I’ve stated this several times in the past, but just in case you don’t know and need a reminder here’s a quick explanation. Nostalgia is a really powerful tool which can take on any shape or form it wants. It can be a meal your mother cooked for you during childhood, or those memories of you and the boys going to the theaters and watching Avengers for the first time. Nostalgia is great because it allows us to look back towards the past at simpler happier times, but it can also be a contraption which studios and corporations can use to sell their products. Less about what they represent, and more about fueling a franchise you used to love. That’s why nostalgia has mixed tastes, but in my mind nostalgia is great. However, it may not be the same way that others look at it. There are developers out there willing to respect the past by creating a piece of their own that not only invokes it, but still stands on their own without relying on past ideas. Video games which party in the eighties, but remember they live in the twentieth century. This is especially true to the indie scene which is bombarded full of games taking influence from the classical era of gaming. Shovel Knight, still one of my favorite games by the way, takes ideas from old school NES platformers and combines them to make a joyous colorful adventure about finding hope. Axiom Verge and Cave Story set new heights for the metroidvania genre and what developers could aim for going forward. Hyper Light Drifter harkens back to classic adventure games, and Katana Zero contains the neon aesthetic of the 1980s. These are some of the best examples of how a video game can handle nostalgia, and luckily we have another stellar example today. Narita Boy, a side scrolling hack and slash adventure by Studio Koda which submerges itself in the eighties. It may be sinking the nostalgia in deep, but man does it feel good.
Narita Boy started off as a small Kickstarter project back in 2017 and set a goal of one hundred thousand euros which it eventually met. The director, Eduardo Fornieles, stated that Narita Boy wasn’t just living in the 1980s, but taking heavy inspiration from the two main cultures which he grew up with. His childhood was spent in Spain, and eventually he would move to Japan where the key influences for Narita Boy were taken from. He grew up in a time period where the human imagination was infinite, and technology was helping creators bring those visions into reality. He wanted this techno themed game centered around the technology and hipness of the era. He soon got a small team of programmers and designers to help, and got to work on his future dream project. Narita Boy spent almost four years secretly in the works, but came out in early 2021 with little fanfare sadly. There weren’t many advertisements or updates which came out during the development process, and the studio struggled to find a decent publisher willing to get their game out to the public. Team 17 would be the company to help publish their games, but they haven’t really been well renowned especially for recent actions. Narita Boy also received mixed reception from critics. Most of it probably being due to some of its weird design choices and how it leans so heavily on the style over substance mentality. However, Narita Boy is overall a good product and the developers managed to fulfill their vision of making a nostalgic joyride.
I was pretty excited to try out Narita Boy. I wasn’t sh*tting my pants off for it, but I was willing to try another game which dabbles into 1980s nostalgia. The main influence for me to try this game out ws Skill Up, who is one of my favorite video game reviewers. Most of his recommendations are really good and I never once felt displeased with one of the games he slapped a recommendation label onto. He gave Narita Boy a strong recommendation level and that was the signal for me to play it. The aesthetic looked really cool, I loved the flashy art style, and the premise while not knowing much of it originally looked interesting to say the least. Got the game during a Christmas sale and haven’t beaten it until recently. For the most part, I would say Narita Boy lived up to my expectations. It didn’t amaze me and there are design decisions which make it difficult for me to personally recommend. Yet, Narita Boy is still a splendid experience a ton of players should enjoy. Today we’ll talk about why Narita Boy is pretty awesome and why it deserves your attention. So here comes Narita Boy with the legendary tri-colored saber to save the digital kingdom from perilous destruction.
Stor
The story takes place during the 1980s, go figure, and we see a fat middle aged man typing away at a keyboard within a room infested with wires and other machinery. No, we are not talking about me silly, this is literally how the game opens up. There’s posters and magazines littered all over the office which hint that he worked on a groundbreaking piece of technology which sold millions of units. It appears to be some sort of computer or video game console. He continues working until he passes out onto his desk. We then cut to a little boy gaming his heart away on one of these consoles until his mother walks upstairs to tell him to go to bed. He shuts the console off and falls asleep, but mysteriously in the middle of the night the console activates.
A burst of energy emits from the console and he is sucked in. The boy is then transported to a world known as the Digital Kingdom, a place made of code and digital beings. Prophets in the area tell the boy that he has been chosen to become a legendary hero named Narita Boy, and that the fate of their kingdom lies on his shoulders. The creator, the greasy programmer we saw during the beginning, was the creator of this world and his skills help keep the Digital Kingdom in balance. One day a demonic entity known as HIM showed up and slowly started to corrupt the kingdom using the Stallion Program. Evil coding started to terrorize the land, and to prevent the creator from noticing HIM decided to put the programmer to sleep. Steal his memories and lock them up so that the programmer would lose purpose and fall into a deep slumber. The prophets give Narita Boy a magical saber designed to cut the Stallion units down, the Tri-Color Sword, and overtime they will guide Narita Boy to different sections of the land. Discover monuments which can give him new powers and stand against the almighty forces of HIM. Some of the monuments which Narita Boy visits are memories of the creator’s past. Through the first set of memories we learn that the programmer didn’t have a fulfilling childhood. His mother died at a young age, and his father would eventually leave him behind for work. This sadness built up even further as the programmer faced more miserable life events. Narita Boy must learn about the past, how he is connected to all of this, and slay HIM before it is too late. Good luck.
Gameplay
Narita Boy is this weird mixture between several genres at once, but if I really have to nail it down I would say it’s a linear side scrolling hack and slash adventure with metroidvania based exploration and character growth. Wow, that is a mouthful to take in. It’s like an underweight child having an entire turkey dinner being shoved down his throat. Anyways, the two areas we’ll focus most on for this review will be the exploration, power-ups, and the combat as that is what the gameplay mainly prioritizes in. Let’s start off with the combat and power-ups you'll find across your journey.
Over time you’ll accumulate new power-ups and new ways in which you can traverse the world and cut down enemies. Certain foes and weaknesses are designed to utilize these abilities, so it gets the player to adapt on the fly quickly. Use your bash to break the defense of a shielded bloke. Uppercut to slash enemies floating above you and can’t be reached with your basic jump. A pierce attack which is the only way to break the armor of this one specific enemy type and so forth. A neat system in Narita Boy is that occasionally enemies will popup with a specific colored flame. Red, blue and yellow. These enemies can be defeated through usual means, but can be chopped up faster when you activate a saber charge which fits the enemy’s flame color. This is especially useful during frenetic fights when hordes of foes are mowing you down from all sides. The one downside of the saber charge is that you take extra damage unless you deactivate the charge, so that is another factor which gets you to play efficiently. I do wish power-ups and new abilities were stumbled upon rather and guided towards. It would have made for a more metroidvania feel where exploration is rewarded.
When you die you spawn at a checkpoint placed before the fight begins, but to recover health you can use energy built up from successively striking foes. You just have to find the right time to use it during combat, because healing leaves you exposed and you don’t want a good heal going to waste. The closest comparison is the healing system of Hollow Knight where you have to find windows of opportunity. The difference is that you can’t be canceled out of a heal animation in Narita Boy and the healing charge only takes a second. Not much thought was put into making a thoughtful healing system, but not only that healing feels worthless in Narita Boy. You get back one point of health when using a healing charge and you have ten hit points worth of health. Trying to get multiple points back is annoying, so it’s better to just kill yourself and respawn with full health for an upcoming fight. Kind of removes the purpose of playing carefully and managing your resources. I can understand the crowd of people who want forgiving checkpoints, because luckily Narita Boy does have forgiving checkpoints, but there has to have been a better way to quickly refill your health. Have some enemies drop health points and let there be healing stations. I don’t know why health is such an important factor to me across a lot of video games.... Now let’s move onto the exploration.
The exploration is sh*t….. the exploration is sh*t, thank you for listening. It’s a linear narrative driven adventure! There shouldn’t really be a point where you get lost and lose track of what corridor to go down next. It does feel like the devs wanted Narita Boy to be a metroidvania at some point, because there are moments where they expect you to dink around huge areas and eventually trigger the next important story fight. That’s when Narita Boy lets you feel free, but it’s not in the best way as the information you are given to find the next objective won’t always be great. As NPCs give long explanatory text which is forgettable and you miss the one line telling you what to do. Yes, I know there is an objective box which i can pull out at any time but that oo doesn’t always give the best direction of what the f*ck to do. Good god man, it’s like you had a vision but rather than carefully plan it throughout you instead grind it through a blender. Gris followed a linear restrictive formula similar to this, but there were actual good design choices that visually pointed you towards where to go next and having environmental changes which locked you out of areas you fully ventured through and didn’t need to explore again. So Narita Boy is kind of all over the place, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. The core combat slowly starts to become more challenging and there are those moments where the game gives you a power trip. Transforming the player into different forms and showing spectacle. Hopefully you can stop HIM.
Thoughts
What are my honest thoughts with Narita Boy anyways? I’ve been accumulating a pile of complaints, but in reality I do think the game is great. What it does right is done tremendously and we don’t get games with aesthetics like this all that much, but there’s a lot of crippling flaws which make Narita Boy a difficult recommendation in my eyes. One of those flaws we just explored was the gameplay. It’s not terribly designed, but it struggles to figure out what it wants to do. One second it has challenging combat and occasional difficulty spikes, and the next it wants to be a metroidvania which gives you vague hints on where to go next. One second it wants to be artistically cinematic and then the next a puzzle game where you run around finding glowing symbols. The puzzles are moderately designed though. They require you to analyze your surroundings and locate key points in the environment. The combat is good and none of your attacks feel unsatisfying to use. Although your basic slashes can feel finicky. Those artistic moments are beautiful, and even though running around annoyed me I would stop and look at the scenery. Realizing the art designers and programmers must have had a really fun time putting the game together. All of it is done well, but none of it is spectacular. It lies in the “fine” zone where nothing is good or bad. It’s passable enough. Narita Boy’s gameplay is confused, not confusing, just confused on what it wants.
Narita Boy spends a lot of time living in nostalgia. More so than any of the other nostalgia heavy games I’ve reviewed in the past, but it does feel like it’s submerging too deeply into the tank of nostalgia. It fails to carve out a unique identity like Shovel Knight or Hyper Light Drifter, and just came across as this project which wanted to take Tron and turn it into a video game. Not saying that every idea needs to be original or groundbreaking, but they could at least do something more. Luckily they did and “something more” was within the story which is also moderately good. The Digital Kingdom is full of bizarreness and whimsy. You have desert ruins which travel for miles like Dune, or cities where the citizens are partying day in and day out. The color, lighting, and soundtrack help make the Digital Kingdom pop out to the player. You can see the Japanese influence the director placed on this game with the culture, people, and sites to see. All of it is beautiful…. but I just stopped caring after a while. I’ve stated in my Sekiro review that I’m a huge fan of Japanese settings and culture, but the Digital Kingdom just failed to click. If the game had leaned more towards the Japanese influence rather than the neon lit high techno stuff then maybe I would have cared more. NPCs and their ramblings as to why the kingdom is grand become mind numbingly boring after a bit, because dialogue is chunkier than it should be.
So the techno fantasy setting Narita Boy had for me kind of left me uninterested, so why am I saying the story is moderately good. The key theme and how it’s revealed overtime. You unlock the memories of this man who faced trauma up until adulthood. He witnessed his mother die within his own home, and his father never gave a damn to take care of him. He then had a wife and child, but lost them through the same method of his father. Work so hard that the work overcomes the life you have. Some incredibly messed up things then happen and his life spirals out of control. This then leads him to self-healing and moving on from the past. Use his talents to create a machine that several others can enjoy. Reconnect with his son and show that he cares for him and is willing to improve. This is when the story of Narita Boy was enjoyable and the main reason as to why I played all the way up till the end. The struggle of the real world, the creator’s struggle, and trying to live up to expectations.
Narita Boy is great when it wants to be and I do think a lot of people will enjoy it. I am going to give a huge epilepsy warning, because the colors and flashing lights make it a difficult game to look at. There were times I had to stop and play something else, because I was getting ready to have a headache and throw up. The game doesn’t overstay its welcome as it has a runtime up to around seven to eight hours, but there isn’t much outside the main story and it lacks replayability. Narita Boy is special and one of the more unique indie titles to come out during 2021. Not one of my favorites, but at least worth the look. In the end I give Narita Boy a 7.5/10 for being okay.
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