Ah, Kemono Friends, the series that’s about a young child going to an island full of anthropomorphic animals that’s all fun and games, but in every episode, there’s just something about the world that’s more than meets the eye.
So naturally they made a video game about it. You might have even seen Kemono Friends: Kingdom around some time ago, but now you can enjoy the English version, and the game also supports multiple languages such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.
This time though Kemono Friends: Kingdom is being handled by a different publisher Neocraft Limited, and while it’s definitely unexpected to see this series take on a genre like Angry Birds while adding RPG elements to it, Kemono Friends: Kingdom is quite fun and has a nice amount of production value put into it, while still being pretty well optimized for lower-end devices. There’s a lot to look forward to in this game, and here’s a quick look at what the game had to offer, even if you’re not a fan of the series.
*Early access to Kemono Friends: Kingdom was provided by the publisher ahead of the game’s release with full access to the game’s content and materials and certain aspects of the game are subject to change by launch. Kemono Friends: Kingdom was played on a Samsung S7.
▍Surprisingly Smooth, Beautiful, and Economic
Mobile games can either look really good and run poorly on my device, or sacrifice graphical fidelity for great performance, and yet here we are looking at Kemono Friends: Kingdom which manages to achieve both of that by clever use of its presentation and smart resource allocation.
The most surprising thing about the game’s presentation is how smooth it is. Most of the time it was running at 60 frames per second. from the game’s dialogue, UI, menus, gacha animations, and even attack animations the game ran smoothly during most of the experience, something you wouldn’t expect your older phone to be able to handle.
Despite being that smooth Kemono Friends: Kingdom still looks good. Attacks are flashy, and a lot of its UI elements are presented with a nice bit of charm and thought put into it, like its many popups and even how the game transitions into stages with Weasel and Chevrotain hanging out in a cable car before the doors open up to the stage, and as the doors open even the lighting on the characters changes which is nice attention to detail.
The game just oozes style and is always moving. It’s nice seeing so many UI elements constantly flowing and it’s helped by having characters that are animated in Live 2D during conversations, it makes the game never seem static and somewhat “alive”, much like the many animals you can play with. Speaking of conversations the game’s story is fully voiced, which is nice to have.
The series has never been shy about its love for animals and Kemono Friends: Kingdom is no exception. Each Friend still carries over their many traits when introduced from the anime and other media, and Kemono Friends: Kingdom even has actual photos of these animals and comes with trivia about their habitats and conservation status, incentivizing you to unlock some more friends to learn more about them.
A minor addition that would have thing that would have been nice though is being able to see the skills and attributes of a character in the middle of a stage. While you will get a general idea of how their skills work from their Natures, early on it’s a little difficult to remember what each character does, and would be nice to have a refresher, especially when you have to try out a new character for trials.
The translation work is also fine for the most part, but there are a few spots where it’s missing, though, by the time you’re reading this, it may have already been fixed. In general Kemono Friends: Kingdom looks great and sounds great, and for what it’s able to do even on an older phone, there’s not a whole lot you can complain about.
▍Tactical Angry…Friends? Action
The last thing one would expect a Kemono Friends game to be inspired by is Angry Birds, but strangely enough the popular aviation game actually quite fits the theme of tossing animals at the cerulean to do battle. Even more so when there’s actually quite a lot going on underneath to make it quite fun, and pretty deep.
In a nutshell, Kemono Friends: Kingdom has you tossing the girls at Ceruleans with you being able to control the angle and power they fly at. When the plane lands on the floor or hits an enemy, the animals that have been deployed will then attack the closest Cerulean to it. If you feed the Friend a Kingdom Bun at any time, they’ll perform their Miracle skill as well before performing their basic action.
Each Friend is also categorized between one of five Natures, or the Friend’s class, ranging from Control, Guard, Heal, Support, and Assault. Each of these has different specializations ranging from doing crowd control, giving them team shields to survive big attacks, healing, auxiliary buffs like more attacks, and of course dealing loads of damage. They’re also split up between different Radiances, or elements, and since you can also bring 8 Friends to the party, there’s quite a lot to consider when building your team.
On top of how you build your team, you also have to figure how “how” to use your team. Because each friend that gets sent out acts before the other one, meaning depending on how you deploy your friends, you can have buffers or healers do their things before certain friends, enhancing only certain members for that turn.
You might want to deploy your Guard Friends right off the bat to ensure you don’t lose a friend at the start of a fight, or deploy an Assault friend at the beginning so they have much more opportunities to damage the opponent at the end of each turn. When certain Friends are deployed to the stage together they can even trigger party-wide buffs with powerful effects for certain turns, so you have to consider when and in what order to deploy them for maximum effect.
And that’s not even including the various stage hazards and designs you have to navigate across, like poison fields, bouncing platforms, portals, and if you hit an enemy at a certain angle you’ll deal bonus damage, or hitting them on a certain spot can trigger negative effects or make their big attacks deal much less damage.
There’s a lot going on to elevate its simple gameplay formula, and as you play you’ll find yourself more and more surprised by its mechanics and how much your own skill and timing can affect the outcome of a stage. This does mean there isn’t an auto-play function for most of the game’s stages, but considering each level doesn’t take too long to complete and its many features to make grinding easier, it’s a small price to pay for a fun time.
▍Features For a Much Smoother Ride
Despite how fun the Kemono Friends: Kingdom is though, a big portion of the game is also spent on progression, and if that part of your game isn’t smooth it can end up drastically damaging the experience. It’s a good thing then that the game knows this and does its best to incorporate plenty of game modes and features to make progression and leveling up a breeze.
Leveling up is fast as the interface lets you use as many experience materials as you need at a time, and the game lets you “Blitz”, or sweep stages as many times as you want, making the whole farming and leveling aspect of the game incredibly painless.
The game also doesn’t seem to lock its materials behind daily schedules except for Pine Cones, letting you farm at your own pace. You also get double rewards three times per blitz on certain stages, it makes coming in and doing your daily missions fairly hassle-free, especially since every menu in the game loads very quickly, minimizing down-time and busy work.
There are some things that would be nice like being able to tap on the missing member of a combo would make team building a little easier since their chibi icons don’t always match up with the Friend portrait, especially when many Friends can look the same if you’re just viewing a part of their head. These kinds of interactable information popups are available in most other places though if you can remember each character by associating them from the story, it’s just a fairly minor thing you’ll only have to deal with in the early game.
Kemono Friends: Kingdom also has other modes like raids and challenges, where completing them can net you gems and even copies of characters like Shoebill, giving some options for free-to-play players, which I’m sure no one will ever complain about. Also thankfully each character only needs Five of their dupes to fully max out their breakthroughs, each one giving some pretty powerful upgrades so even if you don’t grab a lot of 6 stars, you’ll find lower rarity characters quite useful.
▍The Kemono Friends Mobile Game We Deserve
Kemono Friends: Kingdom is simply put loads of fun. Even if you were never into the anime for one reason or another, the way the game presents its story as a brand new tale without much baggage from its anime and with its own unique blend of fun gameplay elements.
Impressive visuals and optimized performance with simple yet surprisingly in-depth gameplay mechanics make this game a pretty good game to add to your catalog whether you want to play it casually or spend a lot of time on it.
Kemono Friends: Kingdom is a fun game that hopefully can last longer than many of its competitors that are seemingly shutting down with so many games on the market, and it’s at least worth a try if you’re looking for something new among the many turn-based RPGs and action-games with bullet-time dodge mechanics.
