This is going to be my August submission.
I admit I was hard pressed for a subject to draw, and when that happens I often consider making some fan art instead of art of my own characters. I recently purchased "Kaze and The Wild Masks" hoping that the game might serve as a distraction to help me recover from my recent mental break down. I've been playing it pretty casually since I purchased it, but I think that is for the best. It's fun for half-hour sittings, but I don't want to sink all my time into it. I'd also like to take my time enjoying the game as well.
I have known about the game for some months but kept putting off purchasing it partly because of the price tag and partly due to indecision about buying the regular game or the Deluxe version (I finally just went for the Deluxe). Probably a waste of money as the base game is the vast majority of the content, but oh well.
While I'm on the subject I will give my opinion and review of the game. It's fair enough to say I'm enough of a fan of the game to draw fan art and I kind of like this Kaze character even though we don't learn that much about her. But she is a cute and likeable character as we will get into.
Unusual for an anthropomorphic mascot platformer, Kaze is indeed canonically female. From what can be gathered from the story she is an adventurer and treasure hunter. Unfortunately it seems that her treasure hunting is what causes the very trouble she now is trying to correct. Grabbing some ancient ring she has accidently trapped her friend Hogo within it, and also a curse has made all the vegetables turn into sentient monsters intent on terrorizing the populace. Okay. A bit odd.
The main area I feel this game is weak is in the story department. A lot of reviewers will say "true to 2D platformers of the day it wasn't really about the story". That is a bit of a gross simplification in my opinion. A big draw of a lot of popular platformers was a compelling world and characters, and platformers that failed to do that tended to suffer. Think of Megaman. Sure, the *story* might be simple, but there was sufficient lore and endearing characters to make that story compelling. Same goes for Sonic The Hedgehog. One of my favorite mascot platformers, Rocket Knight Adventures, is briming with personality world building and character. Again the story is simple, you spend most of the game chasing after your rival who has kidnapped the princess, but the world of magic and mechanics with opposum Knights fighting an oppressive Pig Empire is compelling. You really feel like a "bad ass" yet noble little rocket knight fighting against the odds with your superior gaming skills. By comparison, there isn't much we learn about Kaze's world except a generic furry treasure hunting world. We don't have a compelling "big bag" as far as I know. There aren't any significant cutscenes except for defeating the bosses as far as I know (I've only cleared the first world so maybe there is more to it but I'm doubtful). There aren't really any twists and turns. What this means in practice is we don't get much compelling story or narrative to accompany the games considerable visual and musical splendor. So while modern gamers may think that older games weren't "much about story", they miss something important. That was true, but it made up for it in world building and inventiveness. Now there is inventiveness in the vegetable designs, however I don't think they make particularly compelling enemies. Most seem fairly neutral and they are not even the major threat in this game.
Alright so the story leaves something to be desired. How about the presentation and gameplay? Well The game is gorgeous to look at on even a moderately large modern screen. Pixel art is a personal fave of mine. It is pleasant to look at, easy to read, colorful, and fun. The art here feels like a proper 32-bit pixel platformer, with large detailed sprites and lots of effects in the foreground and background. Kind of like what you'd expect the playstation to be like if it weren't focused on 3d and polygons. Kaze is cute and many of her poses and animations are adorable. You will either fall in love with her or find her a tad annoying. She makes little grunts and moans with almost every movement, so you will either find that endearing or grating. The game consists mostly of jumping, spinning, and 'coptering'. Kaze's main gimmick and ability is her extra long rabbit ears. This enables her to helicopter glide down by spinning her ears and slowing her descent. This allows her to do a long jump for clearing large gaps or adjusting landing time.
This gets us into the main game play. Kaze is very weak. She gets no more than 2 hit points at any time. You have base Kaze which will die on contact with anything, and she gets an extra hit point when grabbing a heart. This extra hitpoint is represented by the appearance of "Hogo" who is your "ring spirit", really your friend who got trapped in the ring. They appear as a red glowing head. The implication seems to be the Hogo will take the hit for you, but then you are on your own. Hearts are not plentiful and are hard to find on "original mode". This is the mode I'm playing and it's "recommended". However it's clear that this was designed to be a platformer for people with a good handle on platformers. It apparently is enough of a nuisance that a "casual mode" was added that gives you way more hearts to make the game more like a conventional platformer. As it stands you will just have to learn not to accidently miss your mark and fall into endless pits, or get knocked off by spikes, or any number of ways to die. Enemies prove to be the least of your worries, as they typically have very simple or no real attack patterns. Some literally just sit around waiting for you to kill them. The real difficulty lies in the obstacle courses involving climbing on moving ropes, jumping into spring loaded crossbows, lots of spike walls, and other such moving obstacles. Timing and precision platforming are key, and messing up even a tiny bit usually means a instant death. You will likely die a lot in Kaze. This won't matter much because you have infinite lives, and it's almost as if the difficulty was scaled to match that fact. Although not as difficult as things like "The World's Hardest Game" or "Kaze Marios", you will none the less encounter a similar kind of play style of dying dozens of times to get a hang of the level layout and the levels mechanics before you get the timing just right. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you are not going to have a good time with this game. If you don't mind perfecting your run though, then this isn't as bad as all that and for the most part you can master a level in 15 minutes or so a piece. I have found the most fun, personally, in the time trials, that are made immediately available upon first completion. Attempting to get the "gold timer" will give you plenty of practice with not dying through the level while not wasting any time warming up for the next section. Since you get no pick ups (no hearts) on timer mode, you literally can only get hit once, have no checkpoints, and have to pull off all the death pit sections flawlessly, this is where you will find yourself dying the most. It almost borderlines on frustrating, until you pull it off and then it's quite satisfying. Once you memorize the layout you can go pretty quickly through the obstacles and iterate until you get a time you are satisfied with.
The game does have inventive and cool levels, I will give it that. Bosses at the end of each world are a welcome addition. There are also bonus level challenges to find if you want to unlock the games extra content. These challenges can be a little frustrating, but you also get infinite tries on these which believe me is a God send. You get one-hit point on these and they can be quite frustrating until you get the hang of it. A few are a bit puzzle like and require a clever route to complete.
Overall what would I say? If you are a fan of anthro characters and enjoy the old-school 2d Platforming format, you will be right at home. Depending on your gaming skills you may find yourself a little frustrated. Don't expect to breeze through levels casually and just take in the sights and sounds like you might on a casual Sonic run. You are likely going to find the gameplay, despite controlling soundly and being solid, a bit limited and wanting. The story is also not likely to be terribly compelling. We don't really know why Kaze hunts for treasure, we don't know if she feels guilty for unleashing the curse, responsible, or anything really. We aren't given a lot of emotional stakes here. Now I could criticize something like Super Lucky's Tale for not having huge stakes either, but there it makes up for it by loading its villain roster with an amusing cast of quirky villains. Here we don't even have that to fall back on. With the somewhat shallow gameplay and story, do I still recommend it? Yes. There aren't nearly enough furry games out there, and this one really shines in the graphics and sound department. I probably haven't given enough praise to the sprite work, beautiful environments, and general game aesthetics and ambience. It is a nice game to play. The controls feel responsive, and if you die its almost always because you were slow on the uptake and just up and let something hit you (perhaps out of a kind of trained gaming laziness. Remember you get 2 hit points here. Not a lot of room for error). On the flip side things rarely move that fast and so getting hit is usually more a matter of impatience and sloppiness than something unfair being thrown your way.
I should probably also mention that masks. Every so often on a level Kaze will reach a statue holding one of four masks: Tiger, Shark, Lizard, Eagle. They give you extra movement abilities which you will have to just pick up by experimenting. There is one jump button and one attack button, so literally its as simple as hitting attack and seeing what happens. These shake things up, but the mask gimmick is not given a lot of attention. Instead a level will occasionally feature one of these 4 masks. They aren't like general power-ups that you can mix and match in the game play. This aspect seems to be a bit tacked on, honestly, and doesn't tie in an interesting way into the lore other than perhaps being more treasure hunting.
All and all for an indie game its charming, but feels a bit underwhelming where it counts: lore, worldbuilding, creating a larger excitement about the world and characters, areas where indie games usually excel. Take Hyperlight Drifter for example. Like Kaze, there is no dialogue, and yet that game build an amazing sense of a post-apocalyptic world, one of rotting labs and technology underneath a new primitive society of tech-ninja's who roam the land in search of the elusive "perfect-cell", cure of a disease that is killing your character. The game has incredible atmosphere and it's world is deeply intriguing in part because so much of it is left mysterious. But you sense a deep well of time, forces larger than yourself guiding history and your journey, and plenty of punishing and demanding gameplay, even more punishing that Kaze truly. But this is a game that asks you to be a real ninja, to dash between multiple enemies, make smart moves with your resources and timing and pull off cool combos. You feel cool when you pull stuff off, because you are a glass power-house. You can die fast but you can do a lot of rapid and precise damage as well. So not only do you get a deep sense of lore and world-building, but the gameplay feels deep in all the ways that matter. Not dozens of mechanics and systems for the sake of being "modern" but a purposeful use of a small set of systems, with a key combat structure that feels tight and demanding, sometimes even a bit overwhelming. It doesn't hold your hand, and yet, if you've played retrogames all your life you will not need a guide. You will intuitively grasp most of what you need to do.
Kaze could have done with some more compelling worldbuilding and possibly some personality for the main character and some villains. If you let her wait on the stage map a bit she has a bit of sass and impatience, not unlike Sonic. But a voice role would have been nice to get more of a feel for the character. If you really like her, you might be able to overlook this. She follows the cartoon convention of being bottomless, unusual for a modern anthro, and esp. for a female. So it's kind of cute seeing her with no pants if that's your thing. I certainly had fun with that in my redesign here.
Speaking of which I did make a few quality of life changes. This pose is taken from the stage completion animation. I removed Hogo but that's just so we can see Kaze more clearly. I gave her less lashes (I don't think so much is necessary), actually bunny buck teeth, and a tail. These bunny staples are missing from her design. I also elongated her body making her look a bit older and more mature, and extended her belly go continue between her legs. She has ever so slightly larger hips. However overall I wanted to keep in the spirit of the original as much as possible. She does not feature any breasts nor hips in the original, so I wanted to keep that similar. Hopefully she still reads as female. Lastly as fan art I wanted to keep this clean and lore accurate, so no bits this time (I suppose they are covered by fur or something).
I am pretty happy with how this turned out. Initially I was feeling pretty discouraged, but then I just relaxed, had a little fun coming up with my own design, and in some ways, I think I've made a slightly sexier and more appealing version of the original.
Anyway, hope you like.
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Published:
6 months, 3 weeks ago
29 Aug 2025 22:13 CEST
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