Kage no Densetsu -The Legend of Kage 2-
By Alex Kierkegaard / March 18, 2009
Sakura leaves gently floating down, a few shamisen notes -- what a wonderful opening scene. Vintage 16-bit style. If only I could say likewise for the rest of the game. It was developed by Lancarse,
who clearly love old-school games and are very capable in making them, but who haven't yet managed to fully capture those two things that made
them great above all else: a complete lack of handholding and a ruthless, unapologetic level of challenge. The otherwise excellent Sekaiju no Meikyuu at least was challenging, though far too accessible and streamlined for its own good, thus depriving itself of part of the mystery
and aloofness on which dungeon crawlers of old thrived; but this game is neither. It is stupidly easy. You have a retardedly huge lifebar. Dying mid-stage sends you barely ten screens back and nets you
full life and magic -- and you have infinite lives. And on top of all that -- for god's sake -- you can simply run past 90% of the enemies in every stage, not to mention that
there's auto-saving after every stage so you'll hardly ever have to run past the same enemies twice.
I should have ended the review right here but I'll keep going because a) there's so much else to admire in this game it would be unfair not to, b) I had a blast the first couple hours despite everything, and c) there's so few games like this coming out anymore that the ones that do deserve the extra attention.
The reason I enjoyed the first few stages so much was that I'd never played the original Kage before (nor Fudou Myouou Den, the Famicom-exclusive sequel of sorts -- though I've played both since), so the high-flying tree-hopping action was new to me. And then I was blown away by all the moves you can pull off right from the start: running, double-jumping, air dashing, shuriken-throwing upwards as well as downwards, or running up walls while doing any of the above -- there's so many moves in this games and they link up with each other so naturally that I found myself trying a few standard command moves just in case (with no luck of course, but just think of the possibilities: fireballs and dragon punches in a side-scroller -- how awesome would that be? And boss fights that play like a versus game! Dream on, Alex). The game felt at first as great as I'd imagine a modern 2D Dracula game would feel if you removed all the stupid grinding and backtracking: it felt like an entirely modern, extremely evolved cross between Strider Hiryuu and The Super Shinobi, and I couldn't be happier.
But yeah, it also felt a bit like Musashi Ganryuki (1999), what with the wide-open and sparsely-populated stages that go on forever without giving you much of a reason to try and fully explore them, and substituting for the Shinobi games' meticulously designed enemy placement with infinitely re-spawning enemies that seem to come at you as if according to an extremely predictable high-school level algebraic equation. Very bland level design in other words, though that's not really something I can hold entirely against Lancarse because the same is true of the first Kage. The stupid (and stupidly huge) lifebar is all their work though, since neither of the Kage games had it -- barring of course Demon Sword, Fudou Myouou Den's hilariously bastardized US version.
Again, it's not that the lifebar itself is a faux pas in a game like this -- both Strider and The Super Shinobi had one and were not the least worse off because of it -- but when it's so ridiculously huge (see screen, lol) and combined with all the other concessions to the mythical modern "average gamer", it renders the whole exercise pointless. Lancarse was clearly trying to marry the intensity of those old action games with the modern "save state" mentality, but this seems to be a dead-end; it always seems to lead to drawn-out, tedious, bloated games. This could be otherwise, and there are a handful of modern action games which have achieved this (Devil May Cry, PS2 Shinobi, Xbox Ninja Gaiden); but then the success of the entire exercise hinges on the quality and variety of the stages and enemies (i.e. you need a huge variety of BOTH to keep the game feeling fresh for six- to eight-hour playthroughs, as opposed to the arcade-style standard of about an hour or so), and it seems no one is willing to go to such lengths for a 2D game, whose expected profits could never rise above whatever level it is that's necessary to amply reward the required investment.
In the absence then of the resources to go the Super Mario World route, there's only one way these games should be designed: short, tight, extremely difficult and forcing the player to go through them in one sitting (in short: the arcade way). And Kage 2 fails in every single one of these criteria.
But, like I said, it succeeds in its extremely versatile fighting engine, which every fan of the genre should at one point experience (to see what's possible one day when used in a game with proper challenge); in some of the very inventive boss fights, a few of which represent the only real challenge to be found in the game, and require decent aerial skills to overcome (though unfortunately others can be slashed to death before your lifebar's empty -- and they are the biggest, most cool-looking ones); in the charming 2D pixel art, which, though it doesn't come anywhere near the old classics (nor the modern Draculas either), still trounces most of the crap we are used to getting in this genre these days (see Ninja Five-O, et al.); and finally in the extremely vertical nature of the action, made possible by the dual DS screens (though the braindead level design and enemy placement never properly exploit it, not to mention that the use of the gap between the screens as in-game playing area is beyond the bounds of what I considered possible from human stupidity -- it reaches out to previously unimagined, perhaps non-human, levels of stupidity (it also means, by the way, that we'll never be able to play this game on a single screen with no gap via an emulator)).
For every aspect of the game I loved, basically, there was another one I hated:
Loved:
-Lots of cool skills as in the Dracula games, without the grinding and the backtracking
-Great attention to detail (deflect shuriken, etc.)
-Some cool set-pieces, including tasteful homages to the original
-The rain stage, lightning, general atmosphere
-The music, character portraits, presentation, even the gallery sketches are awesome, and there's a classy
intro to get you in the proper ninja mood, the kind of polish sorely missing from all the modern pretend-old-school-XBLA-retro-artfag cheapo efforts
Hated:
-The lack of decent platforming challenge to make use of all the aerial linkage moves (even the Super Shinobi ripoff waterfall section is a pushover)
-The combo counter which is not really a combo counter
-The lack of a power-up/power-down mechanic (which would have helped motivate a no-hit style of play despite the lifebar)
-The sphere-matching mini-game through which you "discover" new spells (a 100% stylus-based gimmick)
-The bloat that can be seen everywhere: from the stage designs to the cutscenes
...
But enough with the analysis -- when seen as a whole, Kage 2 defines mediocrity in the genre. But it's not the mediocrity that results from a number of individually mediocre aspects -- it comes about by averaging extremes.