Kabuki Warriors

Brought to us by the team that gave us the borderline brilliant Bushido Blade, Kabuki Warriors is a piss poor fighting game that isn’t as much terrible as it is mind numbingly boring. As the title implies, Kabuki Warriors is based on Kabuki Theater where actors would dress in elaborate costumes and make-up where they would sing, dance, and even fly around. Why a fighting game would be made based off of this is beyond me, but then again, I’m just one of many ignorant Americans – and I’ll wholeheartedly admit it. From what I’ve seen of the art form, there’s more emphasis on drama than battle. Who wouldn’t agree that maybe a Kabuki rhythm game would have been a better idea?
 
 

The main attraction of Kabuki Warriors is Tour Mode where you take your troupe of Kabuki clones on a tour of Japan performing at a number of spots on your way to Kyoto, which if Futurama taught me anything, is the anagram lover’s Tokyo. Of course, you wouldn’t know this looking at the map since nobody even bothered to translate the damn thing. As you make your way across Japan, you’ll fight against rival groups - Kabuki style, which can only be interpreted as Japanese for button mashing. You’ve only got one attack button in your repertoire, which is used in conjunction with the left Analog stick for high, mid, and low attacks. You also have a jump and roll button, but you’ll never need them since mindlessly tapping the A button will pretty much ensure that you’ll take down anyone who stands in your way. The core of Kabuki Warriors is to sway the crowd in your favor, which gets them to throw a bunch of coins at you in return. You earn money and favor by completing combos or by posing or dancing. Earning both isn’t a hard task since pressing the attack button will send your character into a flurry of three-hit combos that can’t be stopped, thus eliminating the need for any kind of strategy. Pressing the white button will execute a pose, which also can’t be stopped and will cause bumbling AI will react in one of two ways – they’ll start posing along with you in a WWF-style pose-down or they’ll totally take advantage of the situation and start wailing on you as your pose is slowly animated. Matches play out in either one of two ways: either you’ll kick their ass with a perfect victory, or they’ll turtle themselves until time runs out. Either way, the yawn factor is through the roof here. When you’ve won your match, you can trade one of your characters with a character from the rival troupe for what they're worth....which is useless in about every case.
 
 

Once you’ve earned a certain amount of favor from the crowd, you can hit the black button to execute a worthless or overpowered special move – depending on the character you’ve chosen. For some characters, you’ll get an unavoidable lightning attack, for others such as Ukon; you’ll get the ability to turn invisible. Now before you start thinking that invisibility sounds pretty cool, it’s not much help in the 2D plane of Kabuki Warriors where you’ll just end up losing sight of your character, thus making things more difficult for you. Other characters will throw down colored smoke bombs of death that they’ll most likely walk into and get juggled from one end of the screen to the other.
 

There are only a handful of characters in the game, and while a couple are hussied up to the point of garishness, the rest fall into the usual generic fighter fodder you’ve come to expect. The vast majority of the characters you’ll come across are guys dressed in gray or palette swapped in darker gray or, get this, black with beekeeper masks and armed with kendo sticks. Worse than that, the game ranks you on how fast you get to the end of the map. You can take the money you earn to jump ahead any number of spaces you can afford. The game can be completed in nine turns – or thirty minutes if you’re highly caffeinated or on enough methamphetamines to keep yourself from nodding off. The tour mode can support up to four players in a race to the finish, but the game is so easy that the starting player will always reach the end first. Seriously, this game is as mindless as it gets and you can button mash your way from start to end on your first try.

 

Graphically, this game is a mess. While a handful of characters look different, their animations are all recycled. Everything from the intro sequences to the stupid dance they’ll pull off in mid-fight are the same for every character. The majority of the beekeepers you’ll encounter come in one color: generic model-in-progress-default-gray. They’re all bald and will sometimes come in an alternate form without the mask. Variety is the spice of life after all. Aside from the beekeepers, you’ve got two characters with wild hair that are palette swaps of each other, a chick that sounds like a guy, a dude in a Kimono, the aforementioned fat guy in a diaper, and a skinny guy who looks like he’s fresh from his latest romp at the local bath house. Watch in awe as your character magically clips through themselves...hair passes seamlessly through their bodies among other outlandish anomalies. Backgrounds consist of nothing more than different painted backdrops on a wooden stage. You’ll get some real-world backgrounds when you’re going through the secondary Time Attack mode, but they’re nothing impressive.
 
 

When it comes to sound, Kabuki Warriors assaults your eardrums with the worst scream you’ll ever hear for every menu selection you make. “EEEEAAAAAAAWWWWW!” will be the soundtrack to your nightmares as it’s gingerly nailed into your subconscious with every menu selection you make. Aside from that, everything you’ll hear spoken in the game is in Japanese without any help from subtitles. Characters only have a handful of sound-bytes and, like their animations, are recycled no matter who you’re playing. Each character has their own victory dance and saying, and even in the case of the only character in the game that closely resembles a real female, the voices are all male. A quick Wikipedia search, which is the only research on the subject matter I’ve done, shows that women were forbidden from the theater at a certain point in time. This could be historical accuracy at work, but who knows and who really even cares? Chicks that sound like guys are funny, however, kendo sticks that clang like swords are not. Everything from the mightiest umbrella to the lowliest katana clangs loudly resulting in a money shot of sparks. Rounding out the package is a soundtrack that consists of traditional Eastern tunes mixed with an electronic beat or wailing guitars. You decide whether that sounds good or not.

This game is not even worth the three bucks Amazon is charging for a new copy. There’s no replay value since you’ll experience all the horror this game has in store after one tour through. Replay value is non-existent as you’ll finish the single player game in thirty minutes and the Time attack mode in about seven. Kabuki Warriors is lazily produced, broken, clunky, and looks about as good as Sally Struthers the morning after an all-night Vegas buffet tour. Despite my ignorance of the subject matter, I can say with the utmost confidence that if I were a fan of Kabuki, this game can only be considered an embarrassment to the art. It’s dull, drab, draining, and about a thousand other synonyms of “boring” that I can’t think of off-hand. It’s hard enough to play the game, but to try to write an entertaining article about it is borderline agony. To see the game in action is far worse – unless it’s set to a snappy soundtrack! That’s why, for your viewing pleasure I offer Kabuki Warriors: A Musical Montage – the ONLY way this game can be enjoyable to anyone. See if you can last the full four minutes. Enjoy.
 

Vids

Kabuki Warriors: A Musical Montage
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Images