Playstation 2 - Legend of Kay, The

Format
Playstation 2
Publisher
Capcom
Developer
Neon Studios
Country of origin
Germany
Genre
Platform

The Legend of Kay Preview

By David Rasmussen
26th Nov 05

Hey, everybody! Have you ever wanted to play a fairly decently animated platformer whose gaming sucked, whose combat system was a one hit button mashing wonder, and whose characters worked hard to insult and degrade your intelligence in ways you never thought possible? Then dear god have I got a review for you!
Because nothing say retarded like a cutesy platformer with zero intelligence I give you The Legend of Kay, and your first… and lord knows last if I have anything to say about it, which I usually don‘t… look as I check out the DEMO for this game!

Platformers, or to be more precise well crafted perfect platformers, are abit of a rare breed. If you have lowered expectations then finding a platformer to play isn’t much of a problem, however if you are looking for a diamond in the rough rare find amongst platformers then it is not such an easy prospect.
Let’s face it, every platformer just can’t be Sly 3 : Honor Among Thieves. If they were all that good then we wouldn’t have a problem since you’ll win no matter what you pick up, but sadly that’s just not the case.
Hence why we have to play games like The Legend of Kay… so you don’t have to.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s all the cutsey animorphic characters that look so appealing to kiddie audiences. Perhaps it’s the action setting and the “asian influence” that seems to be abound in this game. Perhaps the fact that it seems to be set in China (and we all know how well those Koei games set in China are) which is the selling point of this particular button masher. Or perhaps it’s the not so sterling voice acting and the terrible script (“Please, you no be hurting me now!“) that makes me wince when I think of this game.
I don’t know! Where does this game begin to suck anyway! So many choices, so little to review.

The game’s DEMO is simple enough. You are a cat person named Kay, who is voiced by a spunky voice actor who I’ve probably heard many times before though whose roles escape me at the moment. He is out to save the innocent people of this quaint… think it’s Chinese looking land… from evil rat people who are out to do no good in this day-glow it’ll make your brain bleed out of your ears game of good vs. evil!
Oh, and I guess it also helps that he’s out on a quest to avenge the shutting down of his old martial arts school -- that and the destruction of his village, which just so happens to always be a gosh darn good motivation for the vengeance minded youth on the go.

Anyway in the demo you bash rat creatures until they fall over and spill coins all over the place, do jumping (sometimes jumping and bashing which is just so gosh darn original), find a village of peaceful rabbit folk (who are presently not multiplying as rabbits have been known to do) through a so-called “secret” way that seems rather obvious, and follow an evil rat boss who… well… should I spoil the DEMO’s plot… nah, you’re not interested in that even if I did spoil it so why bother. Anyway the DEMO has a time limit so you don’t have much time to absorb the mediocre gaming before it ends.

Anyway if you were hoping there’d be some saving grace in the gameplay of The Legend of Kay then you might as well forget it, there’s no such thing here. The gameplay is basically simple as you run, hit the action button and knock things down and make them go bye-bye. Then you collect the stuff they leave behind and, well, repeat until everything is dead. Yeah, that’s so intelligent and insightful! Then you find the village by going through a secret revolving door hidden in plain sight in a tree. Yeah, like nobody can notice the strange hollow in the tree or how it spins as if to give access to another area. Of course you can undertake a side mission to find six cat statues which gives you access to coins and armor, but given the severe time restrictions I don’t know if you’ll have the time in this DEMO to pull that off.

The rest of the DEMO is short, really really short, I mean I played L.A. Rush longer than I played this short demo! It’s all the fault of the damn time limit on the DEMO! If the game allowed you to play as long as you’d want… oh, wait, then you’d realize how pedestrian and average this game is. My bad.

Renting may even be too good for this game as it is not the most original, or inspired, or even most exciting or fun platformer I’ve seen this year but at least you‘ll see the full game and realize how you shouldn‘t own this. There are really a ton of other games that are more deserving of your money than The Legend of Kay, and somehow I can’t help but fell a game like this won’t even last you one sitting since you should be able to breeze through this with little to no actual effort.

Sure, I think there might be some attempt by the developers to make the game try to grab what little attention you have left when you first look at this game, but after the characters and the dull gameplay reduces your interest to near nothing there isn’t much left for the developers to do to salvage interest short of dropping the kid friendly gaming and log chucking you into a full on M for Mature animorphic on animorphic sex sim… not happening, of course, but at least it would have caught your now almost non-existent attention.

Yeah, it’s for kids, but there are far better games out there for kids than this so I don’t see the appeal of a button masher that just isn’t very well constructed, or has enough incentive to see the story through from beginning to end even with it’s somewhat vibrant animation style. Still I guess it won’t kill me to review it somewhere down the line I guess… but don’t expect me to be too happy about it.
Of course should I change my mind later that’ll even surprise me since this DEMO… it’s just not doing anything for me whatsoever. Go figure.

-- David Rasmussen 26th Nov 05

Playstation 2 Legend of Kay, The Images