Kitsune Tails review for PC

Kitsune Games are nothing if not consistent in their influences. Their previous outing, Super Bernie World, was an homage to/copy of the first Super Mario Bros with some tweaks (the obvious one being that it starred Bernie Sanders). Now they’ve returned with Kitsune Tails, which is an homage to/copy of Super Mario Bros 3 with some tweaks.

Of course, the main tweak here is that Kitsune Tails is about a lesbian fox-girl trying to save one of her girlfriends from another of her girlfriends, so right off the bat you know that this is more than just a reskin of SMB3.

And, to be sure, there are a lot more cutscenes here than NES developers could’ve done in their wildest dreams. This makes sense, since it’s much easier to write about a love triangle when you can add in scenes like meet-cutes and dates than it would be to try and tell that story via a simple 2D platformer. So if you want a fleshed-out narrative, Kitsune Tails has that.

Unfortunately, the rest of the differences between Kitsune Tails and SMB3 don’t feel so much like tweaks as they feel like the work of a team trying to copy one of the most iconic platformers of all time, and not quite being up to the task.

This is probably a little unfair, but at the same time, the comparisons between the two games are inevitable thanks to the way that Kitsune Tails goes out of its way to invite them. I know that foxes and raccoons are two different creatures, but when you give 8-bit characters tails, they look awfully identical, so right off the bat you have the game’s star, Yuzu, looking like a purple version of Mario, except she’s a version of Mario that can’t bat enemies with her tail and that can’t even pretend to fly. That latter problem is especially noticeable because Kitsune Tails even features a little metre in the top corner that fills up the faster you run, and when you max it out, your reward is to…uh, keep running faster.

There are lots of other areas where Kitsune Tails fails to live up to its influence, too. For example, the game’s version of an invincibility star is a fox head that makes you pulsate (much like a star), except it has an annoying tendency to end very abruptly, so if you’re, say, bopping an otherwise unbeatable enemy off the screen and the star ends mid-bop, you die instead.

Similarly, the water levels here are a nightmare. While I can’t imagine many people look back on the Mario Bros. water levels with anything resembling fondness, compared to the mess here, they look amazing. Yuzu basically has two modes of moving when she’s underwater: she either sinks like a stone, or rockets upwards whenever you try to swim, so you spend entire levels trying to make her run/bounce across the top of the water, hoping that if and when she sinks down she has enough momentum to keep her moving forwards.

Mind you, it’s not like Yuzu’s on land is anything spectacular. While she can run quickly, getting her started can feel like a bit of a pain, and any time you encounter an enemy it’s always a bit of a roll of the dice whether the hit box will register you stomping on them, or if you’ll miss the perfect angle and find yourself down a life (or shrinking from a girl to a fox). It also didn’t help matters that the game’s technical performance was a little sluggish – not all the time, but enough that it made the game more challenging than it intended to be.

Obviously, the big draw in Kitsune Tails isn’t meant to be the gameplay – you don’t make the focus of your game a lesbian love triangle between two mythical creatures and a sorceress if you aren’t hoping to draw in fans who want a meaty narrative at the core of their games. But while that may be fine for a visual novel, if you’re trying to sell a 2D platformer you need good gameplay too. And even if Kitsune Tails borrows liberally from one of the best of those ever made, it doesn’t come anywhere close to living up to its inspiration.

Midboss provided us with a Kitsune Tails PC code for review purposes.