Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage is a game where you play Ken a musclebound guy that looks like he wears saran wrap on his hands. You go through each level and punch lots of enemies while trying to protect villagers from being killed by the bad guys. This is about as deep as the gameplay gets and there are far too many reasons to avoid this title to even consider spending hard earned money on a rental.
The sound in Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage is a mind numbing repetitive metal track that drolls on and on throughout the whole game. The music mixed with the horrible combat sounds and repetitive taunts made by both the protagonist and the antagonists makes you want to mute the game all together. This is not even considering the dialogue done in cut scenes which is generally either cheesy or laughable. Graphically most levels look very similar and the character models look way too shiny especially on their hands. A lot of textures, character models, and even cutscenes are reused again and again especially at the beginning of levels and at the end of levels. Many times I thought I accidentally started the same mission because the opening cutscene was identical to the last levels, not until I started moving through the level did I notice the setup was different.
The combat itself and the controls feels very stiff and most enemies will just stand around while you beat on them making this a very easy game. I found if you hide behind a wall of sandbags or any other destroyable wall and charge up your powerful attack you can get all the enemies to collect on the other side of the wall and kill them all by destroying the wall and sending the shards flying toward them. This tended to be my main strategy throughout the game. Another problem is a lot of times your character will pause after an attack and be unable to move for a short time after that leaving you open to attacks that would generally move you half way across the room.
As you fight through Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage you gain karma which can then be used to purchase upgrades between levels. These upgrades tend to be fairly expensive though and you will find yourself buying only 1 maybe 2 upgrades after each level. One of the upgrades is required to get through some walls that you can find as early as chapter 1, and it is impossible to get that upgrade until chapter 5. This does allow for some backtracking, but I highly doubt anything could be worth the extra time in this game. Honestly, the only good thing I can say about this game is that the upgrade system uses a kind of sphere grid similar to what Final Fantasy X used only much simpler and smaller. Also, if you have a friend that loves torture too Fist of the North Star supports drop in multiplayer.
Final Verdict
Overall, Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage has little to no redeemable values and is a complete mess from beginning to end. I highly recommend avoiding this title like the plague that it is.
Score
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