RKGK/Rakugaki’s bold use of color in his anime-inspired art style has something so enticing at first. From the jump, the game’s story seems exuberant and foolish in the best possible way, accompanied by a gameplay where split-second decisions honour your well-timed jumps and strokes with short bursts of color. However, as the game progresses, the aesthetics of each level begin to work together, and the underlying narrative loses power, so only the platform challenges develop significantly. Even if the story does not leave a lasting impression, her acrobatic escapades do it through each level and take the game to honouring heights.
In RKGK, you play the rebellious street artist Valah, who is determined to reclaim her city from Mr. Buff, a resounding megalomaniac who is determined to enslave the population with mesmerizing billboards and an army of robots. With spray cans in hand, Valah actions with Mr. Buffs robot servants in a series of third-person 3D platforming levels, returning to his base in the middle of each mission to talk to his allies or change outfits.
Each rkgk level is a standalone gauntlet of changing platforms, explosive traps, twisted rails and fragile containers that Valah has to double jump, overtake, grind or crush. Enemies popuafter each level, but can be easily defeated with a quick ray of color from Valah-it’s not so difficult or honouring to knock them down. Some offer an extra challenge by protecting themselves or performing area of effect actions, but nothing that comes close to Valah, even on more difficult difficulty levels where she has less health.
But the name of the game for each level is speed, not action. Your performance for each level is evaluated, with the completion time mainly affecting the turn-it is clear that enemies are supposed to be a speed threshold, and not a action challenge. Keeping track of that faster time is at the heart of RKGK, and it’s nice to play levels again, hoping to uncover hidden shortcuts or find faster ways to chain enough platform combinations without hitting Valah to unlock a speed boost that will propel you forward. Deriving a new way to win a crucial handful of seconds to get a superior letter grade feels like a victory over robot servants in itself.
Even RKGK’s boss actions are structured around the platform, prioritizing Valah’s positioning and timing until the boss opens up for an action. It’s not the most exciting way to tear down the massive constructions that are hindering Valah’s path, but what reduces the thrill of overcoming them is hiding behind an obstacle and waiting for the boss to sillyly dig in for the third time is just not as exciting as, for example, a expired-defying jump to save time on a level.
Valah’s movements possess an exuberant sense of speed, without sacrificing control Whenever every time I fell off a platform or missed a jump, it was my fault. The accumulation of platform challenges is also a honouring climb. As Valah continues the game and reaches after levels, she comes across faster moving platforms, flame-popping traps and increasingly intrusive obstacles, but RKGK never stacks several new items at the same time. Instead, you are usually introduced to a vacuum, so you have to face the new element once or twice before finding ways to integrate it into the aspects of level design that you have experienceed, and then turn an old obstacle into a new challenge that you already have an idea of how to overcome.
This level design method guarantees RKGK a constant upward trend. Even on the more difficult of the two difficulties, you are rarely stuck for a long time, so you can complete each level in a few minutes and, if desired, move on to the next level. Each level hides secrets off the overcome track and some contain a handful of shortcuts that entice you to play them again to reach a higher rank and unlock more honours, which can then be spent on buying cosmetics for Valah such as outfits and colors.
This structure, aimed at replayability, helps to eliminate the shortcomings of the boring and superficial history of RKGK. Valah is not an easy-to-understand protagonist who raves from original action movie lines and wants to resist the big bad, but does not really exist beyond these general characterizations. The story hurries through her action with Mr. Buff and never quite delves into the motivations or rivalries of both characters in a fascinating way. By the middle of the game, I had completely reviewed its story, just to continue enjoying the well-designed levels and the increasingly complex platform challenges.
The mildness of the narrative also bleeds a little into the aesthetics of the plains. Although they are well designed and each have a handful of their own obstacles and challenges, many of the levels that Valah parkour goes through are visually similar. Presumably, it goes hand in hand with Mr. Buffs motivations to make everything as identical and lifeless as the robots he commands, but in practice this leads to dozens of levels, all bleeding together in my head. It does not harm the instant gameplay of RKGK, but it affects the general memorization of the game and further harms the narrative elements of the world. It’s hard to take care of such an identical world, and I want Valah’s efforts to erase every step and remind the population of the uniqueness of their hometown to be transafterd into the game so that I can also see it.
You will see a snippet of something like this when Valah appears on one of the hypnotic billboards in the world, which she can paint for extra points if she has collected enough paint throughout the scene. When she does, you will be presented with beautiful works of art inspired by both the Japanese anime and the graffiti culture in Mexico, hinting at the kind of world Valah lived in before everything turned red and gray. They are always impressive to watch, and Valah, suddenly painting something new, quickly became one of the things I was most looking forward to when playing each level. However, these matters are rare and hide one of the most overcome aspects of the game.