TBT REVIEW: Kendo Rage

Let’s finally begin the review for Kendo Rage!

The story begins with a girl named Josephine, or Jo, who travels to Japan as an exchange student to attend summer kendo school. Her trainer, Osaki “Bob” Yoritomo, intercepts her one day on the way to school. Bob gives Jo an ancient trinket of an elephant and pleads with her to defeat evil monsters along her way. Jo is annoyed because the house supplied to her is six hours away from school, but she decides to help anyway.

Kendo Rage | Mai's Task — Bob is Doro-San, and Jo is Mai. Now you know.

Welcome to Round 1! Jo walks triumphantly on screen and uses her elephant trinket to turn into a magical kendo girl! You begin your journey in the forest outside Jo’s home, and you need to make it to the first bus stop. Standard SNES controls for platformer games take place here. You move Jo with the d-pad, and you have a jump, attack, and special button. The first thing you’ll notice is Jo moves very slowly, however, while holding a direction on the d-pad Jo will build up momentum. When Jo is moving down a slope she will gain a lot of speed, too. She’ll gain so much speed that she will wildly start flailing out of control.

The art in this game is wonderful. The characters are detailed and fun. The different levels are just as unique, and also a pleasure to look at. The music in this game is quirky and fits the mood of the stages. The music isn’t what I’d exactly call a masterpiece, but it gives off the feeling of a Saturday morning anime. That’s just what this game represents, a comedic anime, and nothing more.

Another thing you’ll notice when starting is that there is a timer on the top left-hand corner of the screen. This game is timed but in an interesting way. When you begin your game you start at 4:00am and time progresses through each level. Jo makes a comment about her school being six hours away, but in reality, you have five hours to get to school, and if you don’t make it by 9:00am then you’re considered late! Luckily, there are clocks hanging around in the levels that will temporarily freeze time to help you make it to school before 9:00am.

As imagined, Jo’s primary weapon is her kendo stick. She can power up her attacks using psy energy, and psy energy is gained by not attacking. You can also obtain different powers from yokai comically called, “Ball Buddies,” which float in offering these powers. The powers act sort-of like power-ups from shoot-em-up games. Jo also has a special dash attack which is very powerful, but it drains so much health that I rarely found myself using it.

Kendo Rage suffers from a common problem that a lot of these SNES platformers have, high difficulty. The difficulty, although not the worst, will have you gritting your teeth. This game prides itself on having you replay levels just to memorize attack patterns and enemy locations. The boss battles also follow the same rules. Just pay attention to the attack patterns and you’ll take the bosses down.

The bosses are unique and funny. Before fighting each one they’ll say some stupid one-liner before attacking you. With everything in this game being extremely Japanese you’ll find that the Japanese dry humor found its way into the game too. I eat this stuff up! After defeating a boss you’ll wait at the bus stop. The bus will pick you up, and Bob will also come in with a one-liner before the next stage begins.

Overall Kendo Rage is silly, but a completely average platformer. It’s not bad by any means, but it isn’t exactly great either. The weirdness factor from the source material followed by the strangeness added by the localization team wears off quickly because of the high difficulty spike. You’ll have a handful of deaths with limited continues that put you all the way back at the beginning of the game. This will zap your energy and tolerance for the game quickly.

Once you get good at the game the pacing still feels slow. Play this one only if you need a quick laugh. I can only justifiably give Kendo Rage three stars because while the separate elements of the game, like the graphics, are great, the game as a whole is just an average experience.

What I’ve reviewed and presented is the entirety of all the information I could find. These titles are already so obscure that barely any information exists surrounding Makendou. Many of the companies that were affiliated with the game are now defunct, and sadly the magic kendo legacy goes with it. Who knew that a game I loved to hate so much as a child had such a crazy and confusing history?

I still have so many questions about Makendou. Who was this series marketed to? What part of the series’ information is valid, and what information was misinterpreted by localization or poor translation? Why so many different genres? I am obsessed and I need to know more. I’ll continue to search because that’s what I do.

Until next time, stay completely average, my friends.