Kaze and the Wild Masks (Switch)
While finding the DNA of the Super Mario Bros. series in other side-scrolling platformers is fairly common and even Sonic the Hedgehog has influenced speed and momentum focused platformers like Freedom Planet, the Donkey Kong Country series’s style is rarely aped despite all of the main titles being stellar experiences. The challenging gameplay offset by how all the obstacles have a rhythm you can get into to overcome them, collectables that unlock secret stages, and the naturalistic feel still stand out even today as parts of a wonderful game series whose designs could provide useful ideas for other platform games. Kaze and the Wild Masks makes no mystery of where its inspirations come from as it practically copies elements straight from Donkey Kong Country, but while it takes perhaps too much of its structure and concept from that series, it still has some gameplay ideas to prevent itself from being a straight up retread.
One area where Kaze and the Wild Masks charts its own path is how it tells its story. Rather than trying to emulate Rare’s wit, Kaze and the Wild Masks actually uses no words during its story scenes, to the point you need to look at outside material to even know the name of certain characters and places. Taking place in the Crystal Islands that float high up in the sky, Kaze and her friend Goro seek to solve a curse that has turned the land’s vegetables into monsters. However, when they come to a temple with a strange magical ring, Goro is turned from a rabbit into a small red sprite. Kaze now sets off to not only restore her friend to normal but also beat back the vegetable army with the powers of the same ring that cursed Goro. This much is clear enough from the marketing and a fair bit of it can be inferred from the short scenes, but if you want to even know what the final boss’s deal is when you encounter them, you’ll need to collect golden tokens with the letters K-A-Z-E in each level, each of them placed in precarious places or hidden to invite more exploration. Each batch of letters gives you a new illustration that explains how the vegetables came to life and what the ring’s history is as well as explaining the mysterious masks Kaze will come across during her journey that let her tap into the powers of animal spirits.
The levels in Kaze and the Wild Masks all emulate Donkey Kong Country’s devotion to rooting platforms and obstacles into a sort of realistic world rather than making things feel like an artificial obstacle course. Platforms don’t just float in the air, they’ll be built into a background wall, be propped up by pillars, or come from some unseen area above the screen’s perspective. Even the little handholds Kaze can grab onto are given little propellers to justify their existence in this mostly grounded world, although much like Donkey Kong it does break the commitment a little bit when it comes to placing its version of barrel cannons in the air. Some stages will ask you to climb into small catapults and time your shots to cross large distances, chaining them together properly or risking an immediate death if you miss. Checkpoints are spaced out to keep things challenging but there is no lives system to bog down attempts. Kaze can take one hit before dying normally, but grabbing a heart makes the altered Goro appear to accompany you and serve as a second health point. These too are usually spaced out, and as you get deeper into the game, Kaze and the Wild Masks will ask for a lot more precision and quick reflexes to avoid danger so that clearing a stage can feel incredibly satisfying.
On her own, Kaze’s abilities are pretty simple. She can do a forward spin while on the ground to remove enemies in her path, but in the air her long ears spin instead similar to Dixie Kong’s ponytail twirl, allowing her to drift over to any platforms that might be out of reach. The ear twirl actually gets some interesting use as more level gimmicks enter the picture such as a stage where the rising heat from a fire means you can rise or fall depending on if your ears are twirling, and since bouncing off a baddy will make it so you can’t twirl until you land, there are secrets and bonus challenges where you need to properly pick when to use enemies like platforms or use your helicopter ears to get to your destination. Speaking of the bonuses, every level has two crystalline portals Kaze can find to teleport to a brief challenge where the player might need to beat a certain amount of vegetables or collect gems within the time limit, these beginning as pretty simple challenges but soon requiring some puzzle solving on top of good reflexes to ensure you can survive and not accidentally screw yourself over by doing things out of order. Completing bonus levels helps you unlock some of the game’s most challenging stages as well, one of them particularly inspired where the whole level falls away and you need to use remaining clues like placement of the abundant gem collectibles or where enemies feel its safe to walk to make your way through on invisible floors. It’s definitely a testament to Kaze and the Wild Mask’s level design that even this stage with no visible ground can still be completed with expert rhythm if you can spot the clues quickly as you move.
Varied level ideas like levels where you’re sliding down a series of ziplines, activating the right plants to deter a ghostly angler fish, swimming around dangerous sea life, or avoiding the rise and fall of acid and lava means the action is always bringing something new to the tabler and the areas are often gorgeously illustrated. A blue nighttime forest illuminated by mushrooms and special flowers, a rain-swept forest choked by thorny vines, a sunset mountainous area with hot air balloons and waterfalls in the distance, even the glowing toxic cavern has a strange beauty to it, that rooting of everything as part of the environment helping the game shake off some of the artificiality that comes with trying to create interesting platforming stages out of lovely environments. The vegetable enemies themselves are mostly comical in design though, like carrots clenching their teeth in terror as they slide across the ice level, bananas who seem too happy to launch out of their peels, and fat frog-like eggplants all serving as legitimate dangers or helpful platforming tools despite their goofy looks. Some of the plant monsters still look angry or fearsome like the thick lumbering carrots or the grumpy flying radishes, and seeing a new enemy comes with that fun discovery of seeing how the developers have realized a new foe from twisting a vegetable’s appearance to match whatever video game purpose it serves.
With levels that can be completed stylishly and quickly if you can identify how to path yourselves through them but also plenty of collectibles to snatch up for extra content, Kaze and the Wild Masks would already work as a loving if perhaps a bit too similar tribute to Donkey Kong Country. It even finds some better uses for obviously borrowed concepts like having the golden letters unlock story bits, and the floating gems that replace floating bananas in helping guide the player and give them something to grab also help the player unlock the game’s true ending here. Kaze and the Wild Masks does at least have one idea that does stand out as an independent idea, and that would be the masks mentioned in the game’s title.
Four masks are found during Kaze’s journey that will completely change how you approach the level once you put them on. For example, Kaze really can’t swim when in a water level, able to take small dives but needing the shark mask to truly plunge beneath the waves and navigate these areas with all the fluidity of a fish. When wearing the tiger mask, Kaze’s mobility increases, giving her an aerial dash and the ability to jump off walls so she can make it around areas with far less solid floor to stand on. The bird mask will let her fly about freely, but the game makes sure to put plenty of dangers in your path so you still need to be careful with each flap of your wings so you don’t ram right into something painful in your eagerness. The greatest departure from regular play comes from the lizard mask though, Kaze losing control of herself and charging forward as long as she wears it. Lizard mask levels become about quick reaction times, utilizing the mask’s double jump and downward plunge properly, and trying to grab all the collectibles as you pass despite your control over your own movement being limited. By mixing and matching level design concepts, special enemy types, and these masks, Kaze’s adventure is able to add important shake ups to the formula to keep the promise of a new level exciting.
The boss battles in Kaze and the Wild Masks are more platforming challenges than involved fights. The boss or their battle arena will necessitate smart movement or proper utilization of the provided mask to survive up until the boss leaves themselves vulnerable, and while the gauntlet-like style of the final battle can be unfortunate to retry considering its difficulty and length, you can make considerable progress through natural reactions and your memory of earlier tries makes going through familiar portions easier to overcome. The boss battles aren’t really highlights of the experience and are fairly few in number though, so Kaze and the Wild Masks instead shines mostly through tight level design that balances difficulty well with exploration and an added option for swift and satisfying forward momentum if you can get in the right groove.
THE VERDICT: Originality may not be its strong suit, but Kaze and the Wild Masks takes all of the ideas it likes from Donkey Kong Country and builds off them to make for an action platforming experience that can stand comfortably right beside them. It may not have the rights to that series’s characters, but it has the same sharp focus on tight level design that allows stages to be challenging to complete but satisfying to overcome. Plenty of collectibles with purpose urge you to explore to unlock more of the story or additional content and the artistry put into the world and color choices makes some levels nice to just look at before running ahead. The masks inject new gameplay styles in a game that already has a good handle on bringing in new enemy types, obstacles, and stage gimmicks, so Kaze and the Wild Masks is able to provide an excellent adventure even if its inspirations are rather unabashedly blatant.
And so, I give Kaze and the Wild Masks for Nintendo Switch…
A GREAT rating. I don’t try to spend too much of a review saying how much one game is like another, but Kaze and the Wild Masks almost feels like you could make a long checklist for concepts that came from Donkey Kong Country but were repurposed due to a lack of the brand. The corn crawling on the ground with sharp teeth is a stand-in for Klaptraps, the bramble levels hearken back to some of the most memorable levels from Donkey Kong Country 2, and Kaze plays incredibly close to Dixie Kong right down to using her ears as a stand-in for the female Kong’s ponytail. This is the kind of game we’d usually see from people who used to work on such a franchise but want to revive the game style away from the rights holder, but when it comes down to it, we shouldn’t grade Kaze and the Wild Masks differently from a Donkey Kong title since it hits a lot of the same notes with the same strength and style.
The plot probably could have used some actual words to make it clearer, but otherwise Kaze and the Wild Masks not only has a great handle on making its game world look both beautiful and silly depending on what it’s trying to evoke, but it makes that game world a wonderful host for the action platforming. Kaze is easy to control and the player can easily find a rhythm in her motions and actions thanks to levels conducive to your fluid movement. Still, doing so requires good timing, a fair degree of skill, and levels not only give you reason to look around for enjoyable extra content, they utilize different ideas to make progress challenging to overcome while not being too frustrating with their gimmick concepts. The masks really help keep the game growing and changing as Kaze and the Wild Masks starts mixing things together more and more while adding even more to the pot, so while you can quite clearly identify it’s following Donkey Kong Country’s recipe even if you’re only lightly familiar with the series, it’s still got a bit of a different flavor that means it will be enjoyable if you like the original while still having a bit of its own appeal to savor.