What ‘Kill la Kill – IF’ Gets Wrong About the Series
Kill la Kill is one of the greatest single-run anime series of all time, featuring an exaggerated parodical critique of fashion culture. Naturally, the idea of playing an incarnation of that universe in video game form appealed greatly to me. But like seemingly all anime games, Kill la Kill – IF wedges beloved characters into a half-assed arena brawler that gapes at the player with dead, fishlike eyes. It reduces a powerful narrative into a cheap broth of boss rushing that gradually turns up the temperature towards the game’s end. Nothing in this game ever performed in an unpolished way, but the story has been choked out like an aggressive weed by the game’s obsession with frenetic, incessant combat.
When approaching certain games, it’s important to manage your expectations because getting too excited can cause great disappointment. It’s rare, however, when your expectations set the bar so low that you expect a toddler to crawl over it and yet somehow the game darts like a stray lizard underneath. It’s truly astonishing, but Kill la Kill – IF is a stray lizard.
In praise of Kill la Kill – IF, the game’s art style was often so uncanny to the original anime that I struggled to tell the difference between 3D animation and 2D cutscene. It’s a beautiful game to look at, and not just because of the attentively sculpted character models throughout each fight. The arenas all feel faithful to the original anime – particularly in the back half of the game. The game’s animations are incredibly fluid and satisfyingly respond to button inputs, which in a technical sense makes the process of playing this game surprisingly intuitive for how methodical combat can be in higher difficulties.
One of the decisions I liked in Kill la Kill – IF was the deliberate focus on Satsuki’s story as the primary narrative until the credits initially rolled. Instead of a Dragonball-style carbon copy of the anime’s narrative, Kill la Kill – IF takes the perspective of the initial antagonist and later deuteragonist of the series, Satsuki Kiryuin. Instead of shrouding Satsuki’s motives and power structure in menacing mystery, including her supporting Elite Four fighters, the game thrusts through much of the backstory that would otherwise center on Ryuko Matoi and her friends who become family.
By focusing on Satsuki and therefore bypassing the narrative, the game creates a fitting excuse to jump straight into the action of arena battle. Satsuki is a supremely skilled warrior whose school uniform, like Ryuko’s, transforms into a powerful ally during combat. Within 20 minutes of playtime, Satsuki encounters a reveal of the Life Fibers that in the anime only comes towards the endgame. So the pacing of this game ends up only retreading about a third of the major plot points throughout the story told by the anime.
Skipping so much of the important setup that the anime provides reminds me of when I was a picky child who couldn’t stand pepperoni on my pizza. I would pick it off and half the cheese would come off with it, leaving me with something truly inferior to the intended experience. Kill la Kill – IF is that inferior pizza with half of the cheese picked off, leaving us with an unsatisfying crust of arena combat and vague leftover flavors of narrative. This game could be something truly incredible if it cared about its characters more than their scantily clad models or its narrative more than its boss battles.
The game rightly assumes that its players will play the game because they love the anime, but it trims all of the importance away from the actions that you have to take in each battle. Apart from visual aesthetics, there is nothing to truly differentiate these characters or their motivations apart from a few spare transitional cutscenes. The motivation to combat each character is assumed to be prior knowledge, and I would be astonished if someone who hasn’t spent time with the anime would feel invested in any of the characters by the time the credits roll.
Not only does this game fail to motivate any of the otherwise lovably goofy and diverse cast of characters throughout the series, it reduces them to fighting thresholds and combos that are as rewarding to figure out as Ralphie’s Ovaltine mystery in A Christmas Story. It frustrates me that Senketsu and Junketsu, for example, are essentially just costumes in this game – with some minor cutscene exceptions – a creative reduction that undermines the entire message of the series. Anyone familiar with Kill la Kill will deeply understand the relationship that both Ryuko and Satsuki have to how their femininity and power are represented through the modesty or immodesty of their clothing. The game just ignores that entirely because it wants the player to get lost in a string of flashy combos.
Kill la Kill – IF only takes about an hour or two to beat, and double that length to complete the post-story content. That’s it. The second playthrough with Ryuko is fun enough because of how well executed the gameplay is, but nearly half of the cutscenes tying each battle together are lazily recycled from the Satsuki playthrough. The additional scenes are indeed satisfying, but they shouldn’t be the exception to the second playthrough considering the laughably meager additional content provided in the Ryuko route.
The most disappointing aspect of Kill la Kill – IF is the cavernous lack of originality in game direction that it shows in comparison to the bold execution of the brief anime series. Some classically adapted anime-to-game series like Naruto or Dragonball are the blueprint for the same fight-centric arena brawler format of Kill la Kill – IF; the key difference is due to the length and depth of available within the source material when approaching each of these series as fighting games. Because Naruto and Dragonball are stretched across hundreds of episodes with a similar number of well-known and adept characters in combat, it makes perfect sense for those extensive narratives to be summarized into purely combative gameplay – narratives that would otherwise take hundreds of hours to develop in a game campaign if unabridged.
The reason this formula doesn’t work for Kill la Kill is because the original anime reaches but 24 episodes. Many of those episodes consist in important character development that isn’t represented in this story campaign, because everything has been reduced to what is ultimately a one-dimensional imagining of the series as combat. It neglects all the connecting threads that wove Kill la Kill together as a multifaceted critique of society, philosophy, gender, and clothing. Instead, Kill la Kill – IF wildly misses the mark despite being a technical powerhouse – and that missed potential is what sometimes grinds this experience to a halt.
I would ask the designers of this game to reconsider their decision to truncate the short story aspect of the narrative that cements Kill la Kill as an incredibly memorable anime. The episode in that series I hold as perhaps the best “filler” episode in the history of the medium is episode seven, “A Loser I Can’t Hate.” In this episode, Ryuko and her friend Mako engage in a struggle to improve their living situation through the artificial might-makes-right advancement system within Honnouji academy. This rapid advancement in lifestyle breaks apart the family through ostentatious and self-interested greed. By the end of the episode, the series has effectively executed a brutal critique on class culture and social hierarchies dominated by the correlation of wealth and power, highlighting how they influence the public’s perception of morality and social worth.
“A Loser I Can’t Hate” is a perfect DNA strand that represents the deeply critical elements contained within Kill la Kill that are entirely absent in this game. It’s shallow enough to be a mobile game due to its brevity and stunted view of the mechanics that could make this series and interesting video game. Kill la Kill – IF is a fun pastime that gives you the vague flavor that this gaming universe has been steeped with familiar lore, but nothing about it feels authentic or genuine in a lasting way beyond the moment-to-moment fights themselves.
Cutscene polish does not translate to effective storytelling, nor does a singular focus on combat convey the engaging themes that Kill la Kill’s narrative provides. This game fails to recognize those distinctions. Gameplay is not everything, especially when adapting a succinct and powerful narrative like Kill la Kill. I don’t think the game would benefit from a bunch of point-and-click style environment exploring and fetch quests, but some kind of variation apart from arena brawling should have allowed the player to explore and empathize with the characters that the game assumes the player to already care about. Instead, I played the game feeling like a puppet master rather than the characters themselves.
Kill la Kill – IF is at best a fun arcade game for a rainy day of nostalgia for someone who doesn’t own the anime but wants to dive into a similar feeling. At its worst, this game is a repetitive and hollow imitation of an entry within the lexicon of legendary cult anime followings. For some reason, so many anime games reduce themselves to arena combat with no story structure of variations that coalesce gameplay with narrative. Unfortunately, Kill la Kill – IF consigns itself to one of the most forgettable experiences I’ve ever had in gaming, memorable only for my resentment at how obviously this could have been done better.
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