What unfolds is a story about a war gone hideously wrong, and the shady, filthy aftermath of it and the costs it has exacted on the populace. Katana Zero tells the story of an unnamed samurai in a dystopian cyberpunk future, visiting what seems to be a posh therapist who gives him dossiers telling him to go kill specific people and usually anyone else involved or nearby.
Hell, its attempts to retroactively fit Hotline Miami 1 to this plot, and pour rivers of plot filler into the sparse framework that made that game so special were personally insulting. The execution of 2's plot in general was just a bit shit, fitting a whole story about a fictional US-Russian war over Hawaii that ended in a nuclear blast at the tail end of the Cold War into a spiralling plot covering five or six clusters of characters whose stories overlapped around each other. In fact, I respect Katana Zero for it because if it was on some level intentional, it was the good type of intentional Hotline Miami 2 fucking tripped over itself and smashed its face on the tarmac trying to awkwardly crowbar piles of story into a gameplay format distinctly not fitting for piles of exposition and full-tilt cutscenes (such as they were). This might look like a real attempt to shit on the game, suggesting it's basically an amalgamated ripoff of the Hotline Miami games, but I swear to you it's not. That could be a recommendation or a condemnation right there, huh. This is because Katana Zero is, more or less, exactly my sort of shit. This'll be a less in-depth one because a) Katana Zero is quite short (and that's fine, not least because it's £13.50 on the eShop) and b) I just kind of want to babble about it rather than critically analyse it right now. Jokes on him, he ended up being convinced to buy it. He later said during the stream it was so he could see the game for himself without buying it. The first game for this ended up being Katana Zero, which I had my eye on at the time of its reveal and whose release sneaked up on me I was only aware of its release on Thursday, its release day, thanks to good friend David nudging me to buy it and stream it. Then I decided to break from my ongoing stream sessions of Kingdom Hearts III to take time out, try and work a weekend slot of streams into a spot for one-offs, "side" games and multiplayer/endless stuff.
I finished the Sekiro post about eight hours ago, and on finishing it, expected that the next thing I'd be posting a review/critique about would be Travis Strikes Again.