Format: Advance
Genre: Brawler
Developer: Na.p.s. Team
Publisher: Destination Software

NOT A PORT but in fact a sequel to the playstation 1 title of the same name "Gekido". I always found it rather odd that some playstation games got ports on the gameboy advance, but even stranger are the sequels to playstation games on the GBA and GBC. Kintaro's Revenge takes place 1 year after the events of Gekido's storyline arc. Admittedly, I never played Gekido. Because of that my knowledge is limited to what went on or even what type of game Gekido was. THIS game however has it's own extended plot so I'll try to navigate through as best I can. The story follows this guy, angry Ryu from street fighter. Joking! He's Tetsuo from that famous Gekido game! The story starts out that his master summons him to go check out some strange happenings of the dead rising from their graves. Despite having an oppressive and ominous tone from the get go, this game is a fast paced action brawler with amazing graphics and reasonable controls. I say it's fast paced because you're given about 1 screen to size-up the situation before being thrown into a zombie invasion. The A button punches and the B button kicks. The L and R buttons do the same thing; Jump. The action takes place in a 2.5D plane. Double tapping left or right instigates a running motion, which can be connected to a punch or kick to perform a really cool looking dash attack that can then be combo'd into a regular combo. This game keeps track of how many hits you do in a row, which is always kinda neat. My best single enemy combo was about 7-hits I think. Jumping also lets you perform a jump attack, which didn't get all that much use in my playthrough. Making bigger combos seems like the way to get some good damage in this game and enemies tend to be a bit beefy. By the end of the game I was just trying to hit as many combos as I could to put problem enemies down while run-dash-punching the weaker ones out of combat as fast as I could. There's also a "Shout" attack by pressing both A+B together that sends all enemies nearby thrown back. This attack is tied to a bar that fills up at the top of the screen. Using the Shout attack without a full bar will cause you some HP Damage. Cutting back to the story, you meet a young girl named taeko annnndddd she's dead. Time to punish the evil-doers! There's a lot of familiar names and faces mentioned in this game, but not having known any of them I can't appreciate the shock value all that much. I will say that there is a guy that looks like he was ripped straight out of an SNK fighting game and another guy that looks like he was shishio's evil magic twin from rurouni kenshin. The game revolves around Tetsuo trying to figure out what's going on and running into a buttload of zombies and evil demonic undeads. The bosses all have gimmicks too, like being immortal until they get tired or try to punch you or grab your nuts. Most of the action revolves around Tetsuo beating the shit out of zombies to find keys that open locks to doors or gates to advance the plot towards the boss. Along the way there's a varying degree of recolored enemies that get progressively stronger and more annoying in their habits. There is also a metric shitton of traps in this game to drive you absolutely insane. From pits, to rolling spike bars, to dropping spike blocks, to wooden-up-your-ass pikes, this game absolutely loves to shit on the player in the worst possible way it can. Rule of thumb, if you think you made it past a trap, there's another trap immediately after it. Proceed swiftly but with extreme prejudice against the devs. The worst of the game comes when you are forced to fight in between some of these traps in a locked screen area. Whenever enemies spawn, you have a limited field of where you can go until you defeat all the enemies on screen. This is probably to prevent the player from just running past everything. This becomes an issue in some later stages when they lock you in between 2 giant rolling spikes of anger, pain, and tears. You start the game with 5 credits and each life is a credit, beating a stage gets you +1 credits and a password. Unfortunately, this game doesn't have any end-game credits.

All in All, This game earned an 8.5 score for it's smooth fun gameplay and tight graphics. Music wasn't the best, Storyline could've been told better, Story could've been better, Remaining Credits tied to Password, TOO MANY TRAPS!! Slow grind to restore health.