No Straight Roads review: Part 3: Yinu · 2:55pm Apr 14th, 2021
Welcome back everyone to my NSR review and... well it's certainly been a little bit, hasn't it? Well rest assured I'm back and ready to continue. Today we'll be looking at The Golden Maestro of Vinyl City. NSR's one and only child prodigy, Yinu.
Yinu is this games representation of the EDM genre of neoclassical, and... okay, I'm gonna be honest. I'm not the biggest fan of classical music usually, but if you like it, more power to you. That being said, Yinu's boss theme is very good. It has a very orchestral tone to it that I really like. Thanks for making this Mr. Falk Au Yeong.
As for the fight itself, it's... interesting, to say the least. It's not bad by any means, I just had a bit of a bad experience with the fight itself. I'll talk about that later. It starts with you running down the center of the concert hall, avoiding music notes as you go. When you reach the foot of the stage, a wooden gate appears, along with a padlock. Don't worry, the lock is breakable, as you need to destroy it in order to progress. While you try to break it however, Yinu constantly tries to blow you up with explosions. Needless to say, it's not very effective. However, the second the lock breaks and you rush up to trounce Yinu, a mysterious giant red hand comes from behind the curtains and lifts Yinu just out of your reach. With the melee option out the window, you are forced to use ranged attacks, shooting Yinu out of the air. Yinu and her piano start to plummet from the air, only to be caught by the owner of the red hands... Yinu's mother.
With the reveal of Yinu's mother, the flow of the battle changes. While you still have to shoot Yinu down, you have to attack her mom for the fight to move on to the next phase, but Yinu and her mother aren't going down without a fight. Aside from the music notes from earlier, Yinu will now shoot rapid-fire musical notes at you while her mother sends shockwaves through the ground. After you do enough damage, Yinu's mother gets angry and grows massive, destroying the concert hall in the process. The phase continues similarly to the last two, avoiding or countering the increasingly hectic notes while shooting at Yinu. However, the second half of the section is replaced with more direct attacks from Yinu's mother, were she will either slam her hand on the center of the stage, creating a shockwave that can do very significant damage, or snap her fingers and summon the 6 pieces of land around the stage to slam down onto the stage directly using vines that look suspiciously like the Strangler vines from Fallout 76. After dealing another round of damage to Yinu's mom, she completely snaps at this point, and she ignores Yinu entirely to focus on Bunk Bed Junction. She transforms into a giant spider-like being and covers the stage. With Yinu out of the picture, Yinu's mother goes all out, intending to make you pay for fucking up her daughter's performance. From landmines, thorn-covered vines, using piano hammers to smash you with, and even slamming her own face into the ground to cause shockwaves. Eventually you beat the shit out of the mom, and once you finally knock her health down, you can do the Showstopper, and it's all over... Or so you think! Before you can finish off the Showstopper, Yinu pops up and knocks you to the base of a large flower. Enraged with both Bunkbed Junction and her mom for ruining her concert, Yinu begins to play all out. This starts up an automatic runner segment where you have scale up the stem of a golden rose, dodging musical notes on the way up. Once you reach the top... there is no finisher, just the sound of a piano being smashed. After watching the cutscene that follows, you are left with the oddest of thoughts; "Are we truly the bad guys here?"
