It’s comforting to know that every video game ever created, no matter its critical reception, is someone’s favorite. That every piece of flawed art is just waiting to be iterated upon by a team willing to sift through what works, throw out what didn’t, and come up with something better. As a true dyed-in-the-wool Super Smash Bros. sicko that spent a couple hundred hours playing Brawl’s single-player offering, Subspace Emissary, a couple decades ago (and looks back on the experience more fondly than I probably should), it delights me that the crew at Moulin aux Bulles Studio managed to chisel out their own take on a platform brawler in the form of Decline’s Drops. It’s leaner by necessity than Smash Bros., of course, but in this case all the better for it.
If you’re unsure what differentiates a platformer from a platform brawler, it’s pretty simple—platform brawlers offer up a lot of the standard sidescrolling platformer challenges that you’re probably familiar with, while having a much bigger emphasis on combat and the player’s own offensive capabilities than something like, say, Super Mario Bros. You’ll of course be doing a lot of running and jumping over pits and other hazards, but equally frequent in platform brawlers are combat rooms that require you to clear out enemies or even the occasional miniboss before being allowed to proceed. Think of any mainline Kirby game from Return to Dreamland onward, and you’re mostly there, though Decline’s Drops eschews the idea of swapping between a collection of copy abilities in favor of having two playable characters with bespoke movesets.
Decline’s Drops’s controls are also heavily inspired by Kirby and Smash Bros. in that all of your attacks are executed by using normal or special attacks in conjunction with tilting or smashing a direction on the left analog stick. Each special costs a certain amount of energy gained by defeating other enemies to prevent overuse, and smash attacks are powerful but much slower than neutral or tilt attacks.
You also have three defensive options tied to the A button—pressing A on the ground without holding a direction on the stick causes you to block, and a perfectly timed neutral A press even results in a devastatingly powerful parry (you’re never required to use the parry, but seriously, try it out sometime and watch enemy health bars absolutely melt away into nothing). Meanwhile, tilting the stick left or right and pressing A on the ground performs a dodge roll, and doing so in the air gives you an air dodge, which is often also used in platforming sections to reach otherwise inaccessible areas.
While you can pretty easily get through most, if not all, of the game by mashing button and stick combinations, the true joy of Decline’s Drops gameplay, much like its direct inspirations, comes in familiarizing yourself with not only enemy animations and attack patterns but yours as well. Clearing out an entire combat room, damageless, by stringing neutral normal attacks into side tilts before parrying and then finishing it off by launching the last pair of enemies up into the air with an up smash before jumping up and crashing back to earth with a down special is truly some of the most satisfying gameplay I’ve experienced in any action game, and it had my Kirby-loving heart soaring.
The game’s outstanding presentation only serves to enhance how good Decline’s Drops feels to play. The obvious standouts are of course the character designs and animations, especially on the two playable characters, Globule and Que Sera. Their animations are so lovingly crafted and full of personality that I could almost believe they were from a different, much higher-budget game than they are, and it never got old, platforming and battling across the 7 worlds totaling a few dozen stages and a boss at the end of each world. All 7 worlds have a different theme, and while the game starts off in pretty typical locations for the genre, such as flower fields and caverns, by the end you’ll be making your way across snake-themed ethereal mountains and hidden laboratories all accompanied by a phenomenal soundtrack. Seriously, my jaw was on the floor the first time I heard Lethal Laboratory 1.
Rounding the game out are various collectibles and modes. Each stage houses five pieces of a heart, as well as a hidden key that initiates a racing mini-challenge that unlocks different palette swaps for both characters. You can spend currency earned in the normal levels in a shop accessed from the world map, and it’s filled with various trinkets that can alter your abilities to varying degrees, like sacrificing special moves for powered-up smashes or a radar to help find collectibles. There’s even a boss rush and time trials, including the ability to race against ghost versions of your own times or developer ones. All of this, coupled with the shocking amount of unique background elements and platforming challenges per level, makes it feel like Decline’s Drops is punching way above its weight class, and it’s nearly an unmitigated success on all fronts.
I say “nearly” because I do have a few quibbles. While the story setup is kept very brief, letting you know right off the rip that Globule is out to punch some dudes that ruined her garden, it feels like it has some things it wants to say about topics like pollution and imperialism while leaving them largely in the background. Keeping the story mostly sequestered to what the player can interpret through its imagery is fine, but personally it made the rare moments of spoken dialogue feel a bit flat, especially going into the final boss.
With how good the combat feels, I found myself wishing for a bit more of an emphasis on combat rooms. To make it completely clear, the platforming is great and, as mentioned before, has more variety in design and set pieces than I expected going in, especially when it comes to the game’s excellent optional “Vanitas” levels; I don’t want less of that, but just some more combat rooms peppered throughout would have done wonders for me. This is less of an issue in the last couple of worlds, which ramped up combat frequency and difficulty to what I would consider the sweet spot, but still, it would have been nice to get a bit more of what makes Decline’s Drops special a bit earlier in its runtime.
My last (super in the weeds) complaint is that while you can set the right analog stick as a shortcut to do smash attacks, a standard in the Super Smash Bros. series, you seemingly can’t customize it to do other functions, at least from my perusal through the options. See, I customize my Smash Bros. controls so the right stick acts as a shortcut for tilt attacks, as I find that function far more finicky than the broader strokes motion of pulling off a smash attack. It’s a small, very niche, and nerdy complaint, but as someone with thousands of hours logged in each Smash Bros. entry, my muscle memory was hard to overcome here. But my two biggest complaints are that I wanted to be able to engage in combat more often and with a slightly more customizable control scheme, feeling like equal parts compliments to the core of Decline’s Drops as they are light criticisms.
