Looking for a comprehensive Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau Review? Anime Stylisation, Guns, unreal Strength, and a conspiracy to kill off outlying areas? Ohh, let’s not forget the ghost! We’ve got you covered! Here is our Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau Review.
Developed and published by Noto Muteki, this supernatural adventure takes you on a journey where guns or any general-use item, a spiked bat, fists, maybe even a gravestone can be used to defeat ghosts.
STORY
The story starts off with you taking control of Mizuki Shiraishi of the SAB (Spiritual Affairs Bureau), who seems to have gone rogue. She encounters several low-ranking spirits before encountering a spirit who is based on Samara from the horror film The Ring. She will direct you to seek out the famous Japanese school legend Hanako.
This will take you on a battle through the school to get answers from her before being betrayed by your superior as they attempt to kill you. This leads to the local supernatural prevention faction, made up of shrine Maidens, saving you. While in the care of the local shrine, the surviving members explain what has recently happened and why they saved you before the SAB could finish the job of killing you.
Upon hearing what had happened, you agreed to help and start with a plan to fix the problems the SAB had set in motion, firstly by infiltrating the base they have in the village and secondly by deactivating the barrier which had been put in place.
Mechanics, Graphics, & Technical things
Mechanically, the game plays decently. There are so many things wrong with it, and it would be easier to say the game is functional but feels unoptimized. However, for the sake of argument, we are going to look at the individual areas.
Locomotion:
The base Locomotion is somewhat fast, and in addition to this, you look like you have a weapon in hand, even if you only have a torch.
While this isn’t wrong, it is bad and gives the wrong impression of the game. This is only made worse when you have to hold the L3 to sprint. Additionally, when armed, the Locomotion becomes somewhat tolerable but not completely.
The only good time that the Locomotion system seems to work alright is when you are in the Shrine. This is when you are preparing for the assault. The reason why this is better is that all you do is walk around talking to people, your arms are by your side and the movement, although still jerky, seems more or less right.
Combat:
Combat is split into Melee and Ranged. Ranged combat has lots of bugs, starting with ADS. While it’s not bad, it is janky, and no amount of tweaking the settings makes it feel better. The close distance line trace to find targets is also pretty glitchy, so if you have an enemy within a certain distance of you, your bullet will be fired off at a strange angle, and that is affected by the Line Trace. The Aim Offset animations are the worst culprit of the Ranged combat; however, with the gun being altered with aiming up or down, and the arms and hands not being affected.
This isn’t how an Aim offset is meant to work; it’s meant to be a fluid animation which blends a base pose (idle/ walk, etc.) with another. In this case, it would be idle and walk with an up-and-down aiming parameter. You will have seen it in countless games, where the character’s arms move to the up or down vector of where you’re aiming, which is the right way to do this; unfortunately, in Kinki, it doesn’t. The other side of this is that with a ranged weapon, you can’t shoot when you aren’t in ADS, which is a pretty bad design.
As for Melee combat, it’s not as bad, but it still needs some addressing. Out of the 2 early weapons you get to swing around in the game, the gravestone and spikebat, it’s probably enough to make you want to turn the game off. This is before we point out that a schoolgirl (Albeit possibly only in title since the character’s age isn’t revealed) would never be able to swing something that heavy or big under normal circumstances, but it’s the fact that the grab points on both the melee weapons are off.
Graphically, the game is a cross between an anime and a violent comic. While the art style is stylistic, it has that sort of anime est vibe, but doesn’t try too hard to keep it.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, it’s not the worst game I have experienced, but it is tired there with the worst. Mechanics you can overlook, and that of the art style, what can’t be ignored, however, is just how bad the game is as a whole. For saying this is classed as a horror game, with its content, it is weak. There are a few poor jump scares in the first chapter of the game. A lot of the time, when you should be fighting Spectres or something supernatural, you are actually fighting soldiers, and the story, which is more or less about revenge, needs work.
One thing which I would like to draw attention to is the Spirit Ranks. This means the grade of enemy spirit which you will be confronted with and will battle. Normally, you will fight enemies who have to close the distance and attack you in close range, causing Melee Damage, or enemies who stay at range and rely on Ballistic or Projectile Damage. Kinki, being a Supernatural game full of ghosts and the like, you would think that you have a mixture of both. Most of the time, you would be fighting against enemies who run you and beat you to death in a melee encounter, while select units utilise range combat.
This would be the normal order of how the game should work; however, in Kinki, we have, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, Suicide Ghosts! If you’re sitting there thinking like we are, “Suicide Ghosts, Really?”, you might be surprised. Despite the fact that a ghost is an apparition who is already dead, making the Suicide factor irrelevant, you have to deal with them. If this were a Zombie game or something like The Lord Of The Rings, I wouldn’t question it, but to have suicide ghosts, there is something strangely wrong with that concept.
Overall, considering the Content Vs Cost, the game is a decent time passer. As an estimate, it should be around 3-4 hours to Platinum once you have read through all the conversations. That all being taken into account, the game is mostly a good acquisition; however, it’s down to the individual to decide if they want to try over something that would take more time. If you are only interested in trophies, they are all story-related, so you could earn a fast platinum trophy to pad out your list, provided you don’t mind the game.
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