{"id":99873,"date":"2019-09-07T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-07T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/nintendo-switch\/umihara_kawase_fresh"},"modified":"2019-09-07T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-07T19:00:00","slug":"review-umihara-kawase-fresh-an-appealing-platformer-that-makes-itself-hard-to-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/09\/07\/review-umihara-kawase-fresh-an-appealing-platformer-that-makes-itself-hard-to-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Umihara Kawase Fresh! &#8211; An Appealing Platformer That Makes Itself Hard To Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/nintendo-switch\/umihara_kawase_fresh\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/nintendo-switch\/umihara_kawase_fresh\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div id>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 1 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98747\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98747\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 1 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>There\u2019s something strange about <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/umihara_kawase_fresh\">Umihara Kawase Fresh!<\/a><\/strong> It\u2019s not the fish with human legs; it\u2019s not the tadpole that lays frogs. It\u2019s not even the pork pizza you serve to a pig. What\u2019s strange is that it can\u2019t seem to decide how difficult it is.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming you are not familiar with the <strong>Umihara Kawase<\/strong> series, the opening of the game will make you let your guard down. It\u2019s pre-schooler fare: cartoon animals all being friendly to one another in their little town. Protagonist Kawase Umihara rocks up and joins in on all the friendliness. She\u2019s a travelling sushi chef and she\u2019s seeking room and board in exchange for work at a restaurant. Not chef work, mind you: <em>deliveries<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This sets up the game\u2019s structure. The &#8216;town&#8217; is just one enormous platforming level made of the usual platform shapes with a very sparse scatter of houses and NPCs for you to deliver things to. The delivery errands make for nicely separated missions, all tied together by your restaurant job, and the missions are on a big list where you can pick them off in order, or jump ahead a few as you complete some and open up more.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 2 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98748\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98748\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 2 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>On every mission, you\u2019re guided by arrows so you\u2019ll never be lost and, although there are secrets to find, you\u2019re never required to explore. That\u2019s even true of quests where you\u2019re asked to go and find, say, five sexy-legged fish. You\u2019ll literally be pointed straight to the five nearest fish.<\/p>\n<p>So far, this sounds like a simple game for tiny children, right? It certainly seems like that at the beginning when you receive almost absurdly thorough tutorials. These start with how to move and how to jump. Umihara Kawase Fresh! takes a screen to tell you which button is jump, then asks you to give it a go, then returns to the tutorial screens. It treats the player as if they\u2019ve never played a platform game.<\/p>\n<p>The over-explaining doesn\u2019t really let up, either. After a good dozen or so missions \u2013 in which you have, every single time, followed the onscreen arrows then pressed X on the giant pulsing X that they lead to \u2013 you get a special tutorial all about an elevator. \u201cAbout elevators,\u201d it begins, showing part of the level with an elevator door on it labelled &#8216;Elevator&#8217; in large letters beside an enormous X button. What are we to do? We follow the arrows, like every other time, to this big X button: fine so far. But until now we would always just press X \u2013 whether the big X is by a house, a tent, a pig or a bag \u2013 but what on Earth do we do when it\u2019s by an elevator?! The tutorial continues: \u201cPress X to use the elevator.\u201d <em>Phew<\/em>.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 3 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98749\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98749\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 3 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>It\u2019s important to understand just how elementary the game is in these regards because all this &#8216;my-first-platformer&#8217; dressing is hung on a movement mechanic that is subtle, complex, full of possibilities, thrilling, liberating \u2013 and <em>infuriatingly<\/em> hard to master. We\u2019re talking red-faced, white-knuckle fury when you fail \u2013 but loving, open oneness with the universe when you succeed. To put it another way, this is definitely an Umihara Kawase game.<\/p>\n<p>Kawase runs and jumps while carrying a fishing rod. She can cast her lure to grab onto enemies and platforms, then reel things in or swing around. The line is elastic and by lengthening and shortening it and building momentum in a swing, you can fling Kawase around the level in all sorts of emergent ways \u2013 then <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/games\/ps4\/marvels_spider-man\" class=\"external\">Spider-Man<\/a><\/strong> the next thing and keep on flying. When you pull it off, this is incredibly satisfying. However, it\u2019s tough. The physics are far from intuitive \u2013 when hanging you press up to go down and down to go up \u2013 but they are consistent and can be learnt, so the game feels fair. It\u2019s hard, but not impossible.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 4 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98752\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98752\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 4 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Fair, however, is not the same as nice. A punishment can still be fair. Having swung and bounced and flicked up screen after vertical screen, a little slip \u2013 or just a failed jump that you could see was always 50\/50 \u2013 will send you falling a thousand miles to goodness knows where. You don\u2019t die; you\u2019re not forced to restart. No, you can always <em>choose<\/em> to restart, you quitter, or you can get your rod out (probably underwater now, slowly drowning) and flail about like a sad animal, nothing left but your dignity, then let go of your dignity as well to <em>really<\/em> get into the flailing thing, all naked and humiliated \u2013 and <em>then<\/em> die. Which is fair: you missed the jump, after all.<\/p>\n<p>And then you\u2019re given a video about how to press to X next to a big X.<\/p>\n<p>This mix of handholding kindergarten presentation and MLG pinpoint &#8216;skillz&#8217; might sound entertaining: to an extent, it is. However, Umihara Kawase Fresh!&#8217;s confusion about its own difficulty means the player doesn\u2019t get the explanation, support and encouragement needed for such a challenging game \u2013 neither in its tutorials nor its level design nor its mission structure.<\/p>\n<p>In apparent acknowledgement of the expertise needed to control Kawase, other characters become available early on and can be selected freely on restarting a mission. These are wildly easier to play with \u2013 <em>one of them can fly!<\/em> \u2013 but it reveals how hard the game is when having a <em>very<\/em> generous extra jump isn\u2019t game-breakingly easy. In fact, it\u2019s so satisfying to play as Cotton, with her mid-jump flying broomstick, that the game might have been better if Kawase could do that and the missions were then built around that ability. The chance to rescue yourself and have another go is a breath of fresh air \u2013 but it feels like cheating when you elect not to play as the titular character and simply skip some of the toughest tests.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 5 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98750\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98750\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 5 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Compounding the bonkers difficulty fluctuations are the incredibly short, basic missions that crop up right in the middle of a bunch of rock-hard ones. The overall effect of all this is that you\u2019re never <em>quite<\/em> allowed to build confidence or feel the satisfaction of progress. It might make you want to give up, rather than encourage you to learn its intricacies. Umihara Kawase Fresh! does offer some friendly assistance in the form of cookable buffs. You collect ingredients and learn recipes as you go, then can prepare pizzas and soups and so on which will boost health and add toughness, extra oxygen, a bigger jump, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>The collecting and cooking needn\u2019t be obtrusive but it again seems to undermine what there is of a difficulty curve. If you can just whip up a teriyaki pizza and suddenly make all the jumps on a mission easy, why torture yourself? And if that\u2019s the best legitimate way to beat the level then why is menu operation made so central to platform gaming? A particularly niggling example: the campsites. These allow you to establish checkpoints during a mission. However, you can only build a camp with the right resources, so you may find you can\u2019t have a checkpoint this time \u2013 or just hesitate to make one in fear that you\u2019ll need the gear later on. It\u2019s an unnecessary interference with the basics of playing the game, making it just a little bit harder to have fun.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 6 of 6\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98751\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/98751\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Umihara Kawase Fresh! Review - Screenshot 6 of 6\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>You\u2019ll be menu-fiddling for a couple more things, too. First, a hunger gauge acts as a time limit that can be extended by selecting food to eat. Second, there are the bosses, which can also be beaten easily by just eating and buffing throughout the fight. (There\u2019s also a tutorial on how to beat them, natch.) The bosses, unfortunately, suffer from the same repetition and inconsistency as the level design.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>All in all, Umihara Kawase Fresh! is presented smartly, if quite bizarrely. Its movement system is fiendish, sometimes frustrating, sometimes free-flowing. Unfortunately, it asks a lot of the player and manages to hide its best bits. The level and boss design are unlikely to inspire anyone, especially when already taken to wit\u2019s end by the stuttering difficulty, but that\u2019s not enough to undo the game\u2019s unique charm. If you\u2019re already an Umihara fan then Umihara Kawase Fresh! will give you your fix like nothing else. For anyone else, it\u2019s harder to love \u2013 but not impossible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s something strange about Umihara Kawase Fresh! It\u2019s not the fish with human legs; it\u2019s not the tadpole that lays frogs. It\u2019s not even the pork pizza you serve to a pig. What\u2019s strange is that it can\u2019t seem to decide how difficult it is. Assuming you are not familiar with the Umihara Kawase series, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}