A slightly retro look at Kya Dark Lineage

Well, hey there fellow nerfherders, and welcome to my 2nd blog entry.

Anyone see that "Yo Soy Kratos" video on Gamevideos.com? What the hell is that dude saying? Anyone? (^_^;

So a few weeks ago I finished a little known platformer/3D exploration game for PS2 called Kya: Dark Lineage. It came out 2 or 3 years ago.

Kya is a game that isn't perfect, but deserves to be better recognised. 1UP's own Retronauts overlord Jeremy Parish made a throwaway criticism about Kya in his Death of Game Mascots podcast a while back, which slightly irked me, because I was enjoying the game immensely at the time.

So what is Kya: Dark Lineage? Take Jak and Daxter 1's platforming. Mix in Super Monkey Ball's vertigo-inducing stages. What happens? You get a sprawling connected 3D world with stages floating in the sky that'll cause heart attacks in agrophobics. (^_^)

Kya is a teenage girl from Earth, but she falls into another world with her half brother where the good natives are known as - and this is the clever part - Nativs. (^_^). The Nativs have been turned into enemy Wolfen(stein?). You have to beat the Wolfen up till they're unconscious and exorcise the Wolfen curses from them. The more you exorcise, the more shops with juicy new upgrades get built in their home village. So not only is it fun to "collect" Nativs, it actually helps you in the game.

There are two really cool things about this game.
It is a great example of how to use your story/world's themes to influence the gameplay. The main theme of Kya is air/wind. Seeing as the whole world Kya finds herself in floats high above the clouds, wind blows all over the place, and you often have to master its currents to get from A to B.



Depth of field is another theme. The draw distance is incredible for a PS2 game. Like Jak and Daxter 1, the stages are connected (but with fairly well-disguised loading time wind tunnels/Stargate tunnels) to form one world, and each stage is Big Jeff Mahoolah huge. You can, for example, get to the top of an island and look down around you at the rest of the stage, even zooming in with added detail if you have the telescope. Sometimes you can even dive off to those far areas! There are bits where you actually have to freefall down huge shafts for minutes at a time avoiding obstructing crud, too, which are good fun.

The other cool thing is this game's McGuffin for collecting. Normally in these kinds of games, there's some shit you have to collect a billion of in order to get a bonus (I'm looking at you, DK64), and Kya is no exception - but with a twist. The collectible is actually your enemy, the Wolfen, who you have to render unconscious then break their curses to release the good Nativs within.
You have to sometimes be pretty cunning at exorcising the Wolfen. They are often placed in precarious or hard to reach positions, and figuring out how to knock them out without Kya dying or knocking the Wolfen into the void below is what makes the combat enjoyable. Sure, you can miss them out (oh yeah, this game is very non-linear, which is very cool), or knock them off the island into the clouds below, but that doesn't help you much in the end, because they'll just respawn when you die or leave the area. So exorcising them means they'll be permanently removed from that area! Bonus!
Stealth plays an important part so you can reach many of the enemies.



There's a lot of satisfaction when you get the drop on them and beat them to a pulp with Kya's acrobatic capoeira punches and kicks, especially the bigger Wolfen.

Strangely for this sort of game, the heroine has a lot of beat 'em up moves that you have to string into combos to effectively take on the Wolfen. While the platforming engine reminds me a lot of Jak 1, the combat makes me think of The Mark of Kri.



Enemies gang up around Kya and you have to do some fairly difficult joypad gymnastics to bust out the better moves, just like Kri. But it doesn't have Kri's right analogue stick targetting. Ah yes, targetting, one of Kya's weak points. There's no way to lock onto enemies, so your punches sometimes miss. But any competent gamer can deal with it - I did, and I'm hardly the world's best gamer.

Many call out the camera in this game, and with good reason. The camera sucks in places, as does the storyline, but the worlds (and thanks to the decent art style, they really do feel like different worlds) are great. The camera is fine most of the time, and it certainly doesn't break the game.

Rather than the camera, the worst part of the game is its annoying difficulty spikes, which are mainly on the landboarding/halfpipe sections. There's a few times where you have to slide down looooooong stretches of land avoiding obstacles and gaps to get to the end.



Some are fantastic to watch - you're being chased by lava down a canyon or up a tower in the final part of the game. They're a real pain to beat, though, compared to the rest of the game. Most of the stages have plenty of checkpoints, but the later boarding sections require the player to pull off a lot of difficult manoeuvres in sequence to get to the end, which can be very frustrating when you flub up just once and drown (and burn!) in lava. The varying difficulty is particularly noticable at the end with an extremely difficult tower climb/spiral shaped board section and a sneeze-and-he'll-keel-over-dead final boss.

Overall a very fun game, I'm glad to have had the chance to play it, but misjudged difficulty spikes and a shitty short cliffhanger ending. Ugh. I hate cliffhanger endings to games you know will never get a sequel... 'sup Advent Rising?

Anyone out there have any annoying cliffhanger endings that you know will ever get resolved?