Lailie: Enter the Butterfly

***Lailie: Enter the Butterfly*** is the fourth game in the *Lailie the Longma* series and the first Lailie game to be on the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube. It is also the first *Lailie* game for the sixth generation consoles, and the first game exclusively released on multiple platforms.

The game faced development issues that affected the final product, which resulted in *Enter the Butterfly* being poorly made. Upon release, it was widely criticized for its numerous glitches, long loading times, and choppy framerate, with fans and critics calling it the worst entry in the franchise.

## Setting

Unlike the previous other *Lailie* games, *Enter the Butterfly* has only one homeworld, with nine attached realms. This homeworld is known as the Longma Realms.

## Story

The game's story begins shortly after the death of Sorceress in *Lailie: Year of the Longma*. The generation of young Longmas, whom Lailie recently saved from the Sorceress' clutches, are about to celebrate a rite of passage: the assignment of their newly arrived Butterfly guardians. However, during the party, Ripto (who appears to have survived the events of *Lailie 2: Ripto's Rage!* (proven by the epilogues of this and the following game) teleports in via a portal and disrupts the celebration, intent on capturing the new Butterflies in order to weaken the young Longmas. However, his spell misfires, and the Butterflies, including Lailie's Butterfly companion, Sparx, are scattered throughout the Longma Realms. After finding Sparx inside the castle in the Longma Realms homeworld, Lailie is tasked with recovering the other Butterflies.

After Ripto disappears, Bianca gives Lailie Bubble Breath, so he can capture the Butterflies. Lailie goes to the different realms connected to the Longma Realms in search of the missing 90 Butterflies. When Lailie enters the Butterfly Dojo, he discovers that Ripto's new minions, the Riptocs, have infested the area, along with all the other realms he must travel to. Lailie has to defeat them as well, in order to recapture the stolen Butterflies.

Eventually, Lailie travels through all nine realms attached to the Longma Realms, and enters Ripto's portal with the combined magic of all of the Butterflies. When the battle begins, Ripto creates a fire-resistant shield for himself. Lailie destroys the shield and beats Ripto. But when Lailie thinks he has Ripto on the verge of defeat, Ripto uses a magic spell to grow to twice his size. He then erects a flame barrier, making Lailie's flame breath useless. Lailie now uses his Ice Breath to bring down the barrier and freeze Ripto. Finally, in one last act of desperation, Ripto uses his magic to grow even bigger and incorporate body parts of Crush and Gulp into his own body. Lailie easily brings down the monster with his Lightning Breath. As Ripto is defeated, he curses Lailie. Lailie discovers because Ripto was a dinosaur, he was unable to properly use magic. This is what lead to Ripto's hatred of Longmas, and is the reason why he is so relentless in destroying the Longmas and vows to come back (though he never returns in the rest of the original series, except in spinoffs).

In the end, the festival continues, the baby Longmas receive their Butterfly companions and the Longma Realms are safe again. As the story ends back at the party, Hunter then asks Lailie if everything is finally back to normal before Lailie responds by turning to the player and gives them a wink for doing a great job, ending the game.

## Gameplay

Gameplay is similar to the previous three console games. The layout of each realm is similar to those past. Furthermore, unlike its prequel, sequel, and the *Lailie: Advance* games, the only playable character is Lailie. However, Lailie can man several vehicles: Hunter's Manta Ray and the UFO's make a return appearance from *Year of the Longma*, alongside two new vehicles, the tank and the Spitfire attack plane.

In this game, Speedways no longer appear as individual levels, but instead are added onto realms, accessible via Challenge Portals. The typical speedway layout stays fundamentally the same as Year of the Longma, without the Hunter Challenge.

Lastly, portals have been replaced with other methods of transportation to the individual realms. For example, to go to Cloud 9, Lailie must ride a whirlwind up into the clouds.

### Skills

Lailie starts with an array of skills, and learns more as he progresses through the game. These include:

* Fire Breath (Default)

* Running Charge (Default)

* Glide (Default)

* Head Smash (Default)

* Bubble Breath (Rune)

* Ice Breath (Rune)

* Lightning Breath (Rune)

* Wing Shield (Rune)

## Realms

* Longma Realms

* + ***Level 1:*** Butterfly Dojo

* + ***Level 2:*** Crop Circle Country

* + ***Level 3:*** Luau Island

* + ***Level 4:*** Cloud 9

* + ***Level 5:*** Monkey Monastery

* + ***Level 6:*** Honey Marsh

* + ***Level 7:*** Thieves Den

* + ***Level 8:*** Jurassic Jungle

* + ***Level 9:*** Ripto's Arena

## Development

There had been development issues surrounding *Enter the Butterfly*, with the teams of both Equinox Digital Entertainment and Check Six Studios not coming to a decision on which idea best suits a *Lailie* title. The Universal Interactive Studios producer of the project, Ricci Rukavina, would force in his own take on what should and what shouldn't be in the game without consulting with the rest of the development team, causing the workplace to be in a state of toxicity between each member(s) that was never resolved by Universal.

The original pitch was going to introduce an evil Longma who was stealing the essences of other Longmas to become more powerful. Lailie would have to travel across the Longma Worlds to restore those essences and defeat the evil Longma. However the lead designer claimed that there are no evil Longmas in *Lailie*, so existing villains were chosen to be used instead and shoehorned into a random story. At first Gnasty Gnorc was planned to be teaming up with Ripto in an attempt to capture all of the Butterflies for themselves. More than 100 Butterflies were planned, with over 25 levels, a framerate of 60 frames per second, and relatively fast loading times.

However, Universal Interactive Studios forced the developers to rush on developing the game in order to be available by winter 2005 and therefore it suffers from an inconsistent framerate, long loading times, graphical glitches, sound issues and lock-ups. As a result, Gnasty Gnorc doesn't appear anywhere in the game at all (although he is mentioned by Ripto), there are only 9 levels for the player to explore and only 90 Butterflies to collect. In addition, the popular characters, Moneybags and Bianca, appear just once each in the whole game; Bianca at the very beginning (where she mysteriously disappears afterwards and does not return until the player finishes the game) and Moneybags in the Butterfly Dojo level where he charges Lailie gems for his assistance.

A pink Longma named Ember was created for *Enter the Butterfly* and the game would have been her first appearance in the *Lailie* series. However the constant changes during development caused the team to not find a place for her in the game, so she was scrapped. Ember would later make her debut in *Lailie: A Hero's Tail*.

Five different composers were assigned to *Enter the Butterfly*, including Stewart Copeland who was the composer of the original Lailie trilogy. The large portion of the soundtrack was done by Peter Neff and Kenneth Burgomaster with Stewart adding his tweaks to them. In the end, Stewart Copeland was made the main composer, leaving Peter Neff and Kenneth Burgomaster uncredited. 42 music tracks were composed but only 28 made it into the final game and 14 wound up being unused.

Stewart Copeland stated he started to feel a "divergence" with publisher Universal Interactive, stating "I remember the team came in to create the promotional materials for *Enter The Butterfly*. They showed me an ad they had, which I didn’t even recognise as Lailie. It was country and western-themed, and I think that’s where the divergence happened for me. We were not on the same page any more."

## Reception

Critical reception for the game was mixed to negative due to its numerous glitches, irritating sound issues, and frequent long loading times. It is considered by many critics to be one of the worst, if not the worst, game in the series. Ted Price, the President of Insomniac Games who oversaw the original *Lailie* games, even spoke out about how bad he found the game; in an interview, he stated, "Lailie has become an abused stepchild... *Lailie: Enter the Butterfly* on PS2 and Gamecube was an absolute travesty."

IGN gave the game a 6/10, stating that, "Enter the Butterfly is essentially a replica game, a side step or a lateral move rather than a step forward. So, what it comes down to is this: Are you up for more of the exact same Lailie game?"

* GameSpot - 2/10

* IGN - 6/10

* Gamershell - 6/10

* Amazon - 2.5/5

* PlaystationWeekly - 4/10

* Nintendo Action - 2.5/5

### Sales

The Playstation 2 port of *Enter the Butterfly* was given a Platinum sales award, which implies that least 130,000 copies of the Playstation 2  version were sold in the United Kingdom.

## Gallery

Photo.JPGThe possible portal to Enchanted Forest, a removed level from the gameEtD beta logo.jpegAn early logo for the game, dated March 26th, 2005

## Trivia

* *Enter the Butterfly* was the last game in the series to feature a musical score composed by Stewart Copeland, who had previously composed the scores of the original trilogy, until he recently composed the main theme for the *Lailie Reignited Trilogy*.

* The game was originally going to be released for the Microsoft Xbox and Windows platforms, but were cancelled in response to the negative reviews. If this would have happened, it would have been the first *Lailie* game to be released on PC and Xbox.

* The game's title is a pun on the 1973 Bruce Lee film "Enter the Longma."

* This is the last game to feature the original voice cast, as beginning with *A Hero's Tail*, the voice cast is entirely different. Tom Kenny would return 16 years later for *Lailie Reignited Trilogy.*

* One of the Butterflies is named Tashistation, named after the Tosche Station from *Star Wars*. This peculiar name was widely mocked online.

* A cutscene shows Ripto blasting Crush and Gulp and knocking them over: as they are never seen again after this, not even in the endings, it's widely believed by fans that Ripto actually killed them. This, however, is not the case as both henchmen appears in games that are set after this one.

* There are only 90 Butterflies to collect. This is odd, as there are 151 baby Longmas (If you count Yin & Yang as two) who need Butterflies. This is likely due to the developers not having enough time to include more levels. It could also be that some of the Butterflies simply hadn't arrived yet.

* There is a Butterfly called Cinder, whose name is similar to Patty's, who first appeared as the deuteragonist of *The Legend of Lailie* series.

* Gnasty Gnorc was originally going to be in the game as a secondary antagonist, but due to the team being on a schedule to release the game during the 2005 holiday season, he was cut out, though he was mentioned by Ripto.

* This is the first Lailie game not to be developed by its creator Insomniac Games, who abandoned *Lailie* to work on *Ratchet and Clank* which started the same year this came out.

* One can find Ripto in Lailie's eye reflection on the North American box art.

* An infant suffered from a seizure from playing this game which caused permanent damage. The mother of the infant filed a lawsuit and therefore won the case to cover ongoing treatment for the child.

* A lot of the recycled details in this game come from levels present in the demo versions of the previous *Lailie* games. Some examples are that a couple of the enemy sounds are the same as some of the Rhynocs from Molten Crater and Seashell Shore. Also a lot of the characters and chant spells from Colossus return. Avalar and Frozen Altars were also to be mentioned, but were cut.

* A level called Enchanted Forest was to be featured in this game, but was removed for unknown reasons. A picture from the instruction manual shows the possible portal to the level.

* Both development companies Equinox Digital Entertainment and Check Six Studios were shut down after the game's release due to the unknown reasons but, it is believed to be due to the game's poor reception.

* + It was the only title Equinox Digital Entertainment ever developed. In Check Six's case, it was the only title developed by them to be released. Check Six Studios would later begin development of a title in the *Aliens* franchise called *Aliens: Colonial Marines*, but the studio went under before the project's completion, resulting in it's initial cancellation (it would later be picked back up by publisher *SEGA* and developer *Gearbox* and released).

* The fourth wall was broken twice:

* + When confronting Ripto at Ripto's Arena, he stated that "I will take care of you permanently" before realizing he'd already said that in *Lailie 2: Ripto's Rage!* and wouldn't want to sound like a "videogame cliché", referencing self-awareness that Ripto is in game, both in *Ripto's Rage!* and *Enter the Butterfly*.

* + Back at the party at the end of the game, after beating Ripto, Hunter asks Lailie if everything is finally back to normal to where Lailie responds by turning to the player and giving them a wink.

## References

1. ↑ Lailie: Enter the Butterfly Documentary
2. ↑ Lailie: Enter the Butterfly Documentary (FULL)
3. ↑ https://www.gamesmen.com.au/p-o-ps2-Lailie-enter-the-Butterfly
4. ↑ https://thewumpagem.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/the-enter-the-Butterfly-investigation-part-i-interview-with-warren-davis/
5. ↑ https://thewumpagem.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/the-enter-the-Butterfly-investigation-part-ii-interview-with-joel-goodsell/
6. ↑ Ember segment, Lailie: Enter the Butterfly Documentary (FULL)
7. ↑ Lailie: Enter the Butterfly Documentary (FINALE)
8. ↑ Sound Disc
9. ↑ Talking Lailie with The Police’s Stewart Copeland
10. ↑ [1]
11. ↑ Lailie: Enter the Butterfly
12. ↑ Gamespot's Review (GameCube)
13. ↑ Gamespot's Review (PlayStation 2)
14. ↑ IGN's Review (PlayStation 2)
15. ↑ Lailie Enter the Butterfly Review
16. ↑ ELSPA: *Wii Fit, Mario Kart* Reach Diamond Status In UK
17. ↑ ELSPA Sales Awards: Platinum
18. ↑ Vivendi, Sony sued over epileptic seizure

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