 Hello and welcome to another edition of Bad Titles for video games, in the past I've gone over stuff like B.O.B. and Operation Logic Bomb, and this time around we've got Kendo Rage, a request from Owen on my Patreon page. I'd never heard of this game and did not know what kind of game it was, but based on the title I was convinced it had to be a one on one fighting game, or maybe even a beat em up. I guess that might have been just me confusing it with something like Primal Rage or Laser Kendo for Commodore 64. Instead Kendo Rage is an action platformer with an anime art style that looks, plays and sounds like something out of the Valus series, or more specifically Super Valus 4 for Super Nintendo. That's the big appeal of this one. The visual presentation and the art style here is well crafted, the pixel art between levels is cool looking, and as you can probably tell the story here has a bit of a comedic slant to it. I mean just look at how your character gets hit here. There's not too many other SNES games that have this kind of humor, and I guess that's what makes Kendo Rage stand out. It's one of the only games to have this kind of visual style and humor that was actually localized in North America. Usually when a game is brought over they make wholesale changes left and right, like when Ranma 1 Half fighting game was turned into the painfully generic street combat. One thing they did change in the Kendo Rage localization though is the story. The Super Famicom version features a Kendo student named Mai, who's approached by a spirit detective to recruit her help to hunt down some monsters. In the North American version Mai is named Joe, she's attending summer school to hone her Kendo skills, and the spirit detective is instead this great Kendo master named Bob, who wants to train Mai to rid the world of rotten evildoers. And you do that throughout seven different levels, of course using a Kendo stick attack, which is correlated with an energy meter. Sure you can just turbo hack and slash your way through enemies, but if you go a few seconds between attacks and let the psi meter down below fill up, your attack turns into a projectile. You can upgrade this particular attack by collecting a colored ball that will occasionally fly across the screen. Each color represents a different type of attack, as well as a shield to help your character absorb a bit more damage. You also have a special dash attack when you press the A button, but that drains the hell out of your life, so it's kind of pointless to use. If you die you come right back at the same spot, no time wasted, so that's kinda nice. There are a limited number of continues though, and there's no battery saver pass where it's here, so you gotta beat the game in one go round. If I had to nitpick anything about Kendo Rage, it's that the level design isn't all that great. It's not that it's bad, it's just kind of annoying. The game is laid out in kind of a where the hell do I go manner, where you have to carve your way through the snow, or wandering around in slow motion underwater. It just gets old sometimes, especially the underwater stuff. Each level has a time limit as well, since the point of each level is for Joe to get to school on time, but that wasn't really that big of a factor for me. Kendo Rage did get a sequel that stayed in Japan on Super Famicom, titled Makaruna Makendo 2, Kimeru Yokai Sori, and this one is a one on one fighting game, so if you're into that, that's there too, and it's reasonably English friendly as well. So yeah, Kendo Rage is an okay-ish game. It's not bad, but it's not great either. It's along the same lines as something like Super Valus 4 or Xardion, games I've done videos on in the past. They're each kind of mediocre, but in the case of Kendo Rage, it is pretty interesting to see a game like this get localized and stay true to what it originally was in Japan, for the most part anyway. If you really like games of this style, however, I'd recommend Ghost Sweeper Mikami, Joreishi Wannai Spotty. That one has the same anime-style presentation, but better level design and platforming elements. As far as Kendo Rage goes, it's fine. Its visual presentation is impressive, but don't go into it expecting too much.