A side-scrolling Metroidvania based on a niche anime doesn’t sound like a recipe for success. Yet if anyone can make it work, it’s Japanese indie studio Inti Creates, which has made a living turning out solid action-platform games over the last two decades. The company’s latest is Yohane the Parhelion: Blaze in the Deepblue, an entry-level Metroidvania starring characters from the animated series Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror.

Blaze in the Deepblue stars student (and aspiring fortune teller) Yohane and her wolf companion Lailaps. The heroic duo decide to enter a vast, monster-infested undersea labyrinth after several of their friends go missing inside. As Yohane liberates each captive, she adds their unique powers to her arsenal, allowing her to dive deeper into the dungeon.

For those unfamiliar with the Yohane the Parhelion anime, the story in Blaze in the Deepblue won't leave much of an impression. The game banks on your familiarity with settings, characters, and relationships established elsewhere. If you don't have any loyalty to the source material, your enjoyment will be limited, despite the infectiously energetic voice acting on display. Even if you are familiar with Yohane, Lailaps, and the rest of the gang, the game's story doesn't provide much in the way of intrigue or drama — apart from a final, rushed revelation about the source of the labyrinth. More than anything, it's an excuse to get Yohane into her own Metroidvania adventure.

Judged as a Metroidvania, Blaze in the Deepblue is fairly good. Players will guide Yohane through multiple discrete biomes, each with a unique look and feel. She'll traverse through the dank, cavernous Grotto; the dusty, ash-filled Sunken Volcano; the mossy, vine-covered Sea of Trees; plus many more. Every area has its own hostile monsters, environmental hazards, and secret items. And in true Metroidvania fashion, each one has several gated-off areas that can only be bypassed once our heroine has the proper power-up.

Backtracking is part and parcel of the Metroidvania experience, but Inti Creates has gratefully installed in the undersea maze many save spots, among which players can warp at any time. This saves a lot of tiresome trudging back to the spot where you left that hidden treasure. At the same time, though, the developer commits an unforced error by not providing enough detail on the in-game map. You can see unopened treasure chests and unexplored paths, but you can't tell what exactly is blocking the way forward — unless you travel there in person and refresh your memory. Adding icons to represent a spiky path or ice blockage, to name a couple of examples, would inform players that it's not yet time to revisit that section.

Revisiting areas isn’t all bad, thanks to the game’s tight and nimble controls. Yohane navigates the halls, chambers, and ship graveyards of the watery labyrinth with ease: she’s neither too leaden nor too floaty, and she can stop and pivot on a dime.

While Inti Creates delivered some very fine controls, its greatest success in Blaze in the Deepblue comes from power-ups and abilities. What makes the game particularly special in this regard is that each rescued comrade becomes a tool in your toolkit, in the style of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue. Dia's electricity attack powers up inactive machinery; Kanan and her robotic frog sidekick Tonosama crash through stone barriers; and Ruby summons a cotton candy barrier that absorbs incoming projectiles.

If you explore every inch of the labyrinth, you'll surely discover special artifacts that are meaningful to each rescued friend. Once found, you'll unlock an upgraded ability. For example, Kanan & Tonosama now crash down and deliver a flurry of punches. Dia, meanwhile, dons her Scarlet Delta suit, and performs an electric dashing charge that rips through the enemy. Finding these artifacts, upgrading all abilities, and completing each friend's request is one of the highlights of the game.

Abilities aren't the only things that will keep you alive in the labyrinth. Yohane will also need to rely on weapons and charms, crafted from materials found in the dungeon or left behind by fallen monsters. This so-called "casting" system allows players to create over 90 weapons and accessories. It's overall a neat feature, and super accessible. As soon as you collect enough crafting components to generate a new sword, ax, ring, or garment, the game will notify you. You can then hop immediately into the pause menu to create it and equip it. The only issue is that some of the items are clearly better than others, and you can often skip entire categories altogether. This is an issue that affects abilities as well. Some are required for one or two puzzles, and then never again. Mari's upgraded freeze ability is better than everything else combined.

While Inti Creates missed the mark in ability and weapon balancing, it scored a bullseye in terms of visuals. Honestly, what else would you expect from the studio's gifted artists and modelers? The pixelated graphics on display in Blaze in the Deepblue are outstanding. Enemy designs, backgrounds, and special effects all look great, as do hand-drawn character portraits. Perhaps the best-looking of the bunch are the game's detailed, smoothly-animated bosses, which come in several shapes and sizes inspired by sea life.

As for the boss battles themselves, they're hit or miss. Some of the fights are varied, challenging encounters where a lot of careful preparation is required. Others, however, are relatively simple, easy affairs. The final two boss battles, which encourage the use of multiple allies/abilities and feature varying elemental attacks, are quite good. Regrettably, Inti Creates forces players to fight each boss a second time in a tedious, tiresome boss rush just ahead of the final showdown. This really disrupts the momentum of the game.

Perhaps the studio added the boss marathon at the end to pad the game's running time, but it really wasn't needed. Blaze in the Deepblue should last between seven and nine hours — a respectable duration for a smaller-scale action-platformer. Unexpectedly, it doesn't feature any post-game content or challenges. Inti Creates's most recent title, Gal Guardians: Demon Purge, boasted an unlockable hard mode and alternative endings. It would've been nice to have seen something similar here. Hard mode would be especially welcome, since this game falls on the easy side.

Ultimately, Blaze in the Deepblue isn't as enjoyable as Gal Guardians, or the better Inti Creates games out there. It's still a fairly good Metroidvania, though, with diverse biomes, tight controls, an interesting set of upgradeable abilities, an approachable crafting system, and striking graphics. What holds it back are small, irksome things: the story doesn’t really go anywhere; the map lacks a complete legend; abilities and gear are fun but imbalanced; and the game insists on a tedious boss rush just before the end. The folks likely to get the most out of Blaze in the Deepblue are fans of the anime and players searching for an easier, more approachable Metroidvania.