Mighty Milky Way (DSi)

At first blush, Mighty Milky Way looks like it’s cut from the same cloth as WayForward’s other “Mighty” games on the DS. It has a peppy-looking protagonist in a cartoon art style that makes it seem cute and approachable, but once the game starts, you notice the star, an alien girl named Luna, only speaks French. Her seemingly chipper delivery makes it sound pretty normal, but if you do know the language or translate it, you’ll soon find even her victory lines are rather strange. Luna has an unusually morbid and nihilistic view of life and death, starting off levels speaking about how she’s ready to endure misery or embraces the potential outcome of failing and dying, and if she does die her final words end up being about how she’s relieved to finally have felt something.

 

This odd undercurrent of morbidity only really pops up in her dialogue, because besides her facade of excitement and cheer, there are also small windows into the life she normally lives that seem pretty typical and even pleasant. While the story doesn’t tell you much of why Luna is exploring the galaxy in this puzzle platformer, when you complete a level, you’ll see a piece of art depicting her doing things like talking on the phone while in bed or dancing to music. In fact, you can even see her spending some time with her rival, a cybernetically altered T-Rex who attacks her in every tenth stage of the game but is also shown happily enjoying a double rainbow alongside Luna, competing with her in an eating contest, and at least pretending to live a domestic life together. It is possible these images aren’t meant to be real events and are just a visual reward for completing a stage, and the fact that they do repeat makes it less likely they’re meant to convey anything of importance, but Luna’s unusual perspective does make her a more fascinating lead than if she was the generically cheerful adventuress she initially appears to be.

One element that might influence Luna’s mindset is the way she navigates outer space. In this DSiWare game, your goal is to safely get Luna to a black hole that will suck her out of the current level, and to do so will involve walking around small planetoids and destroying them to get a boost to new ground. The planetoids are rarely presented as something capable of housing life and it might be more accurate to call most of them asteroids, and you do acquire “planet candy” that allows you to create your own little worlds to land on and use to navigate space. Perhaps this destructive approach still has warped her perspective some, but it does work well as a way to construct some puzzles where the player will need to manage things like character placement, the influence of gravity, and the limits of how much control you have over not only the tools important to your success, but Luna herself.

 

Luna is not really directly controlled by the player. When standing on a planetoid in this side-scroller, she’ll always walk clockwise around it, the player instead instructing her on how quickly she should move while doing so. There are a few different ranges for speed and you can make her come to a complete stop, but you cannot make her take even a single step backwards, an entire walk around an asteroid necessary if you overshot your intended destination. Initially this isn’t much of a problem, and the limits on Luna’s movement are definitely part of the puzzle you’re figuring out in many early stages. Some planetoids are dangerously close to the electrical barriers that enclose a stage so you don’t want Luna to just stroll right to her immediate death, and other times enemies might be on the planet as well and you’ll need to make sure she keeps a step ahead of them before moving on. However, later levels start to become very particular about where Luna must be standing to effectively take off and reach her next destination. One step too many can make a level instantly unwinnable as she no longer has the proper angle to launch herself to the next asteroid, and this tends to pair a bit roughly with the longer sequence of actions required in the later stages. In a majority of the levels you often have wiggle room or options to adjust on the fly so that you won’t need to keep retrying until you learn exactly where Luna needs to stand to ensure success, but this restrictive movement system does start to lead to more frustration as precise timing become overemphasized.

While Luna’s specific movement style may seem like the main source of challenge, there are other ideas at play and many that still ensure it’s not just a matter of managing the alien girl’s walking speed. To have Luna leave a planetoid, you need to tap it, sending out a pulse that launches anything on it up and away. Larger planets might suck characters back towards them, but normal asteroids will be completely destroyed after being tapped twice, meaning you can then eliminate their gravitational pull and successfully launch yourself out into space. Planet candies allow you to make your own planets of varying sizes, and while they can only be placed in mid-flight and sometimes those late game stages again require pinpoint accuracy for where they go, other times you are granted more candies than you technically need to beat a stage and thus can form your own strategies or accommodate an error in judgment. The pulse effect can impact enemies as well, and one of the better ideas Mighty Milky Way hits on is trying to escort enemies around the level, launching them off towards other enemies to defeat them and clear a way onward your hero couldn’t make on her own. Homing missile creatures are added as a smart iteration on this too as they try to follow your actions, giving you another element where your movement is important to getting something where you need it but with some appropriate factors in place so it’s not frustrating. The homing missiles are slow so you have time to adjust where you stand to lure them and the machines firing them will continuously do so to prevent you from missing your chance on guiding them properly. Some stages even include iron planets that are never broken no matter how many times you use the pulse, this giving you room to have solid ground that can better play into puzzle solving moments like getting your enemies where they need to be to aid you.

 

The normal stages can construct pretty decent challenges related to how you manage available ground and resources like the candy or enemies, and with the excellent and bouncy music backing it, it’s easy to forgive that in these lower pressure situations you may need to do a few circuits around a planet until you line up just right. A line extending out from Luna’s face on the top screen map of the level helps you plan out how to launch yourself which is a nice feature until leniency dries up later on. Having to ricochet Luna off bouncy barriers just so or have her whip around a spike-covered planet’s surface by barely brushing its orbit to avoid instant death are again ideas that work until the game becomes a bit too demanding about them, and the first tastes you’ll get at the game perhaps pushing too hard are in the T-Rex levels. Here, the giant cybernetic Tyrannosaurus rex mentioned earlier will be trying to wipe you out, a targeting reticle appearing on whatever planet you’re standing on to show the dinosaur’s about to blast it to bits with its laser eyes. There is a decent amount of time to make your way around the planet and launch yourself off when you see the marker and even if you’re on it when it’s blasted you will just be launched off into space instead of instantly killed. Once the game starts to want Luna to be positioned just right to land where you need her to be, the associated T-Rex stages start to show that adding time pressure to the affair really does it no favors. Not only do you now need to stand in the exact right spot to ensure success, but you need to reach it quickly or else the stage becomes unwinnable. There is room in a puzzle game for expert challenges where you need to be spot on and the game even unlocks a Time Bomb mode after you beat it where every level is on a timer to provide such strict conditions, but tacking such tedious tests onto the end of a main adventure that otherwise can provide good puzzles without needing to demand perfection creates an unfortunate final stretch.

THE VERDICT: Mighty Milky Way begins strong as its planet-hopping puzzles properly test your ability to manage resources and line things up to get your oddly nihilistic alien to her goal, but some demanding later stages start to turn the game away from the challenge of figuring things out and more towards making sure you stop Luna’s movement on the exact spot necessary to avoid having to restart a level that features many moments with such stringent demands. While the added pressure doesn’t gel well with the limited control you have over your character, there are still a good deal of well-executed levels before then to ensure the game isn’t defined by its late game difficulty spike.

 

And so, I give Mighty Milky Way for the Nintendo DSi…

An OKAY rating. The knee jerk reaction to trying to rectify Mighty Milky Way’s later stages valuing exact positioning to their detriment would be to free up how you control Luna, but that would fundamentally change how the game is played and perhaps oversimplify some of the puzzles that actually do work well. The game does have a consistent physics system in place so fudging the player’s positioning to send them where they were clearly aiming could have knock on effects that could harm the experience as well. Perhaps instead of controlling walking speed the player could just press forward to have Luna move around the planet clockwise as much as they desire, but other areas it might just be right to add a bit of leniency into the design. A little more time before the T-Rex destroys a planet in the later confrontations or planets where you don’t have to thread a needle perfectly to land safely on them can make the longer strings of necessary actions easier to complete, as really the issue seems to be less about the puzzle design and more when execution of your plans get hampered by fiddly systems. Mighty Milky Way has plenty of levels where it will take some thought and consideration to make sure you utilize gravity, candy, enemies, and the destructible planets right to complete the stage, your movement limitations not really impacting the ability for these puzzles to provide satisfying challenges. The Time Bomb mode already offers a shift towards focusing more on execution than understanding, so it doesn’t feel too necessary to have levels in the main adventure that will ask you to launch from an exact spot or place a planet perfectly.

 

Mighty Milky Way will still likely provide more enjoyment than it does frustration simply because of the number of levels that do handle things well, and while Luna herself might have a somewhat dour perspective on her work, it is a mostly colorful and pleasant journey that even manages to mix up how its levels look by having regions of space that have lush green worlds and a sky backdrop or a hot volcanic presentation. While Luna’s strange French phrases might stick with you more than most things about the game once you look up their translations, the peppy music and better designed puzzles still ensure Mighty Milky Way has a lot to give before it starts to overtax its mechanics.