So, aliens have invaded and couple of weird kids and a cat that can transform into a muscle man have to fight them off and save the day. Why? Because of REASONS!
As I said, I absolutely love the presentation. It's all very over the top anime inspired and absolutely wonderful. The characters look great. There's a LOT of sexy lady alien fanservice. The music is great. The voices have that sort of 90's bad anime dub quality that I can only assume is intentional - and I love it for that. The cat meowing during cutscenes is hilarious. There's tons of little touches and references and things everywhere you look that shows a lot of love and attention when into making it. Everything about it is ridiculously charming.
But I absolutely freaking hate actually playing it. Kinnikuneko is a 2D platformer that plays like dog butt. It isn't fun. The platforming is awkward. The combat is awkward. The mechanic of switching back and forth between cat and muscle man form - which you can only do at set points during levels - is more annoying than fun. Basically, the muscle man can fight enemies, but can't climb walls or jump long gaps. The cat can't fight enemies, but can climb and jump really far. So the levels were designed to have you switching back and forth to get through various obstacles. But none of it feels good. None of it is fun. The levels are super simple and boring. The whole game is actually really, really short.
The boss fights are absolutely abysmally terrible, too. They all have you yelling at your screen "what the fuck am I supposed to do?" for several tries until you oops accidentally figure it out. The last two fights in particular are just unacceptable putrid stinking trash.
To spice things up a bit, there are mini games to add in some variety. And they're terrible. First, you can find gyms so the muscle cat can work out and get even stronger, but the way you work out is by button mashing so much it should be classified as torture. Seriously, it's practically impossible and seems meant to test whether your hand or controller will break first. Thankfully, you can select an accessibility option to just hold the button down instead of mashing it a million times. I highly recommend you use that option.
Another mini game is a musical rhythm game section that they clearly didn't think through. The buttons are color coded, but not to the actual Xbox buttons, so it's extremely confusing to decipher what you should be pushing. I'm sure you get used to it, but why would I bother when I wasn't having fun with the rest of the game to begin with?
Another mini game is an arm wrestling match where you win by picking correct dialogue choices. This one was pretty good, actually. There's also a level that's basically "baby's first shmup" that isn't bad, but not good either.
For the most part, though, I hated actually playing Kinnikuneko. It's a bland boring frustrating totally not fun basic 2D platformer that doesn't do anything especially well. It's not bad, and let me make that clear - It's totally passable mechanically - but it doesn't do anything interesting or unique or fun, either. The insanely charming presentation is doing 99.9% of the work here, and that's not a good thing for an interactive video game.
In the end, I can't recommend Kinnikuneko: Super Muscle Cat. It's just not fun to play. Even at only $18 the gameplay is such a monumental disappointment that it isn't worth it. I really wanted to love it, too, because the presentation truly is incredible, but it just ain't fun.
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