Sanabi Thoughts
“Getting to the end isn’t the most important part!”
“With every hello comes a goodbye”
“If the end comes for everyone exactly the same.. Getting to the end.. Is not important”
Those are definitely my favourite three quotes from Sanabi. To be honest, when I looked at the game and read the reviews, all I could think was “fuck yeah, let’s go Katana Zero!”
But I was instantly blown away by how the game looked. I loved Katana Zero’s aesthetic, being a huge pixel art and cyberpunk aesthetic fan. But even I had to concede that the pixel art renditions in this game were extremely impressive. The music from the start was great, and the animations for the characters were so expressive that I was immediately impressed. In some aspects, I think it’s better than Katana Zero (being a complete story definitely helped).
Unfortunately, I don’t just have positive things to say. I’m going to quickly get my negative complaints out of the way first because in the long run of things, they’re pretty minor (depending who you are at least). The biggest one, for a game like this, is that the gameplay was… rather annoying at times. Namely there were three major parts in the game where I was annoyed/frustrated and wanted it to be over with.
The first area is the first time you enter the business district? The district where you have the red lasers shooting at you when you enter the red areas. In a game where you feel like you want to move fast, the game does a lot of enemy encounters and gimmicks that force you to kinda slow down and I didn’t really like that. I get the “idea” of the red zones, to force you to kind of think about how you’re moving, but it felt more obstructive and momentum stopping than reaction focused.
The second area was the factory, the first time through I didn’t enjoy the whole thing with the overseer constantly following you. This was more of a personal gripe, but I didn’t find the timing aspects that good.
The third part was the retread through the first areas. In both the concept and lead up, this seemed sick as fuck. You come to terms with the truth, and you know what you have to do. You drop down through all the areas you went through and…. You have to climb your way back to the top.
Normally, I love getting more powers and going through these areas again. But the powers you have when you come back don’t really feel that impactful. It ultimately just feels like you’re playing more padding of the game, and some areas are really long, or at least felt long. It kinda serves to pace out the knowledge learning of Mari’s backstory, but it just didn’t feel that good.
With all the bad out of the way, let’s get to the good!
First off, the art is fan fucking tastic. Loved the art style, and all the little portraits of Mari and the general are cute as fuck. The backgrounds are SO good, so good that I’m amazed they put that much effort. The scene where you first see the top floor of Mago city is fucking outstanding. The animations themselves are also fantastic, honestly blown away.
Second, the music is ALSO incredible. Listening to the OST right now, it nails the cyberpunk vibe but it ALSO nails the emotional scenes. All the flashbacks with Mari are cute, and the music is just… mwah.
But of course, the best part, and honestly the part I didn’t really expect to be blown away by, the writing.
When the game started, I really expected the writing to be serviceable, and the way the game starts, it’s pretty standard stuff. Guy’s daughter gets killed, wants to go on revenge fueled rampage, sweet, I’m in.
I even thought I figured out the twist a bit in, and while I “did”, I wasn’t exactly ready for the detailed story. I had assumed about 1/3 of the way in that Mari really was his daughter, and that he was the one who died in the explosion. This was in line with the whole personality duplication and insertion stuff.
But the real twist was how much of the MC’s memories were manipulated. The reveal of that plus going through your real source memories and listening to the researchers talk about what they did was cool. I liked that.
The best element though, is of course Mari and the MC’s relationship. When they introduce the harmonica early, then near the end he gets the flashback and picks up the harmonica… and plays it again… and the song is called Sanabi… that was peak fiction. Playing the song to cheer up his daughter one last time…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
That shit was really good.
I think that combined with the whole “getting to the end is not the important part” and “with every hello comes a goodbye”, it really hit hard. It made Mari realise that it’s not just about the end result, it really is about the journey.
Oh man, speaking of parts that hit hard. The flashback where they talk about fighting the worm man, and how all the bosses they talk about in their pretend adventure match up with the real adventure they did… and you realise why Mari really wanted to work with you… I’m not crying… you are…
Overall, I really do like Sanabi. Parts of the gameplay miffed me, but I really do think that the story, setting, art, and music set it apart. Definitely worth the money I spent and I’m happy I played it.