Review: The Variety of Chance remastered

 

Finished in ~8h

Like Romancing Mario, The Variety of Chance is a hack I remember raocow let's played a while ago, and so I decided to play it myself. Although I do not remember anything about it, except that the overworld use graphics from the Zelda Oracle games. The hack is a bit old, however the creator posted a Remastered version in 2018, which fix the musics on modern emulators and other things I do not know. So let's go.

Ah, those Zelda Oracle graphics are nice.

You play as Marin. There is a plot, probably, getting rid of the bad guys or something. The plot is very minimal, however Marin and the enemy have some funny interactions together. And I totally like that, no detailed plot but funny interactions. Well there's some cutscenes in the first part, but later in the game they mostly disappear unfortunately. In particular, the final boss and ending (or lack of) was disappointing.

Very cute piranha plant.

You play as Marin, which plays like Mario. The only difference are the ability to double jump, which is nice. It sure makes the game easier, and some levels can be completed without. But there's some later levels that requires double jump, and have tricky obstacles using it. You can also shoot fireball upward which is pretty useful. The cape was replaced by a racoon tail, but it's alright. Other important change is the game use the SMB3 powerdown while still keeping item boxes. This means you can have 4 hits before dying (fire->big->small(use reserve fire)->big->small->death) and contribute to making the game easier, maybe a bit too much? This system also force you to juggle a bit with your powerups, for example if you are big and have a reserve feather, you must drop your feather before getting a fireflower or else you will get a mushroom in your reserve box replacing your feather. The game would have benefited to have some sort of powerup priority system.

In the Mega Man level you shoot fire straight. Nice touch.

Not only Mario changed. All the enemies have changed graphics, from original graphics to rip from other games. In general, the game is very romhacky, in that it openly use many inspiration from many games together, and I think it's totally fine. The graphics are good (I love the overworld). There may be some clash sometimes but nothing looking too bad.

Clash 8-bit/16-bit.

Some levels are more generals, while some are greatly inspired from games. The biggest inspiration you can see are Mega Man (with many, many custom musics from MM games), Zelda, Metroid, and mostly Touhou. There's multiple touhou "bosses", were it's just dodging projectiles for a fixed duration, but it's fine. Better than some other boss, which are literally custom bosses straight from smwcentral, with no new graphics or change in rooms designs. Yeah some bosses were nice but some others very unoriginal.

 

👁️

 

The level design is good. Most of the levels are simple vanilla-like design that doesn't revolutionize the genre, but are nice to play. Sometimes a bit too simple, I remember I breezed really quickly through forest world, double jump helping rushing the obstacles. But it is fun to play like that. The game still have some puzzle levels or interesting secret exits that made me use my brain. For the simple levels Yes more elaborated level design is good, but old school fun short rompy romp have a certain charm you know. Actually at the start of the game I felt the levels were a bit too long and hard for a beginning and I was getting worried for the future, but turns out it was fine. Even, I felt in the lategame the levels were shorter, and I definitely wanted them longer. Maybe they were short because they were harder, but honestly they weren't that hard. I would have liked more challenge tbh. Also no need to lifefarm, I got over 50 lives without trying.

Boss bass in the sauna.

The game quality is overall good. But it's varied, and unfortunately uneven. You have simple SMW-like levels and have levels very inspired from other games. You have cute cutscene in the first half of the game but almost none in the second half, and no ending. The levels feels shorter and the boss less interesting in the second half too. But still since lategame is harder, it play more around the double jump which is great, there were some nice platforming challenge. But not always, sometimes the double jump still felt too strong. Well I'm repeating myself. I'll just say I had fun playing it, and you can tell the creator had fun making it too. I hesitated to rate it 8 tbh.

Use your double jump at the right time!

A really fun romhack, with some simple but enjoyable level design, and a lot of flavor. The levels, with the double jump and it's diverse aesthetics, feels good to get through, but sometimes they seems to go by too quickly.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Very good