KAMUI (WBW)

Googling this game is impossible.

To preface this review, KAMUI is part of this week's "Made in Japan" bundle from humblebundle.com.  I bought it and intend to review every game in it, because that's a lot of content for 10 dollars.  Expect to see a review a day, possibly more if I'm feeling particularly video game that day.  I'll call it the Weekly Bundle Wextravaganza in the name of alliteration.  Look for the WBW seal!

Now, for the first WBW entry, we have KAMUI.  KAMUI is a shmup, or "shoot em up" as people with the time and patience to say three syllables call it.  Ever play Gradius, R Type, or Raiden?  Then you know the basic formula.  KAMUI does a few things differently, however, and for that I thank it.  Don't get me wrong, I love to stay within a 4 pixel radius or lose ten minutes of progress as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just want to like...not have to do that.

To facilitate not dying, KAMUI has two main ways to avoid death that aren't "don't get shot".  The first is the shield bar.  This is more or less a simple hit points counter.  You've got four hits before your shields go down.  Get hit once more and you're dead.  Shields don't regenerate between bosses or, as far as I'm aware, ever, so they're functionally identical to lives, including the fact that by playing well you can acquire more shields up to a maximum of 8.

The second and more fun way is the Lightning Katana.  Yes, that is what the developers named it.  Press the special button and the shoot button at the same time to fire the katana, which deals massive damage to enemies and consumes any bullets it comes into contact with, making it a convenient way to clear the screen when you get overwhelmed.  You can only sustain the katana for a couple seconds before it overheats or whatever, filling the Lightning gauge with a red bar.

Seen here: Lightning Katana

Oh yes, about that.  The Lightning gauge is this game's version of those screen-clearing bombs every shmup ever has.  It constantly fills itself, taking about four seconds to fill up all the way.  Press the Lightning button and unleash dozens of homing bolts.  These don't clear the screen the way the katanadoes, but they're the only way to hit enemies on this game's oft-used lower layer.  They also require no aiming or thought whatsoever, so it's good to fire off a volley or two when you're too focused on dodging projectiles to see where your enemy is.

Seen here: Lightning Lightning

The gauge has two bars.  One is the Lightning bar, which is blue and comes from the left, while the other is the katana bar, which is red and comes from the right.  The Lightning bar can only fill up until it meets the katana bar.  The katana bar, however, only fills as long as you're firing the katana and will happily travel all the way to the left in any situation.  What this means is that Lightning is limited by katana use, but not the other way around.  This is a good thing, since there are many situations in which the only way to survive is to fire off a katana blast and wipe some enemy bullets off the screen.

Now that you've been tantalized with my unnecessarily thorough explanation of the game's mechanics, how about the rest of it?  Well, that's where the game is a little less good.  For one, it's short.  6 stages, each lasting about 5 minutes.  This is pretty par for the course for shmups, but it's still worth mentioning.  It's also got a maximum resolution of 800x600.  This is because KAMUI was originally released in 1998 and this is a straight port.  You have the option to play full screen with 16:9 stretching applied, but to me it just looks bad.  Playing in a window will suit you just fine unless you have a 4k display, in which case you might as well be playing a game boy from a mile away.

Layering has a nice 3D effect, like playing a game boy from a mile away.

But just because it's Japanese doesn't mean the PC port is horrible, a point we will almost certainly brush upon in a later review.  For one, it has XInput support, which I did not at all expect.  It's still locked to 8 directions so don't expect smooth analog control, but this is one game I would not at all recommend playing with a keyboard.  KAMUI also offers, for some reason, stereo sound.  When you're all the way on the left side of the screen the sounds of your bullets and whatnot will come from the left speaker.  It's weird and not very noticeable, but it's worth mentioning because...well, they didn't really have to do that.  But they did anyway.

One final weirdness is the soundtrack option.  You have the choice between PCM, midi, and CD.  PCM is the default setting.  It sounds nice.  Not a lot I have to say about that.  Midi is really not good at all, as midi tends to be, which is too bad because you can tell that the composer put a lot of effort into making it sound as good as midi can.  But still, there's no reason to choose midi.  The final option is CD.  That must mean CD audio, right?  Nope!  It means it'll play an audio CD you have in your computer.  It's a nice enough option, I guess, but I can't see most people using it.  But hey, if you want to jam out to classic Metallica but don't want to do it in VLC, there you go.

All in all, it's a well made shoot em up that fans of the genre will love.  It's not going to make a shmup-hater into a shmup-not-hater by any means, so if you're one of those don't bother.  While it has a few unique ideas and does almost everything right, it's still pretty much the same as all the rest, for better or for worse.