The Legend of Kusakari (3DS)

While you can find yourself cutting grass in games like The Legend of Zelda to find goodies, Shiba Kari does so for a nobler purpose. While not much of a fighter himself, he can still recognize the importance of even terrain, and to help warriors braver than him, he aims to ensure their battles against an invasion of monsters happen on an even playing field. And so The Legend of Kusakari begins, its hero committed not to saving the kingdom, but to trimming the grass so that others won’t trip or stumble while doing so.

 

The Legend of Kusakari is the story of Shiba Kari, the naming discrepancy arising from the original intended title “The Legend of Kusakari: Shiba Kari’s Story” being trimmed down while the word Kusakari itself means something close to grass cutting. The kingdom of Southern Cross has been invaded by the Demon King’s forces, and while Shiba Kari sets out to implement his unusual approach to aiding the heroes of the realm in fighting back, his scythe is exclusively meant for cutting foliage. Players will need to maneuver themselves around the many patrolling monsters to get at every piece of grass they find in a level, the creatures thankfully not abandoning their routes to pursue you but they can sometimes be found locked in combat with heroes and moving in a more erratic manner as their battle bounces back and forth. You don’t get too much of a plot beyond the initial setup and a finale, although between certain levels there will be a small screen showing people gradually realizing that someone is helping keep the battlefield nice and tidy.

 

This cartoony fantasy game’s strange approach to heroism also extends a bit of its goofiness to its music in an odd way. Right at the title screen you see a little marching band playing the game’s theme, and while most of them do so well, a big-nosed trumpeter seems unusually out of tune, and every time they introduce a level or play the victory song, you can expect a few more sour notes from this abnormal instrumentalist. His presence is lightly amusing at first but there isn’t any evolution to this joke, the trumpeter consistently present to make it a little harder to listen to some music you’ll hear fairly often. Thankfully while in a level he seems to sit out so the music can sound normal, but without some sort of payoff to his unusual presence he ends up just bringing down the music any time he contributes.

For the play itself, The Legend of Kusakari’s main adventure provides 50 levels as well as 10 unlockable bonus levels for you to cut the grass in. Shiba Kari has two means of cutting grass, a simple scythe swing directly in front of him and a spin that can cover a bit more area. Using the basic swing will build up power levels to make the spin more capable when unleashed, but the game doesn’t often demand careful power building so it’s not too much of an incentive to mix up the slice types. All it takes is a single swipe and a tuft of grass will go down, although eventually some more durable and solid grass appears that can’t even be walked through until you’ve sliced it a few times or utilized a leveled up spin. While there are dangerous creatures like ghosts, living trees, and skeletal soldiers in every level, the main concern while trying to cut down every tuft of grass is probably going to be your own stamina. Over the course of the stage, your life will gradually drain, meaning if you don’t complete it quickly enough Shiba Kari will keel over and you’ll have to start again. This is where most of the challenge comes from as stages become larger and larger, the player needing to better plan out their reaping routes while making sure not to bump into dangers that will take a chunk out of your life as well. Healing blue grass can be found and so factoring in when it’s smart to go slash it for a boost becomes important as well, and with a sort of radar on the bottom screen that gradually fills out into a proper map you can make sure you find all of your targets even if the game’s tilted camera angle might obscure them a little behind a tree or other barrier.

 

The gameplay format seems to place The Legend of Kusakari somewhere between an action game and a puzzle game, but while there will be times you have to get dangerously close to a battle or weave between monsters who are closely clustered together, you see most of the unique mechanics fairly early on. There will be new monster types down the line like dragons, but they’re just a bit bigger and more erratic than other creatures and you still approach cutting grass around them in a similar manner. Levels don’t last very long so it’s not like its simple set of variables grows old and they are mixed together quite well, different stages implementing things like elevated areas that you can hop down from to adjust how you plan your path through the stage. Keeping healthy remains a pretty solid challenge once you’re out of the early levels as well, but perhaps the smartest idea in keeping the adventure from being too simple arises from something called the Greenthumb Almanac.

If you’re only concerned with clearing a level, it can be done with a bit of persistence even if you slip up and bump into an enemy or don’t plan the best grass cutting route. However, every level has a special flower you can earn for your Greenthumb Almanac provided you beat its associated challenge. There are three types of challenges, the first being to clear a level without healing at all and this only arises in some early stages since the tougher ones make healing a necessity to even survive their greater size. The second challenge type is to always ensure you’re hitting a patch of grass whenever you swing your scythe, and this can lead to some tense little moments where you’re trying to carefully inch towards a spot to cut while making sure you don’t bump into the hero and monster battling atop it. The third challenge type actually ties into your life, that being you need to clear the level without ever bumping into any of the creatures in a stage. While unfortunately you cannot view which condition applies to a level without exiting it and going to check the almanac, this does breathe some more life into the experience, the player now encouraged to be more careful in their work if they want a reward. There is a rating system for how quickly you can clear the level that will instead potentially encourage more reckless play, the ten bonus levels requiring you earn an S rank in normal stages to unlock them. The almanac’s rewards may not be so substantial, but having to be more cautious despite your dwindling health feels the better challenge than trying to blitz through a level without too much concern about if you ram into heroes and villains so long as it’s faster to do so.

 

An Endless Mode exists to try and add a bit more to do to the experience as well, although it is fairly simple. Normal levels will lay out obstacles and grass in a variety of ways to make it a bit of a challenge to reach it all in time while clearing the almanac challenge, but Endless Mode is just one large simple lawn with a bunch of clusters of grass. Some slimes patrol the areas between the clusters, but there’s not much impediment to charging between each one to slice them up. The goal in Endless Mode is to cut as much grass as you can before Shiba Kari faints, grass even regrowing after a time to ensure you won’t run out or need to meticulously cut each tuft. To ensure your survival you’ll also need to find the occasionally appearing blue grass to slice it before it disappears, and while it’s a simple barebones challenge, the online leaderboard at least gives a slightly compelling reason to attempt it more than once.

THE VERDICT: A silly little adventure realized fairly well, The Legend of Kusakari concocts a good selection of levels for its grass-cutting stages but it might lean a little hard on the extra content to make it challenging. The Greenthumb Almanac draws a little more out of the level designs although the ranking system might instead encourage recklessness, but there is still enough to the basics of cutting the grass and avoiding monsters that it can hold your interest regardless of how committed you are to the extras. The Legend of Kusakari could have been more compelling if it had a wider range of dangers or mechanics to vary up its play, but it lays out what little it has with enough thought to make for a quick and quirky journey that has its moments.

 

And so, I give The Legend of Kusakari for Nintendo 3DS…

An OKAY rating. The main thing holding The Legend of Kusakari back is its low amount of variety. Each stage is unique but they also blur together pretty easily, especially if you aren’t committed to any of the extra goals and just want to cut your way through all the grass to reach the next one. Few can put together really distinct challenges, and while there are environmental hazards like mud that slows you down, desert sand that drains your health faster, or outright damaging poison floors, they don’t really impact your activities that much since you can often sprint on through them quickly enough. This impacts the enemy variety too, because while the monsters look different from each other, they do all just move around in set patterns so it’s not too important if it’s a slime or a ghost going down a certain route. The way the levels are laid out mean that in the moment a stage can still provide a sufficient set of impediments to your work but not enough to really make your work too exciting. The Greenthumb Almanac adds an important extra layer where actually figuring out your routes and approaching certain areas carefully is key to snagging that flower, and the experience is certainly richer if you refuse to settle for missing out on one so it is certainly the recommended approach to playing The Legend of Kusakari.

 

Admittedly, most ideas for how to make the game more exciting perhaps pull it away from its premise. You’re not meant to be the hero saving the world, you’re just helping clear the turf so the warriors can step up and do their job unimpeded. Enemies who react to your presence would pull the game away from the idea you’re slipping around cutting grass in secret like a lawn care ninja and introducing interactive stage elements or true puzzle solving might again feel like you’re getting too involved despite Shiba Kari’s more passive approach. There really isn’t much wrong with the approach taken to designing the levels even if they sometimes can feel plain and easy, so besides that trumpet player’s pitch problems, The Legend of Kusakari provides a pretty nifty and consistent experience that works as a nice low commitment game to play between the types of grand adventures where you are the one fighting the dragons and demon kings.