Sonzai. Kumotoshi secrets

Sonzai is a 2D action brawler platformer Role Playing game developed by ‘2 Odd Diodes’ and published by ‘Top Hate studios‘. Sonzai is said to be coming out the 29th of March 2024 on the Xbox Series X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac, Linux, PS5, PS4 and PC. X35 Earthwalker has to be in the mood for mysteries.  Sonzai apparently has some mysteries going on. Let’s take a look. 

Keeping things simple here. Sonzai takes place in Kumotoshi. Kumotoshi is a magical town. A place that numerous young mages go to. Other for a big adventure, to learn, opportunities, whatever. It’s nice too but the outsides are not so nice. Dangerous even. We hear there those places are infused with magical energy. Players control a new student who just showed up in town.

Sonzai is going to be a magical brawling adventure. There will be new people to meet and friends to make… hopefully. What’s more certain though is that Kumotoshi has mysteries and secrets confirmed. What’s not so secret is that there’s a bunch of people and Sonzai has placed good emphasis and focus on the relationships you build with characters. Each character is said to have their own lives and stories. Hopefully that will be clear and strong in the game.

Basically Sonzai has made it so that your relationships affect both “the scope of the player’s skill” and even the story itself. So yeah, get more powerful through those relationships. Some characters like to see a new person in town while others don’t. Keep that in mind. All this is happening while you still got to handle your high school life here at Kumotoshi. We trust that the ,ore of this magical place is deep enough. 

The biggest factor has to be the combat. It’s combo based. Really about the combos. We hear there’s lots of customisation when it comes to the combat. There’s runes and modules. Active runes are the big magical attacks to use against foes. Passive runes grant sweet buffs if you meet the conditions. Modules are what causes the modifiers. Get creative with them to adjust your loadout. We see some crazy combo potential from staying airborne, to dashing around to pulling enemies in, to melee and to ranged. Things looking real nice.

We checked out some Sonzai gameplay and it’s not what we expected. Let’s start with the visuals. The graphics style we don’t like at all but we see the work that goes into it. This style take a lot of effort to pull off. It’s described as inky minimalist with “precisely choreographed animations”. All hand drawn. Respect the work that went into it. We do, even though we don’t like it. It’s apparently quite a big world with different locations that have their own main stand out. Like an underground civilisation, what looks like a  mystical forest. There’s even a burning town.

Overall Sonzai is looking like an excellent game. Most likely top tier. X35 Earthwalker always respects the hard work that goes into these things. So the developers has to prove us right concerning this respect. Don’t fail us. From the art style, to the mechanics, to the combat. This does look real deep for sure. The developers ‘2 Odd Diodes’ have done an excellent job so far. We at X35 Earthwalker will keep our eyes open for this game. Now Sonzai may have deep customisable combat but it’s far too basic in the eyes of… the ‘Earth Walk!’