Taimumari is a great side-scrolling, retro-style action platformer that uses a variety of magic, maneuvers and a sword as you collect things across a selection of five different levels. There's an equal amount of fun and challenge. The game is no pushover, but even the rough patches are no reason for frustration.

Its a game that oozes that retro style with great chip tunes and sound effects from that Nintendo era. The graphics fit for the most part, but they can be an bit immersion breaking with some of the ugly looking giant dragon heads and the giant boss pictures that kick off each level. The backgrounds and terrain look a lot better and have more detail than the moving sprites in the game.

Right off the bat, this is a game about great controls and an abundance of them. You have a double jump, a dash that rockets you forward whether you're in the air or on the ground, short range sword, wall clinging, long range spells that use mana and you can even charge your spells. The only downside is sometimes its tough to get away from a wall. You can drop, but trying to leap off to a different area is tough. Its best to play it safe and stay on the wall.

The story is simple, but I'm never one to read a story. The town is in danger, now you must go through four levels to defeat their boss before unlocking the fifth level to stop the true evil at the end. Its a formula that has been done before, but that's no reason to turn away.

Each of the five or so levels has a different theme and spell to find. A haunted castle, an aerial castle, a post apocalyptic wasteland, a frozen cavern, and so on. The levels keep track of your best times and how many items from that level you've collected so there's a reason to go back and speed run.

These levels are a healthy length and do offer a variety of different platforming action to make each stage feel more unique. One stage has a shooter section and after that you keep the wings to let you jump as many times as you want in the air. Another stage halts the action in two different rooms for you to dodge an array of arrows and another to avoid smashers. The ice cavern lets you ride ropes down to the bottom. It shows that effort was put into the game to make it more than just another platformer.

The brief tutorial level that spoon feeds you with text as you run through the level such as how to jump over a pit. Then the game opens into a town where you can purchase upgrades and head off to the next level. its a hub world and with every game over, you respawn here with everything but your score in tact. Its a forgiving game. Every item, star, ability and spell you've collected stays with you.

Continues are infinite and each one grants you three lives, but you can purchase more for forty stars. You can also find or earn lives as you play. Each enemy drops one or two stars and you'll need at least one hundred for any upgrade.

The merchant in town will sell you upgrades for your attack strength, health increase, spell strength and mana recharge rate. There is one passive ability to purchase that will let you attract items toward you like extra lives, hearts and stars. While none of these is a game changer, its more of a reward for your hard work.

Because you have attack strength and spell strength, that means the enemies take a while to defeat. You need to put a little effort into slashing a slime a half a dozen times. By effort I mean the sword will slash as fast as you can mash that button.

As for the spells, there are four of them. A simple shot that can charge into a bright blue beam. A triple shot spark that can charge into a shield of eight shots which then throw out in different directions. A bomb that charges into four bombs. Its a skill that feels lackluster. The last spell is the ice spell, which does... lava? No it is just a simple ice spell. The charged variant of it throws out three blades of ice forward and one behind you.

There is only a small variety of enemies. Knights will charge forward. Slimes just hang out and jump every so often. Ghosts fly in. Birds dive toward you. Flowers spit projectiles in three directions. Oh and spikes they are instant death traps, but this game goes easy on the amount of spikes, but it uses them well.

Then the bosses tend to be the ones with diversity. Each boss has a few different simple patterns and can throw a lot of projectiles. A lot of them will force you to jump to hit them and scurry away to avoid projectiles. They are a good challenge after a long level when you've run out of lives and health.

Taimumari makes you earn some of the collectible items and even hearts that give you full health. The items are found near pits or hard-to-reach places like just over a cliff. While its nothing too difficult, it makes you challenge yourself to get them. Once you have them, you never have to get them again so you can even cheat by just dropping into a pit after collecting the item. People looking for a challenge will avoid the pit.

I did find some minor issues, such as projectiles shooting backward. When new areas of a level would load, the screen would shift around. Its nothing that broke the game and they did seem quite consistent.

For the price, this is a great game even if the game can be considered short with five deep and diverse levels. Its still well worth the price for any issues that I have with the game.

It is so depressingly easy to take the wrong lessons from classic games. Mega Man 2, for example, is a master class in play control, graphics, sound design, and challenge. However, there were undeniably some enemies that were tuned a little too high, and some level segments that presented unfair challenges or could force a restart under some conditions. Taimumari is a retro platformer made by the sort of people who look at the laser beams in Quick Man's stage and think yes, this is the sort of thing we should be shooting for.

The enormous blocks of poorly-written text the game opens with explain that your magical world had a thingy that could make everyone divine but some dudes messed with it and now everything is disappearing. You play a young, inexperienced mage who gets the quest to save the world thrust upon her for unclear reasons. The pleasant, pastoral intro level eases you into your double-jumps, wall jumping, magic, and dash abilities before depositing you into the hub town. Here you can talk to people, buy upgrades with stars, or choose your next level to challenge.

For God's sake, start with Sir Fallenstar because his creepy-themed level is the only one that offers a reasonable challenge. All the others devolve into improbable arrays of bottomless pits and instant-kill spike platforms that will force you into Super Meat Boy-esque contortions to pass. Explosion Girl's stage has a long moving platform section where you have to keep perfect pace with your ride, and Roketto's stage (I swear I am not making these names up) has some Flappy Bird-style weaving through spike gauntlets. Passing these obstacles can take numerous attempts, sending you back to distant checkpoints for each retry.

This alone wouldn't damn Taimumari, because honestly the platforming challenges aren't all that much worse than those of the NES ball-breakers of yore. No, what kills this game is that you get exactly three tries to pass each level. Lose all your lives, and you get kicked straight back to the hub with a big, chunky GAME OVER. You can spend your precious stars on 1-ups, and most levels have one or two hidden away in particularly deadly spots, but that does little to ease the pain of losing your last life on learning a boss and having to re-do the entire 10-minute stage.

If the game was particularly polished or compelling you could almost make a case to stick it out, but Taimumari can't manage that either. The graphics do a lot of flickering all over, especially during scene transitions. Everything is oddly-proportioned, with a lot of long, uneventful walks and melee combat taking place at the very bottom of the screen between squat characters. The backgrounds are detailed but the foregrounds and characters are not, especially the larger ones. Weapons are poorly balanced, your sword has aggravatingly little reach, and enemies take a ridiculous number of hits to kill.

I feel like all the right intentions to make a good game were here, but the polishing and balance passes were overlooked or skipped altogether. Unless you like your platformers absolutely punishing, something is going to make you rage in this game. It might be the umpteenth nigh-unkillable enemy, it might be the thousandth death by corner spike, or it might be the laughably bad dialogue between the embarrassingly bad characters. And with a range of threats like that, you're much better off staying far away from this one.



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I hardly ever write reviews but here:

The primary issue with Taimumari is that it's constantly hit and miss.
It's obvious there's inspiration from Megaman in this game, but it seems they overlooked the technical aspect of what made the gameplay so solid in megaman games, this game could be a real gem if it had all the kinks worked out and if it had more polish.

To provide an example, there's a point where you're running from a machine and the screen is panning, you've seen a scene like this in many platforming games probably.
Well while on this moving screen if you attack or dash, the camera follows that action rather than staying centered where it was.
And if you throw an attack that trails on the camera will follow it which will result in you dying because you can't see what's going on where you currently are.
There's a boss fight involving this same concept later in the game, and for some reason it doesn't have this issue there, it being fine for the boss fight where the screen is also panning but not for the part earlier in the game is a good example of how Taimumari is hit and miss.

I haven't beaten the game and I probably won't, I'm on chapter 3 of the final area of the game, if you beat it, congratulations.
it's playable, but don't expect to get through it without getting frustrated by technical limitations.

Also just so you know, you have a double jump but unlike other games with double jump, walking off of a ledge will act as if you've expended both of your jumps and you'll just fall to your death.

And that's my review for a game that's already been out for a year

I really enjoyed Rabi-Ribi, and this games seems like it could be the prequel. I don't understand why the rating is so sub-par, I thought this was an exceptional sidescrolling action platformer. Complete with good boss fights, several types of magic and a variety of unique levels.

Definately a diamond in the rough, and for the price it's worth it. You will get a solid 3 hours worth of play-through on the easy difficulty, and then it has a re-playability factor as well regardless of difficulty. If you like your games more difficult like I do, you can still beat it in one sitting on Hard mode, and it will probably take you 4-4.5 hours, and then the next day you can pick it up and play through it again and it's just as fun.

I highly reccomend this and I am all about good 2d platfromers. It's my genre of choice.

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Choppy platformer with ton of glitches.
Mobs and items spawn in walls.
In dialogs camera shudders every time you click an action button and texts warps while typing.
I have blocked stuck lowering ceiling with my body while holding to a wall.
Main menu features DOUBLE "Exit" options and character selector has untranslated "Назад" option.
The way the heroine behaves when touching left side of screen is totally unacceptable.
F12 key only takes screenshot of a part of the screen.

Can megaman clones fall so low?

Taimumari can be summed up as playing X (from Megaman X) in the original Megaman. The mobility of the protagonist is excellent, but the levels and bosses are clearly not balanced. For example, the Knight is a pushover, while Explosion Girl is aggravatingly difficult.

The greatest disappointment in the game is the lost opportunities presented by the story. Rather than presenting a dynamic world in which time and space are slowly disintegrating, the uber-powerful forces commanded by the bad guys serve only as a backdrop for some fairly lame melodrama. This game milks the "misunderstood villain" trope to the fullest, sacrificing excellent opportunities for a meshing of surprising gameplay and narrative in the process. I mean, seriously, one of the villains disrupted the fabric of space-time so he could look cool for a girl?

I also should note that you shouldn't trust reviews from anyone with .6 hours on record saying this game is just-hard-enough. They haven't reached the third stage of Dr. Wily's the main villain's fortress. The game was pleasantly difficult--and concurrently very rewarding--until then, at which point it seems as though the developer decided to design an entire level after Megaman's infamous Yellow Devil.

So why am I recommending this game? A few delightful positives make it shine:

First, it's an excellent clone of retro Megaman, and the added mobility of the protagonist (double jump, wall dash, wall climb) is not only great fun to play with but excellently utilized in level design. The way levels motivate you to learn and use the protagonist's mobility is perhaps the best part of the entire production. Kudos to the developers.

Second, there are segments in two of the game's four main stages that implement welcome changes in gameplay. In one, you hang from the ceiling on a descending rope that you have clumsy control over, a la Battletoads, while in the other, the game becomes a Bullet-Hell shooter.

Third, the time slowing spell quickly becomes a go-to ability for the most interesting and clever parts of play. The joy of laughing at your enemies while you dodge their bullets, get in some cheap-as-free hits, and jump-dash-jump through terrain that's supposed to be tough will motivate you to level up your magic meter just so you can keep laughing at them a little longer.

Despite its weaknesses, Taimumari is definitely worth playing. The gameplay isn't consistently great, but there are enough tight maneuvers, rewarding challenges, and interesting enemies to keep me playing. Now if I can just get through the third chapter of the final boss stage (the developer deserves a smack on the jaw for that one), I can find out if the ending was worth the wear on my teeth.

It makes me feel kind of bad to poop on this game, considering it looks like it was someone's personal project and not just a cynical cash-in. But a precision retro action game needs to be more polished than this. Jittering sprites, inconsistent hitboxes, a charged ranged attack that you can't charge while attacking with the sword (defeating the point of a separate button) enemies that either suicide-bum-rush you or just soak damage, instant-kill crushers, pits and spikes. I quit when I clipped into a moving platform just below a fire-breathing dragon. Couldn't jump, move, or even die, just endlessly pump magic shots into a dragon which seemingly took damage but refused to die. I would recommend the devs to keep trying, but try harder next time.

I was supplied with this key by the developer, this however did not affect the review.
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OVERVIEW
In Taimumari you play as Himari, a female wizard on a quest to restore balance to the world, in a challenging old school platformer. The game consists of 8 levels with a boss fight at the end of each one. There are stars along with other collectibles on each level, and you can use the stars you collected to increase your health and mana bars, and your physical and magic damage. There are a variety of spells to unlock in this game and they are all helpful and necessary to get through parts of some levels. There are three difficulty settings, and although I played on the easiest one, I still found the game a challenge and have gotten stuck on the second to last level.

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PROS & CONS

Pros:
Unique bossfights and levels
Lots of spells, slow time down, reverse time, or summon a magic shield!
Lots of hidden collectibles every level for completionists
Extremely challenging, and certain achievements require beating the game without buying any upgrades!

Cons:
Getting powerups can be grindy
Some English translations were sloppy
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SUMMARY & FINAL RATING
Extremely challenging platformer that reminds me of classics such as the Kirby games. For just a few dollars, this game delivers more than enough content.
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For more recommendations on quality indie games or ones with high potential follow our group curations here

Absolutely standard platformer with a few very serious flaws that keep me from recommending it for nostalgia reasons.

The character graphics are fantastic, but they don't resemble the pixel-art characters at all. I feel like even with an 8-bit aesthetic there's way more that could be done to make things more appealing and colorful.

Collision detection is off. The sword's hitbox extends slightly further than it should, and my very first time playing a monster jumped right into a wall and back out again. That shouldn't be happening in a game that's been released.

Dialogue is choppy. There's a flash as dialogue boxes switch, and that shouldn't be happening in 2018. I can only even recall a couple of 8-bit games with that problem. There are also emoticons in the text ... it wouldn't have been difficult to slightly change the character graphics to display a few different emotions.

But the really fatal flaw is performance. There is no way I should be getting this much slowdown on a game like this. None. The game also occasionally freezes for a moment, including during boss fights, like the PC can't handle processing this much data. This code needs to be massively optimized.

There's a good basic game here and some nice ideas, but the implementation just isn't there. Optimize the code, get rid of the graphical glitches, and put a little more effort into sprites and dialogue, and this could be a classic simple platformer, but Taimumari absolutely shouldn't have been released in its current state.