The Super Play Top 100 was the 1990’s SNES culture magazine’s final ranking of the 16-bit system’s catalogue, mere months before the publication ended. This regular monthly feature takes a look back at each title, how it fared back then and how it fares now. This month: Spooks and Tanuks.
Game Title: Kiki Kai Kai
Developer: Natsume
Release dates:
22nd December 1992 (JPN)
August 1993 (EU)
June 1993 (US)
There are certain games that announce themselves like a brass band—full of noise, confidence, and the faint suspicion that they are trying to drown out their own lack of substance. And then there are those that arrive quietly, arrange themselves with impeccable taste, and proceed to dismantle your self-esteem with the politeness of a butler correcting your grammar. The Super Nintendo incarnation of arcade Kiki Kaikai, belongs very much to the second category.
At first glance, it appears almost disarmingly quaint. A shrine maiden toddles about firing paper talismans at an advancing cast of folkloric miscreants, accompanied by a mythical raccoon dog known as a Tanuki, both of such mild disposition that one suspects they might apologise before attacking. The colours are bright, the sprites are charming, and the entire enterprise seems designed to reassure us that nothing too distressing will occur. Such an impression survives for approximately the time it takes to be hit by the first projectile, at which point the game reveals itself as an exquisitely calibrated engine of humiliation. But what did Super Play have to say, to ensure its inclusion in the top 100 games of the Super Nintendo?
“Capcom’s Gunsmoke and Commando coin-ops paved the way for countless games presented in the same vein, and Kikikaikai is one of the finest examples you’ll see on the SNES. More difficult than its slightly prettier sequel (which was published by Ocean in the UK under the name of Pocky and Rocky 2), it chronicles the exploits of a young, reifu-throwing sorceress and her cuddly racoon companion. As you’d expect from a game with a name like this, it’s packed to the rafters with Japanese weirdness, and we love it dearly.”
The narrative, such as it is, has the simplicity and faintly ominous clarity of a Japanese folktale told to children who are expected to learn something from it. A peaceful shrine has been disrupted by the sudden return of mischievous spirits, their behaviour escalating from nuisance to outright hostility. The source of this disturbance? An imprisoned demon who has rather inconveniently escaped and begun marshalling the yōkai into a kind of supernatural uprising. Into this breach steps Sayo-chan, the shrine maiden, whose job description appears to be a combination of spiritual mediation and crowd control. She is soon joined by Manuke, the aforementioned Tanuki, equipped with a talent for shape-shifting and a commendable willingness to get involved in matters well above their pay grade. Together they set out to pacify the spirits, restore order, and in the manner of all good folklore, put everything back exactly where it was before things went wrong. 1980s Saturday morning cartoon criteria that we can all get on board with.
What distinguishes Kiki Kai Kai from the more bombastic offerings on the SNES is not merely the difficulty, but the manner in which that difficulty is expressed. None of the chaos is for the sake of it; everything is arranged with a fastidiousness that suggests not so much game design as garden design, with each enemy placed just so, and each bullet tracing a line of intent that, if you fail to read it correctly, results in your immediate and instructive demise. It is, in short, a game that kills you with reasons. There is lineage in this severity that can be traced back to the arcade original, which, like many of its coin-operated contemporaries, was built on the principle that the player’s suffering should be both frequent and profitable. But in this 16-bit home form, the experience has been refined into something less mercenary and more aesthetic. You are no longer feeding a machine with coins; you are engaging in a dialogue with a system that expects you to improve. It is stern but not unreasonable, rather like an examiner who marks harshly because he knows you are capable of achieving more.
The game’s aesthetic, meanwhile, performs a subtle act of cultural insubordination. At a time when much of the industry was either peering into the future or borrowing liberally from Western fantasy, Kiki Kai Kai remained steadfastly rooted in Japanese folklore. Its world is populated by yōkai and spirits that seem to have wandered in from an illustrated scroll, bringing with them an atmosphere that is at once whimsical and faintly threatening. The result is not exoticism but authenticity—a game that does not explain itself because it does not feel the need to. There is also the small matter of its cooperative mode, which transforms the experience from a solitary trial into a shared ordeal. Two players, confined to the same screen and subject to the same unforgiving rules, must learn to operate with a degree of coordination that would not disgrace a chamber orchestra. The effect is both exhilarating and faintly accusatory: when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, there is always someone else to blame, even if the evidence suggests otherwise.
Kiki Kai Kai cements its place in the top 100 with almost embarrassing precision. It is mechanically pure, aesthetically distinctive, and entirely uninterested in courting the player’s affection. Like many Japanese curios that eventually found themselves blinking in the harsher light of international release schedules, Kiki Kai Kai didn’t so much launch globally as migrate - politely, and in stages. A game so rooted in Japanese folklore was never likely to explode onto the global stage in a single, coordinated moment. Especially in the 1990s. Instead, it travelled the way its spirits might have done, quietly crossing borders, unsettling a few players at a time, and leaving behind a reputation that grew by word of mouth rather than marketing muscle. In other words, it didn’t arrive everywhere at once. It simply appeared, which, given its subject matter, feels entirely appropriate. Kiki Kai Kai was repurposed for the west with the title Pocky & Rocky, as well as our two leads being repurposed with those names also: Sayo-Chan is now Pocky, and Manuke renamed as Rocky.
The westernised presentation of Pocky and Rocky had the look and feel of Nickelodeon cartoons of that era, from the boxart to the typeface being lifted right out of the Ren & Stimpy show. In an era where Japanese-grounded SNES titles were often on the receiving end of Westernised artwork, Pocky and Rocky is no Breath of Fire. Instead it represents a middle ground of sorts, carefully retaining character relevancy alongside the aforementioned injection of the fashionable cartoon feel of the 1990s. Once Kikikaikai arrived, the series never left, with 2022’s Pocky & Rocky Reshrined remaining prominent on current digital stores as of today.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that this title offers little in the way of concession. Never expect Kikikaikai to guide, reassure, or accommodate you. Instead, it expects you to meet it on its own terms and, if you fail to do so, it dispatches you with a brisk efficiency that borders on the dismissive. But to complain about this would be rather like criticising a sonnet for not being a novel. The limitation is the point. In the end, what remains most striking about KikiKaiKai is its confidence. It knows exactly what it is - a tightly constructed, ruthlessly fair test of skill - and it pursues that identity without distraction. In an era increasingly preoccupied with spectacle, this kind of clarity feels almost radical. From a Super Play perspective, Kikikaikai is a perfect fit.
