Kena: Bridge of Spirits Review

It makes sense that Ember Lab, the developer of Kena: Bridge of Spirits, started out as an animation studio. Just looking at this beautiful world and Pixar-style character designs, you can tell that this is a team that has a ton of experience creating incredible digital work, including their Majora’s Mask fan movie, Terrible Fate. While Bridge of Spirits’ gameplay falls short of the extraordinarily high bar set by its visuals for a number of reasons, including smooth storytelling and shallow progression, this 3D open-world action adventure remains an impressive achievement thanks to its combat. exciting and deceptively simple and an excellent balance of action, puzzle solving and platforming.

Kena is a spirit guide who helps spirits who cannot move on to the next life, whether due to lingering guilt or unfinished business. The story follows her as she makes her way through a beautiful but dying land in search of her sacred mountain sanctuary, leading the troubled spirits she encounters along the way. Not enough good things can be said about the character designs, facial expressions, and animation in Bridge of Spirits, which do an amazing job of making everyone you meet immediately endearing, especially Kena herself.

She’s so nice, in fact, that it’s actually kind of annoying that we never get to learn much about her. You get hints of her background and history, but never anything that lets you get to know her in the same way that you get to know the spirits and other characters she ends up interacting with. It’s a shame because she’s the one we spent the most time with, and everything else about her is amazing and made me want to know more.

In many ways, Bridge of Spirits is a throwback to the classic 3D Zelda game style of having a big world that is divided into main zones and then guides you through them in a linear fashion. Each zone will then require you to collect X amount of item Y, fight a boss, and then snag an upgrade that allows you to travel and explore the next zone. It’s very simple and formulated, but it works gracefully – each area is home to a corrupt spirit that Kena needs to save, and as you explore the region, you meet other characters who were close to the spirit, learn about the history of how things were. . To bad for them, he finds their personal effects, watches flashbacks, and then it all culminates in a boss fight that ties a little noose in the story arc.

The combat, on the other hand, is nothing like Zelda’s. It’s fast, deceptively simple, and surprisingly challenging on the normal difficulty level due to its cheesy and colorful demeanor. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, and the ability to use your staff as a bow for ranged attacks, and … that’s about it in terms of your main offensive tools, start to finish. The combat options were so limited, in fact, that I was actually quite disappointed at first because most enemies could be killed with just one or two light attack combos, and they didn’t give me much reason to do anything else for long. more than I would have liked in a game that only lasts about nine hours.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits Photo Mode Screenshots

Some nuances are introduced into the shape of your adorable little Ghibli-style sprites, inappropriately known as Rot. These little guys help you in battle by attacking an enemy and temporarily locking them in, giving you a chance to attack their weak spots or just focus on taking out the surrounding enemies. The ability to command them is tied to a fun contextualized Courage Meter that builds as you deal damage, encouraging them to put themselves in danger to help you.

What really redeems the combat in Bridge of Spirits is that after a while it begins to introduce new types of enemies that encourage you to change your tactics and explore some of the subtleties of its limited tools. Whether you’re making use of your bow’s time slow by leaping into the air and targeting hard-to-hit weak spots, using a parry against an attack that’s hard to dodge, or using your Rot to immobilize a tough enemy so that can attack it. from behind. There is an impressive amount of variety of enemies, and once they started showing up at the party, I felt like I was constantly being confronted with new and interesting scenarios. This is exactly how it should be in a game like this.

You must also manage your resources very carefully in battle once the difficulty starts to increase significantly later in the campaign. Not only can you use Courage to block enemies with Rot, but you must also use it to heal by clearing specific areas in a fight. There are rarely more than two of these heal points in any scrap, making every damage you take incredibly significant, and you often have to decide if you want to use your courage in order to survive another hit. or use it to take a ton of damage to a stationary enemy or boss.

That said, it would have been nice to have something else to do in a fight. Bridge of Spirts’ progression system doesn’t provide many attractive options to evolve your fighting style, and it made me feel pigeonholed into my approach to combat, especially since there is a melee weapon, and that weapon never got much better or better than me. . continued playing. You can update your moves, but the impact of those updates is disappointing to say the least. Three of the four melee buffs are skills that Kena looks like she should have from the start (two quick attacks and an overhead punch while in the air) the post parry counterattack doesn’t feel much stronger than only attacking while the opponent is backing away, and many other updates are small, barely noticeable incremental improvements. I never thought “It would be nice if I could shoot five arrows instead of just four”, especially considering how fast the arrows regenerate.

There are exceptions, of course: a charged bow shot that deals heavy damage at the cost of a bar of Courage, a slow hammer strike that could take out a group of enemies at once, and the ability to activate slow motion while shooting. aiming without jumping in the air was the kind of new techniques I was looking for the most. But aside from these, I was never thrilled about the updates because they rarely seemed like something that would be especially useful or make combat more fun.

Fighting baddies isn’t all you’ll do in Bridge of Spirits, and the fact that it so well balances combat, platforming, puzzle solving, and exploration is one of its strongest points. You never do anything for too long. After finishing a challenging combat encounter, you’ll typically be challenged to solve some sort of puzzle to open up the next area, sometimes ordering your little Rot army, like Pikmin, to move objects to press buttons or give you a platform. to stand. Once you get the bomb powered up, you will regularly do fun platforming sequences where you have to activate a series of platformers and figure out the best way to get from point A to B before the platformers return to their natural states. And on top of all that, this is an open world with many hidden secrets off the beaten track, although whether most of those secrets will be of interest to you is another story.

My only complaint about exploring and hunting for collectibles is that with the exception of the meditation spots (which increase your max health), none of the collectibles really had a huge impact on my game. For context, I’m someone who doesn’t really care much about cosmetics, which is why I never felt very compelled to search for Bridge of Spirits collectibles when most of the time they ended up being new hats to me. Rot or coin that I could use to buy more hats for my Rot. Sure, there are cursed chests, which are fun to track down because they force you to complete a combat challenge to open them, but it’s almost always disappointing when you’re going through a tough battle and your payoff is … another bit of fun. hat to put on one of your funny creatures. So I quickly lost the motivation to do more.

One final area that deserves special mention is the boss battles, which are some of the most intense and challenging I’ve fought all year. Every fight feels different, the big ones have appropriately epic music, and there are plenty too. Some of the smaller boss battles even end up becoming regular enemies that you’ll have to fight later, and that’s a good way to revisit some of the funniest and most difficult fights.