levels as background footage in this video and you may have started to notice something about all of them the two levels in world 1 were both straight lines with minimal platforming and constant enemy spawns and the two levels in World 2 are also straight lines with minimal platforming and constant enemy spawns huh I wonder what's up with that well I'll tell you what's up with that ladies gentlemen and everyone in between I've been hiding a crucial aspect about this game from all of you so far in this video The Run and Gun levels in Enchanted portals aka the majority of the content in the entire game are randomly generated yes the devs of this game had four plus years to spend any amount of time putting together actual level designs but instead they decided to take the easiest route possible and just let the computer make the levels for them every single time you die in a run and Gun stage the entire level layout changes but you'd be hard-pressed to even notice half the time considering the level layouts all feel the exact same thanks to them being long straight boring hallways with minimal platforming when you're making a game such as cuphead where there aren't many levels you need each and every one to feel like it had the maximum amount of Love put into it and this just has none of that thanks all these run and Gun stages being randomly generated you get into situations such as the one I experienced on this spaceship level on the ceiling of the ship there are these little bug-like creatures that shoot out a bunch of projectiles all at once on a downward trajectory because the game doesn't actually know what the level is like and just knows to make the level then place the enemies in their respective areas you're left with level design where you need to platform on floating discs while being bombarded with unfair enemy placement and projectile spam the worst part you can't even kill these things if you could just shoot them and they die and stop shooting at you you boom problem solved but for some reason Enchanted portals is obsessed with giving a majority of the levels and even bosses unkillable enemies in the cuphead running on stages there are very few enemies that just can't be killed and the ones that can't always make sense like of course the giant woodpecker with a set clear path can't be killed and of course the chomping flowers that act as obstacles that jump over can't be killed even some enemies you'd think would be unkillable can be killed such as the giant Lobster in that one Boardwalk level being able to kill these annoying enemies would fix so many issues Enchanted portals has but as it stands it just makes these randomly generated slop layouts feel even worse to play through if you fall off a platform into a pit at any point during the game instead of just getting invincibility frames and bouncing back up like in cuphead you instead get put in this portal at the top of the screen that you can move around in and are eventually kicked out of it's not the worst change I guess but if you're going this far to rip off cuphead you might as well just take the things that aren't broken from it the quick bounce back up and cuphead keeps the flow of the game going well this system just brings the entire game to a halt for pretty much no reason and lets you kind of just cheese entire chunks of a level after that annoying ass spaceship level is finished you're sucked into what I think is some sort of security system any to destroy it from the inside this level features these alien cop things that ride around on flying ships that constantly spawn in from the front and back for the entire level no matter what so you always have to waste time killing these things or risk being shot at every two seconds the other main enemy of this level are these viruses that you guessed it can't be killed at all the colors of these viruses even line up with each of the bullet types so you'd think that you'd have to swap to the correct color to kill them just like the first level of the game but guess what that entire gimmick is just dropped completely until the last phase of the world 3 boss just one of the many many smart decisions this game has made at the end of the level you have to do a mini boss thing where you need to destroy the machine but the real challenge here isn't breaking the machine it's fighting the stupid alien cops that still continue to spawn in once the machine is destroyed we're sent back up to the ship where we fight the second boss of the game this space cow thing yeah I'm gonna be real this isn't a very interesting boss design at the start of the fight that purple book with a face from earlier shows up again remember that thing remember the plot of this game this first phase and probably just the whole boss in general is one of the easiest in the entire game the cow sits in a chair as you get bombarded with alien projectiles bowling balls and anvils however you can just stand directly under the cow spam the blue bullets and shield every time something is about to hit you and beat this thing pretty easily phase two is like borderline not even a phase the cow puts on some music that is so hypnotic you're forced to start dancing around the tiles will light up and you need to make it to safety before the lit up tiles fall and that's it it's not even remotely hard I never died a single time to it and it really just ends up being a Time waster between phases one and three here it's kind of cute though I will give it that phase 3 freeze Enchanted Portal's introduction to plane levels from cuphead but instead of a plane you're on a broomstick very creative the cow shrinks you down and starts chasing after you as you shoot back at them and avoid the various obstacles they throw out your way this part of the fight is essentially ripped straight from Dr Cal's robot from cuphead even down to the top middle and bottom sections of the cow breaking and causing stronger attacks to come out of them the cow is a cyborg or something by the way that's why it's breaking I think now would be a good time to talk about these flight bosses and how they work compared to what they're ripping off unlike cuphead where the plane stages had two unique weapons specifically made for them here we're stuck with the same three bullet types from before which is kind of lame the first thing I noticed is that you move very slowly on the Broom it feels like you took the cuphead plane physics and dropped them in maple syrup or something to make up for this I guess the broom keeps the dash feature from the bass movement but like why would you ever use this I never used it seriously once in my entire playthrough and every time I tried to make use of it I just thought it was a pretty nothing addition to the kit in these sorts of bullet hell levels getting too close often just leads to getting hit so why would I want to dash in any direction in any of these levels The Shield is thankfully not directly copied over to the flight levels and is instead replaced with a Dodge that makes you unable to shoot while using it but makes you invincible while in the animation this I actually found useful it's essentially just another take on the small plane thing from cuphead just a safer version of it with zero damage output rather than minimal damage output the flight stuff in this game is essentially just a more boring less thought out version of the stages that appear in cuphead but you could probably already piece that puzzle together one of the biggest problems with this fight and many others in the game is that some attacks have pretty much zero indication giving that they're about to happen they kind of just happen it's especially kind of bad here since set attacks are all just giant [ __ ] lasers that will each through your health there is a very short animation that plays before it actually fires but it's super hard to notice and I never experienced anything even remotely similar to this while playing cuphead enemy attacks are all fairly telegraphed in that game other than that one small gripe though this phase is also pretty easy and didn't take too long to get through and with that we wrap up world 2. the further we get into this the more flaws start to rear their ugly head and I don't suspect that's going to be stopping anytime soon time for World 3. world 3 takes us out of space and back on Earth after a crash landing at the start of a jungle level this is that level I briefly mentioned earlier featuring those rotating PNG monkeys this level actually gives me a great excuse to go in depth in the way Enchanted portal spawns enemies and how its entire structure is anti-speed running whether or not that anti-speed running sentiment was intentional or just shitty game design who's to say but let's get into it like I mentioned earlier Enchanted portals uses randomly generated level layouts for all the Run and Gun stages so you may be wondering how the game then handles enemies and where to put them if the devs were to make these levels from scratch they would have to individually Place each enemy to make sure they make sense within the context of the whole level well they actually kind of still did that but in the most backwards way possible the game has two different varieties of enemy types those that are spawned along with a chunk of the level and those that are spawned regardless of placement and level for example these crocodiles in the water act as both platforms and enemies in a level and they're generated in groups that coincide with certain parts of the level design which in this case is water sections another example is in a later level where there are birds that spawn at Parts with Windows you get the picture these enemies are tied to the generation of the environment and for the most part usually fits somewhat well because of it then we have the other type these are the enemies that get spawned regardless if placed in the level and instead spawning how far you are into the level take these mosquitoes holding needles for example they Spawn from both the left and right side of the screen constantly throughout the entire level regardless of what's going on in the level or where you are in the level instead of just having these enemies respawn once they're killed or go off screen for some reason the depths of this game decided the best course of action would be to have them continuously spawn throughout the entire level to the point where you start moving too fast the enemies will keep spawning and every couple seconds and start stacking on top of each other I use this level as an example because it's actually the easiest to Showcase it in just hop in the level go as fast as you can then wait a few seconds eventually an entire swarm of mosquitoes will fly from the back of the level in regards to the anti-speed running thing I mentioned this level doesn't really apply since the mosquitoes can be outran pretty easily and don't spawn nearly as much from the other direction but in other levels such as the Haunted Mansion if you try and dash past all the spiders without killing them a million ghost Maids start to appear from both sides of the screen and since Enchanted portals lacks iframes you take a [ __ ] ton of damage all at once it's such a weird and broken system and it's just another consequence of taking the lazy way out and letting a [ __ ] computer decide what the level layout should look like Anyway this level isn't the worst thing in the game but it's fairly annoying at parts and is definitely harder than the level directly following it after finishing the jungle section you're brought to an ancient Temple full of snakes and spike traps this level is incredibly easy surprisingly and nothing Interest really happens in it so let's talk about something else instead the sound design sound design is something the average player usually won't think too hard about while playing a game which is a good thing by the way A Game's sound design should aim to immerse the player into the world naturally and blend into everything else in the best way possible on that note though cuphead has some fire sound design the iconic Snappy noise that plays when you shoot bullets in cuphead is one of the best decisions those devs made for that game this should go without saying but the rest of the sound design is spectacular as well everything fits and I can't think of a single out of place or distracting sound effect used in that whole game now Enchanted portals on the other hand the shitty controls mixed with this game's abysmal sound design really make it feel way more like a free mobile game than it realistically should given the quality of some of these graphical assets let's talk about the shooting sounds first since that's what I brought up as an example for cuphead each of the three different weapon types has a unique shooting sound which is nice I guess but none of the three sounds have any amount of um for satisfaction to them not only that but these sounds in particular get hardcore drowned out by the soundtrack which is a whole other can of worms we'll talk about later because it doesn't fare very well either the worst sound in the entire game has to be the sound that plays when you take damage though it is literally just a generic stock punch sound and it stands out so much it's especially bad when you get hit a bunch of times in a row it's genuinely comical not only are the sounds chosen for the game all around pretty bad there is a surprising lack of sound effects for the majority of the game let's go forward a little bit to this western style boss fight later in the game there is so much Happening Here a bunch of cowboy birds riding a massive bison bald eagles flying through the sky and most importantly for this point lots of bullets being shot none of this has sound effects it is so eerily quiet considering just how much is happening on screen I feel like a lot of this stuff was supposed to have sounds but they either just forgot or didn't think it was worth the time investment regardless of what happened during development this is a huge hit against the game that you really wouldn't think about at first glance after completing the temple level you have to do the boss of World 3 which is actually maybe one of the better ones the first phase requires you to shoot this crab boat hybrid thing while avoiding a bunch of different attacks such as coconuts from the palm trees in the back and piranhas being shot out of a cannon it's not amazing or anything but overall I'd say this is a pretty decent phase if not a little too open similar to phase one of the witch fight I do wish everything was slightly more compact here the next two phases both take place underwater and use the flight level control scheme except instead of flying you turn into a mermaid to swim around as a thematic visual change Phase 2 suffers from the issue of a majority of the attacks having really bad telegraphic especially these coil things that spring up out of nowhere I swear to God I can never tell when they're supposed to appear and more importantly where they're supposed to appear there is actually a tell for both of these things but it's so subtle and out of the way of where you would be looking realistically that it's hard to notice especially without any sort of sound cue the space also just feels so empty the boss like a majority of the bosses in this game actually is entirely stationary this leads to everything feeling super lifeless which is not something you want when you're trying to replicate an animation Style full of so much life phase 3 brings back the crab as a ghost and spams a bunch of fish all at once the gimmick here is you can switch bullet types to kill the fish of the corresponding color but this whole thing feels lazy and like another excuse to whip out this dumb color weakening thing again the first phase is definitely the best one from this boss and overall it's a pretty mediocre showing the purple book Moving the plot along escapes through another portal and with that we have reached the end of world 3. when I was playing Enchanted portals for the first time I'd stopped around this part to go to sleep I quit the game during the middle of the world 3 boss to be specific I had intentions of going to bed waking up and finishing the game in the morning well when I finally got up and booted up Enchanted portals again I was met with a completely empty save file with all my keybinds set back to default I have no idea what happened here but for some reason the game just decided to Nuke all of my progress right then and there I even have my live reaction to it recorded thankfully what does this game manual save are you serious I realistically could have stopped there I didn't even plan on making a video on the game at this point but something in me told me to keep going maybe it was the 20 bucks I'll never get back or maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome either way I sat my ass down and replayed all of worlds one two and three oh I really didn't want to play any of this again oh I am I'm so what the [ __ ] thankfully at this point I was already pretty used to the Jank of Enchanted portals so it only took me a little bit of time to get back to where I was after all that I finally made it to world four wow making progress now okay wow interesting from both the consistency and gameplay standpoint I think world four is a contender were the best levels in Enchanted portals now that doesn't really mean that much considering a program generated said level layouts for me but the whole thing is still just a straight line anyway so not like it really changes that much all things considered World 4 actually has really solid theming that actually fits with the tone of the game as well while worlds one and three prior to this kind of have mismatched theming when looking at the levels and then looking at what the bosses are and World 2 doesn't even remotely fit the game's tone in my opinion World 4 is a fairy tale book classic The Princess and the Frog all the enemies are frogs even these bears and moles in the second level are frogs this all leads to a world boss that that is literally a princess that turns into a frog this whole world is by far the most thematically coherent within its own world and with the rest of the game's universe and style but yeah given that both of these levels are pretty much fine other than the fact that they both use the stupid color gimmick again for the second last time ever mind you I don't really have much to say about them what am I supposed to praise here the level design anyway since I don't have much to say here let's talk about another aspect of Enchanted portals the soundtrack I kinda hinted at it earlier but this soundtrack is bad there was a very large amount of time while I was playing the game that I kept questioning whether or not it was just generic stock music or not it's that bad there are maybe two memorable tracks in the entire game and overall the whole OST is a letdown especially compared to cuphead and its beautiful OST speaking of the music on another issue with it is unfitting it can be take this very next boss fight for example it's this Castle style fantasy track but in no way even remotely sounds like music for a boss battle it's extremely low energy and almost feels like it was made before it was decided what it was going to be used for and to be completely Fair that's something cuphead also did but even though the songs weren't composed specifically for each of the bosses or levels they ended up going to they were all composed in a way that fit pretty much any boss fight the game could have had each and every one is super high energy something that Enchanted portals lacks almost completely with its Soundtrack This OST is so nothing that as of the time I'm running this video not a single piece of music from the game can be found on YouTube when looking up Enchanted portals OST or Enchanted Portal soundtrack it's not like it's even hard to rip the music I ripped a few tracks while ripping Sprites to make the thumbnail it it's just this OST is so forgettable that not a single person has even bothered to do it anyway I really don't have much to say for the rest of the world so let's talk about the boss fight I actually like this fight quite a bit it's probably the best boss in the game the bar is on the [ __ ] floor but this one ain't too bad phase one has you shooting the princess while hopping between three lily pads and dodging three different attacks from three different frogs over and over again it's pretty easy to get into a flow State here and get the hang of dodging everything while also making progress I think my biggest complaint is that you can't shoot these flying frogs which is very dumb the other two fine whatever but the flying frog here is literally just that one mechanic from the ghost train cuphead boss where pumpkins drop pink bricks out of the sky and in that fight you can shoot the pumpkins to make them drop the bricks early here you have to be directly under the Frog for it to drop anything and I just think it's a worse more unfair version of an already kind of annoying cuphead boss mechanic phase two begins with the princess giving a frog a big old smooch turning herself into a frog in the Pro process these two dragonfly's Sony Vegas key frame their way down to right above the lily pads and you can use them as platforms this phase is painfully empty two of the three different frog types from before are just gone now and in their place you get double the amount of flying frogs which was already the worst mechanic from phase one and now the princess will occasionally stick her tongue out at you and you have to dodge it the whole thing just boils down to waiting for the flying frogs to come on screen and dashing into the invisible wall right in front of the princess to avoid all the potions dropping it is very boring phase three is very interesting because I literally didn't know what to do at first the frog princess jumped into the water shown via a [ __ ] PNG fading onto the screen by the way and she stays in the water below if the remainder of the fight this fight may be the only time in cuphead and Enchanted Portal's history where the lock-on feature is a mandatory tool to beat this boss in a reasonable way I didn't even mention it earlier because I never ever use it but both cuphead and Enchanted portals have a lock-on button that freezes your character and allows you to point and shoot any of the directions possible I've beaten cuphead like four times and there is not a single fight where using the lock-on was something I felt like I needed to do but here since the princess is below you you have to shoot downward and diagonally to make any progress this really confused me at first because it's so odd for a fight to expect you to use that feature all of a sudden and it doesn't even help that there are so many random projectiles bombing the screen that it's hard to tell what's even going on eventually I did beat it however and with that the best world in the entire game is finished it's actually only down from here world five time guys I have some sad news not only is this the final world of the entire game with a run and Gun level not only is there only one instead of two this time but it also just so happens to be the absolute worst one in Enchanted portals but we can't talk about that yet because we have not one but two boss fights to go over World 5 starts off with that bison fight with non-existent sound design I mentioned earlier before we talk about the fight itself which trust me this one one's a doozy I should probably first explain some controversy this boss had during development originally this bison boss featured the birds in stereotypical Native American outfits and the whole Western theming was completely absent instead of guns it was bow and arrows and the broken wagons in the background were originally tense almost immediately after this footage was dropped the devs were quickly called out and they redid the whole section of the western theming seen in the final release this whole controversy sparked up a few years after the kickstarter and reveal drama and was not a very good look as the first look at Enchanted portals after a long period of Silence felt like I should bring that up as another example of just how rocky the development of Enchanted portals truly was anyway on to the shitty boss fight the first phase of this fight really only has two different attacks one of them is a bald eagle that flies by every few seconds and the other is just bullets [ __ ] bullets everywhere bullets coming from the birds in the front coming at you bolts being shot into the sky and falling down and bullets from this lone cowboy up front that you can do damage to for some reason I don't think he can and die and I don't know if he counts towards the overall boss damage but for some reason he out of all the random unkillable enemies in this game can take damage looking back at the footage now this phase has some pretty easy patterns to dodge but for some reason I was just eating total [ __ ] on this one I think it might just be how much health the whole boss has because I swear to God this thing would just not die eventually I did do it however and made it to phase two phase two switches things up by giving the Bison a gun that shoots out cacti now while the bullet spam is gone in favor of these Cactus bullets that randomly shoot out Thorns I genuinely cannot tell if there is any sign of when they shoot out the Thorns because sometimes it happens and sometimes it just doesn't and it's very annoying there isn't actually a whole lot going on here especially compared to the previous flight bosses in the game but somehow this one ended up giving me the most trouble It's gotta be those cacti man that thorn pattern hurts my brain enough of that though now we get to talk about the worst and final run and Gun level in the entire game same deal as every other Run and Gun stage straight line with randomly generated segments with this level is not only super long it's also full of some of the most annoying projectiles and Enchanted portals eggs eggs flying out of Windows cars guns everything in this level is eggs and pizza for some reason as well I don't know don't question it probably a TMNT reference there are just so many small things here that make this one annoying for one the eggs being shot out of the windows have like egg physics for some reason you'd assume they just go on a diagonal line but they actually taper off that direction slightly during their fall down making it incredibly annoying to dodge them half the time the cars that randomly spawn in during this level have to be dealt with the same way every single time and since they just appear whenever they want you can get in situations where you either have to get hit by the car hit by an egg coming from the car or get hit by something from behind it all of these things wouldn't even be that bad if this particular level didn't last so goddamn long and as expected of Enchanted portals at this point half the enemies in this level just can't be killed anyway after all that we have the final boss of world 5. Rocky the rooster Rocky is an extremely interesting fight in Enchanted portals and gives me a good excuse to talk about the scrapped content of this game Rocky has a particular attack where he uses a mirror to reflect light which then sends a white PNG out to hit the player it's a super odd attack that doesn't even do a remotely good job of conveying the idea of reflecting light well if we go take a little trip to the first Kickstarter trailer there's a clip of this exact boss fight included and would you look at that the mirror actually has a light reflection here from an almost four-year-old build of the game what the hell happened this isn't even the only thing like this by the way the original trailers and promo material have a handful of baffling changes from the final release there's completely different weapon types from the final release which also means the enemy color gimmick was definitely a late addition since it isn't present at all here either they're swinging vines in the jungle level which are not only not present in the final game but might also suggest that the levels were not randomly generated at one point and the vines were only removed because they couldn't get it to work with the generation a dog boss that appears later in the game that has no body animation in the final build has the body animation in this trailer the list goes on I understand dialing back the scope of the game's animation and content because of the unsuccessful Kickstarter but why remove content that was not only advertised but also finished to some degree just to be replaced with worse stuff it makes actually zero sense speaking of scrapped content this boss fight is completely different than what it was originally planned there's a sign in the background that says Fountain of time which isn't really a thing the Fountain of Youth is a thing and surprise surprise if we take a look at that Kickstarter trailer we can see that same sign says Fountain of Youth this ties directly into the original concept art for the fight where the rooster would grow younger for each of the phases which is a significantly more interesting idea than what they ended up going with instead of going from young to old in the release version Rocky goes from a greaser to a gladiator to a caveman phases 2 and 3 of this fight are super boring and have really odd visuals compared to phase one maybe the original fight concept was just too ambitious for the budget they had I have no idea but what we're left with here is this awkward time travel boss that stays in the same location for the entire fight and awkwardly does one attack while some random [ __ ] happens on screen what could have been the most creative boss of the game became one of the most boring at least the music in phase one is actually one of the better songs on the OST the whole situation with this game makes me really upset because not only did I want this game to be good I think it could have been good given different circumstances a lot of the concept art is great and it's just a shame that one bad thing after another just led to this game coming out in the sad state it did I truly want this Dev team to either patch the hell out of Enchanted portals or start working on a Redemption Arc game because I'd like this whole thing to be a huge learning experience for both these devs and all other game devs with that said we have finally made it to the final world in Enchanted portals world six this world truly shows the amount of duct tape and prayers that was thrown all over this game to release it in a semi-complete state so strap in everybody this is the end world 6 isn't really a world at all it's actually a weird collection of Unfinished boss fights from the trailers alongside the final boss fight itself the catch you have to do it all in one go two one phase unfinished fights and three phases of the final boss for five total phases with no checkpoints in total if the final boss just had five phases I think I'd be fine with this it's the end of the game so a challenge is fine it's the use of clearly unfinished bosses to pad out the ending that really annoys me the first of these unfinished fights is The Pianist this is actually a really cool idea for a cuphead boss but there are so many little things that make this whole thing feel wrong first of all look at the perspective here what the hell is going on this makes zero sense why does the book look like this given the perspective I just don't get it the notes The Pianist plays do not line up with the song in any way they are just a set of random notes or combination of notes that he Cycles through you can tell this [ __ ] was unfinished because the only attack he does is the piano keys nothing else the other enemies here are these little music note things that fall down which you can actually kill surprisingly if this fight was finished and given a few more phases it probably would have been one of the best fights in the game but as it stands now it just serves as the awkward first phase of this awkward collage of a final boss after The Pianist is defeated we move on to the Cerberus boss fight which is another very clearly unfinished one-phase fight this one is better than The Pianist thankfully there's just a lot more going on here one of the most interesting parts of this boss is that it is the only one in the entire game to feature a full intro cut scene in the actual engine itself not a full ass cutscene outside of a fight or PNG slideshow an actual in-engine intro animation makes you wonder if every boss was supposed to have something like this at first but was scrapped after the failure of the kickstarter I like this fight and I think it's a shame it went unfinished and thrown into this section because it's actually really cool each of the three dogs has a unique attack that they can do if all three heads are on the dog at once they can do all three of those attacks however a dog can remove itself from the body and run around the arena going back and forth acting as a new challenge to avoid but removing their specific attack until they decide to join back with the body it is a really creative idea for a fight that is seriously hindered by being thrown sloppily into this ending crazy how both The Pianist and this boss could have been actually quite good if they were fully finished and somehow both ended up here this whole thing just really sucks with that done though we are now at the actual final boss the purple book thing from earlier this final boss was very very obviously thrown together at the end of development because the holy [ __ ] are there a lot of odd choices made here the first phase is just the book at the top of the screen going back and forth it randomly summons a set of attacks every few seconds that are all from older bosses and enemies this is kind of a cool idea on paper but it all falls apart the more details you learn first off these happen fast you have very little time to figure out what is spawning and how to deal with it making taking damage here very easy even then if you could just Dash and jump around to avoid everything your hearts contend it wouldn't be all that bad however we have one final appearance from the shitty color mechanic the book will change from color to color and you have to switch to the bullet type in order to damage them if you remember from earlier in order to switch bullet types in this game you have to be on the ground and not moving and since he switches colors every time he spawns in new stuff it becomes more of a battle against the shitty weapon swapping system than a battle against the boss itself it is an empty poorly thought of phase and it just gets weirder from here upon beating the phase you're greeted with a Microsoft PowerPoint slide transition and then a complete art style change something mind you that hasn't happened since the [ __ ] first boss fight of the whole game remember when I said this fight was definitely thrown together very late in development this is the other main reason I think that besides the scraps of Unfinished bosses thrown here the art style changes again for the phase after this and the normal art style of the game is gone for the remainder of the gameplay from this point forward yeah it's definitely not a coincidence that the final boss just magically uses animation styles that are easier to produce for its final two phases this was definitely a budget or time thing I would have loved to see what this final boss was supposed to be because I can almost guarantee this is a far cry from what the devs probably intended anyway this phase uses a 2000 cartoon art style as the book becomes a tree and drops explosive squirrels and acorns on the player who is also a squirrel now whole thing reminds me of Scaredy Squirrel no not the book series the cartoon with a completely different art style that was Loosely based on the book series no clue if that was intentional but it's what I immediately thought of maybe just because I'm Canadian who knows the Final Phase has this anime-esque art style that reminds me a lot of this educational RPG thing I played in school called Prodigy it is very odd the actual boss that you have to do damage to does one single animation and facial expression for the entire fight and they don't move at all besides that it is very weird looking and once again was clearly done as a last-ditch effort to finish this game part of this phase is the wizard calling in three different fairies that just so happen to share the colors that your bullets have but as far as I can tell the bullets you use in this fight have no meaning you can use whatever ones you want this is even weirder because when the wizard calls each fairy their one changes to said color eventually settling on Blue once all the fair are called in when I first played this I assumed you had to beat the boss using the blue weapon because the wands color at the start of the fight is actually white so if it was going to go back to default you'd think it would return to white but nope very weird oversight but once I figured out you could use any of the Bold types this phase was a breeze and with the book finally defeated in anime form Enchanted portals is finally over thank God the game ends with one final PNG cutscene that ends on a cliffhanger so maybe they plan on doing a sequel or DLC or something and you know what I hope they do it I hope this game somehow makes money and they can fund an actually good project because wow this was rough it hurts all the more knowing these devs absolutely had their hearts in the right place but they took missteps pretty much every turn which led to Enchanted portals being the incomplete unsatisfying mess that it is going into this video project I could have never imagined I would have so much to say about this game but 25 pages of text and two examples exhausted hands later here we are before we actually wrap up I should talk a little bit about the multiplayer I tried a little bit of it just to get a feel for what it offers and it's pretty much the same game but bosses take longer to kill and if one of the players is taken off screen they just get teleported through the portal thing that normally appears when you fall down a pit didn't do a full play through this way or anything though so I'll leave my comments on it there for now Enchanted portals is a brilliantly tragic case study and what can happen to a game that is left in the oven for too long without the resources it needs to properly cook it screams like these devs wanted to drop this project at so many moments but if I had to guess and this is pure speculation that epic Grant may have locked them into completing the game leading to so many passionless aspects of Enchanted portals being crammed into it last second just to release the damn thing once and for all Enchanted portals was at its best when it was an idea a pie in the sky Kickstarter dream that's when I believed in it that's also when no one else did but now we're here four years later was the internet truly right to bash this game all those years ago considering the state it launched in or is there a better timeline where Enchanted portals got its funding and became something great who knows best not to linger in the past I suppose so I'll leave it there for today thank you all so much for watching this gigantic video to completion it really means a lot I've been uh yeah and I'll see you all next time [Music] thank you

Channel: uhyeah

Views: 2,229,281

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Id: X2nyv0pvef4

Length: 53min 44sec (3224 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023