Quick summary: Reasonable Zelda Clone that while has charm and is faithful to its source material suffers from poor communication and player feedback regarding objectives and puzzles, clunky controls, lack luster pickups/powerups and finally no autosave with a tendancy to crash after cut scenes potentially losing hours of play time.
6.5/10 Do not buy at full price, purchase only with 80% off or more.
In Depth Below:
First of all let me say I am a big fan of both Adventure Time and The Legend of Zelda Series and when I saw this game I was rather excited as this seemed like the ideal formula for an adventure time game and if a sequal is released with the issues in this game addressed it could be a real hit.
Now I'll go over the following areas in depth, Story/Theme, Controls/Game Mechanics, Graphics/Sound though it should be noted there may be overlape at times.
Story/Theme
Adventure Time: The Secret of The Nameless Kingdom strongest point is its loyalty to it source material, the games plot could easily be made into a two or three part episode and be well recieved and its newly introduced characters all have the charm and strangeness one would expect from Adventure Time.
Nearly all the monsters can be recognised from the show (however theres no real reasoning or theme why they are in a location and are often recoloured and resused elsewhere with more hitpoints) and there is no shortage of cameos from major and minor characters, all of which are voiced and have perfectly written in character lines, this been said there is not nearly enough character interaction between them with each only having a handful of lines. Another minor issue is that unless you are very familar with the series many of these cameos will be unrecognisable and having a small character journal which unlocks a paragraph about each character you meet would of been a nice addition.
Outside of cutscenes Finn is the only one who speaks at least in the early periods of the game (I confess I have not completed it due to crashing issues after the second dungeon), these short lines are spoken each time Finn picks up an item or treasure with 4-5 lines of alternative dialogue for each. While these didn't bother me so much as I naturally phased them out I do know players who would be driven crazy by this over the first hour so this is just a warning for those who have little tolerance for such things.
This also highlights another issue which is the lack of banter or comments by character to the enviroments or bosses as you go through the game, this feels like a real wasted oppertunity and unfortuately means theres little to distract from the lackluster gameplay that is the core of the game.
While there are side quests in the game they are of "Find Item A give to Person A collect item from person A give to Person B" which is typical of top down adventures, the only trouble been the location of these characters are not marked on your map and are often in tedious to travel to locations.
Controls/Game Mechanics
As basic controls go the game is passable, if you have played any of the gameboy Legend of Zelda games you'll feel pretty much at home however in spite of this you'll find traveling and combat becomes a chore.
First of all Finn seems to move slightly too slow which combined with the large amount of travel, exploration and fetch quests in the game begins to grow frustrating, also there are numberous stairs and cave entrances/exits which you need to traverse and unless you are exactly in the centre of them you just walk against them rather than up/down/through them which often leaves you open to been struck if your just passing through an area trying to avoid combat this can be a further problem when moving up or down stairs. Due to this been an animation you cannot attack or stop but this often lead to cheap hits from monsters gathered at the top or bottom, while there seems to be an slight invisible barrier to try and prevent this this doesn't work very well and actually causes issues with any block pushing puzzles that require you to push it near a door.
These movement issues begin to also affect combat as well with many monsters been able to out pace you in general or with sudden bursts of speed making you get hit (as any monster touching you harms you) or miss a swing often as unlike Link Finn requires to stand still to attack with his sword which again slows down gameplay.
The sword is your main weapon throughout the game as Finn and has seeming extremely short range but with reasonable power with some monsters dying in a single blow but with some taking up to 4-5 hits by the second dungeon, I say seemingly short range as the hit box for the blade (or in fact anything in the game is rather difficult to judge) combined with a slightly too slow swing animation and the inability to move when attacking means you'll be getting much closer than I suspect you need to and as such take damage more often than you would normally.
The sword can not be swung diagonal so if your moving diagonal and need to attack you will swing in the direction closest to the angle you are moving.
Even hitting a monster can actually do more harm than good in most cases as it knocks away and with most monsters possessing range attacks and you'll often get hit just as your moving in to finish them off. The ideal way to avoid this is to obtain the boomerang stand in which like the Legend of Zelda series paralyzes monsters briefly if you hit them (and can be thrown diagonal) and then go in swinging.
You also get a ranged attack yourself by the second dungeon but you again need to stand still when using it, its slow to fire, it does less damage than the sword, if you miss you have to wait until it strikes a wall or goes its full screen travel distance before you can fire again which means its only good as a utility item in most cases.
Your main defense other than hopefully moving out the way of the monsters far faster attacks is a shield which bluntly borders on useless, Like the sword it can only be used in the main four directions it is also extremely picky about positioning and will only block attacks that are central on Finn, a few pixels either way and you'll get hit. Its inconsistent about exactly which attacks it will block for example it will block a monster thats running at you with a blade knocking it back but if a monster just walks into you it won't stop them and when using it to push spiky objects you can suddenly slip past its perfect blocking spot and be damaged.
With these issues combined with the fact that monsters respawn the moment you re-enter an area you'll quickly start trying to avoid unnecessary combat unless you need money, this brings us to the next few points the shops and baggies..
Baggies are small plastic bags and these are essentially glass jars from the Legend of Zelda game but you use them for even more, they are your potion bottle, your bomb bag, your monster catcher, I'm at the second dungeon and I've already found eight items that can go in them, however they are as rare as hell and you'll often need a spare one to get through a dungeons puzzles so as a result all the healing items which you can collect (which are lost if you don't have a free bag btw) or buy you won't be using them even if they weren't stupidly high prices. You see Legend of Zelda has multiple different values of Zenny and Zenny chests littered everywhere Adventure Time you get coins in values of 1 sparsely (3-6 a screen if lucky) on average and chests are rare often giving you trail mix or one of the other healling item components (which you also have to pay to create). To be fair the most expensive thing I have bought was 200 coins but the combination of low coins, little bag space and high prices means I rarely go near a shop.
Opps I've hit my word count so Graphics/Sound: Music forgetable Graphics pixelated sprites from earlier game.
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