HP can be restored by returning to the starting room, drinking health potions, or using certain special moves in combat.
When adventuring, you have two attributes you have to worry about, HP and food. Dying will remove any unidentified items in your possession, and returning to the start via an escape rope is a one-way trip, leading to some circumstances in the later floors where you need to weigh up whether you think you can push forward, or not take the risk and return back to Rosetta. Any items you collect in the dungeon will be ‘unidentified’ until you bring them to Rosetta by returning through the use of an escape rope, or by using elevators found at the end of each floor.
Here, Märchen Forest plays out almost like a roguelite, with the cavern having multiple floors and bosses for Mylne to fight through. Here we meet some more characters, with the standout character being Rosetta, who acts as a sort of merchant. Part II is where the main bulk of the game is, as we find Mylne exploring a mysterious cavern in search of her long-lost mother. Overall it makes Part I of Märchen Forest feel like it existed just to introduce us to the story of the rest of the game, and while it does do this successfully, it absolutely could have done it in a more engaging or relevant manner. Only one character you meet here is a recurring character, and the way potion-making here works differently from how it functions in the later game. Those who come into Märchen Forest expecting a dungeon-crawling JRPG experience and end up in this two hour Harvest Moon section will likely get mental whiplash so hard that they may have to drag themselves to hospital, especially as basically all the mechanics that are introduced in Part I are never brought up again. The first part of the game encompasses this and has players wandering a small section of the forest and talking to its residents to gather information and ingredients. We play as Mylne, a young apothecary belonging to an unnamed anthropomorphised feline-race, living in a small hut among a forest with her grandfather and aiding him with his craft. Now that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the game itself. There’s so much of a stark contrast between the three parts, especially the first one, that I had half a mind to split this review into multiple write-ups, but for as weird as it feels, part of Märchen Forest’s charm is it’s progressing gameplay and how it evolves with the narrative (something I spoke about in Resident Evil Village, albeit to a lesser degree), and as such is best received and discussed as a single package Players will find themselves going from picking carrots for their potion-making grandfather in an Animal Crossing-esque sequence that is essentially the entire first part and concluding with acts like dropping into the astral realm and fighting an undead pirate ship on your way to destroy an eldritch demigod. I say this because Märchen Forest already has quite a major genre shift after Part I, and the inclusion of Requiem makes this more apparent and causes the experience to play like three completely different videogames and stories that have been awkwardly super-glued together. It features enhanced graphics, deeper dives into the game’s story, and new combat mechanics, as well as including the later-released DLC Requiem of the Astral World, complete with English, Chinese & Korean subtitles. I want to preface this by stating that Märchen Forest is a ‘renewed’ version of a JRPG released in 2018 by the name of Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift. Reviews // 19th Jun 2021 - 2 years ago // By Luke Greenfield Märchen Forest 2021 Review
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