Welcome back to 2006. No, you haven’t stepped back in time. Instead, NIS America and developer Acquire have done it for you. It turns out there’s an obscure sequel to the PS2 Way of the Samurai games that never made it to the West entitled Kamiwaza. For some reason, it has sat ignored for over a decade and a half and now, NIS America has decided to publish the first English release, now called Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief.
Now if you’ve never played PS2 games before, Kamiwaza will be rather archaic for you. This isn’t an update or an upgrade, instead it’s a straight port of a mid-tier PS2 game. This is not a current-gen title by any means so prepare yourself. If you’re old (like some of us), you’ve likely forgetting how rough-around-the-edges that older games can be, especially if you haven’t cracked out any old discs in a while.
Either way, Kamiwaza features, well, thieves. You play Ebizo, a rather odd thief in Edo period Japan (that’s around the 17th or 18th century) who’s just learning the ropes when all the rules change and the crew you’re working with starts slaughtering people. He’s not on board with this dishonorable behavior and neither is his teacher Ainosuke so they rescue a young girl from an untimely death and Ebizo runs off to raise her. It’s a weird way to start a stealth game but you’ll find that Kamiwaza is rather unconventional across the board.
The start of the story introduces you to the mechanics of the game and you’ll definitely want to pay close attention. There are a ton of weird moves and combos available here, making Kamiwaza feel as much like a Devil May Cry spin-off as anything else. Apparently style counts in thievery as well as in avoiding detection. Who knew? After learning the ropes while the initial story plays out, we fast forward a bit. Ebizo has raised the girl as his own and Suzuna is a rather sickly thing, requiring expensive medicine (no, this isn’t a story about the American health care system…) so Ebizo resorts to the last thing he can do to make ends meet. Thievery!
As it turns out, there’s a Thieves Guild hiding in the next town over and it’s now your job to run missions for them and steal a ton of stuff to pay for Suzuna’s medicine and maybe make a tidy profit to boot. There’s a lot going on here though as Kamiwaza is anything but a standard game. Instead of just breaking into places, stealing what you need to and getting out, you’ll be breaking in and dancing past guards and citizens with a giant Santa Claus bag full of ill gotten loot. As you grab more and more, your bag gets ridiculously big and people start to spot you more. Fortunately you can drop the bag and kick it into people, knocking them out and allowing you to pass by with no notice. They’re only dazed so they get back up. You might be a criminal, but you’re certainly no killer! Yes, it’s that weird. Don’t worry, it gets stranger.
In addition to literally using your stolen goods as a weapon, you’ll have to wear masks to hide your identity because people see you walking about. If enough people see you, wanted signs start to resemble you more and more and you’ll have to physically tear them down in order to hide your identity. Odd, but it makes sense for the most part. Then there’s the awareness icons. If people see you, their awareness of your rises until they shout an alarm. People will come running and guards will attack you at that point. Fortunately, you have a variety of ridiculous moves in order to dodge people so they don’t see you or are left confused. You can cling to walls, inching millimeters behind guards and they won’t see you or your giant bag. You can also perform a series of acrobatic dance moves that earn you style points which you can trade for upgrades at the Thieves Guild. As you dance idiotically by, you can also pick the pockets of the people you zip past, resulting in a style boost and even sometimes triggering special moves if you can remember the insane number of combos and button presses required to trigger everything.
Honestly for most players, Kamiwaza will be a combination of hitting a bunch of random buttons and trying to remember what they do and a bunch of wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do and where to go next. You see, the game is a semi-open world game and you can pretty much go anywhere that’s available. Even finding the Thieves Guild in the first place can be a hassle because the map sort of tells you where to go but there are no on-screen prompts and the people around town are irritatingly unhelpful. This lack of direction in an open game is fine in a modern game but with a PS2 era game where everything looks the same and moving to a new area triggers load times, it can be more than a bit frustrating.
Now in addition to thievery being more about style than stealth, there are more oddities to Kamiwaza. First off, you have to beat up items in order to steal them because apparently they have innate resistance to being stolen that you have to pummel out of them. Why? No idea. Couldn’t tell you. It’s weird as all hell though. Additionally, the controls are simply terrible. Remember how we said this was a port? It’s a very direct port with no modernization of controls whatsoever. The first thing it reminds you of (if you’re old like some of us) is God Hand, the classic Clover/Capcom beat-em up. It has the same clunky feel to it that God Hand does but with none of the refinements that made that game so playable. For example, when you drop your bag, you have to kick it at enemies. But there’s no lock-on and you have to kind of aim at them. If your camera is misaligned with the kick target, you’ll miss easily, making them wildly suspicious immediately and setting your teeth to grating against each other. Sometimes your kicks won’t line up either and you have to scoot back bit by it until what you want to hit aligns, a pretty difficult proposition if the guards are hot on your tail.
There are plenty more similar issues too, with the possibility of leaving your bag behind entirely, timers on various missions, police chasing you, getting literally stuck in the ground or a wall, and a whole host of other irritating problems. If this were a modern game it wouldn’t have been released but apparently age makes that ok in this instance. The worst part is that underneath all the weirdness, complexity, and awkwardness of Kamiwaza, there’s an honest-to-goodness good game in there!
Not only does Ebzio just want to help Suzuna, but he also wants to help his fellow man. You have the option of donating the spoils of your actions to the community to help improve conditions for everyone and you must also balance that help with assisting your daughter. The plot is actually quite interesting if you can get past all the incredibly over-the-top characters, ridiculous action sequences and brutal controls. Kamiwaza is a game that is desperately yearning to be played and honestly is so frustrating that it’s hard to follow through and play it. If you don’t get sidetracked and stuck, you’re looking at a 10-15 hour game here and while that’s not long, the path to finishing is challenging and frustrating. Not everyone is going to be up to the task and even though this is a lost treasure of sorts, it’s definitely a flawed one as well.
Realistically, Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief is just not for everyone. In fact, unless they’re obsessed with older games, the stealth genre, or weird, heavily Japanese titles, it won’t be for most people. For the extremely niche audience that the game targets, it’s a fantastic title. For the rest of us, it’s going to try our patience and tolerance every step of the way. It’s too bad that such an interesting plot and story aren’t in a nice updated package that sports at the bare minimum, fully modernized controls and targeting. But what you’re getting is pure 2006 and if that’s good for you, then the $40 that Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief will run you is definitely worth spending!
This review is based on a digital copy of Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief is also available for PS4 and PC on Steam.