Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore Review: Cursed Demon Imprisonment

The Phillips CD-i deserved better. Not much better, but better nonetheless. At least in the US, almost all of the discussion about this console centers solely around its infamous quartet of Mario and Zelda games, though it’s easy to see why. In an era where Nintendo protects its IPs like a dragon would protect its vast riches, games like these could never get made. They’re a strange mirror into a world where Nintendo was younger and reckless, willing to hand their IPs to Phillips, who themselves handed them off to a team of literal nobodies called Animation Magic in Massachusets, who would partner with a bunch of Russians to deliver one of the most cursed things Nintendo has ever had their name attached to.

Their baffling nature was enough for them to become internet memes in the early days of YouTube, and their popularity would later lead to one strange, strange man named Seth Fulkerson giving them the PC remaster treatment, though taking them down shortly after to avoid a legal spat. So this is where Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore comes in. Seth created his own studio, “Seedy Eye Software”, with one mission, to make something as close as close to the CD-i games as they could without drawing the attention of Nintendo’s legal attack dogs. Does Arzette succeed at homaging Zelda’s most memed upon entries, or was this an utterly doomed endeavor from the start?

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is available now for Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam for $19.99

Story: Attack of the Eyesores

The Kingdom of Faramore is under attack from the evil forces of Daimur. Or rather, it was, 10 years ago, before he got his butt kicked by a team of legendary heroes led by Princess Arzette. But now Daimur is back, having escaped his imprisonment in the book of Oakurin, and the crack team of heroes that dispatched him are called upon once more to defeat him. Except now one’s an old man and the other is a drunken idiot, and Faramore is run even more incompetently than FEMA, so nobody bothered to maintain all of the magical macguffins that were supposed to guard against Daimur’s return. Arzette, being the only competent one in the whole kingdom, heads to stop Daimur and his minions. 

The CD-i Zeldas are famous for many things, but a detailed narrative is not one of them. This is your classic “collect the MacGuffins” plot and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The appeal of the game’s story is laughing at all of the strange characters and cutscenes you meet along the way. This the game understands, for the most part at least. Arzette perfectly recreates the awkwardness that a lot of early CD-ROM games had.

The game’s characters all have faces of evil that only a mother could love.

The game’s narrative can get weirdly serious at times. There’s a plot thread about halfway through the game about Arzette’s dad dying, a strangely emotional bit that I found completely out of place. This is not a real game, this is a shitpost, and the game should treat itself like that. It is mostly all played for laughs though, which is good.

Gameplay: A Million To None

One thing I don’t think most people take into account regarding the CD-i Zeldas (specifically Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon) is the circumstances in which they were made. These were a pair of games made on just $600,000, in 10 months, on a system that was only ever intended for digital board games and edutainment software, and with Phillips breathing down the developer’s neck to utilize all of the CD-i’s marketable features. It’s easy to see why something forced to check all those boxes would turn out bad. This is easy to see in both games’ “Smart Sword” mechanic, where stabbing friendly people with your sword makes them talk. It’s baffling, but it makes sense when the CD-i devs were dealing with a gamepad with even fewer buttons than an NES controller.

Stab characters to make them talk, then proceed to immediately regret it.

It should also be easy to see why trying to intentionally recreate these design choices could be a recipe for disaster. Arzette’s faithfulness is thankfully constrained to the presentation for the most part, and most, but not all, of the annoyances seen in the CD-i games have been addressed.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is a 2D action platformer with a modest springing of adventure game elements. Arzette must travel across the kingdom, batting monsters and searching for candles and items that will let her progress further in her journey. There’s a faint sprinkling of Metroidvania elements scattered throughout the game, a wise addition in my view. The game is level-based, but you’re constantly encouraged to re-explore old areas for upgrades and quest items. The game mostly does a good job of guiding you in the right direction, and progression is rather breezy overall, with incredibly frequent checkpoints ensuring that death is inconsequential. 

The cursed tapestries bar your way to valuable items and bosses.

Faithful To A Fault

Controls are not the most graceful. Arzette’s jumps are really heavy and have lots of momentum, and her initial movement speed is rather slow. One of the final upgrades you unlock in the game is a movement speed increase, and it feels like the sort of thing Arzette should just have by default. They thankfully don’t stick to the two-button control scheme of the CD-i originals, but there are still a ton of unused buttons on the controller. You can only have one item equipped at a time, which results in a lot of needless menuing.

There’s at least a decent variety of combat options, with bombs, super-powered punches, and a gun being among the other tools at Arzette’s disposal. Unlike certain other princesses with a Z in their name, Arzette knows how to fight. It’s a shame that there’s nothing there to test your combat skills. There are only a half dozen or so basic enemies in the game, and they never change. You’ll be fighting the same tree monsters and goblins from the starting area until the endgame. For all of the fancy new tools you get, the game doesn’t force you to use them.

Look at all these items and upgrades, you hardly need any of them. It’s like Gwonam said, your sword really is enough.

Bosses don’t help much. The CD-i games had utterly pathetic bosses, and Arzette is no different. The bosses either try to run into you, or they randomly teleport around the arena throwing a single, slow-moving projectile at you, never changing tactics. One of the last upgrades you get is an omnidirectional shield that reflects projectiles, so half of the bosses can be defeated just by holding down L1 and waiting for them to kill themselves. Even Daimur is an utterly pathetic final boss, probably the least threatening one I’ve seen in a long time.

Other annoying mechanics from the CD-i games that get faithfully recreated include the lantern. Almost every stage has at least one dark area, and you have to go into the menu and manually equip the lantern each and every time you need it. You also cannot drop down through platforms, a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. The developers had to be cute and include a “Classic Controls” mode, where you jump by pressing up on the D-pad, and “Down+Jump to drop down” doesn’t work when you jump by pressing up.

Exploration is key to surviving in the land of Faramore.

Graphics and Sound: The Power of Compact Discs

If nothing else, Animation Magic managed to create something that at least looked unique. The Zelda CD-i games’ cutscenes became early internet memes for a very good reason. They’re glorious in how terrible they are. Trying to recreate that magic could have resulted in something super cursed. For Arzette’s cutscenes, the animation is horrible, the voice acting is complete garbage, and the character designs are strange and off-putting. And I love it! The cutscenes were the one thing the developers had to get right (or wrong, depending on how one sees it), and they passed with flying colors.

But it’s not just through the horrifying cutscenes that Arzette remains faithful to its inspiration. The levels are also all hand-painted backdrops, though these are met with less success. Some of the backgrounds look fine, beautiful even, but others are muddy and indistinct, particularly the starting forest and canyon areas. Maybe it’s just the lower resolution and color depth of the CD-i backgrounds hiding the imperfections, but I think they look better. The spritework also faithfully matches the CD-i games’ style, all one could ask for.

Hand painted backgrounds are a strange choice, but they aren’t necessarily a wrong choice.

For the Zelda CD-i games, the music is probably the one thing people can point to and genuinely say that it’s good. Its CD-quality genre mashup score sounds nothing like a Zelda game, but it does sound good. Arzette also sounds good, down to recycling many of the sound effects from those games. The music fits right in, and it sounds great. One minor complaint I have relative to the CD-i games is that those had multiple remixes of each song for all the different rooms of an area, and Arzette just has one mix of each song.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore was reviewed on PlayStation 5, using a key provided by Game.Press