Update News
The Legend of Kusakari Releasing
August 5, in the year of our Lord 2016 - Sydney,
Australia: Independent developer and publisher Nnooo is
delighted to announce the release date for The Legend of
Kusakari, a quirky adventure-puzzle game from Japanese developer
Librage. The game is scheduled to launch on August 25th on
Nintendo 3DS™ in The Americas, UK, Europe, Australia and New
Zealand.
In The Legend of Kusakari you play the role of Shiba Kari, a
humble grass cutter who keeps the fields clean so brave warriors
can focus on defeating evil and in doing so, eventually defeat
the Demon King. While cutting the grass Shiba Kari has to avoid
the battles going on around him as well as the slimes, dragons
and other objects trying to distract him from his heroic task.
He can level-up his scythe within each level of the game by
cutting more grass and use this to unleash a powerful
grass-cutting swing. He literally lives to cut the grass, so if
he stops even for a short period he will lose health which can
be replenished by finding and cutting a clump of life-giving
blue grass. The faster Shiba Kari completes each level, the
higher his rank will be for that level. On completing each level
he is rewarded with a fanfare from the good king’s band, in
which one of the trumpeters is not quite as proficient as the
other band members.
Founder and Creative Director of Nnooo, Nic Watt says:
“There is a constant and unfulfilled demand to bring Japanese
content to western markets so we will be bringing great Japanese
games to western consoles and handhelds as part of our
publishing business. The Legend of Kusakari is full of quirky
humour, has great polished gameplay and is a lot of fun to play.
We were left with smiles on our faces when we played this on our
Japanese Nintendo 3DS so we decided to sign it up and publish it
in the west.”
Developer Librage was inspired to make The Legend of Kusakari
from cutting the grass in the SNES version of The Legend of
Zelda. "We felt that we would like to produce and play a game
which had this as a central mechanic,” according to Kenichi
Fujimoto, localisation manager at Librage. "However, we didn’t
feel it would be appealing if players just cut grass, so we
introduced the puzzle/challenge element. We also wanted to have
a story hook to keep the player interested. Seeing as there are
so many stories about a brave warrior beating an evil King, we
thought it would be interesting to compose the story from a
fresh point of view. In The Legend of Kusakari you are a humble
grass cutter who keeps the battlefields clean.”
The game's 50 levels are expected to take players around 10
hours to complete. There are an additional 10 levels to unlock
which can take up to another 10 hours to finish. There is also a
Green Thumb Almanac system, a book which documents all the
different types of grass, plants and weeds you cut. There are
various conditions under which players can get each collectible
plant which will require them to attempt different ways of
playing the levels to unlock them.
The game also has an endless mode where the grass keeps spawning
for as long as Shiba Kari can stay alive to cut it. Finding and
cutting the elusive blue grass is the key to survival in this
mode. Fortunately there’s a map and a sprint ability to help him
survive. Online leaderboards for this mode will turn you from
humble grass cutter to legendary lawn-mowing champion!
And that out-of-tune trumpeter? An incompetent relative of the
good king, leaving us wondering just how good that king is!
The Legend of Kusakari is priced at US$4.99 / €4.99 / £3.99 /
AUS$6.99 / NZ$7.99.
Families are required to pay for Internet usage fees to download
this game. For more information click
here.