Kuon

I needed to post something else. So I decided to review a video game that in all likelyhood none of you have ever heard of: Kuon.

What the fuck is Kuon you ask? It's a PS2 Survival Horror game based on Heian-era Japan. It's also been localized by our good friends Agetec, so the odd obvious translation error is present.

The story is simple, yet confusing. You control one of two characters: A preist's daughter who is a total shut-in, who finds herself seperated from her sister, or a female excorsist who is investigating the dissapearance of the former's fuedal lord. All Jigoku breaks loose, and gaki and ghosts overrun a castle. You complete the story with one character, then you play as the other in a slight variation of the other story, then you play as a third character, another excorsist who is the rival of the person who turns out to be the main villain of the game.

Also, the story centers around some weird spell that can bring someone back to life by turning them into a famished undead who has to feed on creatures to come back to life, but instead of coming back to life as a human they are reborn as a mulberry. The preist's daughter accidentally killed her sister, but doesn't know the sister is actually dead, and the priest used the spell to try to bring the daughter to life.

And how does this turns the fuedal castle into an ancient Racoon City you ask? I'm not sure. Apparently the trees are evil and the silkworms that grow on the trees are sacred or something.

Overall, it's an okay game. You can set the difficulty between three modes, it's not too hard to beat the medium setting though you might die a couple times because the characters are a quite a bit fragile. Luckily you can heal them, in-combat by using items and out-of-combat with meditation. Outside of combat you travel the map in typical 'you need the red key to pass this door, the blue key to pass this other door' fashion, and there are a couple puzzles which you can solve in simple trial and error fashion. You can only save by using a limited item in certain locations on the map, but in all likelyhood you will rarely find yourself unable to save regularly.

Replay value is very very limited though. The entire game can be beaten in about eight to ten hours, and while there is a challenge mode where if you are hit nine times you die there's not really much else to make you want to play the whole thing again. There IS a minigame you can unlock, which is essentially a heian-era version of backgammon... in that it's EXACTLY like backgammon without the part where you take your stones off the board at the end.

So, if you have seven bucks, like a decent but not memorable story, and REALLY REALLY like Backgammon, get Kuon. Otherwise, get yourself some Chik-Fil-A.