Name: Katana ZERO; Target Audience: None specified, but more adult due to themes of drug abuse, violence, and gore; Game’s Creator: Justin Stander under the name Akiisoft, published by Devolver Digital; Platforms: PC, MacOS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Mobile
Katana ZERO is easily one of the most surprising games I’ve played for a critical play. Although I’ve heard of this game, I never felt highly incentivized to play it as there were other things on my radar I wanted to clear out first. Wow, was I wrong to wait to play it until now. The art, the music, the fluidity of the hack-and-slash gameplay, the mystery of the world and of the narrative — everything weaves together so effortlessly and immediately, instantly transporting yuo to the grimy, desolate, hopeless world of Katana ZERO. Released in 2019, Katana ZERO is a breakneck action-platformer that labels itself as “neo-noir,” a descriptor that is more than accurate for reasons I will explain in this critical play.
Katana ZERO‘s employment of a noir-esque embedded narrative combined with its retrofuturistic, cyberpunk setting through its cohesive art, music, and architecture catalyze an incredible mystery that makes the player question their every interaction and relationship.
As a noir narrative, Katana ZERO implements many of the tropes of the genre in order to create a sense of mystery and conspiracy, encouraging the player to trust no one — even those that the game portrays as outwardly trustworthy. Katana ZERO‘s levels are separated into “days,” each day having a different assignment for our main character, a sword-wielding assassin whose true identity is a mystery even to himself.
At the beginning of each day, we meet with our employer, who is revealed to also be a kind of psychiatrist for your character. The psychiatrist helps the main character with a myriad of things, namely: helping the main character interpret their night terrors, interpreting the main character’s feelings for them, and providing medicine to the main character which supposedly helps the night terrors subside. As the psychiatrist is also our employer and his office is one of the few spaces in the game in which the player is not thinking about combat and is physically prevented from swinging his sword, the developers through the physical architecture of the psychiatrist’s office (Fig. 1) create a sense of comfort and reprieve in the player when interacting with the employer. This sense of reprieve with the employer is emboldened due to the juxtaposition of his relaxing office with the loud, crowded, filthy rest of the city, encouraging the main character to be trusting and relaxed around the employer (Fig. 2).
However, like all good noir mysteries, not everything is what it seems. On your third day in the game, your employer instructs you to take a hit out on a character named DJ Electrohead. After a long stretch of gameplay combining stealth and combat, before reaching the target, the main character receives a phone call imploring them to not speak to the target whatsoever — to just kill them and leave. For the sake of exploring the story the developers wanted to tell, I completely ignored this instruction and began talking to the DJ. Through this conversation, the player learns that the DJ received the ability to slow down time, just like the main character, by ingesting a certain drug (Fig. 3). As the player pushes and asks more questions to get closer to the truth, all of a sudden the DJ is shot by someone off screen.
This sequence highlights the strength of the embedded narrative in the world of Katana ZERO. A player with no interest in story would just kill the DJ and move along with the other jobs given by the employer. However, those interested in the story that are willing to ignore direct orders now have new questions they didn’t have previously — what drugs did the DJ ingest? How did they give him the same power as the main character? Is the medicine given by our employer the same drug the DJ is describing? Are we to trust the employer anymore? Effective use of embedded narrative in Katana ZERO keeps the player asking themselves question after question, further encouraging them to do as much detective work as they can to learn more about the world and their place in it.
This mystery contrasts with the actual gameplay of Katana ZERO. The story is completely concealed from the player, and the player must act in very specific ways to learn more about the world. However, in contrast, the player has nearly perfect information during the gameplay segments (Fig. 4). Each section of gameplay is called a “planning phase,” where in-game the main character considers different paths of attack to complete each level (Fig. 5). A failure by the player in passing a level is considered a “poor plan,” and the main character simply rewinds to the beginning of the level and begins planning again until they create a plan that completes the level, creating a challenging kind of fun. This contrast of near-perfect game information and completely obfuscated narrative is fascinating to me, as despite having all the information in a level, the player still has no idea why they are doing what they are doing. This allows some players to self-insert if they want to and live out their power fantasy by overcoming those challenges, ignoring all narrative elements, and allow others to engage more deeply with the narrative to learn why they’re hacking and slashing.
Although I appreciate this approach to narrative and gameplay, I think I want to more explicitly encourage players of my team’s P2 than Katana ZERO. Especially since my team’s P2 will contain themes on the glorification of violence, I want to make sure that any player, even if they don’t engage with the text of the narrative, understands the subtext and themes in a way that isn’t necessarily possible for all players of Katana ZERO.
One thing I found interesting about Katana ZERO is the way it feeds into certain negative tropes of the retrofuturistic/cyberpunk genre it pulls heavy inspiration from. I’m a big fan of this genre and aesthetic, but if there is anything that makes me uncomfortable with this genre it is the way art in this genre depicts race. One would think that in a dystopian, retrofuturistic society hundreds if not thousands of years in the future, we wouldn’t see modern-day racial stereotypes depicted, specifically those exotifying East and South Asian people. This is apparent in Katana ZERO through the way people in its world interact with the main character. Why was the decision made to make the main character a katana-wielding man that is questioned by everyone in the world of the game? Why does everyone treat him as exotic and strange? I think this is certainly a reflection of the tendency to exotify these people in this genre, although I do not think it is purposeful or malicious. Ways to mod this out of the game could include not treating the main character as strange or exotic through the text, and instead explain away his style and weaponry in other ways.
