To properly talk about this game, you’re going to need a brief history lesson. Around the mid-2000’s, Starfish-SD got the license from Taito (yes, the Taito that made Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble) to make a sequel to an arcade game made by them called Kiki Kaikai, which is best known overseas by its SNES adaptation, Pocky & Rocky. Things were going fairly swimmingly… until Square-Enix acquired Taito as a fully-owned subindustry. For whatever reason, Square-Enix had a problem with it, and revoked the Kiki Kaikai license from Starfish-SD, as well as other Taito licenses that other developers had their hands on at the time (Balloon Pop on Wii/DS was a similar case, as that was going to be a Pop’n Pop sequel). After a bit of rocky development, the game was finally released in 2007 as the game that you see here, albeit called Heavenly Guardian (or Legend of Sayuki, if you’re in Europe), on PlayStation 2 and Wii. Learning about this and seeing gameplay of it, I thought, “Man, Square were a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for not letting this be a Kiki Kaikai sequel.” And the pedigree that Starfish-SD had supported my agenda, as it is made up of former Hot-B developers. If you go back even further, Hot-B had a good business relationship with Taito, developing quite a few games on Taito arcade hardware (one of these games, Monkey King: Master of the Clouds, is also on Steam, even), and developing a couple ports of Taito games (The Fairyland Story on MSX, Ka-Ge-Ki on Mega Drive, etc), so it sounded like a good idea on paper that Starfish-SD had their hands on the Kiki Kaikai license. 12 or so years later after its debut on PS2 and Wii, the game quietly appears on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam. And now finally playing the game via this new port… I think maybe Square-Enix and Taito were right in revoking the Kiki Kaikai license.
The game’s plot revolves around a snow goddess, Sayuki, falling in love with a boy in a village. However, the boy fell under a curse that puts him to sleep permanently, and it is up to Sayuki to find the cure for the boy’s curse.
The game should be very familiar if you’ve played Kiki Kaikai, but it lacks the finesse of that game. It's a top-down shooter where you can shoot in any direction, get the power-ups to improve your shots, etc. With all that aside, the gameplay doesn’t need much explaining. What does need explaining, however, is some of the issues this game has.
While the game might be adequate if you’ve never played any of the Kiki Kaikai games... if you played any of them the game's issues are amplified. Cheap deaths, spotty hitboxes, and uneven difficulty are just a few of these problems. It stings even more that (from what I can tell) these issues were also in the original PS2/Wii version, and they didn’t bother to fix it for this new version. The OST is also very forgettable unlike the Kiki Kaikai games, which have pretty good OSTs, and the graphics themselves are alright, but they could be better. The worst issue of all, and the one that turns an average game into a pretty bad one, is the lack of any save features. While this is an understandable design choice, given the nature of most shoot-em-ups, which are usually meant to be beaten in under an hour, it's pretty bad in this case. Mostly due to the game’s difficulty, the length of the levels, and the fact that you have to beat it twice to get the best ending, a la Ghosts’n Goblins. It does save high scores, but it's rather pointless, as there's no stuff like leaderboards and whatnot anyways. And again, this is something they could have added in this new port, but didn’t bother to, from what I can tell.
Speaking of the port, it’s an awful PC port. The game was ported over from (what I assume to be) a custom engine into Unity, and while that isn’t bad per se, it doesn’t feel polished like other ports that have done the same thing, like Final Fantasy IX PC. The default Unity startup window is the only way you can configure your graphics and controllers, and once you’re in the game, you can’t configure them anymore until you quit out of the game (only via Alt-F4, lol) and start it up again. The game is also presented in a 4:3 with boarders on the side, and while that also really isn’t an issue by itself, you can only use 16:9 resolutions, with no way to play the game on 4:3 monitors without windowboxing.
Overall, while you might have some fun if you’ve haven’t played a top-down shooter before, this game is really only worth looking at for the history behind it, and even then, I’d say wait for a sale.
Edit (7/8/20): The game apparently does have a save feature, at least in this new version. Still doesn't solve the levels being too long though, as you have to beat a level in order for it to save.
