Metroidvanias and side-scrolling RPGs come out at a constant clip these days, so I feel like I get to be pretty selective about the ones I actually end up playing. When every art style and sub-genre and mood under the sun has an applicable dozen or so metroidvanias to tap into it, why wouldn’t I? For me, my weak spot is pretty consistently a metroidvania with obvious and endearing anime inspirations.
If your side-scrolling action game has neon-colored women swinging giant swords at each other, I’m there. So, when I saw Kotama and Academy Citadel come out, I was immediately drawn to it. Thankfully, there’s more to appreciate here than just the crisp character designs – although there’s some also some stuff holding the overall experience back.
Kotama and Academy Citadel tosses you in pretty immediately, without much preamble or context. You’re at a massive Academy Citadel called Carmel, and the entire student and worker body is currently holding an election to select the Carmel Star. It’s a symbol of ultimate honor and respect, and for whatever reason, our mysterious exchange student protagonist wants to win that honor for herself. Whatever our hero’s deal is, she has special abilities and the people she encounters can see there’s something special about her too. In order to get their votes, though, you’ll have to go through a series of trials and favors and assignments to fully win them over.
Kotama and Academy Citadel is polished, but it isn’t very…cohesive? I had put about 3 or so hours into the game, exploring a winding metroidvania map and collecting upgrades and fighting a few bosses. I took a moment to pause and realize that, despite being that far into the game, I still had no idea what I was doing, who I was, or even where I was. There isn’t very much context behind your adventure at the start of it, and while things eventually snowball into bigger stakes and interesting encounters, the start of the game being such a random running dash left me feeling a little lost and confused almost the entire time I played.
Mechanically, the game is a pretty standard metroidvania. You’ll collect new abilities, upgrades, and weapons at a steady clip. Some of them improve your prowess in combat or give you new tools to bust out against the various enemies and bosses in the game. Others are new ways to explore the environment, allowing you to open special doors or get to ledges and secrets that are otherwise juuuust out of reach. Part of why I spent so much time playing the game before my lack of context truly kicked in is that it’s just, honestly, really fun and really tight. Combat is responsive, animations are fluid, and the biomes and rooms I explored kept themselves varied at a pretty steady rate.
There’s also a pretty unique time-travel system at play in Kotama and Academy Citadel, but I honestly barely understood it for most of my playthrough. Time stays frozen to a certain hour when you’re in a room of the map, but if you move to a different room, time moves forward by an hour, eventually capping off at a certain point on the clock. Some character interactions and quest objectives are only available in certain rooms at certain times.
Special gates scattered across the map will also only activate if you reach them with a certain amount of time still left on the clock. Both of these things challenge you to reach certain rooms in a specific amount of movements, but most of the time, I found myself just stumbling upon the solutions and doorways in the right way via my repeated back-tracking and checkpoint usage. Like the story, this mechanic is really promising, but lacks a lot of proper onboarding and explanation.
Overall, I did have a pretty good time with Kotama and Academy Citadel. It felt a bit like starting a book at chapter 5, but the game is so fluid and so gorgeous that the lack of context never stopped me from having a good time playing.
