Kien Review (GBA) | Smash Jump

KIEN is a game that must have had one of the longest development cycles of any game I can remember. It was originally designed and created by a team of first-time developers in south Italy in around 2001. The original team couldn’t find a publisher in 2001.

This passionate team of young artists and coders were essentially not that experienced and while the game has potential as the combat system is fun, it seems like the new developers haven’t brought the game up to modern standards. It is littered with archaic systems and annoying gameplay design. The game has no auto-save feature and uses a password system. It is also annoyingly difficult and the player only has a few lives before they reach a game over screen and their progress is erased.

Sword and sandal narrative

The game begins with text setting out a fantasy narrative about gods and warriors. It’s quite interesting and does a job of enticing the player into the protagonists’ fate. You then choose either the male or female character, the male is a warrior and the female a mage. Then you are straight into the action. The animation is fluid and the game uses a cartoony visual style that looks quite good for a GBA game.

You almost immediately have access to power-ups, which are locked to each character class. The gameplay consists of killing enemies. There are quite a few forms of said enemies. However, the projectile-throwing foes are quite irritating, and partly due to respawning and their placement on the map things get frustrating. Another negative aspect of the title is the music, which repeats and seems to be made up of one single track.

To add to the archaic feel of the game, there is no modern save system. Instead, the game uses passwords to load areas deep into the game. You are given a password once you reach certain checkpoints. Wouldn’t It have been easier to implement an autosave feature? Because it uses a password system in Kien, you have to carry a pen and paper and it is not convenient.

The status page shows the playable character’s level and stats and this all seems wasteful because of how quick it is to get a game over and for the game to reset. It seems like a wasted opportunity because the core gameplay of killing enemies using the sword and spells has potential and is fun. However, because of the lack of an autosave and the minimal lives you are given at the start of the game achieving progress is frustrating and you’ll have a hard time having fun in Kien.

Definitely not “Soulslike”

The advertising for the game calls it “pre-Soulslike” and I find the comparison to Dark Souls misleading on multiple levels. Firstly, Kien is a 2D action platformer, nothing like a 3D action RPG. The gameplay has no similarities to Dark Souls. Also, it was first developed decades before Dark Souls was created, so there can be no link between the two games. Both games involve combat, that’s the only similarity.

Kien has a branching level structure with stages linked through “portals.” Dark Souls, similarly to this game, lacks the open-world structure that has been popular over the last decade because of games like Skyrim and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, it is ridiculous to compare this platformer to FromSoft’s fare.

In Kien, some warp points open up a map of the “Land of Malkut,” which shows a spider’s web of linked locations of which only the nearest few you can choose as available destinations. The boss who was described at the first mission’s briefing appeared at the end of one of these linked locations, not at the end of what seemed like a level, or group of levels, but at a seemingly random stage.

He was illustrated well and had decent animation but to defeat him I literally just spammed the attack button. I hardly had to move the position of the player character. After about two minutes, he died. Usually, in a good action-platformer, some tactics are required to defeat a boss and even in beat ’em’ ups some thought is needed, but in Kien it seems that just tapping the A button continuously for two minutes does the job. Ironically, it seems that it needed more development time because what we have here is a rushed, archaic, platformer.

Conclusion

To sum it up, Kien had some potential in its combat system but is blighted by having an old-fashioned password save system and no quality-of-life additions. At its core, the game has respawning enemies and poorly thought-out positioning for enemy placement, which is more annoying than challenging. The bosses don’t require many tactics, they just require constant hitting of the attack button. The story and narrative is compelling, but overall KIEN is a game that is hard to enjoy and hampered by archaic game design and systems.