BAKERU - Nintendo Switch Review

BAKERU by developer Good-Feel Co. and publisher Spike Chunsoft—Nintendo Switch review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.

 
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes 

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Are you ready for a wacky and weirdly informative/educational trip through Japan to dispel a not-so-vague evil? Well, you're in luck because today we're taking a look at BAKERU! 

BAKERU tells the tale of a young Tanuki Bakeru, or transforming raccoon-spirit, who ventures across Japan working to stop Oracle Saitama from taking over Japan with his Festival Troops. Along the way, Bakeru will meet allies, explore various locales, get into some fights, and improve his powers of transformation! If you're observant, you may also collect interesting trivia and souvenirs from the locations you visit.

As Bakeru you will travel across Japan in a 3D action adventure style. Gameplay is split into multiple stages, where each stage has the goal of either getting to the end and hitting an "end goal", or defeating a specific enemy to clear the stage. In the case of the "end goals", these are protected, and you must find and destroy at least three festival lanterns in order to break the protective barrier. These are either sitting around somewhere in the stage, protected by enemies, or need coaxing out of the ground with a power attack. There are usually more than three protective festival lanterns per stage, so no need to worry too much if you miss one.

Bakeru has a number of options available at his disposal in order to traverse Japan and defeat the Festival Troops. You can whack enemies with either of the shoulder buttons on the Switch, left button hits left, right hits right, or you can hit both at once for a stronger hit. You can also charge your hits for a power attack. Each individual charge does a different type of attack, while both together charged are an area of effect slam, which will also pull hidden festival lanterns out of the ground. You have a block and dodge, as well as a "perfect" form of both, where activating it just before a hit stuns an enemy or allows you to chain into attacks respectively. You will also acquire different powers of transformation as you progress through the game, such as the ability to shrink to get into small spaces, or a strong hitting form that doesn't last too long.

As you explore around each stage, there are collectables to find in the form of trivia, souvenirs, and friendly tanuki. The tanuki get unlocked later in the game, but the trivia and souvenirs are available from the beginning. Trivia can be earned by talking to a little yellow-coated character, and usually provides you with a piece of trivia related to the area. Sometimes this trivia is about the specific location you're visiting, or maybe it's about something related to a local specialty. The souvenirs come in sets of three and consist of a pennant for the area, and two locale related items. The tanuki on the other hand disguise themselves as objects in the stage, just with a raccoon stamp or tail on them, and shake occasionally. Whack them a few times and they'll join your roaming band as you travel Japan.

Is the game getting too tough for you? Enemies packing a wallop? Not enough health? Want to deal more damage or run faster? Well, lucky you! Throughout each stage there will be a vendor station where you can buy health replenishments, permanent health increase, stage long power and speed increases, as well as consumable items. Obviously these cost cash, but you'll be earning quite a bit throughout your journey. Speaking of cash, it also acts as your "lives" in a stage. Every time you die, whether by falling off an edge into a bottomless pit or losing all your health, you forcibly pay one hundred bucks and come back at the last checkpoint you poked. Death is pretty cheap in BAKERU, both literally and figuratively.

BAKERU is pretty clearly targeting a bit of a younger audience here, both in tone and gameplay. The narrative, gameplay, characters, and even presentation definitely give off a sort of "let's get kids more into this" type of feeling. The game certainly isn't that difficult, especially if you pick up the power/speed upgrades at the start of a level, some of the trivia adults or older players would look at and think"...uh, doesn't everybody know that?", and all the characters have a cartoon-y and friendly feel to them like a Saturday morning cartoon. Now I'd like to be very clear here when I say none of this is a bad thing. Yeah, I'd personally prefer a bit more of a challenge, but that's personal preference rather than developer fault. I certainly really enjoyed playing through the game, even if I didn't have much trouble with any of the stages.

Another piece of good news is that the stage design and music were always in-sync and really gave the stages that extra oomph that you don't always see, which was really nice. Stages are all places in Japan, tailored to something related to that area, such as beach fronts, long skybridges, an "underworld"-esque theme, or rife with orange trees (mikan!). If the goal was "Saturday morning cartoon vibe", the developers certainly nailed it, especially with the wide variety of stage types.

There's a lot to praise about BAKERU: the combat is smooth and not clunky at all, the stages are varied and fun, there are different stage types like races and shooting sections to freshen things up, and the collectables and trivia are really great to keep you invested in exploring the surprisingly lengthy stages. There is extremely little I can really say that's a complaint, other than that I feel like world map movement can feel a little slow. Eventually you get a method to free travel on the world map, while you start going between connected nodes for the first while, and while there is a speed boost to your travel method, it does feel a little slow still. Either way it's rather small potatoes compared to the experience as a whole.

All that being the case, while BAKERU was a wonderful experience, it also doesn't really push the envelope or revolutionize anything that hasn't been done already. Once again, no slight to the title, I really did enjoy it immensely, but by the time I got to the end, I was about ready to conclude my time with BAKERU. It certainly held me all the way to the end, but I doubt I'll be replaying it anytime soon. It's a bit of an area where you're trying to make it accessible to as many as possible, meaning you're a little limited by what you can put in and try. It hits every checkmark on the list to make a good game, but doesn't quite push past that.

BAKERU is at it's heart a very Japan themed action adventure/platformer style title that presents itself well both mechanically and aesthetically. Filled with colourful characters, vibrant and unique stages, really interesting trivia facts, and smooth combat, BAKERU is an absolute gem to play through. Although maybe geared for a younger audience, it's still all-ages fun!

Score: 9 / 10