I love to see a video game full of janky anime absurdity, but there has to be heart and soul behind that absurdity. Anime culture is so inherently Japanese, not only in it’s origin but in it’s meaning and it’s DNA. When someone who doesn’t come from that Japanese culture attempts to emulate it, you need to hope they respect and understand its depth to do it justice. KinnikuNeko: SUPER MUSCLE CAT, despite being developed by a sole artist in Barcelona, is thoroughly and passionately tapped into what makes anime culture click.
At first glance, KinnikuNeko is eye-roll inducing with how on-the-nose its whole anime shtick is. References to Evangelion, Sega and more are tossed at you constantly as the game introduces your trio of protagonists. There’s a ditzy girl named Lemon, a shy nerd with a heart of gold named Keita, and the titular KinnikuNeko. KinnikuNeko is just a cat, nothing else. Except for when he puts on a pair of magical alien underwear and transforms into a shredded humanoid bodybuilder with an adorable kitty face. You know, standard cat stuff. The trio team up to prevent an alien invasion of Earth, prompting you to dive into a few hours of platforming action to face that threat.
The platforming in KinnikuNeko is simple enough, although there’s some variety tossed into it via your feline hero’s multiple forms. By finding Lemon in various spots of the level, you can swap between regular cat mode or buff cat mode. The former can make huge jumps and cling to walls, but can’t fight enemies at all. The latter can tussle with Yatterman inspired baddies and lift weights to progress at certain points. I wish this element of the game was less restrictive, though – needing to find Lemon just to swap is a needless complication, and her very presence at key points in each level basically implies that you’re required to swap forms there to progress.
Even in the correct form, though, the game tossed out platforming challenges that left me far more frustrated than excited. Certain jumps and platforming challenges require hyper-specific timing that are far too punishing compared to the flow of earlier levels in the game. Often times, moving platforms would feel like they failed to register a landing on their corner, leading to so many annoying deaths where I thought I landed safely only to be proven wrong by the games inconsistent physics. It’s mostly worth suffering through these ill-designed platforming sections for the zany cutscene antics that book-end them, but by the end of the game’s 3 or 4 hour runtime, I felt like I was craving far more story shenanigans and far fewer platforming challenges.
Overall, KinnikuNeko: SUPER MUSCLE CAT knows what it’s about. This is a game steeped in obscure and obnoxiously wacky anime culture and it owns it from start to finish. It’s just a shame that, for all that cultural care and consideration, the accompanying gameplay feels tolerable at best and punishing at worst.