Kaze Kiri - Ninja Action is a beat'em'up featuring a ninja, the story is pretty straightforward, a girl is kidnaped and the hero is sent to her rescue.
Like for all games on pcecd, it feature anime manga, the intro can be watched in encodes section
[1], its nicely made and worth a peek.
Note that a secondary character is available after beating the game, Suzu (girl version of Kaze, same movements ect...), she also got her own sprite into intro/end sequence anime.
I havent finded a walktrought or speedrun of this game, so it was realy a first time apparently. The bad ending happen if you kill the girl instead rescue her, you still have to defeat the same boss tought (no obvious time gain), in the ending Kaze will stand in flammes and not escape (mission failed?!?).
The only differences between easy mode and hard mode are hps basicly, i didnt went into the hassle to see if stastisticaly in easy mode they parry less, but they use parry a lot too.
The game is pretty simple, not much variety available to the player attacks, you can use trow ennemys, trow ninja-sort-of-knifes, dash kick, jump kick, or swing the sword, while on floor the sword have 3 "phases", and you can also duck.
edit: it seem there is a sort of flamme thing i oversight, oh well...
Ennemys are able to parry any of your attacks but the trow, also, they parry depending where you hit, standing or duck height are 2 different hit zones on each ennemys, while they parry "high", you can hit them "low" (duck), note this is unlikely to happen in real time tought, unless you got some sick reflex.
Parry is especially used by boss, to make them harder to defeat, the parry system is totaly luck based (and abused here, in this run), its manipulated simply by input delays (very sensistive i have to say).
To access boss, you have to empty the ennemy "bar" by killing them, once it reach zero the boss load will load, on some stages (noticably stage5), i keep only killing ennemys that worth it, some ennemys have too much hp and in that case i just scroll or trow them to manipulate spawns.
The fastest movement available is simply to run (hold up + directions), you also can do evasive moves (down or up + jump) but they are not very usefull and slower than just running, i avoided to use it.
You can also diseaper by pressing select, this is useless, i just use it at end of boss for the fun, it also drain some hps (the knives also drain 1 per trow).
In term of power, the knives are the less efficient, each phase of the sword swing is more powerfull than the precedent (third been the best). The jump kick is totaly shit, its not used at all, while the dash kick is often used, its as much powerfull than a knife and is quite reasonably fast movement.
Its good also to note here that the sword can be re-used before the animation of Kaze holsting the sword is complete, the exception is if some ennemy is very near you (in that case he will always holster before you can re-attack).
Manipulating luck was mostly about how much you delay the next attack, as such, boss are generaly hit with the first swing (less powerfull), but more frequently, i also avoid them to fall and trigger their invulnerability timer (this happen often unassisted), exception is stage1 boss (he fall no matter what), i trow some boss in order to manipulate them or put them on a better position.
Also worth noting that i wasnt able to get past stage2 on hard mode unassisted, i did realize the hard mode was bad when i reached stage9, the tiger miniboss was longer than the actuall boss, ive decided then to finish hard mode but doing also easy mode, it happen to be some 7mins and 50 seconds faster.
I believe the easy mode will be more suited for publishing, if you also think the same way please post and say it, so the judges can have more weight in the balance.
On optimization matter, since most of the tas is luck based, i believe this can be further optimized, and since apparently i did oversight a move (add some variety...), ill probably try to make an improvement over this, on a rainy day, the game is not easy to optimize overall but i think the movie is good quality, last remark, the game lag only in loading never 'in-game'.
PCEjin does support Drag&Drop, this will let you easly (re)watch every stages, load the lua script, or the movie itself.
