Review: Revisiting A Classic Format In KOWLOON HIGHSCHOOL CHRONICLE
Long ago, many years before Crash Bandicoot and Master Chief, there was an age of first-person games that would lead players on adventures with puzzles, items, and enemies to fight. These games were pixelated, slow, and very ridged. Kowloon Highschool Chronicle takes players on a treasure hunting adventure while still adding the charm and silliness of a dating sim.
These dungeons/tombs/adventures take on a pretty straight forward format, but that is hard to explain through writing. Basically, players can only move in four directions through a series of rooms that usually have some enemies to fight, a puzzle, or both. The puzzles aren’t too hard or creatively challenging but are entertaining enough. The combat is a simple turn-based mechanic that barely challenges the player but adds some fun flair. The last element of the game is the dating-sim/visual novel aspect of the game. Again, these relationships and characters are very easy to read and befriend but they keep moment to moment gameplay interesting. These three parts of the game are frankly about as average as ever, but putting them together with a slightly engaging story makes for a solid game overall.
Compared to other games, Kowloon Highschool Chronicle doesn’t look very good at all. The dungeon crawling part looks straight out of a cartridge found 20 years ago (even though this was originally a PS2 game). The textures and animations do look better than they did before, but between color choice, odd shapes, and textures, it still isn’t a great game to look at. The dating sim’s character designs are in HD, but they are fairly average looking and acting characters. The game is visually passable, but it may be a turn off for most modern players.
There are only two major issues with the game: pacing and controls. The game is really slow and takes far too long to get to the puzzles or conversations. Also, I was waiting so long so many times to just get to a point for me to save let alone participate in the other side of the gameplay. I wish that the dungeons were shorter, faster and that a lot of conversations could be consolidated. Controls for this game aren’t terrible, they just aren’t intuitive and can get easily mixed up, which can cause accidental choices or wasting items. The Nintendo Switch has more buttons that the game could use, why not use them instead of doubling up on buttons and having to switch from combat to exploration mode frequently? This seems like a development and testing oversight that could have been hammered out fairly easily.
For fans of the original game on Playstation 2 or that want to relive a classic experience, there is a lot to enjoy here. But I could see this being a game most players would pass over because of the odd pacing and older graphics.
