This is from a classic series that started on the Famicom as Kiki Kaikai. It came to the US later, on the SNES, and was renamed to Pocky & Rocky, probably because a title like Kiki Kaikai would be a harder sell. It was a shoot ’em up, except you have control over the scrolling, and you can shoot in 8 directions. It got a sequel on the SNES and one on GBA called “Pocky & Rocky with Becky” which seems a bit more similar to the NES original than the SNES games from what I’ve seen (never played it myself).

There has been a few games kinda like this since, such as Heavenly Guardian on PS2 and Wii, and Mamorukun Curse on PS3 (which took on a more bullet hell approach), but Pocky & Rocky itself has been dormant for quite a while.

I was really hyped to try this one, let’s see if it’s a good revival!

Developer and publisher: NATSUME ATARI
Release date: June 24, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PS4 (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Shoot ’em up (“cute ’em up”)

Review

The story of the game is a take on the original Pocky & Rocky, where you fight Black Mantle. But it’s not the exact same story. You don’t go through the same levels, the gameplay has changes, and there’s more playable characters. The story here includes a bunch of random, unexplained, weird time travel. It makes no sense, and there’s not really anything to spoil here. Black Mantle is someone that Pocky defeats in the future, but then there’s some time travel (and other wacky shit) and he tries to kill Pocky before she can defeat him, but she gets help from the Gods of Fortune to fight back… And Rocky basically does nothing the whole time… at least he’s in the title! The plot isn’t horrible, but it’s definitely not why you’d play this game. Also the graphics are great, it’s like it’s straight out of the SNES, with sprites just slightly more detailed and more animated. It’s really nice. All it’s missing is… playing it on a CRT so you get the effect CRT TV had on pixels (see this twitter account). Scanlines (which are an option here) aren’t quite doing what CRTs actually did with pixels.

The gameplay is fairly simple, and very much in line with the SNES classics. You play as one of 5 characters. The base moveset for all is similar. Holding Y shoots a projectile in the direction your character is facing, pressing B swings a melee attack (which has the extra functionality of reflecting most (but not all) projectiles), a does a slide dodge (Ikazuchi jumps which is a different kind of dodge) and X does a super attack. The one issue from the base controls is that, when you move around, the screen scrolls roughly as fast as you do, but if you dodge towards the direction of the scroll, the screen doesn’t scroll, and instead you need to kinda move around for the scroll to catch up. Otherwise, this is very smooth.

What these attacks are differ per character, may it be different projectile size or different shot patterns. Some characters have different aiming mechanisms as well, such as Ame-no-Uzume having these orbs that move around depending on your movements and attacks come out of those orbs. As of level 3 in story mode, you unlock 2 new abilities. The first one is a charge attack with the melee attack, which again differs per character. Some of those are shields that protect from projectiles (and hurt enemies that get very close to you), and these tend to be defensive (though they do all deal damage, especially Hotaru Gozen’s). The other new ability is one that’s a bit awkward to use. It requires mashing the projectile attack button for a bit, and then something activates. Again this is different per character. Pocky sends out a mirror, and attacking that mirror shoots out semi-homing bullets that I believe are a bit stronger than normal hits. Ame-no-Uzume sends 3 of those. Rocky gets the power to STRAFE (so he’s the only character that can shoot in a different direction that his movement), Ikazuchi summons mini-clones that do extra attacks and Hotaru Gozen shoots arrows.

Going through a level you’ll find enemies (some of which can be infinitely-respawning based on where you are in the level, sometimes scrolling the screen a bit will stop the respawning), which tend to take several hits to kill. There’s minibosses all over the place, and some encounters that stop the scrolling until you defeat every enemy that’s on screen. Enemies, as well as chests, may spawn various power-ups. There’s shields that protect you from a few hits, and there’s 3 elemental power-ups. Grabbing one changes your projectile weapon, which of course is different between characters. Getting a power-up of the element you already have powers up that weapon (and switching weapons at that point puts you at the same level as your current weapon). Getting a weapon to max power is only temporary (though grabbing more power-ups extends that), which is a bit of an annoyance against bosses because that max power timer goes down while it’s talking (and is invincible), so that max power can be wasted for nothing. That said, getting max power is super fun and generally useful outside of bosses. And there’s a few other things in levels, may it be hidden power-ups (may it be extra uses for supers) or “different” sprites that are (I believe) a certain god in disguise. Touching them (if you have enough coins) spawns the god, then hitting the god with your melee attack starts a slot machine at the cost he has displayed. His prizes can be max power for any weapon, the shield, super ammo and 1ups. I played through story mode twice without realizing this… It would’ve made things a lot easier. But there’s a few of these in each level. If a sprite seems a bit out of place, there’s likely a way to get to it.

This is where I get to the challenge… because, man, this game is way tougher than the SNES game. Like, it’s not hard to beat, since you have infinite continues, but it’s difficult to do well until you start to really get the gameplay and how you’re meant to use your options, and getting better at dealing with certain enemies and such. This game WILL kick your ass. That said, while it’s difficult, it’s not hard. Because dying brings you back where you died (and deals damage to all enemies on screen) and getting a game over (since there is a life system) only brings you back to the last checkpoint (some levels don’t have checkpoints though). What makes this one more difficult is of course the learning curve on how to deal with enemies, but also the fact that enemies take more hits than they did on the SNES games (on normal mode), and until you learn the patterns and strategies, you’re basically just getting your ass kicked. It’s great.

The game has 2 modes. The story mode has set characters for each level (though a second playthrough of it has a different character for level 5), and you save your progress between levels if you decide to stop the game. This is how you unlock all the characters for free mode, as well as hard difficulty. Then there’s free mode, which has you going through the same levels as story mode, except you choose one character and go through the whole game with that character. Also progress isn’t saved if you leave. This actually goes with one of my many praises of this game, the fact that a full playthrough will take you less than an hour (once you’re good enough at it), and with 5 characters to play as AND an online leaderboard (that you don’t need to subscribe to NSO to use), it’s extremely replayable. Because, if you want to get high on the leaderboard (one leaderboard per character, and one for story mode), you need to get as far as possible into the game without getting a game over, because of course game over resets your score. I got up to 83rd spot in the Gozen Hotaru leaderboard despite my only game over being against the final boss. There’s a lot of ways to get bonus points and such, so that leaderboard can be very rough to get a good position in.

Overall

This game is super good. It’s a simple, fun, quick game, it’s really well designed, and I just can’t find anything to really fault it for. Like, one of my biggest complaint for the new TMNT game (which is fantastic) was that it was too long, but this one is actually a perfect length, giving it even more replayability.

Buy it. Definite recommendation. People are sleeping on this and shouldn’t be.