Using the example of the 2015 remaster of Legend of Kay Anniversary.
Platformer again. Something has really struck me about them lately. I bet that I will replay them again and for a long time I will not touch the genre with a ten-meter stick. Ahem. At one time I was eager to try to beat this game on PS2, but I ended up waiting until it was ported to PC. Realizing that this time the signal from Space had already arrived, I did not delay and got acquainted with Legend of Kay already there.
Legend of Kay is a game from the unremarkable German studio Neon Software, which has specialized in games licensed for portable consoles from Nintendo for almost its entire adult life. Finding themselves in the 2000s under the wing of JoWooD, they apparently decided to break the vicious circle and made an attempt to conquer the market of stationary consoles with a three-dimensional hybrid of a platformer and an arena slasher. This attempt was the last for Neon Software, because.To. due to financial difficulties that arose after the release of the game, JoWooD studio disbanded. Years later, Legend of Kay has returned in the form of a port for the main current generation consoles, as well as for PC. That’s what we’ll try now.
To put it briefly and to the point, Legend of Kay Anniversary is an okay game. Not great, not terrible, just okay. It would seem that there are furry animals, and a Far Eastern fantasy setting, and a wonderful soundtrack from Jake Kaufman, this very setting in some places perfectly complements it, but, as they say, “they didn’t make it”. Almost every key aspect of the game has some kind of flaw that prevents you from getting as much fun out of it as Legend of Kay could provide. Well, it’s time to plunge into the game again and literally walk through it from beginning to end, t.To. a dry listing of pros and cons will not lead to anything good in this case.
Once upon a time, on the Yenchin Islands, all the peoples: cats, hares, frogs and pandas lived in peace and harmony, following the philosophy of the Way. But with each subsequent generation, the attitude towards traditions became more and more disregardful, as a result, the teaching about the Path from a way of life turned into a fairy tale from the distant past, and peoples lost their spiritual connection with each other and became isolated in themselves. All this led to the fact that the scattered nations were not ready for the attack of warlike gorillas supported by alchemist rats, and they themselves were unable to oppose anything to them. From this moment begins the story of the cat Kay, learning martial arts from an elderly master, who was a living legend in his youth, and now constantly drinks bottles. At the same time, gorillas are trying to come to power on legitimate terms, guaranteeing the snickering feline population protection from any external threats. At first, Kay tolerated the uninvited guests, but when his teacher’s school was closed on false accusations of preparing an uprising, Kay, seeing the complete reluctance of the “master” to somehow counteract this, decides that he’s had enough, steals his teacher’s sword and goes to war against foreign invaders. But I’m already getting a little ahead of myself, since we still have time to catch the last hours of peaceful life.
The game begins very promisingly: you are immediately given a small village to explore and gain first management skills, and all cut-scenes significant to the plot are presented in the form of a voice-over comic. Kay, for whom we have to play, is free to enter almost every house, communicate with everyone he meets, and even receive optional quests, for the completion of which he can reasonably expect gifts of varying degrees of value. But you will quickly understand that the whole village is one big tutorial in which you will not be allowed to take a step on your own. Moreover, the tutorial is fully voiced and – worst of all – non-rewindable! No joke, every possible action, every new attack and every acrobatic move is chewed over in entire paragraphs. The culmination of the developers’ disrespect for the mental abilities of players is learning to ride wild boars: everything that can be explained is explained by a huge voiced treatise, which, moreover, makes no sense at all, because.To. all the necessary control tips will still appear on the screen. Well, at least the damn beautiful music from Jake Kaufman smooths out all this hassle.
The Legend of Kay soundtrack, on the one hand, is a fairly typical example of background support for the corresponding Far Eastern setting. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to call game music inexpressive. The game’s locations are literally saturated with compositions one more beautiful than the other, the music so successfully creates the atmosphere and breathes life into the environment! Moments of calm are accompanied by very beautiful and shimmering oriental melodies, the gloomy and uncomfortable environment is supported by disturbing strings and evokes in the brain an associative mixture of MediEvil, Evil Twin and even a little Gothic by Kai Rosenkrantz, and during battles copper comes to the foreground. The recipe, as you can see, is standard, but damn, how well did the soundtrack fit into the game?.
And you know what? It still hasn’t come out anywhere! Neither on physical media, nor in digital distribution services – nowhere! If you want to listen to it outside of the game, either hope that the links to the gamerip on the Internet are still alive, or dig up the disc yourself. Considering that Jake does not hesitate to publish his works on bandcamp for download, it is doubly strange to see that even the re-release of the game did not become a compelling reason to post music from it somewhere. I don’t rule out that the rights to the music are owned by someone from Neon Software, but then I would address the same claims to them.
Everything seems to have been https://pinkribbonbingocasinoonline.co.uk/mobile-app/ said, now we can return to the main part. At the end of the tutorial, which seemed simply endless, Kay ends up with the hares, who have already managed to fully appreciate the character of gorillas and rats. Well, there will be someone to test the local combat system to which we are finally allowed. At first, Kay is armed only with a sword, but one of them is enough to keep the player from getting bored, since there are enough techniques for using it. There are regular combos, there is a jumping attack, there is an uppercut from a crouch, there is an enhanced jump from the same crouch, which can be used to reach higher platforms, and to perform a technique that literally presses enemies into the ground when hit, there is an attack on the run, there is an acrobatic “wrapping” behind the enemy’s back, there is even a grab, and the last two techniques will appear in the arsenal only after special training.
Of course, there is also a block, the inability to use which at a difficulty level higher than normal can quickly end the game. The controls are scattered across the controller surprisingly well: the character is controlled perfectly, and the techniques do not require complicated combinations. There is only one small drawback – the game remembers the buttons pressed too well. Imagine the situation: the enemy knocked Kay to the floor with a powerful blow, Kay lies fainting for a second or two, comes to his senses, gets up and immediately hits the empty air in front of him. Why did this happen? But because you pressed the attack button when the hero could no longer perform it, but the game remembered the selected action and waited for the moment when Kay could perform it. Despite the fact that in particularly large messes even this “blind” attack can sometimes hit the target, such spontaneity really hits the nerves.
Although enemies can withstand entire series of blows, Kei cannot boast of the same, having from the very beginning only four hearts and a couple of extra lives. One missed hit in most cases is equal to one heart, but especially powerful enemies at a high level of difficulty can reset their health indicator much faster, so it’s worth taking care of pumping it up. For completing quests, for money in stores and from especially well hidden chests you can get t.n. “Heart Container”, which adds an extra heart to the overall score, so if you want to make it easier for yourself to further advance in the game, be a plug for every barrel. Also, over time, you will begin to come across armor that takes several hits and then breaks. When you have extra money, it is better to buy it, because.To. there may not be enough first aid kits for all occasions, and they are not much cheaper than armor.
In general, the arsenal of additional items is quite extensive, despite all their secondary nature. In addition to the banal health and mana replenishers, which will be discussed a little later, as well as additional lives, there are such instances as a berserker potion, which sets the sword on fire and allows Kay to break through any block and cause increased damage, a jar with hornets that attack all enemies in sight when used, as well as a kind of demonic potion that shows the gates leading literally to hell. These gates are something like bonus stages where you can score a lot of points, but. For regular bonuses they look peculiar. There are also bombs that can not only punish enemies, but also blow up walls in some places, so it’s better to always carry one or two of these things with you.
The second way to put your enemies in their place is magic. True, its implementation in the game is completely trivial – hold down the attack button for a while and strike everyone who stands nearby with lightning. Comparable to using bombs in those shmups where they exist. One such lightning bolt costs five mana points, which is extremely high and will not allow you to abuse magic throughout almost the entire game, because.To. the hero starts with only four units and receives the coveted fifth during that very initial tutorial. Mana is pumped up in the same way as health – by finding the appropriate power-ups, so don’t be lazy to look into all suspicious corners.
The only thing that’s a little frustrating is that most of the battles in the game take place in improvised “arenas”, where the hero is locked up with his enemies. There is nothing wrong with this, but after the hundredth time this structure begins to tire, and you most likely will not be allowed to simply avoid an unwanted battle.
The next thing you will notice after the battle is the surprisingly strange system for earning points for such a game. Yes, the developers were clearly too clever with it, I even find it difficult to describe it in words. I’ll try to put it briefly: the player receives points for collecting money and multi-colored crystals, collecting crystals of the same color increases the points collection multiplier, but a randomly taken crystal of a different color resets the multiplier, and the multiplier is also reset automatically after a long period of inactivity, and it is maintained by collecting money and crystals. It seems to be easy, but for a banal collection of points it’s somehow pretentious. It would seem why this is necessary at all, but if you intend to open all the bonus materials included in the game by the developers, then you will have to get used to the points system.
By the time you go to the dragon’s lair, the overabundance of accents in the voice acting of the characters can lead to a seizure. Squeaky rats, lisping hares, slowly bassing gorillas – that’s okay, but a dragon with an Australian accent?! Oh my god. It’s as if someone took on the voice acting of Chrono Cross, where there were also a lot of accents for no one knows why. The only thing worse than this is the constant puns and jokes. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases they are simply not funny. But even this gives in to what awaits you next. Get ready, the main bald spot of the whole game is the swamp level populated by frogs!
This is a fierce drag, entirely consisting of shades of green and brown, and nothing can save it: neither new enemies, nor new weapons, which are claws, nor new gimmicks, nor atmospheric compositions in the background. The only thing that brightens up your stay in this gray-brown-raspberry place is a visit to the underground labyrinths, which, although linear in themselves, just require a little running back and forth, are done damn well. However, due to the fact that this level is terribly long and slow, it feels like half the entire game consists of swamps alone. Those who are also not impressed by this green porridge are advised to simply endure it, fortunately in the future the city of pandas awaits, where they will give you the third and final weapon – a hammer!
And now about the tasty stuff – about additional weapons. Claws are a pretty funny thing, characterized by fast, deadly attacks and very long combos that can literally crush an unprepared enemy. The claws have only one drawback, but it is because of this that the weapon is not as effective as we would like – the claws do not penetrate armor. At all. Considering that almost all large enemies by that time are already dressed in steel from head to toe, there is practically no one to use claws on. Spiders, bees and other small animals are the only ones they can be effective against. A war hammer is a different matter entirely. This is a powerful, but difficult to use weapon with extremely slow combinations that faster enemies will constantly shoot down, but in the hands of a master it is devastating. If you learn how to properly combine uppercut sweeps and high jump strikes, the hammer may well become your favorite weapon in the game.
Having seen enough of the dedication with which the hero swings all three types of weapons, one comes to understand how much effort was put into the character’s animation. Not a single NPC in the game can boast of such elaboration. Moreover, this elaboration sometimes seems even a little unnecessary! A couple of examples:
If Kay goes down the spiral staircase for a long time without stopping, then at the end he begins to feel dizzy;
If the hero falls into boiling lava, then he drowns in it, holding his fist up with his thumb raised. I couldn’t think of a better reference than this;
And so on and so on. It’s nice that the guys from Neon Software really realized that it makes sense to detail the main character, who takes up 99% of the screen time, so that the players don’t get bored with him.
Meanwhile, Kay is part of the rebel organization Avalanche (uh-uh. Well, at least this is a funny reference) I’m already ready to go to the volcanic island of La-vu, where the leaders of the invaders settled, and give them the last battle. However, even without the help of the hero, the alliance of rats and gorillas is already bursting at the seams and is overgrown with internal intrigues.
Unfortunately, all hints of the enemies’ crumbling friendship disappear somewhere with Kei’s arrival at the site of the final battle. The game doesn’t have much of a plot, but even so, the authors managed to create a feeling of haste and understatement at the end. And this applies not only to conflict between enemies. The same philosophy of the Path is sometimes remembered in the plot, then forgotten again and in the end simply leads nowhere. The villains’ motivations also seem more ambitious, but in reality they are nothing special.
The final boss is a living reflection of all this chaos. I won’t describe it because you just have to see it. I don’t know, maybe I’m just finding fault with the plot, which is simply not for my age and all that, but it’s a little disappointing to see that for such a complete world they made such a disjointed story. There is a feeling that the developers are exhausted after coming up with all the puns embedded in the characters’ lines, and did not have enough strength or time for the rest.
And it won’t be enough anymore, as Legend of Kay has come to its not entirely logical, but conclusion. What can we say in the end?? The platforming is vigorous, the combat system is simple, but interesting and has some nuances that are revealed after liters of sweat and blood spent in particularly difficult moments, the soundtrack from Jake Kaufman, which should not raise questions, the plot. He simply doesn’t take himself seriously, so he may not live up to expectations.