When standing on a planetoid in this side-scroller, she’ll always walk clockwise around it, the player instead instructing her on how quickly she should move while doing so. Luna is not really directly controlled by the player. Perhaps this destructive approach still has warped her perspective some, but it does work well as a way to construct some puzzles where the player will need to manage things like character placement, the influence of gravity, and the limits of how much control you have over not only the tools important to your success, but Luna herself. The planetoids are rarely presented as something capable of housing life and it might be more accurate to call most of them asteroids, and you do acquire “planet candy” that allows you to create your own little worlds to land on and use to navigate space. In this DSiWare game, your goal is to safely get Luna to a black hole that will suck her out of the current level, and to do so will involve walking around small planetoids and destroying them to get a boost to new ground. One element that might influence Luna’s mindset is the way she navigates outer space. It is possible these images aren’t meant to be real events and are just a visual reward for completing a stage, and the fact that they do repeat makes it less likely they’re meant to convey anything of importance, but Luna’s unusual perspective does make her a more fascinating lead than if she was the generically cheerful adventuress she initially appears to be. In fact, you can even see her spending some time with her rival, a cybernetically altered T-Rex who attacks her in every tenth stage of the game but is also shown happily enjoying a double rainbow alongside Luna, competing with her in an eating contest, and at least pretending to live a domestic life together. While the story doesn’t tell you much of why Luna is exploring the galaxy in this puzzle platformer, when you complete a level, you’ll see a piece of art depicting her doing things like talking on the phone while in bed or dancing to music. This odd undercurrent of morbidity only really pops up in her dialogue, because besides her facade of excitement and cheer, there are also small windows into the life she normally lives that seem pretty typical and even pleasant. Luna has an unusually morbid and nihilistic view of life and death, starting off levels speaking about how she’s ready to endure misery or embraces the potential outcome of failing and dying, and if she does die her final words end up being about how she’s relieved to finally have felt something. Her seemingly chipper delivery makes it sound pretty normal, but if you do know the language or translate it, you’ll soon find even her victory lines are rather strange. It has a peppy-looking protagonist in a cartoon art style that makes it seem cute and approachable, but once the game starts, you notice the star, an alien girl named Luna, only speaks French. At first blush, Mighty Milky Way looks like it’s cut from the same cloth as WayForward’s other “Mighty” games on the DS.
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