Minority Report: Playstation Simple 1500 Series
Jonny Dimaline highlights the best of this Japanese budget Playstation series
Developer: amedio ■ Year: 2002
Considering how it’s one of Japan’s traditional sports, and taking into account its simple, precise nature, you’d think there’d be at least as many videogames about kendo as there are about sumo wrestling. In actual fact, though, you can count the number of dedicated kendo games on a single hand and still be left with one finger left over, and one of those games is mostly a platformer. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, this Japanonly budget Playstation release is the only kendo game released in the 21st century! Kendo, for those who are unfamiliar, is a sport descended from sword training techniques in which competitors swing at each other and attempt to block blows with wooden swords, scoring points for successful hits.
Bearing in mind the fact that both its genremates were released on 8-bit systems in the Eighties, Ken No Hanamichi doesn’t really have any contemporary competition to compare it to, though it does borrow heavily from arcade fighting games in its structure, having a singleplayer story mode, a survival mode and a versus mode. The story mode, as far as we can tell being unable to read Japanese, is a fairly down-toearth affair: you play as a clean-cut young man training and competing in kendo tournaments. There are two other stories we’re yet to unlock, however, which apparently cast a policewoman and a zombie in the starring roles, respectively. You play a match, there’s a bunch of dialogue text and character portraits, you know the deal.
Survival mode is a little bit more interesting in terms of games design: since this isn’t a fighting game, but a simulation of a sport based on points, in survival mode you face off against an endless stream of generic opponents in matches that end in a single point. You’re allowed to lose five rounds before getting a game over, though the game only counts victories towards your survival score.
Versus mode is pretty much exactly as you expect, too. You can choose how many points each match goes up to, though onepoint matches are definitely not recommended, since you’ll end up spending more time in loading screens than you do actually playing the game. There’s a whole bunch of characters to unlock, too, though as
they’re all masked and there’s no special moves,the only differences between them as far as we can tell are their heights and the colours of their outfits. There might be slight differences in their reaction times too, though if there are we haven’t been able to notice them, and from a game balancing perspective what kind of advantage could you give to slower characters in a situation where there’s no damage and all hits are created equal?
Ken no Hanamichi is a game that’s peerless, though in this case it just means that it’s running in a one-horse race. It’s a great game, and it’s definitely something to seek out if you’re looking for something a little more calm and contemplative than pretty much every other game about combat sports.