Developer: Kitsune Games

Publisher: Kitsune Games, MidBoss LLC.

Played on: PC

Release Date: August 1, 2024

Played with: Keyboard

Paid: $0 (Key Provided for Review)

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It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if that’s the case, Super Mario World had better feel the sincerity emanating off every inch of Kitsune Tails.  From its aesthetics to its gameplay to even the game physics, so much of Kitsune Tails feels like it’s cribbed from or paying homage to Super Mario World that it initially felt uninspired.  That’s not to say that it does nothing new, as its cozy, lesbian love triangle narrative gives it a far more progressive spin than anything Mario’s been in, not to mention its setting inspired by Japanese folklore being a far cry from the Mushroom Kingdom.  With such a classic game as its inspiration, though, the real question is whether Kitsune Tails can manage to slip out of the shadow of its ancestor  to stand on its own.

The biggest difference between Kitsune Tails and its inspirations is its greater focus on storytelling.  Following a young kitsune named Yuzu, the game tracks her journey as she becomes a messenger for the spirit Inari and sets out on her own, to the concern of her friend Kiri.  After winding up attacked by an oni, Yuzu is rescued by the local healer Akko, and the two become fast friends, with it soon becoming clear that Akko would like to be more than that.  This frustrates Kiri, who also has a crush on Yuzu, and she kidnaps Akko out of spite, imprisoning her in an elemental prison.  Thus, it falls to Yuzu to journey across the land, gather five elemental attunements, and unlock the prison to rescue Akko.

I have to say, I was surprised by the story in Kitsune Tails.  It’s not going to win any awards, but it has some pleasantly surprising twists in it that manage to make all the characters a lot more relatable, even the ones that grate at the start.  I’m always down for a cute sapphic story, and this one fits the bill over the course of its runtime, even switching to a different character at one point to tell events from their perspective.  Unfortunately, while a lot of effort was clearly put into making the characters fully voice acted, the performances leave something to be desired.  Vocal delivery and actual dialogue can be extremely mismatched, and some voices straight-up set my teeth on edge.  However, it’s not all bad, with characters like the cat merchant who helps you win “purrrrizes” managing to strike the right balance between cheesy and charming.

Gameplay is where a lot of the similarities with Kitsune Tails’ contemporaries start to crop up.  If you’ve played a Mario game, you know the drill here: run and jump through 2D sidescrolling levels, collect powerups and coins, jump on enemies to defeat them, and turn into a smaller version of yourself (a fox in this case) when you take a hit.  It’s a tried and true formula, and it works just as well here, even if it does feel a bit uninspired.  Of the different powerups on offer, only a couple feel unique, though they all have their place in helping you traverse levels, even if that place is just letting you take an extra hit before death.

Similarly, enemies fill a lot of Mario niches: there are pangolins that act like Koopas, cats that are just Lakitus, tengu that behave like Chargin’ Chucks, and even ghosts that are just Boos, except they annoyingly don’t stop moving when you look at them.  I want to put special emphasis on that last one, as the ghosts are far and away the most infuriating enemies in the game, with several levels requiring you to repeatedly juke them while waiting for timed platforms and the like; it often ends up feeling impossible to do so without getting hit.  Their one weakness is that they turn incorporeal when exposed to light, and so one interesting level sees Yuzu navigating a haunted house while carrying lanterns around to make the ghosts unable to hit her.  This isn’t the only time that Kitsune Tails throws an intriguing twist on its platforming, and it was always appreciated when the game tried something new and exciting.

The flow of the game sees you traversing several world maps, each with 7 platforming levels and a boss at the end.  There are also occasional bonus encounters to break things up, whether it’s the aforementioned cat merchant’s games or some fox soldiers you can defeat to earn an item.  Additionally, a town can be accessed between levels, which includes a minigame-filled arcade for earning more coins (if the amount you get from the regular levels isn’t enough), and a shop to purchase items from with that currency.  Depending on your difficulty, those items can be used in or out of levels to power up Yuzu, whether it’s letting her take an extra hit before death, swim better, or turn into a samurai, complete with a spear for attacking and platforming.  There’s a decent variety on offer, and by the end I was rolling in so many coins that I could pretty much stock up on whatever I wanted and always have it at the ready if a level was giving me trouble.  However, that still didn’t stop me from lowering the difficulty after I got to the mid-game.

My biggest gripe with Kitsune Tails is something I alluded to earlier: you play some of the game from a different character’s perspective.  On the surface, this is cool: they die in one hit by default, increasing the challenge compared to Yuzu, but they have an attack they can perform at any time and also unlock new moves as you progress through their story.  The problem is that the levels you play through are the exact same ones you played through with Yuzu.  After pushing through dozens of levels with Yuzu, some of which definitely came with a, “Glad I never have to do that again,” after beating them, I found out that yes, I did in fact have to do them again, only this time the challenge was kicked up a notch.

To make matters worse, this design decision forces the levels to perform double duty, attempting to provide a fair challenge for two different characters instead of being tailored to just one.  The end result is that some levels are a breeze with Yuzu and a pain in the ass with her counterpart, or vice versa .  Sure, it spikes the difficulty overall to make the second half of the game harder than the first, but the fact that I was going through repeated content the entire time (save for the plot sections) made it such a slog.  I ended up turning the difficulty down to the easiest setting (which allows you to respawn in place when you die) and just blitzed through the redo of each level, removing much of the challenge in favour of simply getting through to the end.

There are also a few scattered technical issues with the game.  While I generally enjoyed how the boss fights mixed things up and were challenging without seeming unfair, one of them has some incredibly janky hitboxes, with the box being tied not just to where their weapon is, but also where it’s going.  The result was that I suffered countless deaths to simply touching a bad section of air, which was quite annoying when I was just about to beat the fight and had to start over.  Also, playing on the easiest difficulty and being able to respawn in place can sort of break some levels; they’re still beatable, but things like scrolling walls just move right past you after death, allowing the level to be beaten without any sort of time crunch.  On some levels, it seems like timed platforms get desynced, meaning I had to wait around (often dodging annoying ghost enemies in the process) until they resynced and I could continue on my way.  Finally, one level has a jump that seemingly can’t be made without using a specific item that isn’t actually obtainable in the level, meaning the only way to do it is to pull one out of your inventory to clear the section.  If you’re playing on the hardest difficulty that locks off your inventory while in levels, I think this level would be literally impossible.

I won’t relitigate my issues with the voice acting here, but beyond that the presentation of Kitsune Tails is solid.  It really does look like a cute mascot platformer from the Super Nintendo era, and there’s even a surprisingly good CRT filter you can throw on the screen if you truly want to embrace the old-school.  The music can get a touch repetitive as each world only has one track for all its levels, but it was pleasant enough that I kept it running throughout my playtime.  Plus, the jingle that plays whenever you beat a level consistently had me tapping my desk to the rhythm, so that further incentivized me to keep the in-game music going.  Finally, the character designs are great, incorporating beings from Japanese myth and legend in fun ways.  The first time a chōchin’obake (lantern ghost) dropped down on me in a level, it was a great surprise, and it was fun seeing how many spirits I could identify while playing.

So Kitsune Tails definitely isn’t a flawless experience, and I don’t think it comes close to outshining its inspirations.  However, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game.  While I did balk at the level retreading and some occasional gameplay issues, the core of the game is still sound, and the fact that it doesn’t penalize you for using the easier difficulty modes to clear its more annoying back half is a huge plus.  It’s also worth noting that for the true challenge fiends out there, the game promises some unlockable “kaizo” style levels to truly test your skills, though these weren’t available at review time.  Despite this, I do think that the game is hurt by being so derivative of other titles in the genre, as there are a lot of 2D platformers that are probably worth a look before taking the plunge on this one.  That being said, if you’re looking for something that manages to be sweet, sapphic, and enjoyably strenuous, you could do a lot worse than Kitsune Tails.

7/10