Koro Koro Post Nin

There exist an unlimited number of Playstation games. Sure, mutliple sources may say that there were only merely over 3,000 of them, but they are limitless. A game will suddenly appear in your life, copyrighted in 1996 or 2002, and a cursory internet search will show you that only a handful of other people know about the same game that you do. Koro Koro Post Nin, I'm going to write about it.

Koro Koro Post Nin made itself known to me through a video shown to me a few days ago, made by someone who I also had no familiarity with, but now cannot get enough of: Ljot Swanhild. She is a German VTuber who makes cool music and makes short videos about games. If nothing else, seeing her videos was a pleasant surprise, as up until now, I only knew two things about VTubing: 1) it's where white people pretend to be anime characters, then say incredibly racist shit on Twitch that I will see screencaps of for two goddamn years straight no matter what web sites I stop going to and apps I delete and Discord servers I have to remove myself from to avoid seeing that shit all the fucking time, and 2) it's that thing Ana Valens has to do to make ends meet because game journalism is full of right-wing transphobes pretending they don't share Adam Sessler's dogshit politics. Anyways, it's cool to see someone using that particular format to make genuine art, and you should go check her out.

Back to the game. Have you ever played Cameltry by Taito? Well, you should; there's an excellent SNES port out there. I guess if I had to do the Elevator Pitch for this game, I would say that Koro Koro Post Nin did for Cameltry what Umihara Kawase did for Bionic Commando. Much like Cameltry, Koro Koro Post Nin is a game where you don't have direct control over your character. Rather, you rotate the world around them, causing the character to move due to gravity doing what gravity does. Much unlike Cameltry, the player character in question is no longer a blue marble, but is instead an android named Akane that delivers mail. Every level has multiple mailboxes, and you can only finish a level once mail has been delivered to each one. That's the main thing that seperates Post Nin from its inspiration.

What follows is Akane being thrown about a series of chaotic, low gravity worlds to deliver your bills and letters, showing very little distress all the while. Akane will remain calm. You, however, might not. Challenge ramps up at a pretty decent rate. First it's simply finding all of the mailboxes, then finding the exit. Then the game will add spikes that will hurt you. Then the sentient vending machines, auto turrets, and what is apparently Jason Voorhees with a chainsaw show up. Oh yeah, Koro Koro Post Nin has a rudimentary combat system! Having Akane move down a steep slope will cause her to sprint, letting you get through stages quicker, and dispatching enemies, or else she gets hit and loses 5 seconds on the time limit. It doesn't get much more complex than that; there's maybe five enemy types and no boss battles, but it's still neat that there's a bit of variety.

However, I must say that whoever decided to add levels where you are all but stuck to the ground unless you rotate the screen to nearly 180 degrees, and introduced electrified orbs that kill you instantly in the same levels can fuck off. Those stages are the worst, and I almost gave up when I got to that point. The difficulty eases up pretty drastically afterwards, though, so I could go back to liking it.

Koro Koro Post Nin is a pretty short game. It's maybe an hour long? Another situation where a game leaves me wanting a little more, rather than going on for so long that I get tired of it. But it is definitely worth playing. Koro Koro Post Nin is this cutesy, colorful game that plays like an excellent arcade port, despite being a wholly original console experience. It makes up for a short length and mild frustration with personality. This is also a 2002 release on the original Playstation, and a lot of PSX games from that time tended to be lacking in personality, being cynical cash-grabs aimed at confused parents doing holiday shopping and unknowing kids at the local Game Crazy with their allowance burning a hole in their pockets. A game looking like this and playing like this during a time like this is nothing short of a miracle. It was this and Gundam Battle Assault 2 and that was probably it.

Kind of a short review, since this is kind of a short game, but I think I got my point across. Go check the game out.