Akane the Kunoichi (Xbox 360) review "Akane is light, bite-sized and can be picked up and put down at will; this is appreciated. But that doesn’t mean to say it won’t claw your face off and have you thank it for the maiming by the end."

If I were to list my values as a hip underground reviewer, we’d be here all day, but near the top (in the top one hundred, certainly) would be the fact that I’m a pretentiously militant retro gamer. As such, I can use my magnificent powers of complaining loquaciously to say horrid and nasty things. Things about games that claim to be throw-backs to that glorious 16-bit era we place far too much nostalgia in, but use this dodgy homage as a mask to smoke screen overly-simplistic and cheap game designs.

Because I was there. I’m not even close to being the oldest member of staff here on Honestgamers.com (Thanks, Rob, for being almost double my age!), but I’m old enough to remember the games that rightfully defined that age. And, more than most titles, I remember the Shinobi games. The bastard, bastard Shinobi games that often walked perfectly the thin line between being challenging and being cheap. Here, you will die. You will die a lot, swear and then pick the pad back from the corner of the room where you’ve flung it and try again, because the death was your fault. It was perfectly avoidable; it wasn’t bad controls or unbalanced odds that sent poor Joe Musashi to an early grave. It was you: you were a split second too late or you bit off more than you could chew, and now you need to try again.

Credentials boasted and ego appeased, now we’ll talk about Akane The Kunoichi. Get ready for the surprising ending!

While Akane has obvious differences to Joe, including a much better set of breasts and a more cartoony art style, there are numerous similarities. That difficult-to-maintain line comes right back to bitch-slap you in the face because, like Joe, Akane will die a lot. And you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

Simplistic in its own right, Akane follows the tried and tested method of starting out light and fluffy before ending the game on plain sadistic. The first level is an obligatorily sunny green field with candyfloss clouds and bright blue skies. There are a few ninja scattered around, but none that should cause much problems and, just in case, there are healing hearts and power-ups aplenty to dig into. Then a huge Oni boss some twenty times your size drops from the skies, chases you into an inescapable chasm and forces you to plough kunai blades into his skull.

Akane’s mission, to rescue some bald guy, takes her through fifteen stages set across five different areas. Castle interiors have her navigating through hidden corridors and scrolling lifts while underground caves have her battling against waterfalls and ill-flowing streams that threaten to push her off sheer drops to instant death. Mountainside levels have her leap across crumbling platforms to try and cling to walls and work her way up a series of temporary safe havens with unwelcome plummets awaiting failure. By the time you reach the last level, filled with spike traps, lava pits and armies of ninja appearing on puffs of smoke exactly where you don’t want them too, the kid gloves are off.



There remain disappointments to be had; each stage ends in some memorable boss fight, but the one to cap the game is a major letdown that should be seen off effortlessly, but getting there is a satisfying slog through enough tricks and traps to keep even the grumpiest platfomer connoisseur with only a handful of rose-tinted grumbles. Complaints can be made about game length, but are circumvented by hidden kimonos you can go back and seek out (and will have to should you want to see the true ending) and a little bit of logic; the Shinobi games will feel like a longer slog, but that’s because Akane offers something games of old rarely did; rather than play the game as one long slog, each stage is stand-alone, meaning you can take on any slice of the unlocked game any time you like. No playing the same easy start levels over and over when you inevitably fall in the harder ones; no seeing one mistimed jump destroy an hour of progress. Going back to beaten levels is a choice, not an obligation, and it’s one modern addition to a solid look back over gaming’s shoulder that can really be appreciated.

The limitations, like how the game only has four basic enemy sets used throughout, are overwritten by a solid soundtrack, but even better level planning and a real sense that those crazy kids at Haruneko know what made well-remembered games worth remembering. I’m not used to these kind of conclusion where I’m not chewing someone out for trying to hide their inabilities behind the façade of an homage, but I’m happy not to have anything to bitch about for a change. Akane is light, bite-sized and can be picked up and put down at will; this is appreciated. But that doesn’t mean to say it won’t claw your face off and have you thank it for the maiming by the end.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (July 17, 2011) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.