Yasai Ninja, a hack and slash game following the adventures of vegetable characters Kaoru Tamanegi and Broccoli Joe across Feudal Japan was not…well received…when it was reviewed here at ICXM. In fact, before the game was heavily patched Yasai Ninja was our first ever one-out-of-ten game. Now, over a year later, its sequel, Kyurinaga’s Revenge has come out of the shadows to bring the pain of repetitious, unfinished, vegetable-themed gameplay to unlucky players again.
Kyurinaga’s Revenge is definitely not as bad as its predecessor. Every mechanic of the game has a vague sense of competence around it so much so that you can actually get through a level or two without wanting to throw your controller at the nearest wall due to broken gameplay…for the most part. This time around Recotechnology have created a game that doesn’t run at a consistently awful frame rate and have created controls that work. Thankfully, the game actually has the makings of a competent platformer and the bar of mediocrity is much closer than it was for Yasai Ninja, however, Yasai Ninja was awful on every single level so mild improvement on that front isn’t much to write home about.
Since the game has been designed primarily as a co-op experience—although in single-player gameplay you can change between both characters with a press of the left bumper—I decided to force my friend Kurt to sit down with me for a couple of hours to play through a game that we were, for some reason, pretty excited for. As someone who plays bad games for the hell of it—I’ve owned four different copies of Ride to Hell over the years—Kurt and I thought that Yasai Ninja would be that special kind of bad which makes you laugh out loud, tears running down your cheek and have a lot of funny gifs for those glorious upvotes from Reddit Gaming. We were wrong, so very wrong.
So we sat down, got a controller each, selected our characters (him being Kaoru and me being Joe) and we started the game. As the opening cutscene played there was a strange silence in the room. I could have sworn there was sound on the menu so I picked up the television remote and turned the volume up . . . no sound at all. No music, no voiceover, no nothing.
Finally, the game started. We stood there in a field of low-res, stretched textures and tested the controls of our vegetable protagonists. Movement was clunky, very clunky. Jumps and double jumps felt overly heavy and movement speed as a whole was a lot slower than what we’ve come to expect from platformers. It became apparent very quickly as well that the movement speed was not…well suited for the type of platforming they had you doing.
In good co-op experiences, the game will always provide things for both players to be doing. For example, in Gears of War 4 when players have to split up and tackle different areas simultaneously they are both doing their own thing whilst still working together. In standard gameplay they have to revive their friends and shoot enemies near-constantly so they never get bored. Kyurinaga’s Revenge seems to have missed this point completely. Kurt and I would frequently run into areas where Kaoru would have nothing to do whilst Joe Broccoli had to hit numerous targets with his kunai ability whilst the other player would have to just stand there doing nothing.
The game does have some sections in which Kaoru has a task to perform but not Joe such as pushing a box, however, the wonky physics of Kyurinaga’s Revenge means that Joe’s player needs to pretty much repeat the actions of Kaoru as Joe will constantly slide off the box. The lean towards playing as Joe is extremely apparent in some of the later sections. Chapter seven sees a pretty lengthy section where the player needs to activate four targets in each corner of a maze-like room with Joe’s Kunai without any interaction from Kaoru. Since Joe can only hold three Kunai at once he is required to travel to three corners, loop back around and get the fourth one before both players can leave.
The lack of input from the other player is made even worse by the fact that if they don’t follow the other player the entire way then the player who leaves the first player has to play through a tiny screen in the upper right corner. This means that technically the other player does have something to do, follow and follow only. Kyurinaga’s Revenge works on a life-based everything-kills-you-in-one-hit method of game design so by following you, the other player is putting themselves in danger and one player dying means you both restart from the previous checkpoint.
If you thought Monopoly was how a friendship is lost then Kyurinaga’s Revenge has the power to split entire families apart. Playing on normal difficulty gives you twenty lives to start with, however, Kyurinaga’s level design is put together with such hurry and inconsistency that every challenge you face needs both players to be pin-point accurate and fast with movement that isn’t designed for speed. The slapdash, insert-asset-here level design is no more apparent than in level six which takes place in a floating cloud city.
Here the developers have just slapped assets used in previous levels, such as the stone walls you can wall jump up and just slapped that asset into a level without any explanation. The lack of effort makes the level look lazy and unfinished overall and pulls you out of any immersion that you might’ve somehow got. Other inconsistencies are also prevalent throughout the game such as entire backgrounds being missing and having the stock purple texture entirely visible to the player for extended sections. Anyone familiar with game development should understand what I’m talking about here.
Assets overall are nothing special either with low-quality textures and models littering the game. Some of these assets that are placed in the foreground are often larger than the player’s character model, obscuring you from view which is especially useful when you’re trying to make a rather difficult jump. Animations are probably the worst offender of all which can be gloriously seen in the game’s combat sections which is a rip-off of One Finger Death Punch but one you cannot lose. You press buttons as enemies come at you and perform one out of about five animations and if you die you repeatedly press both bumpers to revive the other character. That’s it. Oh, and they’re long. Very, very long.
Summary
Overall, Kyurinaga’s Revenge is not a good game. While it is a lot more competent than it’s hack-and-slash predecessor, developers Recotechnology have created a sub-par, unfinished experience with terrible co-op gameplay and slapdash level design.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.