Finding Teddy II: Definitive Edition Review (NSW)

Written by Patrick Orquia

Title: Finding Teddy II: Definitive Edition
Developer: Storybird Studio
Publisher: Pixelheart
Genre: Action, Adventure, RPG, Platformer
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 16, April 2020
Price: $9.99

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Finding Teddy II: Definitive Edition is a port of the game first released on other platforms (including the Wii U) from some years ago. It was released back in 2015 as Chronicles of Teddy: Harmony of Exidus, and is a sequel to Finding Teddy, a point-and-click game released in 2013.

The game looks amazing on Switch. It has a vibrantly colorful pixel artstyle that is reminiscent of the 16-bit classics of old, albeit with modern effects. The soundtrack is even better, with lots of catchy tunes from beginning to end. 

I never played the first game, but at the beginning of this one, there is a prologue that sort of summarizes the first game along with some information about this game. You play as a nameless little girl who, one night during an electrical outage, finds herself following her toy teddy bear into another world, the land of Exidus, a kingdom being ruled by an usurper, the magician Anguis. You are tasked to free the captive King Tarant by going through an epic adventure, wherein you have to find four crystal eggs hidden within four palaces, guarded by Anguis’ minions. At one point of the game, your trusted toy teddy bear will be a captive himself, and it’s up to you to you to find him and free the land of Exidus from the clasps of evil.

The game is presented as a 2D sidescroller with RPG elements. You have four biomes to explore and you start each one from a library that acts like a hub world. Once you have defeated the boss guarding the palace in each biome, you obtain a crystal egg. You need four to unlock a fifth and final area, where you battle Anguis. But exploring the biomes and defeating the bosses are easier said than done. You are armed with a shield and a sword, with which you can slash and stab and do downward attacks on enemies, very similar to Zelda 2. You will encounter a lot of enemies, some are even equipped with shields, which will make you try different ways to defeat them. This sword, along with your clothes and HP meter and defense, can be upgraded with gems that you get from fallen enemies. You will also be able to acquire additional abilities, such as swimming, double jump, and wall jump, as you progress into the game, and you will need these abilities to further open up the biomes, similar to metroidvania games, but not in the strict sense, since the four biomes are not interconnected with one another other than via the library.

Aside from the sword and shield, you also have your Musicom, a musical instrument that acts like a communication device, and it allows you to talk to the various NPCs in Exidus, as well as opening some doors or making platforms appear, or opening treasure chests. The Musicom has 12 keys, each corresponding to a note, and you use combinations of notes to to form sentences and commands. You learn individual words from NPCs. Also, the Musicom has missing keys at the beginning, which you should find to allow you to progress further into the game. Sound simple enough, but it’s quite troublesome to learn and combine words. The Musicom has its own lexicon that has all the words that you have learned, which can help you if you forget which key to correctly press, but still, I find this aspect of the game unnecesarily tedious, but I guess this is this game’s gimmick to make it stand on its own.

So, the game is fun to play and not too hard, but this version on Switch has quite a few technical issues, with some almost rendering the game unplayable. There are minor frame rate dips here and there and I have encountered at least two game crashes. Also, the sound effects would drop regularly. A restart may resolve it, but it will then happen again. But my main gripe is that the buttons cannot be remapped. We all know that Nintendo has its classic BAYX button configuration, but this game mapped the actions to ABXY, similar to other versions of the game, and it makes the game quite inconvenient to play, making the tedious tasks more tedious.

Overall, Findng Teddy: Definitive Edition is a beautiful game, both in its looks and sounds. It also doesn’t cost much and you can have up to 20 hours of playtime off it, so it offers good bang for your buck. However, there are better indie games on the eShop, so maybe get this during a sale. But if you can look beyond its technical flaws, I’m pretty sure that you will like it, maybe more that you can expect.

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REPLAY VALUE: Medium

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PROS

• Vibrant and colorful pixel artstyle, reminiscent of 16-bit classics, albeit with more modern effectts
• Superb soundtrack from beginning to end
• Simple core gameplay
• Boss fights are awesome
• Expansive levels
• Ideal for handheld gaming

CONS

• Bland story
• The Musicom mechanic is unecessarily tedious
• Lack of clear signposting
• The map is not too user-friendly
• The sound effects would regularly drop out, leaving only the background music playing
• Some enemies are unfairly place, wherein they are almost impossble to defeat
• Minor framerate dips here and tehre
• Controls cannot be remapped; a recent update interchanged the actions for the X and Y buttons and the A and B buttons, seemingly mirroring the versions of the game on other platforms, but it is a well-known fact that the button placement on Nintendo consoles have been virutally unchanged since the beginning, making this change in the controls a bit inconvenient to Nintendo gamers

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RATING: 3.5/5 Magical Teddys

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