Child of Light is an Arcade 2D Platformer Turn-based RPG. We don't see many attempts at innovation such as this, but when it comes from the people who brought us Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, you can count on their quality deliverance to put a huge smile on your face. While I was playing this game, there came moments when I would just stand still or go back and forth just enjoying the music and smooth visuals that are usually the reason I would pick up a game like this, I don't care how old I am, the game is super attractive, and that's enough for me. Framerate is 60fps easy, and during my entire play through I did not experience any stagger in gameplay whenever the screen gets overwhelmed with colors, characters or animations. There is one more thing to mention about the game as a whole, the dialogue is made to rhyme, so when someone speaks you can expect a sentence to rhyme with another which is a nice touch, but takes a little bit out of what the characters would mean to you if this feature wasn't there.
Onto the story then, you play as a princess named Aurora who sets out on a quest to reclaim the sun, the moon, and the stars in the land of Lumeria where she awakens after falling into a deep sleep following her fathers wedding. During her quest, she comes across different obstacles such as quests, puzzles, and enemies. She also comes across different allies that offer to help her on her quest.
The first ally you gain would be the firefly which you can control with your right analog stick, you can use him in real time to heal you, incapacitate enemies, collect health points and mana points, and retrieve items that are out of reach. During battle, he can also slow down enemies.
Lets talk about battle for a minute, if you have ever played a turn based rpg, then you would understand the concept of what an ATB is, to those who don't, ATB stands for "Active Time Bar" which is a bar that when filled means its your turn to perform an action, and after that action is complete, the bar starts filling again, and so on. You can cast "Quicken" to make your bar fill faster, you can cast "Lull" to make your enemies' bar fill slower, and so on. Unlike other games where each character has their own ATB, this game has one ATB in a fight shared by friends and foes. In this games' ATB is an a small section between the moment you select an action and the moment you perform that action, the time it takes to reach from one point to the other is called "Cast Time" if you attack an enemy during their cast time, it will interrupt them and push back their attack, so make sure to plan accordingly which enemy to attack at which time.
Time to describe your equipment, equipment such as weapons and armor are fixed for each character, what makes your characters distinct is the ability to equip gems called Oculli, they have different colors and give a different effect depending if you equip them on your weapon, your shield (Armor), or accessory. For Example, if you equip a red gem on your weapon, it will make it stronger against enemies who are weak against fire, but when you equip it on your shield, you will get some fire resistance, and so on with the different colored gems. You can also merge those gems to get either stronger gems of the same kind, or if you merge 3 different gems together and get one completely different gem.
You gain experience from fights, and using that experience you can level up your characters using the skill tree whose concept is pretty familiar to RPG players in general. Using the skill tree, you can unlock skills, and permanent stat boosts to your characters.
So lets sum this up. To me, the visuals alone are worth the money I paid for it, because I am such a sucker when it comes to eye candy I can control, but fortunately it's backed up by great combat. I won't lie, my favorite genre is the JRPG genre, but I have played some bad ones, and this isn't one of them. As I have mentioned in a previous review of mine, no game deserves 10/10, so I gave this a 9, as flawless to me as it might be.
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I'd recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a platformer, a sidescroller, a Jrpg, or pure eye candy. I played it on the Xbox 360 and I think I got the entire experience from it. I'll also be damned if you reach "Of Mice & Magna" and the music doesn't get stuck in your head, you'll know it when you hear it.
Enjoy, and Thank you for reading my review of Child of Light.