Mister Mosquito

"Ruining an entire family's summer vacation never felt so good!"

The full title of this game is ''Ka: Yamada-ke no Natsu'', which best translates as ''Mosquito: Summer at the Yamada Residence''. Both the title and subtitle here are important, as this bizarre little game from Sony involves your ''hero'' the mosquito just as much as it involves your ''opponents'' the Yamadas.

In short, this is a game which challenges you to ruin the Yamada family's happy summer vacation. And stay ''well-fed'' in the process, of course.

But beware! As the splash screen before the title translates, ''this game may contain itchy language!''

Say hello to the world's tiniest anti-hero.

With its bizarre sense of humor and rather challenging strategic gameplay, Ka is actually a surprisingly, almost inexplicably fun game. There's no doubt it could've been better, but even as it stands, it may be one of the more simple yet addicting games currently available for the PS2. And there's no denying one thing, at the very least: it's definitely original.

Ka is split into 12 stages (and a second quest, if you can manage to find and fill all the EX tanks in the first!), each of which consists of one room in the Yamada family's fairly average Japanese household, usually with one family member residing there, doing his/her ''thang'' (as it were). Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to (1) locate the best ''suck-points'' on this person, (2) land on them, (3) suck a certain amount of blood (divided into ''tanks'') from each one without being noticed, and (4) fly away from this person's suck-points intact. Sounds simple, right?

Wrong. The Yamada family may be a bit more lethargic than most people you know, but when you're a mosquito, even the smallest bodily movements can be a big problem. You have to wait for just the right moment to strike -- and if the right moment doesn't come, you have to MAKE it come by dive-bombing various switches and such, turning lights off, stereos on, and just in general wreaking havoc. If you create enough of a distraction, you may puzzle your poor little target person for just long enough to be able to ''make your move''.

And even once you've gone in for the kill, the challenge doesn't end there. Sucking a person's blood is no easy task! It involves rotating the right stick at a fairly steady rate which depends on the person's pulse. As you rotate the stick, the speed of your rotation makes a small circle on the person's pulse meter either rise or fall. Part of this meter is shaded in blue, and this blue shaded area keeps moving, growing, shrinking, etc. -- again, depending on the person's pulse. Your goal is to rotate the stick at just the right speed so that the circle stays fairly close to the center of the blue area, no matter where this blue area may happen to be. So if the person's pulse suddenly rises, get ready to do some fast spinning... and if it suddenly falls, get ready to slow to a crawl.

If you should get too close to the edge of this blue shaded area, or if you should go outside of it altogether, there's a chance the person will notice you (if you're outside of the area, it will turn red, and the person will DEFINITELY notice you unless you get back in the blue REALLY quickly), or worse yet, that he/she will instinctively swat you (resulting in an instant game over).

If the Yamada family member should notice you -- whether sucking blood or just buzzing around the room -- you may end up in ''battle mode''. And although battle mode makes no real logical sense whatsoever, the basic concept of it is that the Yamada in question will chase you around the room, attempting to swat or spray you, and you must fight back by finding this person's ''relax points'' and divebombing them, effectively calming his/her rage. If you should be swatted or hit with bug spray during this interval, you'll bounce around the room a bit, and your life meter will decrease. Close calls are marked by amusing Matrix-like atmospheric distortions, so if things suddenly get all ''funky'', you'd better be on your guard!!

And as if all of this isn't enough, the family will get wise to your antics as you get further and further into the game, and begin setting more and more traps for you. While at first there are only small bug traps here and there -- the kinds that virtually all Japanese households have set up -- by the time you reach stage 7, the Yamadas will have become paranoid to the point of fanaticism about seeing you dead, and will have so much poison all around the house that it's hard to believe THEY can survive! Now add to this the further factor of air conditioners and the like, effectively blowing poisonous vapors (and you!) all over the place, and you have some seriously challenging obstacles to deal with.

Fortunately, there are also lots of bonuses scattered around the house, just waiting for a little mosquito like you to fly into them. These include heart-rings (collect 50 to increase your maximum life), hearts (refills your life meter), EX tanks (find and fill them all to play the bonus second quest), and food items (gives you hints and information about the game). And believe me, there's nothing quite like a spinning onigiri (Japanese rice snack) floating by the ceiling.

But one of the greatest parts of this game is its twisted sense of humor. Although you really need to understand Japanese fairly well (and have a pretty good knowledge of Japanese culture) in order to understand them, there are brief cut-scenes between levels which depict the three members of the Yamada family from a rather odd angle (looking up from the kitchen table, I believe) as they discuss their plans for the day and lament about their itchiness. Between these cut-scenes and the looping actions of the family members during the levels themselves, you really begin to get a feel for what the Yamada family is like -- and, consequently, how your presence in their household is effectively ruining their summer vacation. Learn all about Rena's dissatisfied rebellious teen nature, or her mother's bizarre way of making croquettes, or her father's short temper and complete ineptitude at flower-arranging. Gaze in awe as the itchiness you've created is used as a catalyst to end some bad blood (no pun intended) between Rena's parents -- then watch as Rena breaks down, unable to bear her itchiness, but unwilling to put aloe on it to make it better. As the events of the Yamadas' summer unfold, so too do their attitudes change. And with their attitudes, your strategies must change as well.

Graphically, this game is somewhat sub-par for PS2, but it gets the job done fairly nicely. Everything looks like what it's supposed to be, and there's a certain amount of detail that really gives each room character (like actual watchable TVs and such). In addition, the characters, while somewhat polygonal and not entirely smooth in their movements, are very very well-done when considering their sheer SIZE. After all, your hero is a mosquito, so the people you're terrorizing are... well... huge!! Still, a little less texture-mapping and a little more texturing certainly would've been nice.

In my opinion, the most charming aspect of the graphics is your mosquito himself, who's absolutely the CUTEST mosquito mankind has ever known! Heck, he even has heart-shaped eyes, and if you do really well in battle mode against the Yamadas, you can unlock new color schemes for him! You can have a black stealth mosquito, or an electric-blue designer mosquito! The possibilities are en--... well... finite, actually... but there are a lot of them, I can assure you of that!!

Musically, this game shines. It won't make you run out for the soundtrack (or, at least, it SHOULDN'T, but you may be a very strange person!), but it's extremely effective for one reason alone: it's VERY exaggerated. Every song sounds ''epic'' (except for the bath song, which sounds like cheezy easy listening), and the battle theme is a fast-paced classical overture. The sheer inappropriateness of the music's grand scale adds to this game's bitingly satirical humor value immensely, while never growing old or grating on the nerves.

Sound effects are a bit more of a mixed bag, though. Every menu in the game uses the same tone when selecting an option, and crashing into any object in any room triggers the same ''ka-bam'' sound. Still, the voice acting in this game (and there's a LOT of it, especially considering that it's a mosquito-sim game!) is fantastic, definitely capturing the feel of a stereotypical Japanese family (and adding to it a female narrator with an almost eerily soothing voice). And when your little mosquito is sucking blood, the variety of gulping and ''mmm-mmm!'' sounds he makes are really cool, and add a strange feeling of urgency (especially when he switches over to his panicky fast-paced ''mmm-mmm!'' sound!).

The controls are a bit clunky and hard to get used to, but they're not too bad once you do. R1 is your accelerator, L1 is your decelerator, R2 spins you 180 degrees, L2 gives you a rear view, O divebombs whatever you're currently targetting, and the right stick is used to suck blood (as described above) or move around with a static camera (''strafe'', if you will). The real problems with the game's controls lie in its limited turning radius (for some reason, your mosquito CANNOT fly straight up or straight down), the fact that acceleration is much quicker than deceleration, and the poor hit detection of some objects (restricting you from flying into seemingly open spaces, like behind curtains).

The most annoying aspect of the game, though, is when you get swatted to an instant death while sucking blood for seemingly no reason at all. At first, this seemed to be a result of my own greed (trying to fill up 3 tanks in rapid suck-session [pun intended]), but it's happened as early as the middle of the first tank already, even though the circle on the pulse meter was right in the middle of the blue!

And although death just means you have to start the stage over again from the beginning, this involves sitting through all of the stage's establishing camera pans and such once again (which CANNOT be skipped), as well as finding all of the bonus items again... not to mention loading time! Fortunately, none of these activities is unbearably time-consuming or annoying, and the frustration suffered as a result of all of these frustrating occurrences is surprisingly minor. Plus, the loading time is usually accompanied by a rather amusing picture of a pig-shaped napkin ring smoking a cigarette, which is so bizarre and amusing that it NEVER gets old.

All in all, Ka is an unusual, rather fun little game. And though its wonderful sense of humor can only truly be appreciated by one with at least limited Japanese proficiency and cultural knowledge, the gameplay is solid enough to be enjoyed on its own, even if you speak no Japanese whatsoever. It has a few flaws, but when it comes down to it, Ka is a great game to play whenever you have a little time to kill, and may just leave you feeling a little itchy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/02, Updated 09/03/02