If you like sushi, you’re probably familiar with Krab.  You know, it more or less looks like crab and more or less tastes like crab and more or less has the same texture as crab, but it’s really mostly whitefish.

It follows, then, that the heroine of “Blade Kitten” would be a Katgirl.

I have nothing against western developers trying to “look Japanese”, and I have no problems being pandered to.  “X-Blades” was one of my favorite games of 2009, after all.  There was just something about the way it’s done in Blade Kitten that irritated me.  Maybe there’s an “Uncanny valley” for trying to look Japanese, where the closer you get to successfully copying the style, the more easy it is to creep people out.

(I guess I can’t say that X-Blades is a WESTERN game, since it’s from Russia, but you get the point I hope.)

Anyway, back to talking about Blade Kitten, which I got as a Christmas gift from my wife this last year and which I just finished playing through.  It’s from Australia, by the way.  As you may have guessed already, it’s about a Katgirl with a Big Damned Sword, which may or may not be sentient – the game doesn’t really explore that part too much.  She’s got an Obligatory Cute Mascot and is out to, uh, I guess she’s a bounty hunter so she’s presumably out to hunt bounties.

Her race was also wiped out by something called the “Darque”, which is something that’s not actually brought up until the very last level of the game.  This makes the point much earlier in the game where the “Darque” actually show up rather confusing.

Oh, and she will take orders from ANYONE.  I will give an example:

For most of the game, you are beating up an endless supply of guys in red, somewhat Haloesque body armor.  They’re called the Stolars.  Maybe Solars.  Something like that.

At one point, you run into some Stolars and one of them gives you a message to take to his commander, so you spend a level navigating traps and avoiding whirling blades and in general getting to the guy.  In the process of this, you actually fight more and more Stolars.

Moreover, when you get to the commander, you’d kind of expect him to say something along the lines of “So you’re the bounty hunter that’s killed a couple thousand of my men, hun?  Guess I’ll have to shoot you” rather than what actually happens, which is that he then assigns you another quest and kicks you off to the next level.

It has the obligatory joke where the main character gets called “ma’am” and gets all defensive about her age, and the bit where a character calls her “young woman” and she gets all deredere.

ah hah ahhaa haha laugh a minute stuff.

Oh, she also speaks in MMORPGisms whenever you pick up a collectible or die.  The first time I found a chest, for example, the camera went into a close-up and she said “DING!”.  She also says things like “Win get!” and “Epic Fail”, but at least there weren’t any “all your base” references.

Anyway, setting the story aside, which you’ll want to do, what’s left is a rather ambitious platforming game with a lot of color and an emphasis on exploration.  That is to say, while you can blast through every level in the game rather quickly, you will do a lot better if you take some time to explore the nooks and crannies.  It also looks good; the worlds are vibrant and it’s worth the time to occasionally slow down and just soak in the background details even if you’re not hunting for hidden stuff.

Oh, I know I promised to set the story aside, but this is Important:  The game ends on a cliffhanger telling you to “wait for episode 2”, and the studio that developed it has kind of sort of gone bankrupt or something so I wouldn’t go holding my breath waiting for episode 2.