Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review – Bladedancing
Grief is a messy, convoluted emotion to navigate. There’s rarely a straightforward path to get through it; oftentimes it can feel like you’re walking in circles around what you’re looking for, or banging your head against the same mental roadblock again and again. In many ways, the experience of playing through a metroidvania mimics the feeling of working through grief–the genre is built on a similar path of progression, where the necessary tools to move forward are earned step-by-step, and a protagonist’s evolving moveset makes it easier to overcome its challenges and navigate a seemingly inescapable world. Tales of Kenzera: Zau leans into that parallel, creating a powerful and moving message within the context of a stellar action-adventure game.
Tales of Kenzera sees you play as Zau, the fictional hero of a story that a father wrote for his son just prior to the father’s death. Zau, similarly, is working through the grief of a lost father. Unable to get past the pain, he calls upon the god of death, Kalunga, and offers him a deal: If Zau successfully brings the three great spirits that have resisted Kalunga to the land of the dead, then Kalunga will bring Zau’s father back to life. The god agrees and the duo set out, Zau relying on the shaman masks and training he inherited from his father to overcome the dangers of nearby lands. As a metroidvania, the game features moments where Zau must backtrack and use newly unlocked abilities (freezing water, for example, or a grappling hook used to swing over large pits), which Kalunga helps Zau master to navigate the distinct biomes of the map.
Inspired by Bantu mythology, Tales of Kenzera’s map is a beautiful maze that pulls from African culture to characterize and flavor the interconnected areas. The myths of the Bantu color the undertones to the story, equating Zau’s battle against larger-than-life monsters with a spiritual journey–you don’t question how or why Zau’s efforts to beat up a mother helps convince her to come to terms with leaving her daughter behind. Within Tales of Kenzera’s lore, these actions make sense, reframing the physical space of the world into something more akin to a mental palace. That reframing contributes to the explosive battles, too, with the sound design and orchestral score of the soundtrack transforming each fight into a frenetic dance of emotion and spiritual energy where flame-infused shockwaves are stand-ins for violent outbursts and well-timed dodges equate to a carefully considered counterargument.
Each locale feels distinct from the others, both in color scheme and challenges. The sickly green swamps and massive trees of the forest to the west test Zau’s acrobatic abilities, for instance, while the volcanic heat and dry oranges and reds of the desert to the north features plenty of endurance-focused challenges that force Zau to withstand large groups of enemies or solve multi-step environmental puzzles. The structure of these areas interweave with the story, enriching the narrative in rewarding ways. The aforementioned desert sees Zau come to understand that grief isn’t something that can be simply overcome–it continues to wash over you in waves, much like the waves of enemies he has to contend with. And sometimes grief can waylay you by showing up in a recognizable but slightly different form, much in the same way the numerous environmental puzzles in the desert region are larger, more convoluted versions of what Zau had to solve in previous areas. We as the player overcome these obstacles alongside Zau working through his pain–he grows as we do, strengthening our connection to his journey.
The mentor/mentee relationship between Kalunga and Zau is front and center throughout, with Kalunga regularly appearing to Zau to provide insight and guidance to the lands’ history and culture, as well as to help Zau process his bubbling emotions. Actors Abubakar Salim and Tristan D. Lalla lend incredible gravitas to their respective performances–Salim seamlessly dips back and forth between hot-headed arrogance and barely contained sorrow in voicing the grieving Zau, while Lalla lends a power and authority to Kalunga’s fatherly tone. The two characters’ growth over the course of the game is surprisingly wholesome despite the dour plotline, making it easy to invest into Zau’s development as a shaman.
The other characters in Tales of Kenzera aren’t as fleshed out, only appearing a handful of times and always being relegated to narrative devices that tell Zau what macguffin he has to chase after next. The voice acting for these characters is still superb, but the supporting cast–both the humans and the great spirits–is let down by its minimal presence in the story.
The framing device for Zau’s story–that this is a story left behind for a grieving boy in the real world–also feels disruptive. Near the end of Zau’s adventure, you’re abruptly yanked back into the real-world to be reminded of this framing device, which felt incredibly jarring. Zau’s story of working through loss was working as a healing experience for me and the game felt the need to stop to explain its own premise, as if it were directly telling me that media can help people overcome grief. And, yes, I know. I was experiencing that sensation. The game broke its own illusion to specifically remind me that it was an illusion, and that lessened the impact of the final moments of Zau’s journey. It didn’t ruin the ending, but it certainly disrupted the narrative flow leading into Tales of Kenzera’s conclusion.
Tales of Kenzera’s combat mechanics, however, are fantastic all the way through. Zau can instantly swap between wearing the mask of the sun and the mask of the moon, each granting him different mechanics. The sun mask focuses on melee while the moon mask prioritizes long-range attacks, but the cadence of each bleeds into the other, rewarding you for chaining together the movements of both masks with devastating pirouettes. One of my favorite combos is slamming down into a foe with the summoned spears of the sun mask, switching to the moon mask to blast them away, dashing toward them, and switching back to the sun to hit them with a four-hit melee combo that launches them skyward, giving me a chance to switch back to the moon and juggle them in the air with ranged attacks.
Zau is powerful, but his enemies are numerous, transforming combat into a puzzle where situational awareness trumps power. As such, the game encourages you to dance between targets, overcoming overwhelming odds by being nimble. The movements of both Zau and enemies are sharp and the game makes good use of color–blue and orange for Zau and green and purple for enemies–to keep the fast-paced fights readable. Rarely does it feel like a loss is due to poor luck–the visual clutter of particle effects can become a problem if you’re ever standing still long enough for enemies to surround you, but that feels more like a consequence of a mistake on the player’s part rather than a detriment of the game itself.
You don’t get many upgrades to Zau’s combat throughout the adventure. There is a skill tree, but unlocks are geared toward improving existing mechanics–charging the projectiles of the moon mask to unleash a more substantial attack, for instance, or increasing the sun mask’s combo chain from three to four strikes. Instead, most of the combat’s evolution is based on the enemies that Zau has to fight. You initially only face warriors armed with simple melee attacks or slow-moving projectiles, but you quickly have to take on enemies who shield themselves or fast ball-like foes who willingly explode to take you down with them. And none of them compare to the dastardly fireflies who sap your health to heal other enemies.
Tales of Kenzera’s easy opening belies its surprising challenge, especially its tough latter half. There is a difficulty slider that allows you to adjust how much Zau can endure before dying and how much damage he has to deal in order for an enemy to perish, so there is some control in how tough combat is (you can adjust the slider at any time as well, so you won’t be punished for accidentally picking a setting too tough or easy at the start). Instant-kill hazards are not affected by difficulty, so there’s no way to make traversal challenges easier, but the game is generous with the checkpoints (save for a few exceptions, which we’ll get into in a bit), preventing any seemingly insurmountable walls from becoming frustratingly so.
Zau’s efforts to pull the great spirits into the realm of the dead culminate in boss battles, and the combat is at its best during these. Most of them see Zau clash with monstrously large beings who are grieving in their own right. Their emotional state informs not only how they fight but what Zau must do in order to get through to them and defeat them. A great spirit overcome with rage angrily lashes out at everything around him, for example, creating huge walls that push out at Zau and threaten to force him off the ledge of the arena unless you use his recently acquired ability to blast through obstacles. This also causes the spirit’s own attack to explode and briefly stun him–his anger literally blowing up in his face makes it harder for him to fight you.
The drama and tension of these encounters are amplified by powerful musical scores. I had to step away from Tales of Kenzera and compose myself after battling the great spirit who is overcome with fear, as the escalating rhythm of the score and tension of the string instruments playing through the boss fight made an already stressful fight a more unnerving experience than I expected. The true strength of these fights is how they are emotionally resonant as well as mechanically satisfying–they’re the moments when the game is firing on all cylinders, using combat and traversal mechanics, enemy and sound design, and music to emulate one of the more pivotal steps in one boy’s struggle with grief. They’re all powerful spectacles that I’m still marveling over.
On the other hand, Tales of Kenzera has a few chase sequences that veer toward irritating. These cinematic platforming sections are a common inclusion in the metroidvania genre, a staple that goes back to the original Metroid and Samus’ scramble to escape Zebes after killing Mother Brain. In most cases, however, these sequences either afford you a chance to recover from your mistakes (like Metroid) or incorporate numerous autosave checkpoints throughout the section (like Ori and the Will of the Wisps or Hollow Knight). Tales of Kenzera does neither, meaning a mistake usually results in a death that sends you back to the beginning of the sequence, forcing you to redo it over and over. There’s a particularly tough sequence near the end of the game where Zau is being chased by something that will kill him instantly, which requires hopping between narrow platforms and over lava that will also kill him instantly to escape. Maybe I’m just getting old, but it took me nearly a dozen attempts to get through that part of the game and by try number seven, I was really frustrated that I had to start over each time.
Thematically, you could say that these sequences emulate working through the fear and anger parts of grief, as both sections deal with the great spirits that embody those emotions, as well as the idea that false starts are an inevitable part of the healing process. And in the same way that there are no save points in working through fear or anger, there are no checkpoints to these platforming sections. That comparison loses value when the rest of the game is hypervigilant about autosaving your progress, however. It’s in these moments that there is a conflict between the fun you expect from a metroidvania and the potential desire to convey an emotional state. Tales of Kenzera cleverly blends the two through most of its elements (especially its world and boss design), but falters when it comes to these traversal challenges–the sheer frustration of these platforming do-overs results more in a lack of fun than it summons a sensation of anger or fear. Thankfully, these moments are few and far between, meaning they’re only a small irritating blip to what’s otherwise a fun game.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s strength lies in its powerful narrative, digging into how one navigates the sadness, rage, and terror that accompanies the worst moments of grief. Its tale has its hiccups, but Zau’s adventure of coming to terms with loss resonates through the beating heart of the thumping musical score, standout vocal performances, and dance-like battles that feel straight out of Bantu myth. Loss is a universal human emotion, making Zau’s attempts to grapple with grief uncomfortably relatable. But there’s catharsis to be earned in working through that discomfort alongside Zau, and a touching story to enjoy along the way.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – One In A Hundred
In the years since the explosion of game crowdfunding, a stigma has emerged surrounding these titles. Yes, there have been plenty of games that enjoyed great success after their crowdfunding campaigns, but more people remember the high-profile flops: games with big names and ambitious promises attached that, for a variety of reasons, betrayed the high hopes fans held for them. Many of these were revivals–spiritual or otherwise–of beloved series from ages past. Now we have Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a crowdfunded game designed to carry the torch of the much-beloved Suikoden series from the PS1 and PS2–and, with such a high pedigree attached, there’s understandable trepidation: Will this be a glorious return to form, or another disappointment? Fortunately, for us (and all of the backers), it turned out wonderfully.
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Eiyuden Chronicle begins when a young man named Nowa joins the Eltisweiss Watch, a small militia unit under the command of Countess Perielle of the League of Nations. On a joint mission with a military team from the Galdean Empire, the Watch discovers a powerful, ancient artifact, the Primal Lens, earning everyone involved instant renown. However, it’s not long before squabbling between the Empire and League over the device, along with internal power struggles in the Empire, erupts into an invasion of Eltisweiss and a full-blown war. As the scope of the conflict expands, so does the story: Nowa rebuilds a resistance army in an abandoned castle, Imperial military prodigy Seign struggles with his feelings of obligation, friendship, and loyalty, and a young warrior woman named Marisa finds her clan caught in the middle.
The story doesn’t shy away from its similarities to games in the Suikoden series. In several ways, it outright embraces them: a story that branches into multiple viewpoints, loyalties among friends being tested during war, internal political intrigue, powerful magic runes being a crucial plot device, and, most obviously, the conceit of building a huge band of warriors to take on an even bigger enemy. The story was helmed by Suikoden creator and writer Yoshitaka Murayama (who sadly passed away shortly before the game’s release), and it brims with the warmth, wit, and plot twists that made the early Suikoden titles so engaging and memorable.
Throughout the game, you’ll be on the lookout for more characters to bolster the ranks of the Watch and, eventually, help build a base for the Resistance army. Some characters are easy to find and recruit, but others will require some searching or additional effort: You may have to go back to a town or dungeon from much earlier in the game, locate a rare item, play a minigame, or fend off a vicious foe to get someone to join the crew. Searching for heroes is a lot of fun (and much easier once you get the fast-travel ability), and the reward of seeing your base grow and improve with the efforts of your new comrades is immensely satisfying.
But the characters themselves are often their own reward. Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality. They don’t just fall into the background once their recruitment arc is over, either; they’ll comment on current story events while they’re in your party, chatter as you explore towns, and interact with other characters at the base and elsewhere on your travels. Sometimes they’ll show up to add extra flair when you least expect it, like when they get dragged into judging a cooking competition.
Aside from giving you a good amount of freedom to search for friends when you feel like it, Eiyuden Chronicle’s story progression is similar to the typical JRPG: mostly linear with major setpieces and battles to highlight key story points. You’ll go through the usual dungeons, deserts, tundras, forests, and mines, sometimes needing to solve puzzles to progress. While most of the puzzles are pretty simple, they can sometimes be more obnoxious than intended due to random enemy encounters interrupting things at the worst possible times. Still, the dungeon design is solid and exploration is generally rewarding.
Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality
Combat is also heavily based on the Suikoden games: turn-based, with up to six active party members at a time, plus a seventh support member who can grant passive benefits like stat boosts or money gain. Characters can have both skills based on SP (which regenerates over time) and MP (which needs items to restore), and each be changed based on the runes that character has equipped. Placement is key: Some attacks and skills won’t reach far beyond the front row, while some less-armored characters work better in the back–and there are also skills that target entire rows. One distinct combat element carried over from Suikoden is multi-character team attacks that require two or more characters with some sort of connection to be in the party together, who can then perform a tandem specialty attack.
Not every character in your army is available to fight, but you’re still given a very wide selection of party members to pick from to fight the way you prefer. You’re probably not going to use every single character you recruit in combat, and that’s fine–seeing who you click with and building them up generally works well. And if you do need to bring a character you’ve been neglecting up to snuff, a graduated XP system works to get them to parity with your high-level warriors quickly. A bit of auto-battling and they should be set.
Boss battles are where things get interesting. Many boss fights in the game come with some sort of interactable gimmick that changes the way you approach the battle. These can be objects to hide behind to avoid damage, background objects that cause damage to either you or the opponent based on who gets to it first, or even a treasure lying just beyond a row of foes. Sometimes these gimmicks are really fun and clever, like a boss who gets knocked off-balance when one of the lackeys hoisting them on their backs is felled, leaving it defenseless. Sometimes it’s miserable, like needing to guess which side of the arena the enemy will appear on to hit a book and deal extra damage, missing entirely if you guess wrong. When the gimmicks are good, they make for very fun fights, but when they’re not, you’ll be longing for more straightforward combat. And sometimes the boss is simply a big difficulty spike in general, leaving you in a very bad situation if you come in ill-prepared.
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By far the worst combat experience, however, are the large-scale army battles. These play out like a turn-based strategy game, with your party members commanding armies and moving around a grid, but lack any of the fun and excitement you’ll find in a dedicated strategy-RPG. You spend most of the time just watching things happen, feeling like you have very little control over the proceedings as the armies you moved around, slowly engage the enemy. You’re left hoping they’ll do more damage than the opposition so you can go back to the fun parts of the game instead.
Overall, Eiyuden Chronicle hits the retro-RPG sweet spot nicely. It’s focused on delivering that warm, comforting feeling of a classic JRPG, and even all of the side distractions–the card minigame, the weird Pokemon/Beyblade hybrid top minigame, the raising/racing sim, even commodities trading–don’t distract too much from the game’s prime mission. Add some gorgeously painted and animated spritework and a stellar soundtrack into the mix, and you’ve got a delightful experience that sometimes falters, though not enough to make you put it down. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes might not be revolutionary, but it successfully delivered on its core promise–and that’s really all it needed to do.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy Review – Way Of Shadow
In what feels like a spiritual successor to 2016’s Aragami, Ereban: Shadow Legacy transforms you into a deadly shadow that can become one with the darkness–the ultimate stealth operative. The game doesn’t quite deliver the necessary challenge to make for a successful stealth game, however, as the first trick you learn will get you through the entire game without a hitch. It does far better on the platforming front, and though its cast of characters could have used some fleshing out, the futuristic sci-fi world they inhabit is cultivated with colorful sights and intriguing snippets of lore.
As its name implies, Shadow Legacy’s main gimmick is its use of shadows. You play as Ayana, the last of the titular Ereban, a people who possess the innate ability to become one with and manipulate shadows. Using her shadow merge ability, Ayana can sink into shadows to creep past enemies, slink up walls, and dispose of bodies, encouraging you to stick to the shadows where your toolbelt is at its strongest. Alongside these shadow abilities, Ayana has an assortment of advanced gadgets–some are always useful like a recon pulse that marks enemies and items through walls, while others are more situational like mines that stun targets–which work regardless of the lighting situation.
I initially thought that this would present plenty of opportunities and strategies to sneak past enemies, most of whom will take out Ayana in a single hit. There’s a healthy variety of foes who want to take her down–standard enemies don’t pose much threat beyond the flashlight they carry to take away your darkness, but the more adept snipers can spot you from afar and the stealthy droids who can go invisible can ruin your day if you’re not taking time to look for the telltale shimmer. And then there are the human enemies who present a moral quandary rather than a gameplay one–while the mechanical droid-like enemies that dominate each level can be killed with impunity, murdering the living and breathing human workers will negatively impact Ayana’s morality and others’ perception of her (which I’ll touch on a bit more later).
Unfortunately, Ayana’s natural ability to merge into the shadows and traverse unseen is very powerful–so powerful, in fact, that you don’t really need to rely on anything else. The enemies aren’t very smart either, so they’re easy to avoid even if you solely rely on shadow merge. This means that it’s actually quite easy to go through the entire game without being seen or resorting to lethally cutting down humans, making for a stealth game that doesn’t quite give you enough opposition to challenge you to think critically when it comes to circumnavigating a threat. There aren’t any difficulty settings to make the enemies smarter or more plentiful either–though you can adjust how many environmental guides show up in each level (purple lamps or purple paint that point you in the general direction you have to go, for example).
Shadow Legacy teases you with a tantalizing view of what it could be in its third chapter, briefly breaking free from its otherwise linear stealth levels to give you a playground in which you can tackle an assortment of missions in any order within an open area. Within this open space, you have more of a choice in how you approach each assignment instead of being funneled through a more linear challenge. Mistakes have a more drastic impact because you’re not moving from one area to the next–it’s all one big connected location, where your actions can snowball into unintended effects. Ayana’s assortment of abilities and gadgets also have way more utility in this level. The binoculars used for scouting and mapping enemy movements are way more valuable in a giant open space than in an enclosed laboratory or city street, for instance. The game never opts for this format again, however, and in doing so it leaves me wishing for what might have been.
To the game’s credit, the back half of Shadow Legacy has some creative set pieces from a platforming standpoint, with one section in particular that I adored for how well it challenged and encouraged me to utilize all I had learned up to that point in one fast-paced gauntlet. Shadow merge can be used to eject out of shadows to make otherwise impossible jumps or interact with the environment to solve simple riddles–skills that apply to challenges that steadily get more complex as the game goes on. Even if Shadow Legacy falls short of being a great stealth game, it’s a good platformer. The environmental elements create an assortment of shadows–some oddly shaped, others that move, and still more that can be altered–and figuring out how to reach an out-of-the-way platform is sometimes a puzzle within itself, made trickier and more rewarding to solve given the stamina meter tied to Ayana’s shadow merge. Not only do you have to figure out which shadows to move or follow or jump between, but you also usually have to do it in a timely manner.
In service of these platforming challenges, Shadow Legacy features a colorful diversity of locales, ranging from an outpost in the desert to an autonomous factory. My favorite is an urban street that hints at the human life that once populated it, now devoid of any movement save for the autonomous drones that patrol the streets and promise that this is for the best. Sporadic graffiti and text logs hint at the growing loss of autonomy among the human citizens leading up to the corporate takeover that promised everyone a better life. It’s such an eerie level, framed against the setting sun that’s causing the street to slowly be encroached by shadow. It feels fitting that Ayana uses those same shadows to sneak her way past the guards searching for her, paralleling how the oppressive regime’s efforts can’t stop the resistance–they squeezed so much life out of this one city block that now there’s no living soul to report Ayana to the authorities, just dumb, easily-fooled machines.
Guiding Ayana through these challenges is a story that never quite gets room to breathe. Initially trapped by an AI-controlled entity hellbent on using her powers for some unknown purpose, Ayana finds herself quickly working with the resistance seeking to free themselves from corporate tyranny. Ayana is hesitant to work with them, having heard they’re nothing more than terrorists but agrees to use her unique skillset to help on the condition that the group gives her everything they know about the Ereban people. There are some interesting, albeit familiar, narrative themes here, but Shadow Legacy rushes through them–Ayana buys into the resistance’s cause remarkably quickly, for example, despite being given no catalyst to do so.
In the game’s third chapter, Ayana is warned to spare humans so as to help alleviate the accusations that the members of the resistance are terrorists. This is the game’s morality system, shifting the coloring of Ayana’s design toward shining white or sinister purple depending on how bloodthirsty you play her. As far as I can tell, the ramifications of this only impact one small moment in the final level of the game–it’s not much of a narrative payoff.
At certain points in the story, Ayana can upgrade her shadow powers and you have a choice of whether to unlock new branches on one of two skill trees. One branch leans toward non-lethal abilities, like cushioning your footsteps, while the other opts for skills that make you a better killer, like making it easier to hide bodies so your deeds aren’t discovered. This creates some fun replayability as it’s impossible to fully unlock both branches in a single playthrough, but, again, shadow merge is just too strong. The new powers are cool, but I never had to use them, as shadow merge makes it fairly easy to sneak through a level without being spotted. Granted, I opted for a nonlethal run. It’s possible that if I had aimed for a playthrough where I killed everything that moved, I’d have needed to rely on more of the powers that hide bodies or kill multiple enemies at a time in order to not alert guards that something was wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy sits in a weird place for me. As a stealth game, it rarely challenged me, reducing protagonist Ayana into a one-trick pony that could sneak past any target with the same shadow merge skill every time. But as a platformer, Shadow Legacy incorporates some entertaining puzzles that grow increasingly complex and rewarding to overcome. I never quite managed to connect to Ayana’s journey against the autonomous overlords planning to doom an entire civilization, but I had a lot of fun slinking up walls and exploding out of the darkness, striving to time my jumps with the movement of a windmill and the rotating shadow it was casting. Those nail-biting moments are the ones that stuck with me, not the dozenth time I slunk past an unsuspecting droid.
