sa;of87sf

this is a game that i've put off for years and years despite it being - by all means - something i was quite likely to enjoy. rare game with a girl protagonist, colorful visual work, nuanced grappling hook/movement mechanics - it feels like it had my name written on it. however, for a variety of reasons, i'd kept my distance. some of the official art for the game felt a little skeevy (particularly for sayonara, released in 2015 - the smoothness of her features, faint blush, and prominent breasts felt creepy), it had a bunch of people aggressively pushing it as an underrated gem (sometimes a bad sign), and i knew that it had a reputation as being highly difficult and would probably deserve some genuine effort and not just lazy play. all that, and a reasonable part of me was afraid i'd like it, and that i needed to wait for the mood to hit to give it the proper time to truly dig in.

i feel like my attitude toward it became outright aversion with how much i'd put off giving it a shot, and i decided there was no better time to rectify having not given it a shot than now, when i'm on a big streak of snes-playing that has had quite a few droughts in quality. it was make or break time, and i was starting to feel well enough to actually tackle a game i knew might be good or even great rather than just bracing for mediority and the lack of investment it tends to ask of me.

my initial impressions were quite mixed! i could tell that there was some serious nuance to the fishing hook, but how much of that was deliberate and how much of that was simply the programmers showing off felt inconclusive, and the nuisance enemies and their frequent respawns really, really got on my nerves. not long after that, i started to run into some of the game's boss fights, some of which are truly, jarringly awful. at times, i felt like this game was only going to get a two-star rating for being decent but highly flawed.

i think the peak of my absolute distaste for the game began and ended with the crab boss - an affair that lasts 4 entire minutes on a successful run with much of it spent simply waiting around for the boss to complete a movement cycle and actually attack again. he gradually destroys platforms and spits bubbles at you, and while the bubbles aren't dangerous at first, their random nature and loss of platforms makes this fight near-impossible without genuine luck involved. what makes this particularly agonizing is that it can take a few minutes for the fight to actually start being dangerous, and the process of dying repeatedly from this and restarting the entire run from being out of lives becomes truly exasperating.

these bosses run incredibly counter-intuitive to what i consider the game's strongest appeal: masterful use of the fishing hook. they're gratingly tedious and painful to sit through with no way to speed them up, and the lack of ability to do them quickly or gracefully makes them horrible toppers to any run. while i did eventually discover a cheap-out strategy for the crab that allowed me to fairly reliably get through it, it still bears mentioning that it's absurdly long. the world record speed-run through one of the branching paths in the game is shorter than this boss fight, by itself, and several paths converge on it.

the game's enemies also frequently act as total nuisances in their behavior, in such ways as firing projectiles from off-screen, respawning onto a platform you are already in the process of landing on, or being placed in ways that causes you to stop mid-swing and do a painful readjustment. they're more annoying toward the beginning of your playing the game, however, and as you master the hook, you can frequently master ways to either get around or trivialize them to the point that you free that painful claw they'd latched into your brain.

and let me use that to forward the point of the game being something to master... if we forget the wretched bosses for a moment, i would say that umihara kawase is - without a doubt - one of the most rewarding games i've ever spent time investing to learn. the gulf between your ability when you start the game and your ability when you've completed every single game exit is absolutely tremendous, and even by the end of that period the room for growth feels larger than with the vast majority of comparable games.

for [i]literal hours and hours of play[/i] i remained convinced that a good portion of the nuance to the swinging in this game was just programming show-off material and either wasn't fully intended or could have been better implemented. however, the more i chipped away at it, the more i came to understand that changing it in almost any way would deny it what makes its identity so unique. the stretchiness of the line and its perpetual bobbing at first feels like an obnoxious and idiosyncratic quirk that will forever keep this game from the realm of excellent swinging games like bionic commando, but instead is what ends up distinguishing it as even more interesting (i still far prefer bionic commando as an action game, but as a swinging game, umihara honestly surpasses).

it takes a while, but you get more than used to it, you begin to excel at it. moves that felt frustratingly complex and almost random to pull off at one point begin to feel like second nature, and you start to breeze through trouble stages. even a feeling of required trial-and-error and developing muscle memory begins to melt away before you've cleared every stage, and i found myself much more adaptable to new stuff the more i played. while a degree of hardened memorization is required for the specific inputs for some nuanced situations, those lessons often become applicable, elsewhere.

speeding through this game is almost pure delight once your skills are up to par, and even the enemies won't be getting in your way but for the occasional slip-up. this game truly rewards timing and execution coming to higher levels. boss fights never become truly mitigated in how awful and pace disrupting they can be, but the rest of the game shines so brightly around them that the weight with which they sabotage the overall product is severely lessened (albeit never completely diminished).

although i first found the game's branching levels to feel disconnected and that the game would probably be improved by a stage select format. it felt like the individual levels would probably be better experienced as their own things you could whittle down faster times with, and that getting to a new level only to fail on it repeatedly and be forced to replay earlier stages was a waste of time. as i continued to play, however, i came to eventually appreciate the speed with which i was starting to rocket through the starter stages and how they served as a warm-up, and eventually came to the position that the semi-arcade format of the game worked in its favor.

even the game's visuals went on a similar trajectory of ambivalence to adoration! i first thought the low-res photographs used for the backgrounds were ugly and that the game used this blocky, checkerboard format out of laziness, but the more i played, the more detail i began to see that wasn't the case. many unique tiles are used to form the game's blocky layout, and it only has the lazy, doujin-esque look of assets tossed together at first glance. many stages have unique background elements as well as bugs or fish moving about them, and this game's visual quality is actually surprisingly top notch. excellent usage of colors and detail, and the photograph backgrounds combined with the checkerboard layout gives it this humble-looking first glance that melts away to surprising labor having been done, underneath.

all that's left to really remark on is the music, which is pleasant and laid back. feels a bit frustrating to have such calm music accompanying what is at first a viciously challenging game, but it later becomes the perfect accompanyment to your relaxing, swinging adventures. replaying this game enough eventually makes it as second nature as going on a walk, and the music seems to perfectly capture that kind of sense of a happy little stroll.

despite having to definitely mention this game is an acquired taste with a very strict learning curve, i'd say it ultimately won out into being a 4-star rated game. a low 4-star due to the flaws, but one deserving of my highest tier of rating, nonetheless. i'd have a hard time recommending it to people due to the amount of time it requires to begin to excel at it and how borderline-agonizing some of the hurdles can be, but its swinging is just [i]so damn good[/i] and so well-explored by the game's huge variety of situations and hazards that i can't deny it accolades.

thinking about recording a quickplay nomiss of the game's shortest route.