Yuzu is excited to finally be a Kitsune messenger. Kiri, her best friend, is excited to finally tell Yuzu how she feels. Akko is excited to learn more about Yuzu after their chance encounter. This is the situation between the three main characters in Kitsune Tails’ opening moments. Add into that Akko suddenly being kidnapped and Kiri seemingly being the reason why, and you have a recipe for a standard paint by numbers retro platformer. Or at least that’s what Kitsune Games and Midboss LLC want you to think when you start Yuzu’s adventure to attune with the elements and rescue Akko from the elemental prison. This is because leaning hard into a cliché is an excellent way to lead into, and in some cases, foreshadow a twist.
Kitsune Tails is a retro 2D platformer with a heavier emphasis both on serious platforming challenge and on narrative than one might expect from a game that’s apparently hitting the nostalgia button as hard as Kitsune Tails appears to be. It features comprehensively voiced cutscenes to set up the plot and at numerous points throughout the journey to explain the situation and give insight into Yuzu’s feelings and perspectives, and the emotions of the people in her life, Kiri, Akko, her parents, the guardians she must fight, and even several NPCs she encounters along the way. It also features levels with extremely tough but tight platforming challenges that do not overstay their welcome, save one or two that might need some minor fixing.
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room, or should I say Kuribo in the Shoe, which is Kitsune Tails’ very deliberate similarities to Super Mario Brothers 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Speaking as an old fogey who played that game when it first came out, Yuzu’s physics and Mario’s are dang near identical. Of course, the game isn’t even trying to hide the fact that it’s heavily inspired by Super Mario. The creators even call it “the follow up to Super Bernie World” which was an even more on-the-nose homage. However,while the graphics and physics are very similar, Kitsune Tails is not just a carbon copy of what came before.
To start with, there is no life counter in Kitsune Tails; if you die in a level, you go back to your last checkpoint. And here is the kicker, Yuzu begins every life in her “super” form, allowing her to take a hit and turn into her weakened fox form instead of dying. This built-in safety net allows Kitsune Tails to craft more challenging levels, since there’s considerably less chance that a player will be stuck forever on a level. And even if a player can get stuck, you can always leave the level, find or buy a power up and challenge the level again. In addition, if a level has a path that requires a power up to access, it also has a path you can use in case you lose said power up.
As for power ups, in addition to the Spirit Orb which allows Yuzu to grow back to her humanoid form there’s the golden fox head which turns Yuzu into an invincible fox form with a super dash for a brief period, a Samurai garb that allows her to attack with a spear and stab it into walls to gain extra height, a breakdancing forest garb that allows her to spin jump onto enemies who might otherwise be too tough and to break blocks below her, the shark form which allows her to swim perfectly and run on water when at full speed, the bird form that gives her a double jump and slow fall, an ice fox costume that lets her freeze enemies and walk on ice without slipping, and the salamander form that can spit fire and swim in lava which will normally kill Yuzu. There’s also a shoe power up for extra jumping height and powerful stomps, and a cloud that can fly over entire levels.
The gameplay loop of Kitsune Tails is likewise familiar to but not quite the same as its inspiration. In each of the six worlds there are seven numbered levels and at least one ghost house, plus a boss, and some extra encounters (like wandering enemy encounters), and a merchant you can challenge to various games, all of which can get Yuzu extra power ups for the game ahead. The goal of each regular level is to reach the Tori at the end and either walk through it for a coin, or across the top for 10 coins. Each ghost house requires you to beat a possessed set of armor, each with a new wrinkle in its attack pattern or the arena. Each world’s boss is also unique, though they all do still follow the basic platformer rule of hop on head enough times to win. Unfortunately, the bosses are emblematic of one of the few problems of Kitsune Tails, that being the inconsistent difficulty curve. There are seven world bosses, five of them being elemental guardians, and it’s the second one, the first Elemental guardian that I think is the hardest by far. This isn’t just due to it being the first serious boss, as I had similar difficulties with a later refight, it just has very very quick attacks that have a hitbox larger than their visible animation. I died on several occasions to being hit above the boss even though the attack animation showed his weapon on the ground already. This is only a problem with that one boss, but even outside of bosses it seemed that the difficulty within a world didn’t always correlate to the order the levels were tackled in.
My other issue with Kitsune Tails actually has to do with something that’s also very cool about the game. Halfway through the game you are given control of Kiri and have to send her through the exact same levels that you’ve already gone through as Yuzu. On the face of it, this is very cool. Kiri has a very different playstyle. She only has one hit by default instead of two – though you can find onigiri in levels to give her a second one – a sword, a wall jump, and a stomp attack, and she encounters several extra bosses along the way, and gains different power ups than Yuzu, both temporary ones like her Ninja outfit and her scuba gear, and permanent ones like new sword techniques that make her more offensively powerful and agile. The downside to this is that when she goes through the same levels, for the most part it’s the exact same levels that we’ve already covered with Yuzu. I get the idea is to see how differently Kiri tackles the levels compared to Yuzu, but some variation in levels or maybe some extra ones would have been nice. The other issue is that once you’ve progressed far enough in the plot to play as Kiri, you can’t play as Yuzu any more, not even after finishing the final boss. There’s also no way to revisit the first world after defeating it, which you can for every other world. These are minor issues in the scheme of things, but it would still be nice to go back and replay all the levels after beating the game.
Kitsune Tails has a very cute story over all and the voice acting definitely adds to the experience, so much so that the one character who isn’t voice acted seemed out of place for its lack. I’ll be giving the extra hard “Kaizo” style levels, the custom level building and minigame a try and plan on beating all of the postgame levels and look forward to seeing the of custom levels from the community as well. Kitsune Tails is a cute little game, perfect for pick up and put down play at your leisure.
Tim reviewed Kitsune Tails on PC with a review code.
