Honestly speaking, Katana Zero was a game I bought on a whim. It was only 15 dollars at the time, and a cyberpunk action game about a Feudal Era Samurai in a modern day urban setting? That's the kind of sales pitch that catches my attention. Because I like cyberpunk, I like samurai, and I like action games. This seems like the holy trinity of all my nerdy interests. Three hours later, and I finished what can best be described as a psychedelic thrill ride through a dystopian story that I sincerely wish was longer. So that's what we're reviewing today. Two quick warnings before we continue with the review. Firstly, I played the Nintendo Switch version of the game, so I will be using that console's controllers as a frame of reference when I discuss the controls. And secondly, Katana Zero is rated M for Mature. Because of violence. And profanity. And because the main character is canonically addicted to a fictional drug. Reader discretion is advised
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| Image found on Wikipedia.org |
But what is Katana Zero exactly? Developed by Akiisoft and published by Devolver Digital back in 2019, Katana Zero is a game with a delightfully simplistic premise. You play as an amnesiac Samurai named Zero. Zero is tasked by a mysterious employer to go around the city of New Mecca and assassinate various "undesirable characters" for reasons unknown. Also, according to designer Justin Stander, the whole game is heavily inspired by neo-noir action movies such as Sin City and John Wick, with a little bit of AKIRA thrown in for good measure. So if you've seen those movies, you know exactly what kind of "vibe" that Katana Zero is going for. In between each mission, Zero visits a suspicious psychiatrist in an attempt to understand a reoccurring nightmare that plagues his mind whenever he sleeps. Said nightmare may or may not be a distorted recreation of an event from Zero's childhood that holds the key to his true identity. Things only get weirder from here.
Let's start at the gameplay. Katana Zero is a side scrolling action game built around two main mechanics; instant death and time manipulation. If you've ever heard the phrase "glass cannon" Zero is that concept turned into an actual character. Every hit, from bullets to punches, will kill him instantly. But the same is true for any enemies standing in Zero's way. All enemies die in one hit. From any source of damage. From slashing with a katana to throwing wine bottles. Even the act of opening a door will kill any bad guy standing on the other side. Because Zero doesn't so much as "open" doors as he does "kick the door down with enough force to break the hinges." Zero is armed with a katana (obviously) and any slash with it will kill anything within reach of the blade. You can also use the katana to deflect enemy bullets back at their source, which again, will instantly kill anyone shooting at you. And finally, Zero can pick up certain objects, such as glass bottles, and throw them with enough force to (you guessed it) instantly kill whatever gets hit by said projectile. Because everyone dies so quickly, levels are lightning fast and demand near perfect precision and speed. Every level is timed, but the timer is generous and I never ran out of time during any of the game's ten main levels. The real main challenge of the game comes from the fact that you cannot progress to the next room in a level until all the enemies in the current room have been defeated. But there is a trick Zero has that gives him a distinct advantage over his targets.
So here's a little bit of lore to provide context for the game mechanics. Zero is dependent on an experimental super steroid called Chronos. Chronos supercharges the body and the mind, to the point where Chronos users can straight up see the future with 100% accuracy. And in game mechanic terms, this is both the explanation for how Zero can retry failed levels and how Zero can pull off these superhuman stunts. Every failed attempt at a level is, canonically speaking, just a future vision Zero is having, warning him against an unforeseen danger. But more importantly, if you hold down the left bumper button, Zero can spend Chronos to slow down time, making it easier to react to enemy attacks and other such hazards. Chronos is limited and recharges slowly, so it is best to use this ability only when you have to. One thing I love about Katana Zero is that after every level you get a replay showing the exact route you took to complete the level. What's cool is that any Chronos related stunts you pulled are shown in real time, without the slow-motion effect that Chronos usually has. Because of that, Zero looks a lot more skilled and dangerous on replays than he does when you play as him directly. This is easily one of the best uses of both slow-motion and instant replays in a video game, at least in my opinion.
Speaking of beating the game, my biggest criticism of Katana Zero is that the game is really short. It will take between 2 and 3 hours to beat on your first try. It's basically the length of the average action movie. I would not mind the shortness under normal circumstances. In fact, speaking as a guy who normally plays role playing games (which are 60-80 hours long on average), the fact that you can beat this game in less than a day would be a breath of fresh air. But without spoiling things too much, the ending of Katana Zero is far too abrupt for my liking. But almost as if to compensate for the shortness of the main campaign, you can unlock a speed run mode that lets you replay the whole game but with a little timer in the top right corner of the screen, as well different sword types that don't really change how the game is played (aside from minor stat adjustments like more range or faster slices) but these extra swords add some cosmetic novelty to future playthroughs. You can also unlock a Hard Mode by beating the game, which shuffles some hazards around and adds in additional enemies to each level.
On the subject of enemies, Katana Zero sports a surprisingly diverse roster of enemies to fight. While all of them die in one hit, how exactly you deal with each one varies. You have basic gangsters that throw slow and predictable punches, you have police officers armed with pistols and shotguns, and even automated turrets that you have to sneak around instead of confronting directly. Remembering what each enemy type does is vital to clearing the levels with a half-decent time. The only enemies who don't die in one hit are to the surprise of literally no one, the bosses. But to be fair, almost every boss has a story reason to be so durable. Most bosses in this game are actually other Chronos users/addicts, and since Chronos users can predict the future with 100% accuracy, when two or more of them fight, it's less a duel to the death and more a test of mental willpower to see who surrenders first after seeing an infinite amount of different futures and experiencing an infinite amount of potential future deaths. Mild spoilers here, but the only reason Zero can even beat the final boss in the first place is because said final boss literally gives up because the mental strain of seeing their future selves die so many times in a row was too much for them to handle.
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| Image found on steamdb.com |
One last gameplay thing before we talk about the story in detail. Katana Zero has one of the most unique dialogue options I've ever seen. In between each level are "downtime" sections, where Zero is free to visit his psychiatrist or talk to his neighbors. And how quickly the player responds changes how Zero responds in conversation. Pick an option before the other person can finish talking, and Zero's dialogue sounds ruder and more aggressive. But if you wait long enough for the other person to finish speaking, then Zero sounds calmer and more level-headed. The options themselves don't really change the story in any obvious way, but they do give Zero a chance to express a bit more personality and charm than his profession normally allows him to. And because I don't have anywhere else to put the nightmare section, I want to talk about Zero's nightmares in more detail. With each night, the nightmare gets longer and more detailed, though it always ends before we can learn anything truly revolutionary about Zero's past. It always starts with a child (presumably a young Zero) playing catch with his sister and ends with a scientist (presumably Zero's parent or guardian) running into the room only to get shot from behind by a masked soldier. Without spoiling the meaning behind the nightmare too much, it's one of those things that makes more sense on a second playthrough than on the first.
Alright. Let's talk about Katana Zero's story because this game's narrative was one of the wildest narratives I've ever had the pleasure to experience. For obvious reasons, beware of spoilers from this point onwards. So first of all, the reason for Zero's assassinations. It's eventually revealed that all his targets, consisting primarily in seemingly unrelated celebrities and billionaires, were all involved in either the creation or the distribution of Chronos. The psychiatrist that Zero's been seeing is involved in some kind of government conspiracy, and has been not-so-subtly manipulating Zero's thoughts and memories to mold him into a compliant but highly effective killer. Chronos is also not only highly addictive (as drugs of this nature often are) but it is literally impossible for a Chronos user to "sober up." Why, you ask? Because the withdrawal symptoms are so intense that if a person who was dependent on Chronos doesn't have any in their bloodstream, they become trapped in their own mind and effectively become a vegetable to the outside world. The main villain of this game, a gangster named V, takes full advantage of these withdrawal symptoms and uses Chronos as a method of psychological torture.
While all of this is happening, Zero hears multiple news reports about a rogue samurai serial killer called "The Dragon" going on a rampage in the same part of town that Zero usually operates in. On a first playthrough, it's easy to assume that Zero is the Dragon and the news reports are just recapping things Zero already did prior to the events of the game. But as it turned out, the Dragon was a completely different person from Zero named Fifteen. 28 years ago, Zero and Fifteen were the result of the NULL program, an experiment to create psychic super soldiers. The experiment was almost successful, but then the psychic super soldiers started committing war crimes so horrible that government funding was pulled from the program. As it turned out, getting the public to support psychic superhumans with a known penchant for murdering civilians just for fun was in fact, a PR nightmare. So the NULL soldiers were cast aside and the program was shut down. Unfortunately, the Chronos didn't exactly go away. Now there was an entire underground criminal empire built around recreating Chronos and selling it on the black market. The NULL soldiers themselves turned to a life of crime in order to afford more Chronos, for without it they were as good as dead. And because of all this, Fifteen is motivated entirely by a desire for vengeance. Vengeance against both the criminals exploiting the drug trade for profit, and against the New Mecca government for turning the NULL soldiers into freaks of nature just to throw them away the instant they outlived their purpose.
Speaking of Fifteen, one of my favorite levels in the game actually has you play as him for a spell. Fifteen controls exactly the same as Zero, but with one key difference. Fifteen cannot pick up objects and throw them. But to compensate for the lack of throwing skills, Fifteen can perform a dash in any direction, and this dash attack will instantly kill anyone standing in between Fifteen's starting point and his destination. This dash attack is so fast that on the replay, it looks like Fifteen is straight up teleporting. This one ability makes it clear that Fifteen is much more powerful than Zero, and also looks like it came straight out of an Shonen battle anime. And I mean that as a complement. If Akiisoft and Devolver Digital ever make another Katana Zero game, I would love to see them bring back Fifteen, or at least his move set, because the fact that Fifteen is only playable in one level is almost a crime.
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| Image found on steamdb.com |
While the Dragon is getting his revenge, Zero is still compliant with the assassination orders, but in between each mission he starts to befriend his neighbor's daughter, a small child known only as the Girl. The interactions and banter between Zero and the Girl are a rare moment of levity and wholesomeness in an otherwise very grim and serious game. Speaking of levity, there's also a hilarious gag early on where Zero infiltrates a hotel, and when the secretary asks about his unusual outfit, he can choose to pass his samurai garb off as either a bathrobe or as a cosplay of an anime character. The secretary turns out to be a massive nerd and starts fangirling at the thought of someone being a fellow anime fan. And Zero can double down on this charade and claim to be a "true connoisseur" of fine anime, and then claim that he's too much of a hipster to watch "mainstream" and "popular" anime. Zero is obviously making everything up as he goes along with this route, but the fact that the secretary is completely enthralled with every word he says is highly entertaining. Especially because I've seen people on the Internet unironically brag about enjoying obscure forms of media simply on the grounds that "obscure is good, popular is bad."
The final main story thing I want to talk about (before I talk about the ending) are Tragedy and Comedy. Tragedy and Comedy are two masked specters that haunt Zero's mind and are strongly implied to be figments of his imagination. Alternatively, they are real entities with some sort of supernatural influence on the world. Either way, Tragedy and Comedy are by far the strangest characters in the game. In fact, they are singlehandedly responsible for the all the weirdness that compelled me to call this game a "psychedelic" experience. They don't seem to be real, seeing as how only Zero seems to acknowledge their existence. But if they are real entities and not a figment of Zero's imagination, then they are clearly supernatural in nature. Because again, only Zero can see or hear them. There's even a scene where Zero is cornered by the police, and Tragedy and Comedy drop in out of nowhere in plain view of the entire police squad, but not a single officer so much as bats an eye at the sudden appearance of these specters. And I'm not sure about you, but if two masked men sudden appeared in between me and a rogue samurai, I would at least comment on it. They taunt Zero about his role as an assassin and push him to commit acts of larger scale violence. And there's even a "bad" ending where, at Tragedy and Comedy's prodding, Zero turns himself in to the police. This ending results in Zero being executed for the many crimes committed on behalf of his mysterious employers.
But you know how I said that this game's ending was abrupt? Well, let me explain why. So towards the end of the game, Zero has rediscovered his past as a NULL soldier. His relationship with the Psychiatrist has grown increasingly strained as Zero's "antics" attract unwanted attention from both the criminal underworld and from the New Mecca government. Zero is given one last mission; to infiltrate a bunker housing the last remnants of Chronos development. Zero's orders are simple; Leave. No. Survivors. For most of the bunker level he carves a bloodied path through all sorts of security. He even manages to slay a fellow Chronos user named Head Hunter and destroys the machines needed to make more Chronos. The only problem he ran into was that the bunker was testing Chronos on homeless children. Because of Zero's time with the Girl, along with dormant memories of the past springing back into his mind, he has a change of heart and flees the scene without killing any of the kids.
The Psychiatrist is furious that Zero didn't "finish the job" and threatens to terminate Zero's contract, thus cutting him off from his weekly Chronos doses. At this point, Zero's fractured mind finally snaps and he tries to kill the Psychiatrist. If you met the requirements for the secret bonus boss (done by being as rude as possible to the Psychiatrist and disobeying his orders whenever possible), you get a boss fight against a Chronos-enhanced mutant version of the Psychiatrist. If you don't meet the requirements, Zero just kills the Psychiatrist automatically in a fit of rage. Either way, Zero breaks into the Psychiatrist's personal Chronos stash and injects as much of it into himself as he can. Meanwhile, the player is treated to one last flash back showing the nightmare in full detail. And the big reveal that I said makes more sense in hindsight is that the kid in the nightmare wasn't actually Zero. Turns out he was the masked soldier that shot the scientist and that Zero himself was one of the "problematic" NULL soldiers who committed various war crimes. The nightmares were a result of a guilty conscience mixed with some PTSD from the New Meccan War that happened 28 years before the events of the game. After this, Zero returns to his apartment, only to find that the Girl is nowhere to be found. When Zero asks his neighbors about the Girl's disappearance, they express confusion and bafflement at the idea of a little Girl living in the complex, strongly implying that the Girl was just a figment of Zero's imagination. And then the game just ends right there. It drops two bombshell revelations about our protagonist back-to-back and then says "later, nerds." It does give a "To be continued..." message at the end of the credits, and out of all the games I played this is the one that most deserves a sequel. Because there's still a lot of unresolved plot threads in this game. You never get to confront Fifteen after his introduction. And you never get to learn anything about Snow, the mysterious lady samurai that V works for. Never has an ending in a video game demanded a sequel as strongly as Katana Zero.
In terms of presentation, Katana Zero can be best described with one word. Stylish. The game is portrayed in a pixel-art style, and the pixel-art is some of the best in the industry. Every animation is fluid and full of expression, and each level is distinct both in terms of layout and in terms of aesthetic. From night clubs, to hotels, to movie studios, Zero's missions take him to a wide variety of locales all throughout New Mecca. Expect a lot of neon from this game. Because it's still a cyberpunk game and a staple of the genre is neon lights all over the place. There's no voice acting whatsoever, but the dialogue (delivered through speech bubbles) is just as snappy and expressive as the animations. And going back to the whole "how quickly you respond determines how you respond" thing, a nice detail in dialogue is that if Zero interrupts the other speaker before they finish talking, the speech bubble above their head physically shatters into a million pieces, further emphasized with a glass breaking sound effect. And the music is superb. Katana Zero's soundtrack, composed and performed by Bill Kiley and LudoWic, is mostly synth wave and techno music, though there are some classical songs mixed in for good measure (mostly for the scenes with the Psychiatrist). And the soundtrack is diegetic, meaning (almost) every song exists in-universe. Every level starts with Zero putting on a song on his MP3 player, and every level ends when Zero turns the music off.
Overall, for a game that I went into with hardly any expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. It is frustratingly short and could easily have at least two more levels to tie up some loose story threads. But if my biggest criticism of a game is "I wanted more of it" is that really a bad thing? The combat is fast, the narrative is engaging, and this game has a wonderfully stylish semi-retro aesthetic. Katana Zero has also joined the likes of Devil May Cry, Hollow Knight and UNDERTALE/deltarune in the great collection of "games with soundtracks that sound better than 90% of all songs on the radio." I give Katana Zero 4 stars out of 5. The only thing keeping it from a 5 star rating is again, the abruptness of the ending. But if Akiisoft and Devolver Digital make a DLC pack or a sequel that retroactively ties up those loose story threads and gives this game a satisfactory conclusion, I would gladly change the rating from 4 stars to 5.
Katana Zero is owned by Akiisoft and Devolver Digital. None of the screenshots used here belong to me. Please support the original creators.
