Everyone's talking about how opportune and fateful the Aeon Genesis fanslation of Cave Story was, but in retrospect I feel like La Mulana's fanslation (by the same team) was a bit more groundbreaking, in terms of injecting new and unfamiliar game design ideas into the West.
I always liked how the La Mulana games had a revolver, in a final nod to Indiana Jones, but made it an exceedingly expensive, cumbersome and impactful weapon… I felt like it emphasised the gun as a bringer of death that didn't belong alongside the others.
La Mulana puzzles to me fall in two overlapping categories: code puzzles (gather the code, then input it) and cause-and-effect puzzles, where the puzzle is realising, or being told, a relationship between disconnected objects, or an edge case in how an object can be manipulated.
……OK, look, let's extract the elephant from the room here: I think everyone saying Void Stranger is "like La Mulana" is doing it a significant disservice, even though it has plenty of obvious references. Its puzzle design is significantly different and more "regular" than that.
🌚Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy a well-written, well-designed classic sim
🌓Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy the Taisen Puzzle-Dama spinoff of it
🌞Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy the secret Easter egg version of it in La Mulana 1
The boss fights are reminding me a lot of the original "MSX" La Mulana… mainly because of how step-by-step the animations are, and, in contrast, how elaborate the sprites are.
Encased in a box with jewels and mummies for calling Patrako from Cleopatra Fortune "PC98 Mulbruk"
