Kaze Kiri: Ninja Action

Developer: Naxat Soft    Publisher: Naxat Soft    Released: April 28, 1994     Genre: Action

While the Turbo Grafx-16 suffered from a dearth of action games in the West in Japan it had a robust library in the genre, especially with the CD-add on. Next to the Saturn it is the system I wish were more successful in the US as the import library is full of all kinds of gems. One of the more interesting is Kaze Kiri-Ninja Action. This late release was incredibly hyped up in Gamefan as one of the best action games you’ve never played. The reality does not live up to that level of hype but it is a good game overall in spite of its faults.

Trying to put Kaze Kiri in one genre is hard. It has the mechanics of a side scrolling brawler but the move set of an action game like Shinobi. Like the Ninja Warriors on SNES Kaze Kiri is a single plane scrolling beat em up. Kaze has one of the most varied move sets of an action character and the game does a great job of making the controls intuitive with two buttons. You can dive kick, slide, throw enemies, and perform a multi-slash attack. You dash by holding Up + forward which feels better than double tapping. Kaze can also somersault which lets you avoid attacks and if performed in close will place you on the other side of an enemy. It’s a lot. But there’s more! You can throw shuriken and even teleport but these use up part of your life bar, another element that makes the game unique.

Kaze Kiri is different in that there are no power-ups. Your entire move set is available from the start. Considering how much you can do you don’t need anything extra. To keep you from completely running through the game some of your moves use up points of health. Shuriken take small amounts but teleporting uses a huge chunk. Your life bar constantly regenerates at all times, even during boss battles to offset this. By and large the game’s pacing is completely up to you. If you are good enough you can steamroll the game and only briefly stop to regain health. But if you want to take it slow there is no penalty for stopping and waiting.

Kaze Kiri has all the makings of a classic action extravaganza. Unfortunately it stumbles when it comes to level design. Essentially there is none; every level is a straight path with no deviation. The goal in each stage is to kill a set number of enemies and deplete the enemy gauge to move on. This is incredibly boring and is made even worse by the fact that there are close to twenty levels total. Most are short; initially the first few levels take a few minutes to clear at most. But by the midpoint it becomes tedious as you face enemies that block nearly every attack and need to kill more of them. You face two different enemies per level and it grows old fast. There is no reason to use your expansive move set outside the boss battles as the enemies rely on numbers rather than tactics.

The boss battles are where the game shows it’s potential. Most of these fights are against rival ninja similar to Kaze with even cooler techniques. Fighting against these opponents is like battling another player as they are aggressive and will also dodge/block your attacks. You can easily exploit their AI to buy time to let your health refill, making these battles easy. But in spite of that they are still fun and show the potential the game had if they spent more time on the level design than just the mechanics.

As a late PC Engine release one would expect Kaze Kiri to be among the best looking games on the system. But in that respect it is a mixed bag. It features more parallax scrolling than most titles in the system’s library and it looks impressive at times. But there are just as many flat backgrounds that are ugly in comparison. There is very little here that justifies this being a CD title. The amount of art assets is the main reason but other than that it feels like a waste. The intro could just as easily have been done on a Hucard and the soundtrack is not very good. It isn’t bad overall but I expected more.

In Conclusion

Kaze Kiri has its faults but is still a good game overall. It had the potential to be great but falls short but is still worth laying in my opinion. But good luck finding it at a decent price.