Kill la Kill – IF (PS4)
In the anime Kill la Kill, clothes are power. Those attending the prestigious Honnouji Academy wear special Goku Uniforms that give them incredible strength and abilities, but new student Ryuko Matoi isn’t interested in that power. Instead, she’s aiming to find out the truth about her father’s death, that answer held by the student council president Satsuki Kiryuin. Ryuko will have to fight her way to Satsuki to learn the truth and tear down this flawed system that undermines those without the special uniforms… or in the case of Kill la Kill – IF, she’ll get to skip right past a small batch of important fights and get rushed through vital plot points. What’s more, she won’t even be the main focus of the plot, Satsuki being the initial focus and the story feels like it takes even greater lunges forward as she has fewer characters to reasonably clash with. If this was all an excuse to set up a fighting game plot more about lining up battles than telling a tale, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. However, Kill la Kill – IF presents itself as an alternate path for the anime’s story, one even overseen by the talent from the amazing animation company Studio Trigger, making the messiness and lack of interesting developments even stranger for incoming fans and almost inexplicable for new ones.
Kill la Kill – IF sets up its world and immediately skips ahead to Ryuko confronting Satsuki and the Elite Four who serve under her, but since the game first has you play through the plot as Satsuki, you actually don’t get to fight a wide breadth of characters during it. That is partially because this 3D arena fighter has a very small roster, but throwing you against Ryuko repeatedly or the deceptively cutesy Nui Harime grows stale even when both stories combined take around 4 hours to complete. The plot does eventually diverge from a rushed retelling of only the most vital moments of the anime and its choice to make Satsuki the main focus could have lead to the new direction being more interesting, but the scenes don’t have the time to do the legwork in setting much up or providing more personal moments. It’s a rushed affair even in new territory, and when you do get to play through as Ryuko, there are times you find her perspective plays an even weaker role. Ryuko’s side does try to make some sense of what exactly the plot is in relation to the anime, perhaps spending too much time trying to make it somehow compatible without jeopardizing the logic of the original show, but it doesn’t work that well and seems to mostly hope you are already invested in the characters before playing so that moments can hold more weight.
However, the messy story mode that doesn’t even set up its battles well does do a rather excellent job of making the everything look and sound like the show. Both English and Japanese voice acting is available and the performers voicing both sides sell everything they’re saying. When it comes to writing characters with their familiar personalities, Kill la Kill – IF shines, there even being a good deal of dialogue for specific character match-ups and midbattle clashes that aid in making these characters feel like accurate representations. The visual design is almost just as strong, the art style able to replicate the anime characters in near perfect detail and despite being 3D models, they can sometimes convincingly look just like they would on the show until you see them move and are reminded they aren’t flat images. Sometimes a little trickery is used like occasional 2D art and a nose or two might not agree with the 3D the best, but rarely can the visuals be faulted, the action also given a great degree of focus. Explosive and exaggerated attacks are common and delightfully extravagant, even simple attacks often looking exciting. It can’t quite capture all of the extreme over-the-top energy of a Studio Trigger production, but the fights are brimming with energy. Little touches are given focus too, memorable elements from the show like Hoka Inumuta retaining his collar that opens when he speaks in cutscenes despite it seeing little use and Mako Mankanshoku gets a few of her ridiculous spotlight speeches where she’s all over the place. Her writing feels a little off during them, but it might be because the underlying earnestness usually found in them has a very lean and empty plot to latch onto. The game does include many of the show’s recognizable and excellent music though, some scenes and battles almost carried by the themes reminding you of how well they worked in the anime and the more meaningful moments they backed there.
It is possible the attention to detail also lead to the underwhelming roster size unfortunately. Besides Satsuki and Ryuko who both feature an alternate fighting type, the game only features the Elite Four and the two villains Nui and Ragyo. A free update did introduce the Nudist Beach mecha fighter and Mako, but their absence in the story is felt when you’re fighting the same faces repeatedly and the added characters feel a bit underbaked as well, Nudist Beach slow and sloppy while Mako being a more regular girl than the others on the roster is represented with proportionally underwhelming attacks. Our original cast is at least varied, Ryuko’s sword fighting more explosive than Satsuki’s more focused and graceful styles, but it’s certainly the others who really diversify the roster. The gigantic Gamagori’s bondage inspired outfit lashes people with leather including himself if he wants to build power, the bandleader Nonon Jakuzure fights with musical blasts turned into lasers, and Ragyo wields cloth fibers like piercing needles that appear where she needs them. All characters are beholden to a fairly simple attack input system, there being three attack buttons of note and combos are mostly about the sequence you press them in and occasionally pressing up to launch someone or swinging to the side to try and catch them if they use the fairly generous dodging. There is some skill in learning the sequences for attacks to get the most out of your attacks though, some combos able to keep people juggled in the air for quite some time with hefty damage to match. It can make you feel helpless to be on the other side of one though, especially since speedy air dashes make it easy to keep charging in even when you knock someone away and everyone packs reliable guard break attacks that discourage more careful play.
Every character gets some sort of projectile or long range attack with different ones favoring it more to ensure there’s some clearer diversity than how attacks look, but there are some character specific mechanics that make your choice feel more interesting. Gamagori’s sadomasochistic approach lets him convert damage into power, even able to absorb damage without flinching for a bit to then release a counterattack. Inumuta builds up energy by landing his analysis projectiles and can turn invisible if he has enough power. Some characters are unfortunately missing such defining mechanics even though they might have neat visual features like Nui’s attacks taking on the form of clones who fight for her, but there is a way to increase your power and unlock new powers no matter who you’re playing as. Normally, you can build up energy in a special meter that can be spent to unleash more powerful attacks, but you can spend that meter instead to trigger Bloody Valor. Bloody Valor has the action stop for a bit as you and the other player are asked to choose between pressing Triangle, Square, or Circle. The player who activates Bloody Valor has better incentives to choose from, the buttons assigned to getting extra special meter, dealing additional damage, or healing some lost health, but the person hit by the Bloody Valor only has additional damage as an option. This makes it a game of trying to predict what the other person will choose, the initiator having the more layered choice but they also need to think if the best benefit will lead to an obvious counter. Bloody Valor works a bit like Rock Paper Scissors where one choice will beat another but loses to a different one, but the scene setting up the choice and the general guesswork makes it a pace breaker that can be especially annoying against game-controlled fighters who you can’t even play mindgames with.
The deeper problem with Kill la Kill – IF’s Bloody Valor system is its importance, the winner of a round of it getting their outfit upgraded to unlock new attacks or perks. Some characters heavily benefit from it like Satsuki and Ryuko and if you can build up to 3 stars through it you then unlock a match-ending attack to shred the opponent’s clothes, incentivizing more instances of this guesswork interruption. Forgoing the system does make for a more kinetic battle and in closer fights it might be better to spend that energy instead on your power moves, but this means you’re essentially ignoring depth in a fairly shallow but visually impressive fighter. Shallow is a good way of describing the game’s extra offerings as well. Outside of the two stories that don’t take long to complete and the expected multiplayer versus matches, the main thing to do will be tackling survival mode where you fight the small roster over and over until you lose or taking on the COVERs Challenges. COVERs are the names for floating clothes enemies who don’t put up much of a fight but do come in high numbers, the different formats for the challenges focusing either on killing as many as you can in a minute, clearing 100 as fast as you can, or just fighting endlessly until you win. As you might expect from barely intelligent but numerous enemies, you mostly just need to find the best moves to mash repeatedly, the fighting system already pretty prone to button mashing but these challenges are dull because of how little you need to think as you participate in them.
The COVER Challenges do touch on one other issue the game has, and that’s the camera. The camera does struggle at times with who to focus its attention on, sometimes leaving one fighter far from the screen as you focus in on the potentially huge back of a character like Uzu Sanageyama and his giant kendo armor. The more damaging issue arises in fights where you are facing more than one foe though. There is no way to manually adjust who you are targeting, your character often selecting whoever hurt you most recently or who you managed to hit. Most fights are one-on-one and in the familiar format of trying to clear 2 rounds before the opponent does, but some fights in the story and challenges have multiple combatants. The COVERs are sometimes fought alongside a proper fighter, almost more decoys to steal camera control so you can’t deal with the real issue. What really starts to feel annoying though are the fights where multiple true fighters are on the field. The Elite Four can gang up on you for example, and if you can’t focus on Nonon, she’ll blast you with huge lasers from afar, the player not able to close the gap and stop her because their movements are instead locked into rushing them towards the more physical fighter who is in your face. It’s not an overly common nuisance but it’s felt every time you have multiple targets, the lack of control not really leading to interesting strategies and instead you just get blindsided as you struggle and hope you won’t get worn down by something you can’t deal with.
THE VERDICT: Kill la Kill – IF looks the part and then some, faithfully recreating the look of the anime and the personalities of its characters well. Even the action is appropriately bombastic and exciting to behold. It’s just a shame all the artistic elements are attached to a fairly hollow fighter with a rushed and sloppy story. The story mode struggles to tell a coherent tale while not even throwing together many good fights due to its small roster while the actual combat has camera issues, the ill-conceived Bloody Valor system, and a bit too much reward for button mashing. Fans of the anime may still be impressed by the aesthetic elements it gets right, but the style doesn’t come with a lot of substance.
And so, I give Kill la Kill – IF for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. The choice to make the plot an alternate course of events pretty much just leads to it being a worse and less meaningful story, its new direction at best creating one new interesting enemy but at the price of a lot of enjoyable and familiar elements from the show. If Kill la Kill – IF had been more of a straight adaptation of the events of the anime, it could have brought in more interesting characters like the boxing club president or tennis club president who would have inherently unique fighting styles to boot. At present, Kill la Kill – IF mostly gets by with the bare minimum of the characters you’d expect to play as, and while focusing on the big names is important, the battle system isn’t complicated enough to really explore the depths of their concepts either. A wider roster could shake off the stagnation with diversity, but beyond just asking for a more layered battle system that doesn’t feature Bloody Valor’s constant interruptions and unengaging Rock-Paper-Scissors play, the modes might need the bigger overhaul. A wider cast would let the story feel less repetitive, but then you have the COVER fights that could have been more interesting with a better camera system and a wider range in terms of what they’re capable of. Very little really comes out clean beyond the impressive dedication to smoothly transitioning the look and feel of Kill la Kill into a game, but if you want battles that are actually as exciting as they look, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Admittedly, once you look past the characters present and my two suggested additions, Kill la Kill isn’t really an anime that feels fit for a fighting game adaptation. To make up for not many eligible characters to adapt, a Kill la Kill game should have maybe focused in more on the substance of a fight, an action game closer to something like Bayonetta appropriate both in the flashy fighting it would feature and how scandalous both series can look for people not expecting the sultry side. Kill la Kill – IF wanted to be a fighting game and yet didn’t put in the work to make the fighting that satisfying, but make these characters bosses you take on as Ryuko and you can better integrate more of them, make them deeper fights, and likely do even better at capturing the look and feel of the show. It’s not wrong to want a Kill la Kill fighting game even if you accept the roster won’t likely be huge, but since the developers here weren’t interested in really fleshing out this fighter, they should have turned their attention to a concept that could have avoided the pitfalls that came from trying to force it into this mold.