Akatori is the story of Mako a young girl wielding a magical staff and tasked with ending the toxic Amber Storms plunging her world into destruction and chaos. Sealed within the red staff is a magical bird, unsuprisingly named Akatori, because we need to get that name in somewhere. Akatori is Metroidvania in style and execution, where you slowly increase your abilities and the powers available at your disposal up to a certain point. Your main weapon becoming the staff that you yield, which allows you to traverse the 2D side scrolling landscape, and also attack the various enemies that you come across as you take on your most serious of quests.
Firstly, Akatori is a lovely looking game, there’s clearly been a huge amount of care and attention in the look and feel and this can be seen in the overall world building and presentation. I’m a pretty big fan of the pixel art style, and over the years its become its own sub genre, games that have that retro aesthetic where the use of the style is the brush type, and none of the real detail is lost. Its not cartoonish like Hollow Knight, but you could imagine Akatori glowing on and old CRT display of the past. I was playing Akatori on the Steam Deck, and while the characters and enemies remain small on screen, they’re not too small to cause you too many issues when it comes to combat in the game.
Akatori starts off slowly in terms of traversal skills, and luckily you gain your red staff early on at the beginning of the game, as this will allow you more freedom, subtly moving the game away from continual combat and more into a traversal type setting, which opens up the game more fully, and takes advantage of the larger more open levels. The game uses a smart zoom feature, which operates so you can see as much of the room as possible, and also utilises the right stick so you can look around. It’s slightly frustrating as a lot of the jumps can rely on some perfect landing to get through, and would be helpful to see the entire screen that you are trying to get through. There’s the genre staple double jump, but some areas are over complicated due to how little of the overall landscape you’re able to see, especially when failure will result in death and respawning at an idol point.
Enemies aren’t too difficult to deal with, and a quick prod of the staff will normally see them off, and if not, a well timed dodge will allow you to avoid a lot of the attacks that you have to face. I’ve not found many of them to be overly tough so far, there are a few that in combination with the parkour verge on being annoying and unfair, but nothing that practice wouldn’t work for. There’s not a huge variety in the enemy types that I could see, which I guess isn’t a concern unless that is something that you demand in your games. For me most of the challenge was in the traversal rather than the overall fight. There’s still plenty to explore and things I’ve probably not uncovered which is why I’m more likely to be staying and exploring. I’ll warn you now though, unless you fancy tearing your hair out, I wouldn’t go near anything over the base difficulty. Even at normal, the enemies pack more of a punch than I would have liked, and there was nothing more frustrating than completely a tricky jumping sequence, only to be wiped out by an enemy waiting for you at the very end.
Akatori contains some interesting ideas, like your ability to upgrade being based around killing enemies but then finding a bell to trade in your rage where you face a horde boss type room. In principle it works, but you need to play large parts of the level without resting to fill up your meter to be able to take on the challenge, where I thought taking on high numbers of enemies to fill up your meter would be a challenge enough to warrant upgrading your skills. There’s some decent back and forward between Mako and Akatori as they journey together, we’re not Banjo Kazooie type territory but still very much worth mentioning.
I think overall the game could do with a bit more tweaking in terms of making things less floaty and more solid. While overall traversal is fun, when you’re not using the staff, things feel a bit hit and miss, I generally felt I have about 90% control over the direction I was going, and this was done to a mixture of the annoying zoomed in screen, and a slight lack of solidness in the controls. This spilled over into combat, where it seemed to be bang on most of the time, but often I felt I was button mashing and hitting first, rather than feeling I was mastering any kind of combat skill. It wasn’t enough to put me off, but enough to have me put the game down after a couple of frustrating encounters and go and play something else for a little while. Though not terrible enough for me to want to uninstall and never play again. Akatori is gong to join that group of delightful, pixel art games that will be played, uninstalled and then picked up again for another play, because overall it’s a strong outing in the Metroidvania genre. I kind of like it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1442520/Akatori/
This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. Videogames are strange because the act of playing them will often cement if you want to keep playing them further. So we normally give a video game the benefit of the doubt and keep playing until we get an idea of what the game offers. Some games will not require a huge written piece to describe what they do and how they made us feel about them. We understand that behind every game is someone who has dedicated time, effort and money and so we'll often tell you about things that didn't gel with us instead of trashing someone's hard work. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
