After exhausting some of my other games on the system, and still waiting for a bunch of new purchases to roll in, I decided I'd finally try to tackle KEITH COURAGE start to finish. I've played through the first few levels a few times over the years, but I'd always lose interest in the repetitive design and having to go from being this fast, powerful badass in the underworld stages to this slow little Dragonball Z wannabe in the overworld. Playing it this time though, I stuck with it and started to enjoy the cyclical yin and yang of the game. Harvesting coin for those swords in the overworld was a cheap and easy thrill, and then the Transformer-like super attacks underneath worked that pleasure principle over and over again.
The game is very forgiving with your life allotment, but taking too much damage is never really the issue in the game. The single-touch game overs in the spikes are a pretty big annoyance, and the enemies strategically placed right beside spike pits can be really cheap at times. While I do like the labyrinth-like levels in the underworld, their design can be incredibly frustrating at times, since so much of it is descending down levels where you can't see the floor. So many times there are just spikes placed at the bottom of a space where you'd normally expect to drop, and then boom, game over and you're back to the start of the level. Some of the labyrinths have some nice bits of misdirection and forced confusion with the path you're supposed to take, but so much of it is ruined by poor game design and cheap deaths. The variety is also lacking - almost all the labyrinths are the same and the bosses even get recycled as regular baddies (B.A.D.dies?) in the later levels.
As a console launch title against the likes of Mario or Sonic it was destined to fail, but taken on its own merits KEITH COURAGE is a fun, if repetitive, game. By the end I was addicted, slaughtering cats like nobody's business to get that Alpha Sword, and then hacking my way through the final labyrinth before I happened upon the all-too-easily-activated last boss cheat to breeze my way to the finish line. The game has my favorite kind of ending - the one valiant final graphic, and then a wicked text scroll that details how much of a wicked hero you are (nothing beats the US ending to ENDURO RACER, if any of you haven't seen that before). It was great fun, and I'm glad I stuck with it. I wish we were given that sequel promised in the credits, but alas, 'twas never meant to be. Like the end of the rainbow, it's something that was never found, but this will be a fun game to beam up every now and again. Stay courageous, Keith!
