Kao The Kangaroo - Aesthetic Charms, A Good Games Does Not Make

11/11/24

When I play through games for the Game Boy Abyss, especially for platformers, frequently I can sort them into three categories - the titles everyone knows, mostly Nintendo’s own games. At the bottom, there’s the dime a dozen licensed platformers that, whilst occasionally having a gem here and there, are forgettable at best and downright atrocious at worst. But then there’s the weird middle ground - titles that aren’t promoted or produced on the level of Nintendo, but feel like they have enough effort and dedication poured into them, but frequently their ideals outstrip their grasp. Kao the Kangaroo, whilst sporting a rather nostalgic, evocative art and audio direction, struggles with the building blocks of platformers, with it’s interesting ideas buried by some of the most bafflingly atrocious boss fights I’ve ever seen, creating a game that could’ve carved out it’s own niche, but ultimately condemns itself to mediocrity.

Kao The Kangaroo at heart is a classic, level-based platformer, with the caveat of having a true case of ‘Nintendo Hard’ difficulty in the twilight year of the practice - and, I guess, the fact that Nintendo didn’t put this bad boy out, leading to the kind of ‘Nintendo hard’ you really don’t want to be dealing with. Between consoles and handhelds, this was the era of mascot platforms; Mario, Sonic, Ratchet and Clank - hell, even characters like Gex were having their five minutes of fame. But people remember the legends of this mascot era because of how good the games are; but does anyone remember Kao the Kangaroo? Across twenty seven levels, you’ll be doing what every other platforming mascot was doing at the time, 2D or 3D - jump from platform to platform, bounce and punch out fools, and rescue Kao’s lost love (friend? Family? It’s very unclear who the hunter kidnaps in the intro, since at first I thought it was Kao themself), taking on bosses along the way. Almost to a T, Kao’s storyline and gameplay premise is generic, and it delivers on that premise with mediocrity… at best.

Kao’s basic platforming is… fine, but the real struggles come with dealing with the myriad of enemies always trying to trip your feet up. Besides the most basic of basic bells and whistles, you won’t be doing anything in Kao that you haven’t done in a thousand other platformers. Jumping onto little platforms, with flying beasts ramming you off the edge at the drop of the hat made me want to tear my hair out. Sometimes, Kao just doesn't seem to want to complete jumps, sliding off the edges of platforms, or not behaving the way they should be. It’s hard to accurately describe how it feels, but the whole game has this jank behavior that makes even simple tasks a little bit annoying. But beyond that, it’s a difficult, albeit generic, platformer, though the game throws enough power ups, lives, and coins (you gain more lives every 120 coins) to offset it enough - but not enough in its more frustrating moments. In that regard, there’s just an embarrassment of riches in regards to leaps of faith and otherwise ‘blind’ platforming that is never, ever fun - not even just over gaps or whatnot, but not knowing what enemies are going to bop your ass, thanks to the ridiculous hit and hurt boxes present in Kao. Enemies won’t kill you too quickly, but with enemies’ near universal ability to seemingly project an invisible field of damage, whilst somehow ignoring hit anywhere beyond their core. These hits you’ll inevitably take stack up, but the fact they happen at all just underlines how shoddy this game can feel even at the best of times. Honestly, Kao’s hitbox for pretty much everything could’ve been expanded, in regards to collection, attacks, everything, and it would’ve paid dividends in making the game feel less ‘off’.

Kao’s most interesting wrinkle it adds to the platforming genre is its checkpoint system. Rather than giving you a checkpoint, say, halfway through a level, as is the standard, Kao the Kangaroo opts for something different. One of the bevy of pickups you can find strewn through each level includes flags; hitting the select button whilst holding a flag will plant it, allowing you to respawn there and then when you (inevitably, in some moments) die. It does create an interesting dynamic - do you horde them through the ostensibly easier earlier worlds, saving them for theoretical, terrifying late-game stages that may feature entire gauntlets of obstacles? Or do you play it safe, use them when you need them? It’s an interesting system that kind of adapts to the skill and risk-taking of the player - though, if I’m being honest, I opted most of the time to just drop the flag wherever I found it, assuming it was on the main path to the end of the level, but don’t let my boring-ass behaviors distract from a pretty interesting mechanic. The game, like many platformers at the time, does dabble with alternate gameplay modes - namely, snowboarding and spaceship-based levels, and whilst these aren’t going to bring down the house, they’re quaint enough and enough of a diversion from the more janky homogeneity the game otherwise presents that they aren’t too bad. Sans that first big jump in the snowboarding stage - took me down four times in a row, no idea how I made it the fifth time, didn’t do a single thing differently. Woo.

But whilst the game would occasionally toss frustrating obstacles in your face, the game still felt like an approachable challenge. This all screeched to a sudden, catastrophic stop when I ran into the first boss, a T-Rex with quite possibly the largest, tankiest health bar I’ve ever seen in a platformer like Kao. Throwing a few jumping attacks, hell, even one of Kao’s patented boxing glove ranged strikes was all I needed to see just how poorly designed this encounter was. Kao legitimately must make dozens upon dozens of hits to take this beast down, and with it’s massive hitbox, hard-to-dodge ranged moves, and the fact you can’t strike it at standing height makes pulling off this encounter a near herculean effort. So how did I pull through? Well, to be honest, I went to YouTube, convinced that I had to be doing *something* wrong. After all, how were my strikes doing no more then 2% of this nightmare’s health bar, when it’s own would cut down Kao an order of magnitude faster. But no - I’d done nothing wrong. In the end, I followed the longplay’s strategy of bouncing on the T-Rex’s head dozens and dozens of times when he lined up with Kao, as he just… doesn’t fight back when you’re above him. There was nothing satisfying, nothing engaging or enjoyable clearing the fight this way - and if that truly is the sole way to beat him (and I genuinely can’t think of anyone with skills lesser than a god pulling it off) I can’t imagine *anyone* had tested this atrocious, abysmal boss fight. It’s not the worst playing, and it’s certainly not the worst looking fight (sans the T-Rex popping out of existence when he’s at the edge of your screen), but the fact that it feels so poorly balanced makes it one of the worst boss encounters I’ve ever engaged in - not just on the GBA, but period. The later bosses aren’t quite as frustrating as "ol Rexy, but those encounters still basically ended up ‘bounce on their head’ at certain moments, repeated ad nauseum. Whoopee.

Something that comes hand in hand with brutally difficult titles like Kao the Kangaroo comes with a ridiculously short playtime. It’s something that has been happening ever since Super Mario Bros.; either you take the time, designing a decent suite of bespoke levels with a nice, curving level of difficulty… or you make a game that is *ridiculously* short, with nothing but brutal difficulty and frustrating design to hide it’s mere two-hour playtime. The difference is, a lot of old titles like Super Mario Bros. *feels* good to grind away, slowly beating world after world, genuinely getting good. In a game like Kao? With as spotty the platforming can be, there’s no real joy in mastering it - especially in the case of the boss fights, that feel overtuned and unsatisfying to encounter at the very best of times. So all you’re left with is a mediocre game that’ll either be too frustrating to grind through, or for those who crave the challenge, a mediocre title that barely takes an hour or two to clear. It’s… not the most enticing package, no? It’s also got the early-GBA platformer curse of having a password system, but at least it doesn’t require ridiculous, encrypted-ass looking passwords, just five different pictures in a certain order - just snap a photo with your phone to avoid a loss of progress (please, do it before the boss fights, I’m begging you).

Despite coming out in 2001, the Game Boy Advance’s first year, whilst it didn’t blow my mind or anything approaching that mark, Kao certainly has a pleasing look to it, though that might have more to d with the vibes it gives me; it almost feels like it has the aesthetic of one of those low-budget PC platformers I think everyone growing up in the 90s to early 2000s seem to have. Kao and the various foes they’ll be dodging almost feel ripped from a dime-a-dozen cartoon that aired on a Saturday morning cartoon block (again, might sound like an insult, but it’s a vibe I adore), but surprisingly enough, it was the game’s backgrounds that really stick out to me, really help set the atmosphere of the few locales Kao the Kangaroo has on display. I’ve seen some criticism directed towards the audio, but continuing my weird takes on vibes and aesthetics over more objective quality in regards to this game, the soundtrack of Kao the Kangaroo is evocative of old, dialogue-less cartoons that’d air at weird times as a child on ABC (one of Australia’s free to air television channels). Something like Soup Opera, or maybe even like Gumby? It’s relaxing, even if, upon more ‘objective’ inspection, it is a bit simplistic and repetitive to be anything particularly remarkable.

Even at its best, Kao the Kangaroo rarely exceeds mediocre. Feeling like one of the last bastions of ‘Nintendo Hard’ quality, Kao throws some interesting wrinkles onto the genre, especially in the ‘choose your own checkpoint’ system, but nearly everything else ranges from ‘just’ fine, to some of the most frustrating moments I’ve had in the Game Boy Abyss so far. Anything mediocre is washed out by atrocious boss fights and at times frustrating platforming, making this a game I find hard to recommend beyond throwing on a longplay to soak in the old-school, cartoon vibes. This was a time of mascots, where the best became superstars - and the fact that it took nearly half a decade for a sequel, and over fifteen years for further entries… Well, suffice to say, Kao the Kangaroo wasn’t meant for the spotlight, just the sands of mediocrity.

Thanks for reading my review of Kao The Kangaroo on the Game Boy Abyss. Insane to think we’re seventy-five games into the Abyss - and even more insane to think that it’s just a drop in the bucket! As always, you can find me over at Twitter @Lemmy7003, Bluesky @GameBoyAbyss, email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com, and over at twitch under GameBoyAbyss. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next week!