game mill have became one of the more infamous publishers as of late with games like king kong, walking dead destinies and avatar: quest for balance but they've been around a lot longer than that and done a lot more than just these, they're a weird publisher, sometimes they'll even have a minor hit like nick all star brawl or cruis'n'blast, miraculous was not one of those games. i don't know if it made any kind of splash really, it's a kids game based on a show for teenage girls that was already losing a lot of popularity by the time this came out (sadly, i love this show so much, the movie owns too) but it is an interesting game, it's got some real charm under its shoestring budget and it's also one of the very few action games to come out that is explicitly geared towards girls, and i think that it should be given credit for that, even if it's not as good as many other women-focused action games like sengoku basara and hakuoki warriors.

the game plays like a mix between a 3D platformer, an arkham game and a persona game, yeah it's clear the devs had a real mix of influences here but it feels like a fun ps2 game like this, you get some fun 3D platforming in the streets of paris with your two leads having different traversal abilities that they can use to get xp orbs for new abilities and leveling up, or macaroons which are the secret collectable that you can use to unlock things like concept art and movies, during combat you get a more basic arkham style combat system with parries and dodges and even some special moves using a meter, sure it's no sleeping dogs but it uses this style well enough when you consider that for the target demo this may be their first game like this, it's fun enough and you get two different movesets to try out with ladybugs yoyo and cat noirs staff. outside of this you have the town'y persona segments, you have a little recreaton of paris to roam in between missions, you can talk to npcs, see master fu to get upgrades and talk to your friends to level up your little social link bar, it's not as deep as a persona or yakuza town but it has the same vibe with some nice music and it's a pretty city, it's a lot more than you would expect from a kids game. it is however still a kids game, it's short at about 4 hours long with only about 7 levels, it's super easy with only really one difficult boss (though there is one really cool non-combat boss that requires show knowledge to beat and i thought that was really cool) and it's as low budget as a game can be without being indie, it may actually have a lower budget than a lot of indie games, dave the diver is not an indie.

it's very, uh, jank though, barely functional at times even, it's buggy of course, animations are really bad but in a way thats more funny than anything with cat noirs cataclysm breaking his wrist multiple times and even the combat has very little real impact because of the sound design and animations, but you really expect all of this considering the budget and, well, it's game mill, it's also a switch game at heart, though i played on ps5, so i don't think you can expect a lot here, the city does look nice though, all of the games levels take place in different parts of paris and it's nice looking, each level has the environment change depending on the villain, with shockwaves having musical equipment you need to platform over, or the sphynx having creepy webbing and moth eggs everywhere, the last level where you climb the eifel tower with all the gross webbing and eggs is actually really good looking, i was shocked to see it. all the villains too are cool looking, there's some older ones here for fanservice like mr pidgeon, who is on his 46th akumatisation and his whole thing is a long running joke in the show and one of the funnier ones but most are new and they all fit in well, the game has a ton of fanservice for fans of the show with all the fun character interactions and even some seemingly canon scenes? i'm not sure on the validity of that but the shows creator did work on the game so i'd imagine it has to be at least a bit canon. music is solid too, the paris music is really cozy and some of the level themes are good too, the OST was worked on by markus schmidt who has done music on a ton of really cool games like the surge, call of cthulhu, the risen series and two of my favourite shooters, stranglehold and kane & lynch 2 and he had some help from noam kaniel, who's only other credits are a DS gormiti game and a french little mermaid learning game and jeremy zag, composer for the show itself, who i'm guessing had a hand in all the really nice remixes of the shows main theme.

the story is also pretty good, you won't really get much out of it if you haven't seen the show but it makes for a perfect extended episode of it with a full arc and a cute little epilogue with multiple endings, you don't get many real cutscenes but the cast do come back for the game and there's lots of dialogue here in the side stuffs and lil visual novel cutscenes too, it's good for what it had to be, though the reveal with sphynx was a bit of a letdown, *spoilers* sentimonsters are kind of lame, i'm sorry. it is cute how you get some not-awkham game over screens with hawk moth mocking you though, that's cute. you also get different NPC dialogue with the two characters which i thought was nice, the game has a lot of effort in it for what you would have expected to just be a cheap tie-in, this could have very easily been a 2 hour 2D platformer with no real fanservice like something from "outright games", but it's not that and i think that should be commended, it'd have been a really fun ps2 tie in, or an XBLA game, it has major XBLA energy with its menus and sound effects, i cant really quantify why, it just does to me, play it and you'll understand, it feels very XBLA.

the devs before this had done a lot of different licenced games like a few pretty good imagine games for DS and even a cool looking bakugan game with "rise of the resistance" but this was their last real project, i do hope they get to work on more cool things in future because i do see a lot of potential here and they deserve a chance to try something a bit more creative and with a real budget, this was pretty good and i think they could do even better if given a real chance, hopefully they're able to get away from gamemill some day.