Legend of Kay Anniversary Review

You know what I like? Remakes. I like them a lot. Sure, they’re mostly cynical cash-ins riding in on a wave of nostalgia dollars, aimed squarely at the kinds of people who couldn’t critically re-evaluate the works from their childhood if their lives depended on it, but that’s all just fine business. In an industry obsessed with filling the checkboxes on whatever’s hip and now, they often stand out with examples of design that seem strange and alien. More than sources of entertainment, I like them for puncturing our collective amnesia and reminding us that sometimes things aren’t the way they are because they’re better; sometimes they’re just the latest in a series of trends. And what better game to showcase that than… erm, Legend of Kay? Actually, let me rethink that.

Now, what we have here is a typical Class B PS2-era Action-Adventure Product: one part combat, one part platforming, one part quote puzzles unquote, and the rest filled in with hastily spray-painted Zelda mechanics. Once upon a time they were a dime a dozen, but in this time of gargantuan budgets and open-world everything and RPGs as far as the eye can see, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to rescue a lucky contender from the tyre fire of gaming history, dust it off, and put it on a stage where it stands out a little bit more. Maybe it will gain a bit more appreciation when it doesn’t have to fight for the spotlight.

So, let’s catch up for the benefit of those of you just joining us. In a land that kind of resembles ancient China if it had been colonised by rejected Disney anthros, the all-giving, all-sustaining magical fountains are slowly becoming less magical, causing the good animals – that is, just anything cute and fuzzy – to be invaded by the not as good animals – rats, gorillas, and anything else envious of the former group. You play Kay, an utterly bland cat-person who jumps the gun a little bit and goes out to jump-start a rebellion when his small oppressed village doesn’t have the common decency to be razed to the ground at any point. I think you can guess where it goes from there: fight dudes, acquire money, jump around a lot and eventually defeat the big dude.

The thing about Legend of Kay, a problem that it shares with Wind Waker, is that it’s kind of hard to justify making an HD remake at all when the original game’s visuals are still pretty serviceable. Consequentially, the list of features does smack a little bit of desperate rummaging around in the next-gen makeup drawer: high-res textures, nicer character models, better lighting, a different HUD for some reason, that sort of thing. Usually developers take this opportunity to carelessly swing around rendering stats like wiffle bats in an antiques store, but although the game runs at 60fps (well, most of the time, barring a few slowdowns and lock-ups) the lack of graphics options means that the only way to get it rendering at a resolution above 720p is to cook up your own config file, which is honestly kind of staggering. I wouldn’t normally chew a game out for stuff like this – we have pompous YouTubers for that – but if you’re going to throw a remake out with its primary selling points being ‘you don’t have to dig your dusty PS2 out from under the spider-infested television cabinet’ and ‘it looks prettier’, I’d be feeling pretty damn cheated if I was buying it for the latter.

And of all the things to leave totally unchanged, utterly pristine, why did the voice acting have to be among them? This is not some pricelessly bad Resident-Evil-esque artefact, to be preserved for the amusement and permanent fascination of future generations; this is the kind of misophonic assault that can normally only be achieved with a team of power-tool wielding workmen in a warehouse full of chalkboards, and what makes it all the more astounding is how much of it was done with intent. The rats all have a comically overblown nasal tone that was probably achieved by hammering a kazoo into somebody’s sinuses, and Kay himself, the character who you will hear quip non-stop for the entire duration of the game, sounds like a seventh-grade Let’s Player monotonically reading out every single line of dialogue for the benefit of his illiterate audience. And guess what? Unlike in the original game, there is no ‘skip dialogue’ option until you’ve heard the lines at least once. Your only options are to turn the voices off entirely – not that this does anything to speed up proceedings – or suffer as your ears shrivel up, turn inside-out, and retreat into your cranium in disgust.

Okay, breathe. Breathe deep. Where were we? Retrospective criticism, right. Remember when ‘press X to parkour’ and Uncharted-style spectacle climbing weren’t a thing, and there were companies other than Nintendo putting out 3D platformers? Legend of Kay lives on the trailing edge of that era, and while its platforming isn’t too bad, you can certainly see why they were on the way out. The game has no shortage of platforming elements to work with – ropes to swing on, crossbars to flip over, posts to leap between, crevasses to wall-jump up, rolling logs to balance oneself on, that sort of thing – but there’s very little room to re-use or combine them in creative ways, so challenges tend to just jumble the same elements into different orders and call it a day. It certainly doesn’t help that they brought a mid-2000s third-person camera along for the ride without so much as a disciplinary clip around the ears. Trying to get it to stay in position near a wall is like trying to squash a hastily bunched-up tent back into its bag, and trying to get it to tilt facing up beyond a horizontal angle – that is to say, the one thing you’ll be doing whenever there’s a platform above you – is like trying to zip the aforementioned tent bag closed in the sense that it is literally physically impossible. Whatever. Why would you need spatial awareness during platforming sections anyway?

Unsurprisingly, this is also a hindrance to the combat, which has the virtue of at least being enjoyable in places. If you’re like me and you’ve been spoiled silly by the likes of Platinum Games, then Kay’s movement is going to feel as smooth and fluid as running around in a pair of waterlogged oversized wellingtons, but once you get a handle on that – and unlock enough of his kit – it feels pretty good to zip around in a blur of fur and whirling claws, catching enemies off-guard and punishing them before they can attack. The main gimmick is that once you get a combo started you can jump to enemies with a vaguely proto-Arkham-ish leap, which certainly gives Kay some much needed mobility and serves as a dodge move of sorts, but I wonder if this system was really thought out given that there’s no reward for having a high combo or keeping one maintained, just getting it started in the first place. Enemies can go all panicky and start fighting defensively in certain cases, which sounds like a neat AI feature until you realise you have to constantly chase down the cowardly little sods like a disgruntled groundskeeper, and the only way to deal with excessively blocking enemies is to pull off the abominably clunky roll move to get behind them. There also isn’t really any cancelling or countering to speak of, so in any fight with more than a handful of enemies the only viable strategy is to either run around looking for opportunistic single hits or hope to get yourself positioned just right for an area-of-effect magic attack. I’m not asking for Devil May Cry mechanics over here, but it really does feel like Kay’s skillset doesn’t quite match the situations he gets thrown into. And for crying out loud, why does there have to be so much dreadful back-and-forth banter before every single fight? Even if Kay wasn’t voiced by a kid who could only sound less intimidating if he turned up to the recording studio with a stuffy nose, it wouldn’t excuse the fact that this game’s idea of rapier wit is the equivalent of two beer-bellied men slapping each other with pool noodles at a Sunday barbecue.

Of course, that’s hardly the limit of the writing’s problems. You can tell this was the kind of game where the writer spent many sleepless nights putting together a plot, restlessly editing for hours on end, only to discover about halfway through development that most of it would have to be burned because the powers that be wanted to be able to slap “25 different levels with over twelve hours of gameplay” on the back of the box at any expense. It’s the kind of story that’s been twisted and stretched to serve the level structures; the kind of plot that would probably take about twenty minutes at the most to play out if it wasn’t for the number of roadblocks that get regularly airdropped into your path. “Oh no, the [PLOT EVENT] is through this door, but we can’t reach it because [HITHERTO UNKNOWN OBSTACLE]. Guess you’ll have to make some detours to [DUNGEON/SIDE-AREA/ANIMAL RIDING SECTION], then!” At one point – and I swear this is true – you fight your way through a ruined palace and its assorted burial chambers to find a nautical map, because despite the presence of a trained crew and a functioning ship, not a single person in this entire city thought to make a photocopy of it. Even the expository opening, in the town that stubbornly refuses to undergo a character-building tragedy, is less of a quick hook and more of a slow, drawn out drag across a thick carpet, as every single meaningful mechanic gets spelled out with patronising slowness. Why? Kids aren’t that stupid, you know. I’m pretty sure if they can figure out automatic redstone farming machines then they can figure out combo attacks without chewing off the thumbstick.

I hope you understand by now why I’m a little bit perplexed as to Legend of Kay Anniversary’s existence: it’s an HD re-release of a game that was merely average to start with, and has only grown dusty with age. It doesn’t serve as a lesson on what modern design has forgotten so much as it serves as a checklist of features we buried because they were evolutionary dead-ends. I, for one, don’t want to see another fixed-speed animal riding section for as long as I live, and while the prevalence of open-world design might have more unhealthy side-effects than making a morning smoothie out of the contents of the medicine cabinet, at least the terrain you backtrack across as you fulfil your fetch quests is interesting enough to warrant covering more than once. Every time I stumbled into a not-so-linear area, I knew without fail that the game would stretch it to breaking point with a shopping list of minor variations on the theme of ‘find the switches’ and ‘find the keys’, a buffet of slag livened up only by the enemies who respawn when you’re out of sight and the moments where you have to arbitrarily talk to an unlabelled NPC to proceed.

I still believe that Legend of Kay Anniversary could’ve charmed me. There is some appeal, even if it is just a drip-feed of pure novelty, in playing an old-fashioned action-adventure that’s a little bit more focussed; a little bit more on-rails in a way that isn’t just a linear sequence of scripted events. Unfortunate, then, that the base game itself is so utterly unremarkable. It’s the kind of game you might’ve found resting in the top of an EB Games bargain bin in 2006; the kind of game that would’ve been bought for you by a well-meaning but relatively clueless relative for your thirteenth birthday. Fast-forward to 2015, and it’s no surprise that a lick of fresh paint isn’t enough to prop it up any more. There’s nothing it does that hasn’t been surpassed countless times by now, and while the same could probably be said of a lot of pioneering titles of the same era, this isn’t one of them. The Legend of Kay, I’m afraid, isn’t a legend so much as a footnote.