#umihara kawase fresh

[video-witch]

Umihara Kawase Fresh has a character named Butt

[lesserknownwaifus]

Brenda from Umihara Kawase Fresh! (2019)

[mugiwaravt]

It is Thursday my dudes! Time for Umihara Kawase Fresh! Come check it out! uwu

[miloscat]

[Review] Cotton Fantasy (PS4)

Hit or miss.

The Cotton series by Success has a kind of cult classic status among shmups. There’s only a handful of games—this is only the fourth horizontal stg game in the series, not counting the two rail shooter instalments—but it’s a key component of the “cute ‘em up” subgenre, with its colourful looks, oddball enemies, and precocious witch protagonist. After a 20-year period of dormancy, Success has been working to revive the series recently with modern reissues, a remake of the original game, and lending out the character for appearances in Umihara Kawase Fresh and Bazooka. This collaboration with Saizensen led to the latter creating this game... and inserting their characters Luffee and Umihara Kawase as reciprocal guests, hence this being the epilogue to my series on grapple games that started with a Kawase sister game.

Now I’ve never been the biggest fan of shoot ‘em ups. They can be quite hostile to players who aren’t already diehards, or are intended to be played and replayed to memorise and master them, in order to aim for high scores and 1cc clears: not my style. This one threw me a bone by allowing you to respawn after a game over at any time with the only penalty being resetting your score (not an issue for my purposes). In fact, you come back fully powered up, which goes some way to avoiding the pitfall these games can fall into—even highly lauded classics—where any mistake is an insurmountable setback as it removes all your upgrades. With this one merciful dynamic, any novice can easily clear the game and see all the content, although they might experience frustration at constantly being knocked on their bum on the way there.

In the long tradition of scrolling shooters, this is a one-hit kill game. They’re not all like this, but... this one is, sadly for me. For fans of the series, it accrues mechanics from previous entries, and features the usual silly interstitial scenes in motion-comic style which are amusing, at least the first time (and for subsequent times you can zip through effortlessly with the handy skip button on R1). The tea-time screens are present and correct, and there’s even bonus stages which approximate the into-the-screen scrolling of my preferred entries Panorama and Rainbow.

Fantasy (known in Japan and on PC by the superior title Cotton Rock’n Roll) features the familiar “magic crystal” mechanic, similar to Twinbee’s bells where you shoot them to change their colour to stock up on particular powerups. You’re constantly shifting frantically between the three shot types, if not by grabbing another crystal then by expending a magic spell. In the rotation are also yellow crystals to increase your EXP meter and power up your shots, which charges up much too slowly for my liking and gets smacked down upon (my too-frequent) deaths. Spending any amount of mental energy on planning weapon types and gathering crystals would inevitably lead to me blundering into an enemy or bullet which come at you in a bewildering blur (depending on the stage). Some bosses also shift gears into almost bullet-hell style, made worse by the poor visibility of your small transparent heart which represents your vulnerable hit point.

A big feature of this is a selection of playable characters, which is sort of a returning feature from Boomerang (the Saturn conversion of Cotton 2, the fourth overall Cotton game... keeping up?). Some play quite similar to Cotton while adding a mechanic, like our beloved Kawase who has her grapple/bazooka. Others overhaul the whole game system in interesting ways, like Ria and Fine who are both references to separate Success shmups circa 2000. Note that Cotton’s fairy friend Silk is playable in the Japanese version but not patched into our release yet (if she ever will be?). Each of the five also unlocks a new stage from their home game when you clear story mode as them, which can then be selected during any subsequent playthrough. It’s a great way to expand the game and give some replay value as you find your favourite. For what it’s worth, the Kawase stage was enjoyable for me as a fan, set in the world of Fresh with a good variety of enemies and even a reprise of the final boss.

While I found some things to enjoy about this, I must say it didn’t convert me into a shmup fan. In fact it just reinforced that the genre still isn’t for me. I have had a decent time blasting through cute ‘em ups before, especially with the benefit of save states, and this provided a similar experience with its no-dramas respawning, but I’m not rushing out to re-evaluate Ikaruga right now or anything. However, I might just get around to some more rail shooters soon...

[crabsinvideogames]

Umihara Kawase Fresh!

The Crabpose boss also appears in the original Umihara Kawase, with a different design.

[tokiro07]

I finally figured out how to find a walkthrough for the secrets in Umihara Kawase Fresh!

I was a fool looking up “Umihara Kawase” when I should have been looking up “海腹川背”! Of course the Japanese community would post a walkthrough, they’re the only ones who’ve actually played the damn thing!

Here’s the playlist (link) if anyone is interested

[satoshi-mochida]

Umihara Kawase Fresh! releases today for the PS4.

[tinycartridge]

Umihara Kawase Fresh on Switch July 9 ⊟

I forgot there was even a new Umihara Kawase game -- or that it had a cute new visual style, or that Nicalis had announced plans to localize it. I’ve had a lot going on, okay? Anyway, I got to have several pleasant surprises in a row when the publisher announced a July 9 release date for the grappling platformer.

This time, the protagonist trades in sushi for burgers, and gets hungry for the first canonical time ever, with the addition of a hunger mechanic. This also means she gets the benefit of food:

Along the way, Kawase can use the lure to collect enemies and various food ingredients to store in her magical backpack. Combining ingredients with special recipes creates dishes that can be consumed to earn temporary special abilities, like jumping higher or being able to survive underwater for a longer time. The game also includes two additional playable characters: Cotton from the scrolling shooter Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams and another storied character yet to be announced.

[flojocabron]

Something fishy is going on!

[bulgariansumo]

(Umihara Kawase Fresh!, 2019)

[nintendocafe]

Umihara Kawase Fresh! | $22.59 Buy-Now!

[stupjam]

Umihara Kawase Fresh concept idea

[gaygamer]

Video games rarely disappoint me so much that I walk away from them after just a few hours.

Well, I stumbled across two exceptions to that rule in 2019: Penny-Punching Princess and Umihara Kawase Fresh!

For more on how and why these titles failed to trip my trigger, as the old saying goes, check out this blog post of mine: “My biggest gaming disappointments of 2019”

[mugiwaravt]

Time for more hard core fishing action with Umihara Kawase Fresh! Let's goooooo!

[miloscat]

[Review] Myastere: Ruins of Deazniff (NS)

What if Umihara Kawase was a steampunk Metroidvania??

When Studio Saizensen announced their next project after Umihara Kawase Bazooka, I was a little taken aback. Here’s a game with a familiar stretchy wire grappling hook, but it seemingly has a whole new grittier setting completely divorced from the growing Kawase universe. After getting some more info and my hands on the game, I came to realise that there’s so much Kawase DNA in here that it’s effectively a spinoff of Fresh just like Bazooka was.

Myastere is running in the Umihara Kawase Fresh engine, with tweaked Fresh mechanics. Like Fresh it has a big open world, although it’s more spelunkish and with a free-roaming structure plus progressive movement upgrades. Curly Brace had a gun in Fresh, which has been expanded into Aaurae Mawkish—part of the royal archaeological society or something—being a walking arsenal. The enemy types are broadly similar, some seeming like they’d be right at home in Kawase’s abstract, more cartoony world while others are creepypasta material. Even the basic premise of a corrupting substance seeping from an evil presence underground is in common between both games.

What sets Myastere apart is the focus of the gameplay. This isn’t a precision puzzle platformer; the grapple is faster, snappier, and expandable, more a satisfyingly zippy means of getting around than a tool the mastery of which the entire game is built around. The default setting for the grapple is similar to Bazooka’s auto-retracting beginner setting, but it can be changed to a more traditional scheme. You get a default double jump early and even a triple jump later! Combat is also much more prominent, with an array of ammo types and throwable bombs for different enemies. So it’s more searching (exploration to progress the story and find hidden secrets and shortcuts) and action (fighting, platforming, etc.). If only there was a term for that.

Quite honestly it struggles to compete in this now crowded genre, however. The shooting is a bit sticky and the expansions to your moveset only slight or incremental. There’s no fast travel system, the world is quite static and barren of NPCs and interaction, and the map didn’t even show where you had been until a post-launch update gave it Metroid Dread-style colouring in. There’s collectible coins to be found but good luck hunting for them if you miss any (finding them all unlocks a new skin for Aaurae sans cloak and goggles, while getting all relics gives her... a schoolgirl outfit...). For English language players, the localisation is frankly embarrassing, with an amateurish, unnatural, machine-translated-feeling English script; actually a machine might even be better as it would more consistently spell words like “wepon”[sic] correctly. Fresh’s PC version and all Bazooka versions were like this too and it’s getting really old. The fact that it has full Japanese voice acting is impressive and makes the lack of effort for the translation more glaring.

[Spoilers in this paragraph] The poor localisation affected my appreciation of the story as well, as it just makes it harder to understand the world and characters. I got the gist of it but in a more story-driven game that wants to be taken seriously this kind of thing is a real barrier. The general idea is this is some kind of alternate modern world where mystical relics have great significance. Aaurae is some kind of steampunk relic cop working for the monarchical government who encounters a band of Deazniff (tomb raiders, given an incomprehensible proper noun for no reason at all?) in a ruin, which leads to more sinister discoveries: monsters mutated by Myastere (evil magic radiation?), an ancient society of exiled undead Paladins from the 14th century, and eventually, the giant reanimated corpse of King Solomon(!!) and a cosmic struggle for the ark of the covenant. The script oddly skirts around naming the Hebrew people/nation directly, but the in-game collectibles have a lot of fun references to real-life historical artefacts and oddities.

So, the plot goes some fun places, but that’s not necessarily enough. The real selling point that helps this game stand out from other Metroidvanias is the integration of Kawase’s “wire action” traversal. It’s certainly a cool direction for the overall Umihara Kawase series to take as an evolution of Fresh, even if the Metroidy elements have been mixed in a little clumsily. It’s a good time, and not too long. I really enjoyed the turbo grappling mechanics, scooting around flooding my pockets with stacks of bombs I’d never use, snooping around corners and crannies while mowing down critters and nasties. I just hope they get a native English speaker to look at the script sometime. Heck, I’ll give it a crack why not!

[ruuuranran]

umihara kawase

listen to the ost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM12xC1Sx1A&list=PLdNS0NBYWchW-wQFeOCu_q4iuYSr9EoUB