KAKU: Ancient Seal Reviews

This game is visually beautiful but has some issues that are holding it back. The "easy" setting is still very difficult. This should be categorized as a precision platformer. The quick select menus are frustrating to use in a battle. I found the guides lacking and often found myself not knowing what to do. There are too many special moves, some of which you have to press 5 or 6 buttons. All in all this game has potential but it can't get out of its own way. I didnt finish it because it was more frustrating than it was fun. Simplify it!

Story 3/10 very generic and poorly written dialogue Gameplay 7.5/10 filled with puzzles, platforming, battlesystem was fun and engaging Music 1/10 weakest part of the game which is a game changer

This is a surprisingly big game. It's also a surprisingly hard game (mainly from a platforming-perspective rather than the combat, but any fight where you can get knocked off the side of the arena is nigh-on impossible due to the outrageous knock-back range. Obviously lowering the difficulty doesn't change this). It's the kind of game I might have 100%'d, but finding all pieces of the blank stele is going to be way too tedious and the later challenges you do to boost your health or stamina (the ones needing 3 rune stones to unlock) are way too hard for me. There is a lot of fun to be had here, so overall it is a recommend, but brace yourself...

Not recommending simply because although it's not a terrible game, it's also just not that interesting. You wouldn't be missing anything if you gave it a miss. You're mainly collecting materials for upgrades (ores, stones, plants etc...) that are spread around the world and in chests. There's 4 worlds to explore but other than the visual change of the environments, they're basically copy and paste in the materials you find, the interactable objects, the villages and quests. So it felt like doing the exact same world 4 times. Since the main things you find in the worlds are materials for upgrades, exploring feels more just for resource gathering than it is to find something cool, which kind of takes the excitement out of exploring. The environments are quite beautiful and look fun to explore, with lots of little caves and hidden areas strewn everywhere. But you start to realise you're only going to find the same materials in them as everywhere else. There's no cool unique item or cool unique gameplay to stumble across. You do occasionally find gear, but in my opinion are largely cosmetic. They do offer a passive ability and varying rune slots, but I found none of the passive abilities beneficial enough to want to swap gear. The runes are helpful at least but aren't that exciting (+10% health kind of stuff). You have a flying pig companion that gives you extra abilities for navigating the world (longer jump, ability to walk on water etc...) as well as a teleport to a sort of hub world. This is where you use the materials you collect to upgrade things like attack/defence, unlock new movesets etc... This hub world also contains BOTW-style puzzle dungeons which I will say at least provided a break from the monotony of the main world. On whatever the standard difficulty is, even after fully upgrading my attack, using attack boosters during combat etc..., I still found most of the enemies a little too spongey. Combat was ok, but became a slog because of this. There were also issues with button detection, like if you're in combat and you're dodging or attacking and you press L2 to get your slingshot out, sometimes it'd work and sometimes not. You'd have to stop pressing everything for a second for it to then recognise the button press. Not a polished game and although you can definitely get some enjoyment out of it, most of what you're doing feels monotonous and uninteresting.