I had to think very carefully about giving Katana Zero a Not Recommended, because every moment I had with this game rolling around and deflecting bullets was a satisfying experience. Go read any of the thousands of reviews talking about how smooth and satisfying the gameplay is if you want to hear about that, and if a short but very tight 3-4 hour gameplay experience with a solid soundtrack is what you are looking for and nothing else, go buy this game. But I want to talk about the story and how it diminishes the impact of the entire game.

Katana Zero has all of the components of a great neo-noir cyberpunk story-- a believable, if generic setting, a brooding, violent protagonist, a scummy city full of bright lights and horrible people, and the feeling that not all is as it appears. Your meetings with your 'psychiatrist' slowly take on a sinister tone, your character's nightmares get more and more vivid, it is implied that you will have to make some kind of important choice, and so on and so on. The buildup is very well done, and matches with the escalation in gameplay. Then the story just... ends. This is my first criticism of Katana Zero, and the one I want to get out of the way because it is obvious that the game is not yet complete-- the final chapter is explicitly unfinished and trying to play it just has the game prompt you to 'come back in a few months'. However, it is extremely unlikely that a single extra level will resolve the issues with the narrative and pacing.

!!SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!!

Katana Zero's narrative is reliant on snap cuts between mundanity, grim violence, and hallucinatory madness. Every night after engaging in wanton slaughter at the behest of his 'psychiatrist', the unnamed main character, referred to by the authorities as The Dragon, returns to his grubby single-room apartment to have herbal tea and fall asleep on the couch. He is then plagued by vague and menacing nightmares, before returning to the psychiatrist's office to receive a dose of 'medicine' and his next contract. This cycle is repeated just enough times for you to start to feel familiar with it, with the intention of making the game's later moments feel shocking and subversive in comparison. The execution of these moments feels somewhat cheap, however, as the way that the game breaks the cycle is just to utilise a glitch effect followed by a smash-cut to a completely different scene.

Soon he's joined by a small girl whose father lives next door. She is presented in an incredibly sickly-sweet manner , sticks out like a sore thumb in the grubby, dangerous city, and it is obvious that she is supposed to be the Dragon's morality ball. He comes to care for her and tolerate her presence in a painfully predictable way. Almost as predictable as the fact that the story ends with her disappearance, and the implication that she may never have been real anyway. Many elements of the game's story fall into these extremely tropey patterns.

The only vaguely interesting elements of the story come from the Men in Masks, who are presented as the central figures of intrigue for much of the story's run. They appear to the Dragon in his sleep, fluctuating between Shakespearean rhetoric and depraved taunting as they tell him that he will be Judged for his actions and shall have to make a grave decision, along with a lot of veiled references to the Dragon's murky past in the war. These scenes are presented in a way which is obviously intending to weave intrigue and mystery into the story. However, it takes more than a pair of walking vague statement generators to make a story ambiguous in a way that makes sense. The 'decision' that the Dragon ends up making is quite literally 'do you want to die right now or not', with the vague implication that choosing to live will have Dire Consequences down the road. And that's... it. Despite how every chapter opens with a Majora's Mask-style countdown of the number of days until your 'JUDGEMENT', once it happened, and once the story did absolutely nothing with it thereafter, it seemed a little ridiculous.

Much of what transpires and what is *actually* revealed in the story is painfully predictable and could be transplanted from any 'secret government super soldier' story ever written, as is the conclusion to the Dragon's nightmares-- once you learn he was in the war, the fact that the 'dreams' are actually flashbacks is pretty much a given, as is the final twist reveal.

I know that picking at the story in a game like this which is gameplay-focused and doesn't pretend to be anything else seems like a shaky basis for a Not Recommended, but I feel like when games try to present stories which are clever and subversive, we should hold them to higher standards.

I had to think very carefully about giving Katana Zero a Not Recommended, because every moment I had with this game rolling around and deflecting bullets was a satisfying experience. Go read any of the thousands of reviews talking about how smooth and satisfying the gameplay is if you want to hear about that, and if a short but very tight 3-4 hour gameplay experience with a solid soundtrack is what you are looking for and nothing else, go buy this game. But I want to talk about the story and how it diminishes the impact of the entire game. Katana Zero has all of the components of a great neo-noir cyberpunk story-- a believable, if generic setting, a brooding, violent protagonist, a scummy city full of bright lights and horrible people, and the feeling that not all is as it appears. Your meetings with your 'psychiatrist' slowly take on a sinister tone, your character's nightmares get more and more vivid, it is implied that you will have to make some kind of important choice, and so on and so on. The buildup is very well done, and matches with the escalation in gameplay. Then the story just... ends. This is my first criticism of Katana Zero, and the one I want to get out of the way because it is obvious that the game is not yet complete-- the final chapter is explicitly unfinished and trying to play it just has the game prompt you to 'come back in a few months'. However, it is extremely unlikely that a single extra level will resolve the issues with the narrative and pacing. !!SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!! Katana Zero's narrative is reliant on snap cuts between mundanity, grim violence, and hallucinatory madness. Every night after engaging in wanton slaughter at the behest of his 'psychiatrist', the unnamed main character, referred to by the authorities as The Dragon, returns to his grubby single-room apartment to have herbal tea and fall asleep on the couch. He is then plagued by vague and menacing nightmares, before returning to the psychiatrist's office to receive a dose of 'medicine' and his next contract. This cycle is repeated just enough times for you to start to feel familiar with it, with the intention of making the game's later moments feel shocking and subversive in comparison. The execution of these moments feels somewhat cheap, however, as the way that the game breaks the cycle is just to utilise a glitch effect followed by a smash-cut to a completely different scene. Soon he's joined by a small girl whose father lives next door. She is presented in an incredibly sickly-sweet manner , sticks out like a sore thumb in the grubby, dangerous city, and it is obvious that she is supposed to be the Dragon's morality ball. He comes to care for her and tolerate her presence in a painfully predictable way. Almost as predictable as the fact that the story ends with her disappearance, and the implication that she may never have been real anyway. Many elements of the game's story fall into these extremely tropey patterns. The only vaguely interesting elements of the story come from the Men in Masks, who are presented as the central figures of intrigue for much of the story's run. They appear to the Dragon in his sleep, fluctuating between Shakespearean rhetoric and depraved taunting as they tell him that he will be Judged for his actions and shall have to make a grave decision, along with a lot of veiled references to the Dragon's murky past in the war. These scenes are presented in a way which is obviously intending to weave intrigue and mystery into the story. However, it takes more than a pair of walking vague statement generators to make a story ambiguous in a way that makes sense. The 'decision' that the Dragon ends up making is quite literally 'do you want to die right now or not', with the vague implication that choosing to live will have Dire Consequences down the road. And that's... it. Despite how every chapter opens with a Majora's Mask-style countdown of the number of days until your 'JUDGEMENT', once it happened, and once the story did absolutely nothing with it thereafter, it seemed a little ridiculous. Much of what transpires and what is *actually* revealed in the story is painfully predictable and could be transplanted from any 'secret government super soldier' story ever written, as is the conclusion to the Dragon's nightmares-- once you learn he was in the war, the fact that the 'dreams' are actually flashbacks is pretty much a given, as is the final twist reveal. I know that picking at the story in a game like this which is gameplay-focused and doesn't pretend to be anything else seems like a shaky basis for a Not Recommended, but I feel like when games try to present stories which are clever and subversive, we should hold them to higher standards.