Akatori

i was waiting 2 years for this day and finnaly Akatori is here! personally im not fan of this type of game but this game is something else story is awesome music is good mechanics are good graphic is good for me this is one of if not only one game in the past 10 years i truly could recommend from my heart if you thinking about buying then i can tell you its worth truly gem of platform games 10/10

Can't recommend this game, with the possible exception of a steep discount. It's very pretty in places, but there's almost nothing going on. I finished it with 6 hours on record despite leaving it running in the background for a bit. There are two main problems with the game during that runtime. The combat and most enemies are pretty average and uninspired, while most of the bosses are bad. Combat ends up being a bit bland and disappointing. The story also barely exists, with very little relevant dialogue or world-building, and an ending that comes out of nowhere and leaves just as quickly. Everything feels stilted and unearned. The game ends with a scene that I can only imagine is sequel bait, but should have led to the other half (or more) of the game which does not exist. Music and atmosphere are serviceable, but in the end, the game feels like the skeleton of something better. Buy it on sale for a decent ~5-8 hours if you're interested.

I really like metroidvanias and this looked gorgeous so I thought this would be a slam dunk... Nope For full transparancy I am pretty irritated right now but I will try to write an objective review anyway. The game is not fun. I played it for like 4 hours on stream and the writing is pretty annoying. Story is usually never a big thing for me in metroidvanias so that's not really an issue for me. There is a lot of cheap moments where enemies can attack you without even seeing them and the MC is an annoying brat. And devs, if you read this: The discount joke is NOT funny! It was not funny when you saw it the first time and it was NOT funny 4 hours later after every single merchant you encounter... My BIGGEST issue with this game is that you don't have equipment. So the only things you find while exploring are either potions (healing, buff dmg, buff currency gain) or amber (money). It kills the fun of exploring because you find secret areas and it's just either of the two, or both of what I said. I found a chest with a yellow glow around it: Money and potions... Every merchant I've encountered so far sells only potions. ONE merchant sold a max life booster. For me it makes money feel boring. Exploring doesen't feel worth it and more likely just punishes you. Another thing to note that is extremely annoying (to me atleast): While you play you find bells that glow purple, they give you a new ability if you finish that trial. But you can only enter it if you strike it when you have a full chaos bar, you get chaos by defeating enemies. But if you die or rest you loose all chaos. So it makes it into: Do I want to farm chaos to get an ability or skip it? As I said, the art style is absolutly stunning and the music is fine, the rest of the game I just can't vibe with. I don't know if I'll finish this game or not but right now, I need a break...

Well I actually really enjoyed the first hour of the game, mainly because of the visuals, but the more you play, the more you realize that something went wrong... So I checked the reviews after beating the game: Apparently the main dev changed mid project and it really shows. Nothing makes sense, game and level design wise, the last 2 areas come with buggy/awkward mechanics and it really feels like a rushed slop. It also represent itself as an exploration (metroidvania) type of game with the map and all the shortcuts, but theres literally no use for the shortcuts really. You never have a reason to go back beside collecting some cats? Then theres shops that pretty much only sell consumables. Whats the point? If you just use money to buy healing then just give a healing flask/system like in Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. And the "secrets" are just either more money or the cats that dont do anything. The wall jump is really weirdly coded at how it doesnt allow you to grab the same side of a wall again. I know it exists to limit vertical movement but its very unintuitive. The chaos system is weird as well... you are forced to not heal at checkpoints and farm enemies to get chaos to be able to open challenge rooms to get access to cool new moves... why. Bosses at first were challenging since you only start with very limited HP, so it was fun learning them but later on you can just facetank all of the content with alot of HP and the surplus of potions. Another reason why the potion system is not good. But after all of this, thats not even the worst part of the game. The game has easily the worst writing Ive ever seen in a video game. The characters turn a supposedly serious calamity into a joke. You get the feeling that noone really cares and the jokes are just terrible. I finished the game in less than 4 hours. I dont mind short games at all but you cant make a game feel like a metroidvania and then just be a linear 4 hour action platformer... One of the rare cases where I deeply regret supporting an indie game. I can NOT recommend this.

I cannot call "Akatori" a bad game, but it is often tedious to play. Two game systems, namely, cash and chaos energy are only there to make the player spend more time, as both can be easily farmed at the nearest zone transition. (One may say it goes for any resource in any video game, but here you literally farm both just a few steps from the shop/shrine. ) The platforming and swimming are decent, the fights are ok, boss encounters are kind of boring, the story is bare-bones, and the writing is, well, it's easier to provide an example. When the main character finds out that her boyfriend dies, she says, "That's not what I meant when speaking about breaking up", and that's her whole reaction.

５年前からウィッシュリストにいれてました。 まだ１時間程度しかやってないので中途の感想。 でももうやることはないかも。 待望のプレイの感想ですが...。 「思ってたメトロイドヴァニアと違う」 コレに尽きる。 "探索"要素が楽しく無さすぎる...。 隠し通路とかみつけてステータスアップアイテム見つけたりしたかったんですけど、今のところない。 無意味に壁とか壊せないかと攻撃したり、何もなさそうな方向にあえて移動したり、 できるだけジャンプして上の方にカメラ向けて何か無いか見たり。 全部時間の無駄だった。 通貨がポーションしか売ってない店にしか使えないから敵を倒す意味もない。 軽快なアクションと素敵なヴィジュアルは高評価。 あと、ストーリーの日本語ローカライズも怪しくて、機械翻訳ではないけど会話の意味がよくわからない。

It just feels bad to play. Jumping feels bad, platforming feels bad, combat feels bad. Nothing has impact, enemies seem unreponsive in combat, attacks don't feel weighty. Most dialogue windows stay open for way too long and can't be skipped. I got lured in with the nice art, but the enjoyment ends there.

TL:DR; If you like funny dialogue and nice looking pixel art, play this game on the easiest difficulty. Otherwise, don't play it. I only played 3 hours, because the tedium and annoyances got to me. If anyone has played further than me (past the sepent boss) and can confirm that my grievances are taken care of after that point, let me know :). Regular enemy combat is weird. As soon as you start hitting enemies, they go afk and let you combo them to death, meaning regular enemy combat is just rolling up to an enemy and mashing X until they die. This leads to enemy variety not mattering at all. There is a decent spread of enemies, but they are all handled in the exact same way: roll up to them and mash X, and they will never attack you. Flying enemies will often just hover out of range or completely forget you exist. The chaos mechanic is tedious - you'll find a bell, and then you'll find the nearest spot to grind enemies by walking in and out of screen transitions to respawn them until your meter is full. It's pointless. Just make the bells self-contained combat challenges, without the weird grinding mechanic. The actual bell challenges are also just waves of normal enemies that stand around in a large arena and wait for you to roll up to them and mash X. *Spoilers for bosses ahead* The bosses are pretty uninspired. Bear in mind, I didn't fight every boss in the game - i quit after beating the serpent. - The shield tortoise guy is fine as a tutorial boss, although it's confusing that you're actually supposed to hit the shield, not dodge around it and hit him in the back. - The wasp boss is off screen for large portions of the fight. Not because it's doing some mechanic, it simply decided to fly off to the other side of the arena for no reason. This boss also stays out of attack range for long stretches of time, leading to a lot of standing around. - The samurai boss has one threatening attack (the sideways slice), everything else can pretty much be ignored and you just chase him around while hitting him. On my kill, the boss never did the slice attack a single time, and i beat him hitless without trying. - The serpent boss is so slow and boring. Every attack is piss easy to dodge, and they come one by one. At the same time, the boss is immune to damage for most of the fight. This means that the gameplay loop involves standing around, occasionally pressing jump or roll to dodge something, and waiting for the boss to do its *one* attack that makes it vulnerable. It's such a slog. I died multiple times to this boss because i got bored and distracted. * boss spoilers over * The difficulty scaling is off by magnitudes. Higher difficulty seems to just mean that most things do a lot more damage, leading to bosses oneshotting from full hp and most other things 2-shotting. It makes learning rooms and bosses slow and cumbersome, since one mistake means you go back to the last respawn points immediately. On top of this, the potion mechanic is super strange. You can infinitely grind money (but you just get a lot by playing the game normally), and spend it on one-time-use health/damage/whatever potions. The health potions barely matter on higher difficulties (read: a lot of things 1-shot you) Since bosses have so much downtime, you can either gamble on drinking a damage potion while it's unhittable and hope that it lets you hit it before your buff runs out, or you can drink one while the boss is hittable and lose uptime. It's barely worth it to do. Additionally, the one-time-use nature of the potions means that you're incentivized to hold onto them until they matter, but the absurd amount of money you earn makes it so that you can dump on potions in every shop you get to. Did not feel very intuitive. The dialogue is pretty funny at times, and MARVEL-levels of corny at others, but generally enjoyable. The game looks pretty nice, although it was sometimes difficult to identify which assets were part of the background, and which were meant to be interacted with. The movement is alright. You have a lot of options and abilities, but most of the time, the platforming puzzles are trivially easy, so it doesn't really matter. Spike hitboxes are... special, and the game has no hazard respawn mechanic, meaning that certain falls into spikes spell certain death, even from full HP. There are also no real secrets, hidden paths, or goodies behind optional challenges, other than the collectible cats. Sometimes you can do a platforming challenge to get a potion, but you don't need the potions you find lying around, since you have infinite money to just buy them. This way, the game heavily incentivizes taking the most direct path to the next story objective (which is always marked on the map). There is very little route variation, and everything leads in a straight line from A to B. There are way better metroidvanias, platformers, and 2D action games to play for a similar price. Don't waste your money.

I’m not usually a huge fan of games like this, but the difficulty really pulled me in. I love how many different ways there are to kill even the most basic enemy. You can slam them into each other and watch one of them SUFFER! Overall, it’s a pretty solid action game that tests the endurance and resilience of every single cell in your body. I have a feeling my controller isn’t going to survive until the end. What I liked: + Great dialogue. Some parts genuinely made me laugh, while others actually got me interested in finding out what the hell happened. + The visual style is really cute and easy on the eyes. + Adorable cat collectibles. There’s a cat with a hookah, and I WILL find him. + A good variety of enemies that force you to actually think about your combat strategy. + Soulslike mechanics. What I didn’t like: - THOSE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BUGS that jump out from the most unexpected places and bite half your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ face off in one hit. And that’s only on the second-highest difficulty. - The first few bosses could’ve used some more epic music. Just put on the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack and enjoy. - Haven’t found anything else yet… still playing. ------------------------------------------------- Не сильно люблю подобные жанры, но эта игра привлекла сложностью. Мне нравится разнообразие убийства обычного рядового противника, потому что тут их можно сталкивать друг с другом и смотреть как один из них СТРАДАЕТ! В целом неплохой экшен на выносливость и стойкость всех твоих клеток. Чую что до конца игры мой контроллер не доживет Из плюсов: - Хорошие диалоги. Местами я хахакнул, где-то было реально интересно узнать че там случилось - Визуальный стиль довольно милый и привлекательный глазу - Милые коллектоблсы в виде котиков (есть котик с кальяном, я ОБЯЗАТЕЛЬНО ЕГО НАЙДУ) - Разнообразные противники, к которым надо продумывать свою стратегию боя - Соулс лайк система Из минусов: - ЕБУЧИЕ жуки, прыгающие из самых неожиданных мест, которые сносят пол ебала за один кусь (предпоследняя сложность) - Не хватило музыкального эпика на первых боссах (Врубайте смело темку из Кунг-фу панды и кайфанете) - Остального пока не нашел.. еще играю