Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour of Heppoko Kishi is direct and easy to understand: you guide a reluctant would-be knight through side-view stages, jumping between platform sections and attacking the creatures in your path. There is little ceremony around the basics, which is a strength if you want a compact action game that gets to the point. You are moving toward a boss almost immediately, rather than waiting for a complicated combat system to reveal itself.

Its most useful wrinkle is the weapon progression. Every defeated boss awards a new weapon, and you can switch freely among the weapons you have earned. That makes each victory more than a checkpoint; it expands the set of tools you bring into later stages. The game is still straightforward at heart, but changing weapons as needed gives the combat a welcome bit of flexibility.

Frustration will come from the punishment for dying. You return to the beginning of the area, with your health restored but your progress through its platform sections reset. Full health softens the blow, yet it does not erase the need to replay what you already cleared. If you enjoy learning an area through repetition and arriving at a boss better prepared, this is a fair trade. If frequent resets drain your patience, the otherwise brisk structure may start to feel stubborn.

Strong New Game is the mode for anyone who wants to immediately experiment with the full weapon set, while Otaku Style turns the whole adventure into a one-hit survival challenge. Those options are not substitutes for a deeper core game, but they do give capable players concrete ways to revisit it with a different level of pressure.

Graphics

The game uses a side-view perspective, so platform routes, enemies, and the boss at the end of each stage section are framed in the classic action-platformer way. Its fantasy setting is paired with an anime/manga genre tag, fitting the young, reluctant knight and fairy premise.

Story

The story knows exactly how lightly it wants to wear its quest premise. A young traveler reaches a new city, gets summoned by the king, and is ordered to rescue the princess. His immediate reaction—he is just a normal traveler—gives the setup a more personable angle than a hero who rushes eagerly toward destiny.

The fairy who stops him as he leaves the city adds a useful push to the premise. She is explicitly forceful where the hero is hesitant, and that contrast gives the journey a little comic energy. It is a familiar fantasy rescue mission, but the protagonist’s lack of confidence keeps it from feeling entirely automatic.

Do not come expecting a sprawling tale from a game built around successive platform stages and bosses. The narrative works best as a clean reason to keep the knight moving forward: he has a princess to save, a fairy insisting he do it, and absolutely no initial belief that he is the right man for the job.

Overall Experience

Heppoko Kishi is a modest, focused action platformer with a likable underdog lead and a structure that respects your ability to grasp its rules quickly. The stages, boss rewards, and weapon switching form a tidy loop. It does not need a complicated premise to make the next boss and its promised weapon feel worth chasing.

The main question is whether you can live with area restarts after death. This is the kind of game where persistence is part of the experience, and the full-health restart makes retrying less punishing without making mistakes consequence-free. That balance will feel satisfyingly traditional to some gamers and unnecessarily repetitive to others.

Give it a chance if you want a no-nonsense fantasy platformer and like the idea of steadily building a weapon collection from boss wins. The Strong New Game mode is a particularly nice invitation to replay once you know the route, while Otaku Style offers a sharp test for anyone who wants every hit to matter. It is small-scale, but it has a clear sense of what kind of challenge it wants to be.

Retro Replay Score

7/10