Kraken Academy!! (Xbox One)

Kraken Academy isn’t like most high schools. Rather than attending classes on a broad set of subjects, you sign up for clubs that aim to cultivate specific talents. The students attending these courses are also quite unusual, one being a girl who is a large head of broccoli and another is a twelve-year old who rides her pony anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps the biggest departure from regular schools though is the fact that in three days, the entire school shall crumble into a fiery pit along with everyone attending it. To prevent this fate, the Kraken picks the most unlikely of heroes, a new student who seemingly has no quirks or abnormal traits, and that is who you find yourself playing as in the adventure game Kraken Academy!!.

 

While you get to name your character, many details of your would-be savior of the academy are set in stone. They are a male student lined up for the Music Club, they have a prissy sister, and their mother seemingly resents them based on the fact she has some new criticism or unfortunate bit of information for you any time you call her. In fact, the relative normalcy of your character doesn’t seem to gel well with the student body of Kraken Academy, many people treating you poorly out of the gate and you seem remarkably prone to accidents and situations that, even when they feature a positive outcome, still involve the poor lead character somehow undermined. Some of this suffering is brushed off and quickly moved on from so it doesn’t feel like the entire game is hostile towards you, and there does seem to be some growing respect from your peers and the academy’s staff as you being to engage with them. Unfortunately, some of it will inevitably be reset, because to save the institution from its untimely demise in three days, you need to employ the Kraken’s magic amulet to reverse time in order to get everything required done in time.

The broader goals of Kraken Academy!! pertain to four guardian spirits who watched over the school’s four clubs. An unknown traitor has managed to seal these spirits inside of four troubled students so they can’t use their powers to save the academy, so it falls on you to get to know the relevant students, help them work through their problems, and then turn back time to befriend a new high schooler within the limited timeframe. Oddly enough, despite the time loop being a pretty important part of the premise, it’s actually not something you’ll necessarily need to engage with often. In fact, if you keep focused on the main plot, you’ll only ever need to reverse it every time you save a spirit, each substory about helping a student able to fit within a single loop and it’s not even difficult to manage that time. When you do longer story tasks called “missions” the game will stop time from progressing, giving you all the time you need to unravel any puzzles or speak with the relevant characters. It’s actually rather easy to imagine a version of the game where the stories were just linked together one after the other in real time rather than involving any sort of time loop, but there are side quests and other opportunities tied to specific times of day or carrying info or items between loops so the time mechanic has some moments of importance.

 

Pinning down the kind of game Kraken Academy!! is feels a little difficult at first. It almost plays like the town sections of a role-playing game where the focus is on speaking with characters and performing light interactions around an open space, and the visuals for the game support this old school sensibility a bit too. The characters are all rendered in a very simplified pixel style that looks nice with larger figures like the Kraken or guardian spirits but normal people tend to look rather plain. Luckily, there is some hand-drawn art that pops up whenever characters speak, and while the voice acting is minimal, there are multiple character portraits that show off different expressions and better support the personalities of a fairly eccentric and endearing cast. There is a pretty heavy focus on the social interactions as well to the point it might be best to call it a “social adventure”, especially since puzzles can be fairly simple when they arise and the game only sparingly whips out some minigames or moments where you need good reflexes. As such, the cast carries most of the adventure with the way they behave and most named characters have some sort of dominant quirk so you understand them quickly and might enjoy they way they bounce off the current situation.

The cast does lean on quirkiness over depth though. Usually a student at the center of a specific guardian spirit quest at least has a few more layers since their personal issues are directly being addressed, but even though the game gives you the opportunity to go on dates with a few people outside of the school, the trips to the movie theater or water park don’t often serve to elucidate anything new on who you’re accompanying. A character like Vladimir who uses his great beauty to turn groups of adoring fans into a profitable business venture only gives you a basic setup for why he felt compelled to do it and you don’t get to scratch much deeper than his attractive surface, the painter dog from the art club surprisingly more complex despite not being able to speak English because she’s the focus of a spirit quest. Comedy is definitely meant to be the appeal of most characters you encounter and there are amusing scenarios to encounter such as trying to put together a student run court trial in the vein of the Phoenix Wright games or performing a play with the drama club that is clearly an adaptation of the film Shrek. The silliness is definitely a suitable stand-in much of the time, but it feels like it mostly has a comedic tone without too many moments that will really get a chuckle out of you unless they land a lucky hit on a very specific part of your funny bone.

 

When it comes to activities outside of talking and sometimes making proper dialogue decisions, Kraken Academy!!’s activities do feel a bit lean. Sometimes you’ll need to collect items and figure out how to use them, but the side quests tend to be where this actually involves some true deductions whereas on the story path you’ll often find everything conveniently nearby. Every now and then an activity will involve a quick reflex test, an indicator moving back and forth on a meter with the player trying to hit the sweet spot. The closer to the center, the more points you earn towards succeeding at the events, but sometimes even doing it perfectly still has our hero failing but in a way that still benefits their long term goals. These also come in a button mashing variant where you try to fill a meter by hammering X as fast as you can, but neither of these are really difficult or engaging. Some late game moments involve needing to move quickly to avoid danger and there are minigames that appear like trying to beat the earlier mentioned girl on a horse in a race, but any sort of challenge beyond puzzle solving often presents difficulty options before you start it or allows you to edit how hard it is in the pause menu. The minigames and dodging segments are mildly interesting and a good injection of sudden activity unless you come to the game for its focus on conversations over action, but they mostly feel like they don’t harm or help the game too much and adjusting the settings doesn’t make you feel like you’re missing much.

 

You can walk around the school and smash trash cans and other objects to gather bottles for recycling, this the way you earn cash for items usually pertaining to plot progress or decorating your rarely visited room. The main adventure can actually be completed quickly but the side quests do give you some reason to stick around and explore, and as new clubs open up and the time of day shifts, it can be interesting to look around and figure out what other characters are up to or how you can newly engage with them to make progress on their substories. Befriending certain characters can help you learn new things about the school and the side activities necessary to make new friends are often not too involved either, so you can usually find something to do while in-transit or waiting for a specific time of day to roll around. Since Kraken Academy!!’s appeal seems to be about briefly immersing yourself in the strangeness of the school it is a wise decision to let you poke around and learn more about it, but the brevity of many things in the game does hold them back from building up more intrigue or getting you emotionally attached unfortunately.

THE VERDICT: Despite how poorly it treats its protagonist, Kraken Academy!! is mostly a light-hearted romp in a strange school with just enough going on to hold your interest. There may not be much depth to what you uncover, but seeing the unusual situations that arise in your time loop tale are enough motivation for you to put up with some mostly simple puzzles and weak interactive segments. Side quests can shore things up a little more with the player having to think a bit when it comes to the problem solving, but mostly Kraken Academy!! feels like its meant to be a short dip into a silly world where the character interaction is the main appeal, and while a lot of it sounds funnier than it actually is, there’s at least enough to it that it doesn’t grow stale.

 

And so, I give Kraken Academy!! for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Having adjustable setting for how well the player needs to perform during minigames or timing their button presses isn’t a poor idea, but leaning mostly on those to add more involved interactions to the plot feels like the point where Kraken Academy!! failed to live up to its potential. Puzzle solving was similarly often pared down to remarkable simplicity for when it is absolutely required to progress, but the side content shows that the game can concoct some unique inventory interaction puzzles when it’s more willing to push against the player. Having a relaxing and goofy game about a school of abnormal individuals was given priority over all else, so the writing feels like what the game expects you to attach to and unfortunately there it doesn’t fully dive in either. You get a good sense for the simple characters you meet and the game veers into enough unusual directions that you’ll want to see how the next guardian spirit quest unfolds, but there’s not enough world-building or character depth to really push the game beyond being a tour of strangeness. The game’s length and the fact you can focus on the story pretty easily without tripping up on the time loop mechanics means this “social adventure” can keep moving you to the next idea it hopes to amuse you with, and while it’s not very sharp or witty, it is at least goofy enough at times to evoke smiles if not laughs.

 

Kraken Academy!!’s current form makes it feel more like the kind of quirky place you’d encounter in a role-playing game given more time to grow, but it doesn’t quite latch onto the unusual ideas it presents hard enough to really deliver on something with a singular strong appeal. Even its wackiness isn’t ever-present so it can’t just be a thrill ride of absurdity, but it’s not an empty experience either. The unusual ideas that likely pull in a player are on show, but the follow-through on them isn’t as strong as many would hope. It doesn’t stumble much in execution, but Kraken Academy!! seems like it either needs more room to grow or it needs to find out how to pack more into those three days you won’t be repeating as often as you’d expect.