Umihara Kawase

Super Famicom

1994

TNN

There are some games that you can dip into any time you like. Games with simple control schemes that betray their underlying complexities. Then there are games that are hideously complex, and that you can spend years attempting to comprehend and master their individual naunces. Umihara Kawase is neither of these things, and yet both at the same time. Confused? Good. Let's continue.

Umihara Kawase is a platform game. You start at one point, you try and get to the exit. There are enemies that march from left to right. In this sense it's a bit like Mario. This is where Umihara Kawase ceases to have any similarity with any game you have ever played.

There are two buttons in Umihara Kawase. A shoots a fishing line out from your hand, which can grip to almost any surface in each of the small but decidedly compact levels. B makes you jump. Thats it. After switching on the game, you come to a pool of water and try to jump over it, but Umi, the titular heroine can't jump that far. You plummet to your death into the sea below. Back to square one. This time you push A, and your fishing line fires out and catches onto the other side of the bank, allowing you to swing across. Great. After climbing up a ladder and repeating this process, you encounter an enemy, a large goldfish that walks back and forth like any self respecting platform baddie. Instinctively you try and jump on the fishes head. Umi crumples to a pile on the floor. Back to the start. You realise that you have to use your line to catch the fish. Umi's no Mario, she can't just jump over it. Or at least you don't think you can. 10 minutes later, you've lost all ten of your lives on level 3. In Umihara Kawase you start off with 10 lives. There are no continues, no power ups, only a few sparse extra lives. It seems like an impossible challenge.

This is until you start to notice things. The game has a physics engine that, while fairly unrealistic, is very consistant. As you get adept at swinging around the levels, you begin to learn how to use it in your favour. By utilising your fishing lines elasticity, for example, you can stretch it in one direction, before jumping. You find yourself pinged backwards at great force. And if, with expert timing you jump again at the moment of landing, you jump further, fueled by the momentum of the lines expended power. And the feeling you get when you finally are able to fly from one end of a level to another in a few precicely timed bounds is worth every one of the ten hours that you spent perfecting this technique.

Umihara Kawase isn't a game that you can be intrinsicly good at. Sure, if you've been gaming for years then you might have a bit of an advantage when it comes to the oh so precise timings involved, but at the same time, reared on traditional platform games and adhearing to the schmeas that this denotes, you probaly won't stand a chance. To be frank, if I were to compare playing Umihara Kawase to anything, it wouldn't be to any other videogames, it would be to learning a musical instrument. Initially, you are put off by the fact that you are so awful. You might have seen the game being played amazingly on youtube, and assumed that the grace and skill that can potentially be aquired in this game would come naturaly, that you could bash some buttons and achieve the deired result, a la Super Smash Brothers. Instead you are forced to practice key skills like the wall climb or the aforementioned rocket jump over and over until perfection in the face of unrelenting difficulty. You die time and time again. But then something magical happens. You get good. You start to take pleasure to perfecting your skills. You start to relish the challenge that the game presents, seeing it as being essential to becoming perfect as oposed to simply the game being unfair. The once brick-like Umi now is steered with unending grace at your deft manipulation of just two buttons. You reach places and exits that you previously thought impossible not through the aquisition of some cool new item, like in Zelda, but through your own hard graft and determination.

In keeping with Umihara Kawase's studied minimalism, there are no extraneous features. Run out of lives, you die. There's no save game, password or level select, but once you start to get good, earlier levels that once might have taken you several minutes can take you as little as five seconds, allowing you to quickly bypass them and get to the real meat of the challenge that awaits. There a many routes through the game, the shortest of which can be completed in under five minutes, should you ever get that good. Of course, to reach the exits to skip to these levels requires literally months of skill. Many gamers will never ever see the end screen, and not for lack of trying.

The levels look simple, but effective. Brightly coloured scenery with a grainy monochrome backround. The enemies are generally surreal and outlandish, but not to the extent that it detracts from the games minimalist, almost zen like presentation. The music is sutably dreamy, and often outstanding in places. Again, however, it isn't distracting. You're always thinking about the task in hand, whether this is the first or 100th time you've played this level.

Umihara Kawase has its faults. Sometimes the difficulty can seem a little too unfair. When you're slaughtered by a previously unseen enemy that just happens to respawn on the ledge you are propelling yourslf towards, you'll throw down the pad cursing. Additionaly, the boss stages seem to detract from the overall rythym of the game, due to the length of these encounters, as well as their extreme difficulty. They can be bypassed, however. Ultimately, Umihara Kawase's greatest strength is its difficulty, or rather its joyous playability because of its difficulty. You have to train long and hard to earn anything in this game, but in the end, every skill, naunce and trick that you learn to conquer a level that much more quickly and pain free makes the eventual mastering of this game such an amazing and rewarding experience.

Graphics: 7

Gameplay: 10

Music: 8

Experience: 10


Score: 35/40