Jul 21

Jul 21 Review | Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights - A Familiar Friend

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is the perfectly placed semicolon in the still being written love affair between the Metroidvania and the Soulsborne genres. Another way to put it would be that it offers nothing new to either genre but it pulls the borrowed elements so well. It’s a nice place to rest while you wait for Silksong, Salt and Sacrifice or whatever the next big entry in this little subgenre. We should talk about the genre and my relationship to it first, actually.

Imagine it’s Christmas morning 2002 and I’m leaning way off the edge of my grandmother’s antique sofa to catch the light from her antique lamps in the cutting edge screen of my Toys-R-Us Exclusive black shelled Gameboy Advance and I’m absolutely taken by the sheer grit and mystique of Metroid Fusion. I quickly learn that I will receive new abilities and that these abilities will open doors. The quintessence of the Metroidvania is returning to a room with two exits and taking the one you couldn't before because you didn’t have the right bombs or climbing skills. Many weapons and movement abilities are keys used to open a certain kind of lock; different coloured doors in Metroid or the tops of collapsed staircases in the many Castlevania GBA entries.

There might as well be a sign reading “Come Back When You Can Glide, Soma.

Ender Lilies does this early game teasing, as well. It doesn’t call attention to this, but a Metroidvania fan knows it when they sees it. And when I sees it I get One Half of an Endorphin and later when I return with the wall grab or whatever I get the other half. Here’s the thing, though, the other little thing EL does is it automatically fills a map marked with un-explored exits to rooms and colour codes those rooms to show whether you’ve cleared them of trinkets or not. And ohhh the trinkets there are to be had.

But first off, I should lay out the basic idea. You are a young girl, Lily, who cannot speak and is sleeping in a gaudy, princess bed in the basement of a church. The spirit of a dead warrior wakes you up, pledges themself to you and gives you the 411 on your doomed fantasy kingdom. It’s your basic undead plague/orange toxin a la Dark Souls and Hollow Knight respectively, destroying a once-great land. The “Blight” has corrupted the kingdom and turned everyone into menacing, violent freaks. This, honestly, doesn’t bother me all that much as this is a Japanese-made game so many ideas from Hollowknight (including the shameless CTRL+C of limited healing charges) is just reborrowing from the west what they already looked to Japan for. Anyway, it’s up to you to “purify” as much of the kingdom as you can. This will come up a lot, the snow white, virginal purity being used to suck the poison (in this case “the Blight”) out. This is subtext, you should be reading into it, here.

As you explore you’ll come across bosses and, when they are defeated, they become equipable spirits. The spirit of the warrior who wields a sword, the one with a hammer, the one with a lance, they all become your sword, hammer, and lance. When you hit the sword button, your little wisp of a warrior will appear briefly by your side to swing his sword. This sounds like an animation and game feel nightmare but the folks over at Live Wire nailed it. It feels so good to wield the ancient swordsman or the big hammer guy. The game is extremely fun to play and move about in as you get to know your entourage of different spirits. And you will feel like you know them well, too. The dialogue and lore of Ender Lilies is very explicit that the blight takes over the body but the mind within is intact, meaning the bosses you face know you and know they’re attacking you, but can't control themselves. After the final swing of a boss battle the monsters gasp out a single line and it can be very emotional to read. Being told “Thank goodness you’re ok” or “I can’t believe you made it this far” from the dying beasts and warriors you’ve bested hits hard, especially when they join your “party” afterwards.

A Metroidvania is only as good as its upgrades and abilities.

Your allies can be improved as well, with trinkets! In every room that isn’t a boss room, whether it’s one of the generously placed (but not overly frequent) safe rooms or the longest hallway in the world, there are hidden items everywhere. These are either in the form of “Blights”, which there are three kinds of, used to upgrade the three classes of spirits. Or they are Relics. Relics are equipable little chachkies, usually jewellery or some such, that provide passive upgrades. More healing charges, more damage while airborne, that kind of thing. The slots for these are limited but of course additional slots can also be picked up. And this, to me, is where a subtle but also most interesting turn (I won’t say twist) on the genre so far takes place in EL: there is no merchant. There’s no currency to go spending at a store and, wracking my brain, I can’t think of another modern Metroidvania which does this. Even old Alucard had to cough up coins to the Librarian and Hollowknight has weird beetle shell money or whatever. This is a great concession to the exploration of the gameworld, frankly. For one thing, the world is just so grim, why would there be a shop in this place. I mean, I love an undead merchant as much as the next guy but having a character to stop and speak to definitely changes the context of your lonely mission. Here, we’re more like Samus, truly alone save for the voices in Lily's head as she climbs and scampers through the halls and tunnels. Having to fill up on BLIGHT BUCKS and return to the Diseased 7-11 wouldn’t totally kill the pace. More total isolation hits all the harder for this title. The bosses are good too, by the way, because all the combat is good. Every enemy has a health bar and a stamina bar, which when emptied by attacking, stuns them. This is great and remains consistent up until the (somewhat underwhelming) room-filling set-piece final boss. You start equipping different spirits for different encounters and obstacles. My favourite combo for bosses was an area filling toxic gas, the giant hammer, and this stamina shredding whirlwind move. Delightful. And the enemies in this game are no slouches, they will bring the heat and several left me slightly shaky and out of breath by the end like the best Dark Souls or Ys bosses.

Sometimes though, a monster is as scary as it looks.

The ending, or rather all three endings which I have seen and which took me just about thirty hours to achieve, is good. I’ll tell you what the final ending of Ender Lilies is, it’s the culmination of a mysterious set of circumstances into something not unsatisfying but, like all other parts of the experience, simply a well done version of what we have seen before. Eastern ideas of magic and folklore preposterously laid over a western medieval aesthetic for forty years of gaming should be enough to let you guess at the ending. But it is good.

Another thing in Ender Lilies which is totally sick is the character design… DAMN.

All told, Ender Lilies is above and beyond worth the purchase. If you want to juggle and fight or explore the teeny tiniest corners of the most dangerous and dimmest rooms on the furthest edges of the stacked 2D map of a ghastly little world, this is it. Also, the music is totally sick. I want the soundtrack and I never want the soundtrack.