Kawaii Deathu Desu is a beat ‘em up game with a very simple control scheme. While it is easy enough to learn and play, the game doesn’t have a tutorial, at all. You’ll have to figure out the menus and controls yourself. The same goes for the premise, you’ll need to read the description on the store page to know what’s the background of this game. It’s basically that supernatural beings are reincarnated as Japanese idols. During their performances, they are swarmed by fans and they take this opportunity to reap as many souls as they can. It’s a competition to them, to see who can claim the throne of the underworld.
The game only uses two buttons and they’re the two shoulder buttons. The left shoulder button will have the character attack left, while the right shoulder button will have the character attack right. Fans will run in from both sides and so you’ll need to juggle between the two sides. This is made harder when fans come in at different speeds, and certain fans will have multiple bars of health so you’ll need to hit them several times. It is hard at first, until you realise that attacking one side will move the character a bit towards that side, so you can delay the time a fan gets to you from the other side.
Each character has a health bar and they lose some of it if a fan runs into them. As you reap the souls, it’ll charge up your magic. Once the bar is full, it will automatically activate, which basically gives you a more powerful one-hit kill move that has a bigger range. The difficulty lies in juggling the crowd when huge amounts of fans swarm in from both sides and it can get hectic. It can feel cheap when the stages can depend on luck and how many fans swarm you from one side to overwhelm you, versus other attempts where it doesn’t. There’s little skill and difficulty when it is designed this way.
While the game is easy to pick up and is fun at first, the game is ultimately repetitive and shallow. You’re mashing two buttons where skill and timing is not required. The Switch is also not the best way to play using physical buttons as the shoulder buttons on the Joy-Cons are tiny and uncomfortable to quickly press in a game such as this one. Thankfully, there are touch screen controls, where you tap on the side you want to attack and it works much better that way. That being said, the game is designed more for short bursts, rather than long sessions, as your hands will get cramped if you tried to play for longer periods of time.
The game is a pixel art game but it can look messy and confusing at first. The menus aren’t the best, so you’ll probably miss the fact that you can level your characters up. By collecting the souls, you’re able to use them to level the characters, improving their damage, health etc. This will help you survive and pass the later stages, which are more difficult. Each stage has three modes: a Normal mode where you must beat it three times to unlock the next stage; a Hard mode which is harder; and an Endless mode, which you can play until you die. There’s no way to regain health and the differences between each stage are mostly aesthetics, as only the background and the designs of the fans change.
The souls that you collect can also be used to unlock new characters, which has different attack animations and magic stages. There are clothing options for the characters, although these are for purely aesthetics reason only. The game makes the unfortunate choice of having everything be extremely grindy. You gain souls at a pitiful rate in comparison to how much it costs to unlock things. You will need to level up to beat the next stage, so you’re stuck repeating the previous one for ten times before you can progress. When the gameplay is as shallow and repetitive like this, it is not a good thing to force the player to grind.
The harder levels just mean more enemies and that they run faster towards you. Each stage ends up devolving into fending off long enough to charge your magic. Then once you get the special attack and wipe out the waves, you continue to last long enough to run out the timer and finish the level. The game doesn’t take long to “finish”, given that there are only 12 stages. The bulk of the time is just slowly grinding for enough souls to unlock all 9 characters and upgrade them.
Overall, Kawaii Deathu Desu may sound like a good idea on paper, as the simple controls and premise can lend well to a chilled and relaxing but also hectic game. Unfortunately, the executed product is only fun for around the first ten minutes, and then because that’s all there is to the game, it’s hard to keep going to unlock everything. Even trying out all the stages at least once can feel like a chore due to the sheer amount of grinding thanks to the repetitive and shallow gameplay.
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