KARAKARA - 22/52

    Me and Japanese media have what could be called a complicated relationship.  This doesn’t exactly apply to gaming, as a majority of my favorite games of all time were designed over in Japan, but more so to Japanese film and television, a subject which surprisingly holds more relevance to this gaming post than anything.  A lot of my peers jumped onto the anime train due to the boom of anime dub for children, preteens, and teenagers that started around the mid-90s and is still going to this day, but I honestly never saw the appeal. As I’ve discovered recently, it’s likely due to the fact that I don’t get along with a lot of Japanese storytelling tropes, especially in terms of the action genre.  Really, I didn’t start getting into anime until I started following the work of one Jacob Chapman in mid-2010, where his reviews managed to show me a lot of anime, primarily non-action, that I ended up really digging. And after a while, I joined in on his streams as well where he would normally host some manner of Pokemon trivia, show off a couple episodes of Case Closed and would play Fire Emblem and visual novels.  And before I started watching his streams, I probably would’ve scoffed at the visual novel genre. But, I had to admit, I was strangely hooked. But much like what happened with PushingUpRoses and Quest for Glory, I was terrible and didn’t get around to trying the VN genre for myself until very recently. Which brings us to today’s subject, KARAKARA. Consider this me officially coming out as weeb trash.

    KARAKARA is set in a world ravaged by some unknown disaster.  Desert stretches as far as the eye can see. Civilization has survived, but in small pockets that get increasingly smaller by the day.  Humanity is on its last legs, with recognizable humans being the minority and human/animal hybrids known as ‘The Others’ vastly outnumbering those original humans.  Technology is still present, but the knowledge to repair it and rebuild it has long since been lost. And that’s not even mentioning the rumors of the supernatural that have been being kicked around by the few vestiges of society that did survive.  It’s a world rocked ready to fall completely apart at any moment. So anyway, this game is about owning a diner with your anime cat-girl girlfriend.

For the record, this is the only image of Cullen related to the game that I could find that wasn't just gameplay.

AMINEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

    Specifically, you take the role of one Leon Laird, one of the last full-blooded humans on Earth.  Leon is the owner of a diner, where he also serves as chef while his friend and roommate, Lucia Haynes, an anime cat girl, serves as the waitress.  From the moment we first meet these two, the tension is clearly present but they’ve let their chance to talk to each other about becoming more long since pass so now there’s just an awkward cloud hanging over the two of them.  Leon’s life is pretty normal considering, you know, the apocalypse happened, working at the diner, running deliveries, chatting to his other best friend, an anime dog girl, police officer and archaeologist Cullen Lancaster, until one day when Leon and Lucia are out for a drive, they find another anime dog girl lying out in the middle of the desert unconscious, one Aisia Mayfield.  After awakening her, they bring her back to the diner and offer her employment and a place to stay. Will this stranger entering Leon and Lucia’s lives finally be the catalyst they need to take the next step in their relationship? Will they be able to keep the diner afloat? And what about the impending threat of vampires roaming the desert at night? Could this game possibly get any weirder?

Also, there's a pupper in this game.  Definitely forgot to mention that.

    So, if you couldn’t tell, there’s kind of a severe tonal dissonance between the main story, a love triangle between a human, a cat-girl and a dog-girl, and whatever is going on out in the Wasteland.  This is admittedly a little off-putting at first, especially since they keep drawing attention to it over the course of the game, but over time it kind of becomes charming in its absurdity. The game is unabashed in being focused on what is perhaps the least important thing in a post-apocalyptic world, some stupid diner near a city that may or may not have once been San Francisco.  But that also works to its benefit. I feel like any attempt to have a bigger story might have caused KARAKARA to fall apart. This odd slice of life 50s rom-com that just happens to take place in a post-apocalypse with anime cat girls is surprisingly compelling and emotional. I was not only into the romantic arc of this game, especially considering it’s incredibly short length, but this world is one I genuinely enjoyed wasting a couple hours in and I wouldn’t be against revisiting it in the near future.

AHHHH.  LOOK AT THE BABY LUCIA!!!

    The characters aid this in a big way.  The entire novel has a very bottle feel so it doesn’t overcrowd the story with too many characters it can’t keep track of.  Besides Leon, who is basically a blank slate for the player to put himself into so he doesn’t get much more than vague personality traits like ‘nice’, and Cullen, who is mostly there to provide exposition and be snarky at Leon because she’s basically his big sister and she can do that, the game only has two characters.  Lucia is the first real face we see in this game. We don’t even know what our generic anime protagonist main looks like until long after we’ve met Lucia. She’s the more stern and mature of the two in terms of personality, acting as sort of a role model for Aisia as well as being the one who manages customer and employee input for Leon while he does the books.  However, she’s the more emotionally immature of the two, being incredibly shy and getting embarrassed easily, as well as being more fearful than her friends of change and intimacy. And thunderstorms. And ghosts. You very quickly get the idea from her that she’s incredibly distant emotionally, either not wanting her relationship with Leon to change despite her obvious feelings as well as being worried too much about the consequences that may arise from Leon and her finally getting together.  Of the two, I’d say I personally like Lucia more because she’s more human and relatable.

Dat panty shot tho.  Guess this review is rated T now.

    That, of course, isn’t to say that Aisia is bad.  Far from it, Aisia is hard to hate. She has a personality akin to an excited puppy, going at the world with raw energy and love and not thinking any of it through.  There’s an interesting storytelling idea prominently featured in Aesop’s works amongst others that writing characters as an animal or having animal-like features aids the audience in being able to easily relate their personalities to the character without needing to go too deep.  KARAKARA uses this to great effect with the sheer difference between Lucia and Aisia’s respective personalities and their respective animal-hybrid features. Aisia is incredibly innocent and naive, seeing nothing wrong with rushing off in random directions as well as having this newfound family of her, Leon and Lucia all sleep in the same bed together. She is, however, far more in-tune with her emotions and is a complete and total optimist about everything.  She clams up way more than Lucia though, surprisingly. Aisia keeps a lot of secrets about herself, focusing far more on others and their problems instead. I won’t tell you those secrets because it’s a major plot twist and integral to the best scene in the game. I genuinely like both of these girls quite a lot and while Lucia is my favorite it’s very close and I’m glad the trio basically ends up in a polyamorous relationship by the end so I never had to choose one over the other.

This is it.  This is their relationship in one image.

    I feel it’s important to mention the fact that I was playing the “all-ages” Steam release, rather than the 18+ original.  Having looked up the differences, the main thing that is notable about the Steam release is that all of the sex scenes are removed as well as most of the nudity, to create something that would get a hard T for Teen Rating by the ESRB for some sexual content, suggestive themes, and only partial nudity.  Hooray for ratings technicalities. Honestly, I wouldn’t have even noticed they were gone if it wasn’t so blatant where they were supposed to go. Near the end of the first part, Leon and Lucia are being forced to finally get intimate by Aisia because I guess if the sexual tension there was any thicker, she would be unable to breathe.  The release I have cuts to black after they start getting close and then when it fades back in, it’s very clear that they were up all night doing something. And that something was not playing their Police Quest-esque video game. But these scenes also don’t add anything to the actual emotional core of the game, so it’s not like you’re losing anything if you’re here for the story.

No gameplay so have boobs.  Guess this review is rated M now. 

    So, let’s talk about gameplay.  KARAKARA doesn’t have any of that.  I admittedly don’t have a lot of experience in the visual novel genre, but from what I’ve seen, I don’t think any of them are as literal about it as KARAKARA.  You’re here watching this story and nothing else. This is where I can see KARAKARA being divisive. It’s very strictly down to whether or not you enjoy the story at that point and, while the reaction to KARAKARA has been overwhelmingly positive, this genre is already very much not everyone’s cup of tea and this genre minus dialogue options and character choices definitely seems like something a lot of people would not be into.  And I get it. But if this isn’t enough to dissuade you and anything I’ve been saying this entire time has been interesting to you for any reason, I highly recommend playing through it. Also, before you complain, this blog series is mine and I dictate what qualifies as a game for the 52.

    I bought KARAKARA as part of a Humble Bundle and, as with most of the games I got via Humble Bundle, I had no idea what to expect.  And after finding out it was a visual novel, I was expecting to either be incredibly uncomfortable talking about it or just riffing on it the entire time.  What I got instead was a nice little romance in a dull locale and an interesting world to just disappear into for a little while. And I do mean little, the game is exceptionally short and, while I did really enjoy it, I recommend not paying full price for it.  My entire playthrough was just under 2 hours and, while the game does come with its own official OST which is nice, I feel like if I had paid the $10 for it instead of paying the relatively smaller $1 by getting it as a huge package on Humble, I would’ve been a little sourer on it.  As it stands though, KARAKARA is really good and I’m so down to play the sequel come next year. I hope you enjoyed this look at KARAKARA and we’ll be back next time to rock and roll with Brutal Legend. It may not be the greatest game in the world, but it is at least a tribute.

Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream - 21/52

      There were a lot of contributing factors to my decision to purchase a Wii back in 2007.  I was super into the gameplay possibilities that motion control, as much as it often didn’t work as intended, it was the place where I was going to be able to play the new Mario and Zelda games and the fact that I was able to keep my Gamecube favorites around for a little while didn’t hurt either.  It would even end up being the only home console I bought that entire generation and still ranks as one of my best times with a game console ever. But the most important thing to me was the birth of the Virtual Console. Around the time the Wii was dominating sales charts, I was making my foray into the world of the internet for the first time, specifically gaming sites like GameTrailers and early YouTube.  As a result, I was discovering all these games that came out before my time that I really wanted to play. So the idea of a digital service where I could buy these games very easily was a must have to me, especially since this was way before I discovered emulation. Today’s subject is one of the first I ever bought, a classic NES title, though unfortunately not the same version that most people remember, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream.

    You gotta love the NES era of gaming where only, like, three games had stories total and the rest just threw you straight into the middle of everything and said ‘figure it out yourself’.  Punch-Out!! is very much in this vain, though it’s not like the game is very hard to figure out. It’s your traditional boxing story. Young, fresh-faced kid with dreams of being the best.  Old former champ breaking his retirement to train this kid because he believes. A series of bigger, stronger and more antagonistic opponents to fight. It’s formulaic, yes, but it’s a good formula.  In Punch-Out’s specific case, you play as a young boxer by the name of Little Mac, an exceptionally short individual who dreams of conquering the World Video Boxing Association for his chance to battle the infamous Mike Tyson and/or Mr. Dream.  Along the way he’ll have to defeat a series of colorful and increasingly stereotypical characters that all have very specific ways of fighting that Mac needs to learn in order to overcome them. It’s both a battle of wits and fists.

    So, normally I’d go into my thoughts on the story or dive straight into the mechanics, but I want to do this a little differently this time.  Punch-Out!! is one of the most famous NES games of all time. It has stood the test of time for being a challenging and rewarding fighting/puzzle game hybrid that is unlike anything to be released before it or to be released since.  I fully understand and respect why people love this game. In fact, before I played the Wii reboot of Punch-Out!!, I loved this game too. I’ve probably played Punch-Out!! from the beginning hundreds of times in my attempts to beat it and I used to have a blast with it.  But time and my opinions of what a good game should be have passed since then and I can now say, without a doubt, I hate the original Punch-Out!! And I feel to fully discuss why, we need to delve more into my personal playthrough than just discussing the game as a whole.  And I want to also make it clear right now that I’m not trying to say that Punch-Out!! is objectively a bad game or anything. I’m the minority here. All I’m trying to do is establish why I think it’s not a good game.

    I’m going to spare you discussing each boxer individually as for the first half of the game they’re pretty inoffensive.  The first five boxers are just pathetically easy and Great Tiger, while he can be tricky for newcomers because he’s, you know, literal magic, he’s pretty simple once you learn him.  Instead, I’m going to talk about the ridiculous spike in difficulty that happens in the Major Circuit title bout against one Bald Bull. Bald Bull throws punches at random that you can’t hope to learn how to block and dodge on your first playthrough.  Bald Bull has an endless series of ramming punches that you need to learn very specific timing in order to stop, or else let yourself get hit by it so you can go back to the vague pattern that he does have. Bald Bull is everything wrong with the back half of this game and why I grew to loathe it as much as I do.  I want to preface my rant by saying that part of this is definitely me. I’m terrible at video games and the setup I was playing with isn’t the setup Punch-Out was designed with. I have a great deal of inconsistent input lag to deal with playing on a rerelease on the WiiU on an HD TV vs. a NES on a CRT as the game was designed with in mind.

    Here’s the thing about that though.  I’ve played the original Punch-Out!! on original hardware on a CRT even.  And I don’t believe the controls are tight enough to justify this kind of game.  The dodging and especially blocking has always felt a little too slow and unresponsive in my opinion.  I don’t feel like my timing ever really matters because the same timing in the same scenario has often produced random results.  The Bald Bull fight is a perfect example of this. Bald Bull’s ramming punches, the ‘Bull Charge’ has a brief moment where you can counter it and get an easy knockdown.  I have done the counter timing the exact same way dozens of times on various versions with maybe a 30% success rate. It might be aging, it might be me being slightly off, but the frequency with which it happens leads me to believe that it’s an issue with the tightness of this game.

    Furthermore, I don’t agree with artificially skewed difficulty in any sense.  I feel a lot of NES game have aged very poorly because of how their difficulty is increased to justify purchase, as without difficulty, many of them are roughly 1-3 hours long and could be beaten by rental.  And I get that, totally. I just don’t like how it has endured as some sort of standard for how games should be in terms of difficulty. I don’t enjoy the way a lot of classic games also spike in difficulty, especially when they had a fair sense of progression up to that point.  It doesn’t feel fun or rewarding to me to play a game with this kind of skewed difficulty. Though that’s definitely me being a younger gamer who grew up spoiled on easier games, so I don’t begrudge you for feeling like I’m just whining or if you disagree with me.

    But really, all of this would be ignorable if I was having any amount of fun with the game.  I mean, I don’t necessarily like the way Platinum Studios makes games but I still have a ton of fun with Bayonetta.  And this is the issue. I don’t have fun with the original Punch-Out!! It feels like kind of a slog to get through. I can’t fully put my finger on why that is, just ‘not having fun’ is something that’s hard to describe in detail.  But that’s what I’ve felt about it for years now. I don’t enjoy this game and quite honestly I’m glad to have beaten it so I never have to play it again.

    Look, I’m not the person to ask about Punch-Out!! clearly.  Lots of people love this game and I’m not trying to dissuade you from playing it if you haven’t already.  Personally, I’d look towards the Wii reboot myself, as I feel like it captures the basic essence of this game while being fairer and more fun.  But if you’d like to check this one out, go ahead. You’ll probably enjoy it even if I didn’t. I hope you enjoyed my look at Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, and we’ll be back next time with a game that may or may not be a dating sim, KARAKARA.