Aka Review

Aka could have used a little more structure. It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do. You start the game on a new island with an urn of your war friend’s ashes and the mission to spread these ashes on the highest mountain peak. It doesn’t take long to find this mountain and complete the quest, though, at which point, you might think, “Okay, now what…” I get that Aka is a casual game, so you could theoretically spend the rest of your time doing whatever you want. And by whatever, I mean farming. But the farming aspect has very little payoff. It’s not like you can sell the produce, so the main goal of farming is to make dragon food to fulfill an optional quest about baby dragons. Unfortunately, you have to make a lot of dragon food to get anywhere with this quest. You will most likely have exhausted everything else there is to do long before then.

So the real objective in Aka is actually to help several ghosts who are byproducts of the war. I do like how such a seemingly cute game on the outside has a fairly dark story about war and death. Many of the ghosts you meet are people you failed to protect in said war, after all. Once you realize the ghosts should be your focus, it’s not a terrible gameplay loop to track them down and meet their demands. It’s just a little annoying that the ghosts only come out at night, leaving you with nothing to do during the daylight hours. I mean, yeah, there’s always the garden, but gardening sucks. And most other quests boil down to repetitive busywork, like cleaning up the same three types of garbage on all four islands. Again, the game gives you the tools to play indefinitely, but it fails to also give you any reason why you would want to.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.