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Good bye Kawase-san! Wait… why is she leaving?
Time has passed and Kawase-san is now 20, but her childhood days of fish-line grappling and mutant-fish hooking are far from over. We’re in a 3-D environment this time but overall, not much has changed. The controls, tactics and general principles are identical to the original Umihara Kawase. Unfortunately the smoothness of control and animations just don’t quite translate as well to the polygon world. A lot of the charm is lost from the character’s movements and expressions and I can’t help but feel the whole thing is just wrong somehow.
You still hook, swing and reel your way to victory, but it almost feels like it’s a system now–a formula that has been repeated without soul in its current state. This is apparently the fifth title in the Umihara series and I think it shows. It doesn’t help that the original had a perfect succession of increasingly difficult levels preceded with micro-tutorial clips. Original Umihara had a skippable textless video at the beginning of the level of Umihara-chan doing some sort of feat within the game. This quickly showed the player the kinds of things that they could and needed to do to beat each level. Unfortunately in this fifth title, Kawase-san isn’t used in this manner at all. Instead, the developers decided that an absolutely ridiculous number of popup windows would do the same. After the 20th or so (and no, I’m not exaggerated) within five minutes, I turned off the tutorial messages completely. Thank goodness they at least let you do that.
Sadly, this one just isn’t as fun as the original. It’s almost the same game but as it is just feels like a Tier 3 downgrade, I can’t recommend it at all if you have access to the original. The spritework feels cleaner and faster and doesn’t have all the stupid annoying pop-up windows. It also feels more like a game and less like a series of consequence-less challenges. You don’t have lives in this new one, you just select levels from a menu which sort of makes everything feel like a grind.
