Saga of the Moon Priestess

Nearly fourty years after first hitting the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Legend of Zelda franchise is bigger, better and more epic than ever before. But even with all of the advances over the years, there are a lot of Zelda fans who prefer the simplicity of the early 2D entries, long before the series had you preparing dinner and constructing weirdly suggestive mechs. Pixel Trash is definitely one of those old school fans, as their brand-new game Saga of the Moon Priestess is a near carbon copy of 8-bit Zelda. That’s a great starting point, but has this up-and-coming developer added enough of its own personality to make it more than just a clone? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Saga of the Moon Priestess.

When a young prince gets kidnapped by an evil entity, it’s up to a young orphaned girl named Sarissa to get him back. Armed with only a spear and the ability to communicate with the Goddess of the Moon, Sarissa will need to fight through five different dungeons and collect a bunch of useful items in order to free her land from the evil, nameless force that seems to be sweeping in.

Look, there’s no reason to beat around the bush here, Saga of the Moon Priestess is as close to The Legend of Zelda as you can possibly get without Nintendo suing you into oblivion. This is a game with a very specific nostalgia for the Game Boy Color-era of Link’s adventure, and longtime fans of the franchise will feel right at home as Sarissa goes through the checklist of cliches. It’s a game that changes just enough to be different – you’re trying to rescue a prince instead of a princess and instead of a giant fairy healing our hero, it’s a mermaid. See, totally different.

While I poke fun at the obvious influences, there’s no denying that Saga of the Moon Priestess does a good job of emulating those early Zelda games. It knows exactly what you want from this kind of adventure and delivers it in a short and compact package that never veers too far from the familiar path. You’ll explore a map that is big enough to house a handful of wildly different terrains, but not big enough to where you’ll get lost. Whether it’s the icy mountains, the sandy desert or the lush forest, each part of the map has its own dungeon to investigate and boss to kill.

In true Zelda fashion, you’ll find several useful secondary items that will open up new parts of the map and help you solve the very simple puzzles. The first thing you’ll pick up is a glove that will allow you to pick up and throw rocks. You’ll also find Zelda mainstays like a bow and arrow, bombs and even a grappling hook. There are also some optional items and upgrades you can find by poking around the open-world and completing some basic quests for the townspeople.

The thing that surprised me was how short and simple this game is. The art style is designed to evoke the spirit of the Game Boy Color, so maybe it makes sense that this isn’t an especially deep or involving adventure game. That said, this game is short even by those standards, as a game like Link’s Awakening is at least twice as long, with a lot more to do and see. In a lot of ways, Moon Priestess feels like it’s speed-running through as many tropes and cliches as it can think of, which ultimately leads to a rather anticlimactic ending and a story that doesn’t amount to much.

There are other problems, like the five boss battles. Save for the final fight at the very end, most of these boss encounters are pedestrian at best. I was genuinely surprised by how easy a couple of them were, and the rest are barely worth bringing up. It’s nice that you have to use your new-found items to defeat each dungeon’s boss, but even that is a staple of the Zelda series.

On that note, I’m not a big fan of the combat in this game. The spear is effective enough, but not that much fun to play around with. It also jabs instead of swings, which can make it challenging to hit enemies that are coming at you diagonally. Again, I understand that this is designed to feel like the classic adventure games, but even those early Zelda entries had deeper combat than this. In those games you had a spin attack to charge up and a projectile you would shoot if Link’s life was full, but all that is stripped out of this barebones retelling.

Saga of the Moon Priestess reminds me a lot of a cover song that gets the notes right, but doesn’t have the heart and soul that made the original so great. This is from an up-and-coming developer, so I can’t fault Pixel Trash for wanting to sharpen their teeth by essentially remaking a game that inspired them. The problem is that while they came up with a cool new hero, the adventure she goes on lacks anything new or unique. It’s one thing to perform a cover song, but you still need to mix in your own style and flavor. In that sense, Moon Priestess is a huge disappointment.

At least the game looks the part. If you grew up loving Zelda’s Game Boy era, then you’ll appreciate the attention to detail found in every part of the map. I also like the soundtrack, and might even make the case that it’s the best part of this game. It’s the only thing about this game that feels different from what Nintendo did thirty years ago. Maybe that nostalgia alone will be enough to keep you invested in this all-too-brief Zelda clone, but I kept waiting for Saga of the Moon Priestess to find its own voice. Sadly, it never does.