Hopping Girl Kohane Jumping Kingdom: Princess of the Black Rabbit

Genre: 3D Platformer

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

The Hopping Girl Kohane series has been around in Japan since 2015, with the first two games releasing on mobile devices. It is only with the third game in the series, Hopping Girl Kohane Jumping Kingdom: Princess of the Black Rabbit (from here on simply referred to as Jumping Kingdom for the sake of my sanity) being the first one to see release outside of Japan, and the first to leave mobile platforms, releasing exclusively on Nintendo Switch in 2019.

The premise of this game is that players are controlling the titular Kohane, a young anime-style girl riding a pogo stick, as she bounces along a path suspended high in the air, trying to make sure she lands on good tiles and not bad ones, and getting her to the stage’s exit as quickly as possible. You’ll earn a better score the faster you are, and the bigger the combo you rack up on the way by jumping on consecutive good or neutral tiles.

The presentation here is over-the-top colorful in a way that might be off-putting to some players, with its extreme Japanese-flavored cheerfulness being extremely saccharine sweet. Others may find it off-putting how the rewards for progress in this game are sometimes unlocking new outfits for the titular Kohane, whose breasts jiggle around in her win animations. The game doesn’t have any nudity, but you can be fairly certain that this “creep factor” is why the game was released under the “T for Teen” ESRB rating in the US.

To the game’s credit, the 3D models used for Kohane and her animal sidekicks are well-designed, well-crafted, detailed, and well-animated. As the star attraction of the game, this is one element that the game’s developers didn’t cheap out on. The game furthermore starts out with a nice animated intro with a lot of polish and personality. However, while those elements clearly got plenty of attention, the entire rest of the game seems to have had any significant funds funneled away from them, with stages consisting of perfectly flat platforms against extremely low-quality 3D backgrounds. It’s bizarre that the character models and intro animation look so polished and professional when the rest of the game looks so cheap and amateurish.

These visuals are joined by an extremely energetic soundtrack and Japanese-language voicework for the characters, and I suppose both suit the game, being both highly expressive and unintelligible. Speaking of unintelligible, the game features an absolutely horrible localization, with the opening story text making almost zero sense. It has something to do with a prince who magically transformed into a frog, and then someone else who transformed into a rabbit, I think? I have no idea how Kohane and her pogo stick factor into that…

However, while the bizarre presentation and the objectification of the game’s female lead may put off some players, the terrible gameplay seems likely to put off just about everyone.

It’s not that the premise here is bad. An Arcade-style obstacle course-esque Platformer where you’re automatically jumping and need to be careful where you land seems like a sound enough idea. And Jumping Kingdom has some decent variety in the sorts of tiles to land on and what they do, tossing your character in various directions, giving you bonuses or debuffs, and so on. And the idea that players will try to beat their scores in subsequent runs fits the Arcade-style gameplay well.

No, the problem here is the controls. Kohane is absolutely miserable to move around, taking forever to get going once you start pushing in a direction, and then taking forever to stop or change direction when you push in a different direction. Because of this, hopping on the correct tiles isn’t just a matter of proper timing, it’s a matter of wrangling with these terrible controls.

Despite this, I can see the appeal of Jumping Kingdom, and not just because of the boob jiggle. I like the gameplay premise here, and with better controls, this could have been a fun Arcade-style romp. However, as-is, this game is torturous to play, and I do not recommend it.

tl;dr – Hopping Girl Kohane Jumping Kingdom is an Arcade-style Platformer where players control the titular anime-style girl Kohane, having her hop on her pogo stick to try and land on good platforms while avoiding bad ones. The over-the-top colorful presentation and objectification may be off-putting to some players, but this game’s biggest problem is absolutely atrocious controls. The result is a game with some good ideas that is not at all fun to play.

Grade: D+

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