INTMD — Where There’s Smoke, They Pinch Back
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore — A Review Session
Recently, I celebrated the 20th year of my career in Information Technology. In my early years of the profession, I had a lot of downtime between helping fellow students, and I used that downtime to absorb various subcultures of the Internet. In those pre-YouTube days, I spent hours engaged in content and discussions at eBaumsWorld, HomeStarRunner, Nintendorks, SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, YTMND, Digg, and a message board featuring a few folks on the WRB staff. But when YouTube took off as a platform and changed how web surfers absorbed content forever, I engaged in a culture entirely different from all the ones before it: “YouTube Poop”.
I know what you’re thinking — the hell does “YouTube Poop” have to do with a video game released in February 2024? Hear me out.
“YouTube Poop” was a video editing subculture dedicated to editing and remixing various 90’s cartoon media into telling absurd, dadaist, and occasionally offensive stories. Unusual targets of this culture included Super Mario World, King of the Hill, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Disney films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Through voice manipulation, exaggerated video effects, and pitch modulation, someone could take an episode of King of the Hill and deliver a 3-minute presentation fit for an Adult Swim fever dream. Frankly, it’s better seen than explained:
One other target of YouTube Poop editors consisted of the “Legend of Zelda” games for the CD-i. I know we’re already going down quite a rabbit hole, but bear with me.
In 1993, Nintendo sold the rights to Philips to create a handful of games for their new CD-I console, based on the Mario and Zelda franchises. Ultimately, four “interactive adventure” games were made:
The games had incredibly low budgets and were absolute train wrecks. They featured insufferably frustrating gameplay mechanics and crude, cheap animated video sequences with low-effort voice acting.
While the games were critically panned, something about these dumpster fires earned the games a cult following in the mid-to-late 00’s, especially the animated cut scenes. For the past 16 years, these cut scenes have been spliced and diced by the YouTube Poop community to tell stories, like for example, a Final Fantasy VI Boss Battle:
Fast forward to today, where YouTube Poops are still being released, albeit at a much slower pace. Out of nowhere, a game developer named “Seedy Eye Software” released a trailer for their own “interactive adventure” game, “Arzette: Jewel of Faramore”.
The trailer lays it out simply in its earnest presentation — what if we had a “good” CD-I interactive adventure game that also takes a satirical poke at its spiritual predecessors? The developers even managed to track down and hire the voice actors that played Link and Zelda in the original games, featured as tongue-in-cheek guest narrators.
When the game finally released on February 14th, 2024, I didn’t hesitate to throw $20 at this labor of love. I’ve played a CD-I console once, but never managed to play the Mario or Zelda games. I’ve seen my fair share of YouTube Poops and Let’s Plays of people losing their sanity to these CD-I games, and that’s all the context I had going in.
And folks, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is actually good.
While the game is very much satire (possibly one of the first satire video games ever made), it stands proudly as its own game. It’s disingenuous to call this an “interactive adventure” as it’s really a Metroidvania side-scrolling platformer.
The intro of the game features a surprisingly detailed history of the plot — the Kingdom of Faramore was once plagued by the evil doings of a sorcerer named Daimur, a stand-in for the horrific-looking Ganon in the Zelda CD-I games. Ten years prior to the start of the story, Princess Arzette and her forces sealed Daimur away in a book, a book embedded with a giant jewel (the um, Jewel of Faramore). Amid the 10 years of peace, one bitter Daimur loyalist tracked down the location of the book and freed his master, shattering the jewel into five pieces and scattering them across the land. Aware of the evil reintroduced to the land while her ailing father slowly succumbs to illness, Princess Arzette rests the fate of the kingdom on her shoulders to put an end to Daimur for good.
Following some cut scenes and a tutorial, you’re taken to a world map where you can visit various locations throughout Faramore to track down those jewel shards. Each location is guaranteed to contain weapons, upgrades to health and armor, consumables, collectibles, quest items, and the occasional NPC. Throughout the adventure, you’ll help NPC’s accomplish various tasks and receive rewards as well. What makes this game a MetroidVania is that you’ll frequently encounter areas that are either out-of-reach, or feature barriers that require an item you don’t have yet. As a result, you’ll be revisiting each of the areas of the game often.
Through these visits, you’ll experience a polished gameplay with modern sensibilities that the original Zelda CD-I games did not have. In those games, if you died three times while in a level/area, you’d be sent back to the World Map to start over, losing all progress. In Arzette, you can die and start over as many times as you need, giving the game a bit of a “Celeste” feel to its recognition that you’re learning as you go.
The efforts made by Seedy Eye Software to make a spiritual successor to the CD-I games are prevalent. The game features original hand-painted artwork by the same artist behind the CD-I games. The animated cut scenes are as crudely-animated as the original games, but the voice acting and writing show some actual effort behind it. Princess Arzette is a courageous, strong, and confident hero pulled from some alternate 90’s reality where such female protagonists existed. The soundtrack to the game is, like its predecessors, surprisingly good.
My only criticism of the game is that despite playing on the game’s Normal (re: highest) difficulty, the game is still relatively easy to beat, and within 5 hours you can nearly 100% the entire game. $4/hr for entertainment isn’t a bad deal, but it did leave me wanting more adventures with Princess Arzette (the end credits did indicate a sequel is coming).
I’ve been running this INTMD series for a couple of years now, and I’m not really one for a rating system. VideoGameDunkey recently pointed out that we live in an age with such a wide variety of accessible, enjoyable content, that we are regularly gambling our free time to engage in a medium and hope that the journey was worth the effort. I can say that, even though Arzette is a satirical MetroidVania, it does so in earnest, and provides fun in a way that I’m certain may be overlooked by the gaming community. I hope I’m wrong on that one.
