So, I’m not the biggest fan of the phrase “So bad, it’s good”.  Like, I have a soft spot for the occasional objectively-bad piece of entertainment – I will defend the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie to my final days – but in general I’m of the belief that most bad things are, well, bad.

Then I play a game like Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau and it’s a nigh-religious experience while also being objectively one of the worst things I’ve ever spent money on.  Like, the controls were clunky, movement was slow, performance wasn’t great, the environments were made up entirely of canned assets, clipping through walls and other theoretically-solid object happened so often that I stopped noticing it, and in general it is such an unpolished game that I find myself stretching for an adjective that means “rough, but rougher than that”.

Despite that, I spent most of the game in a general semi-stunned state of “wait, did that just happen?” and wondering what would come next.

Put in simplest terms, it’s a very VERY low budget Call of Duty clone, except you’re not playing as the typical patriotic young lad out to distribute democracy to people who have the misfortune to live in whichever foreign country it’s politically-correct to hate this year.

Rather, you’re a young woman in a school uniform laying spirits to rest in rural Japan.

“Exorcist” conjures up images of, like, chanting and waving bells around and similar nonsense.  Shiraishi has no time for that.  Shiraishi has a big gun that kills ghosts.

And Shiraishi has a mission statement:

Look, “cute girl who swears a lot” is a trope that has been done plenty of times.  I’m not going to say it’s particularly novel.  I AM going to say that this particular iteration is a lot of fun.

One of the best metrics I have to tell me whether I am enjoying something is how often the screenshot key gets pressed.  If I’m just playing something more-or-less by the numbers, I’ll finish a game and there will be a screenshot for every time the game console automatically took one when I got an achievement, plus usually five to ten more for particularly epic bits or blatant fan service.

In the course of KSAB’s 4-hour campaign, I took 94 screenshots.  That’s just unprecedented.  I would share more of them, but… well, out of context, I don’t think they would be all that interesting and more importantly I think this is a game that people should play with as little information as possible going in.

You’re going to hate the controls, and you are probably going to hate a particular stealth mission about halfway through the campaign that represents the only real difficulty spike, but it’s worth it.