Yumi's Odd Odyssey

Sayonara Umihara Kawase (also known as Yumi's Odd Odyssey) is the latest in the Umihara Kawase series, which began as far back as 1994 as an entirely inexplicable Super Famicom game. Twenty years and several sequels later, very little has changed. Kawase is a young woman with a very unusual problem: she is trapped in a surreal world of oddly-shaped floating platforms, hostile bipedal fish and everyday objects like vending machines, pencils and stop signs jutting out at weird angles in the background. Her only means of escape is an elastic fishing line, which she uses as a grappling hook. By building momentum, reeling in and out the line and using gravity and frictionless ice to boost her speed, she can fling herself across each stage to the exit door (or, in some stages, one of several exit doors). It's superficially similar to NES classic Bionic Commando or the ninja rope item in the Worms series, but with far more intricacy and exactitude.

Grappling around each stage is far trickier than it sounds. Getting the momentum right and understanding the limitations of the grappling hook & line requires some training before the player has a decent sense of how to properly navigate Sayonara Umihara Kawase's world, and the game in turn rewards experimentation and practice, presenting its most basic techniques up front and then tasking players with discovering the advanced moves on their own. Kawase can fling out her fishhook straight up, diagonally upwards or straight down and then use the line to either swing to the desired destination, reel in to quickly travel to where the hook is caught (say, at the edge of a platform, so she can climb up the lip) or reel out to safely travel further down the level. The game presents traps and obstacles as the player progresses through the game's fifty stages, and options start to open up as players find alternate exits: Each exit is linked to a different stage, and it's possible to skip ahead by finding and entering hidden exits which often require some fancy hook skills to reach. The game will also present a handful of premature endings, once certain boss stages found at the ends of paths are defeated. These effectively work as dead ends, and require that the player backtrack and search for a different route to take. The game has a versatile map screen that tracks all the found paths and there are options to retry or quit mid-stage if the player runs into trouble, so it's not hurting for player friendliness. At least with its menu UI, anyway.

As stated, the player has to discover the more difficult techniques on their own, and this often leads to wonderful situations where a puzzle solution "clicks", and the player figures out how a certain obstacle operates, or how to fling themselves across a level more effectively. After doing so, they can return to previous areas and use what they've learned to find more secrets. For instance, hooking onto the undersides of platform might originally be limited as a means to swing from one platform to another to a novice, but a particularly tenacious player can slowly make their way across this ceiling to its edge, up the side of the platform and then eventually reach the top. The game has plenty of collectibles to find, and trying to grab them provides many of the more challenging puzzles in the game. It's usually a good idea to give up on any troublesome treasures and come back later once your skills have improved.

The music and graphics of Sayonara Umihara Kawase are pleasingly and deliberately banal. The game does all it can to underplay the bizarre world Kawase inhabits, with its inoffensive muzak and competent enough 2D polygonal stages. Excepting the randomness of the background ornaments, it keeps things purposefully simple and overt with its eyecatching checkerboard patterns and large enemy sprites, reducing any player frustration by eliminating as many potentially obfuscating details as possible. For as odd as the worlds look, they've all been designed to be easy to navigate. Visually speaking, at least.

Ultimately, Sayonara Umihara Kawase lacks the necessary precision to make it a true classic, and this inaccuracy ends up making the game something of a frustrating disappointment. Any game that heavily features physics and momentum is doomed to display a certain amount of chaos, and with a game that demands this much precision any amount of unpredictability or fickleness becomes anathema. There's times when the hook doesn't fire in the direction indicated (this is more the fault of the 3DS's squeaky and somewhat lacking D-pad), Kawase regularly refuses to climb up ledges directly in front of her because of the odd way the rope physics can react with walls and obstacles like trampolines often bounce Kawase in completely incalculable directions. Other means of building momentum, such as running down ice slopes or reeling in the line while jumping for a speed boost, can lead to arbitrary amounts of boosted speed. There are a lot of frustrating scenarios where the solution is obvious, the timing is there, but the game simply flips out and sends you flying in the wrong direction or removes all momentum at the last second to let you drop like an agitated rock into the pitiless sea below. These problems get all the more pronounced the trickier the stages become, and the more precise you need to be.

Notably, this is the first Umihara Kawase game to ever be released outside of Japan. Agatsuma Entertainment, which previously worked on the 3DS game Code of Princess, purchased the rights to produce a new Umihara Kawase with much of the original game's developers behind it and, with help from Natsume, was able to publish Sayonara Umihara Kawase in both the US and European 3DS eShop as well as Japan's. For fans of obscure, cult previously-Japan-only games, it was something of a minor coup, not unlike the semi-recent Operation Rainfall. Retitled Yumi's Odd Odyssey in the US, it continues to be a promising sign of what digital distribution can mean for otherwise "unpublishable" niche Japanese games and those localization teams dedicated to bringing them to a wider audience. As with another game I reviewed recently, Project X Zone, Sayonara Umihara Kawase is one of those games where I felt I had to put my money where my mouth was to provide tacit approval that a series previously exclusive to its country of origin was finally given some global exposure.

It's a shame that it doesn't quite live up to my impressions of the series as an outsider who could only stare at these strange oddities from afar until recently, but at the same time I'm glad to have played such a distinctive and unusual game, and equally glad to have finally been afforded an opportunity to do so.