I don't have 100% completion, but I did finish the entire main plot of Hell Yeah! There is a lot about it I don't understand. It's set in hell. The mani character is the Prince of Hell, who is about to take over for his father, the recently deceased(?) King of Hell. So why is he a rabbit? Why does he have a spinning disc that drills through stone? He's on a quest to recover compromising pictures of himself in the bath with a rubber duck, but such low stakes imply that the game is meant for children and that belies the often gruesome violence that you encounter at basically every turn. And what's up with the toxic masculinity out of nowhere? The game begins with a newspaper clipping that says "The Prince is a Pussy" and it ends with the headline "Prince Still A Pussy." Who is the target audience for this game?
The game itself is . . . okay. I only cursed at it once, which is good for a platformer, but there's an indefinable alchemy that goes into making a great platforming game, and Hell Yeah! just doesn't have it. Maybe it's the QTEs that pop up every time you defeat a major enemy. The animations are funny (if, at times, needlessly gory), but after I've just fought your way through a spike-filled maze and subdued a challenging mini-boss, the last thing I want to do is play a rhythm mini-game to determine whether all that effort was worth it or not. I wouldn't say they add nothing to the game, but like so much else in Hell Yeah!, they give with one hand and take away with the other.
Like The Island, a potentially interesting feature that just sort of wound up being half-baked. The best part of this game is the unique design of the 100 major enemies you have to track down and defeat. So the knowledge that after you kill them, they are not gone forever, but reincarnated on a mystical island prison is pretty welcome. I'm not normally a sadist, but I like the idea of shipping all the boss monsters off to a labor camp, where they can mine for money and items to aid me on my adventure. It's cruel, but I am a demon prince of hell. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that has much payoff. In the roughly 7 and a half hours since I unlocked The Island, I only received one health item, which didn't do me much good because I was already at full health when I got it. In the end, the only thing I got out of the Island was a vague sense of satisfaction at seeing all of my enemies in a conga-line procession going down into a mine. That's not nothing, but it could be more.
Overall, Hell Yeah!'s main virtue is that it is not entirely unpleasant to sit down and play for 8 hours in a single night, and it was not so off-putting that I dread starting over. Technically, I still have a bunch of optional side missions to complete, but since half of the ones I've already tried have required an annoying degree of precision, I'll probably just let them be.
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