You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/sakuna-of-rice-and-ruin.1574/

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a game many people have heard about, subsequently forgotten, and heard about again. First shown in 2016, and featured at three consecutive E3 events, Sakuna has been a long time coming. I’ve found myself excited for it several times over, and now that it’s finally being released, I can say the wait was worth it.

Kicking off on a grand bridge, our story begins with not the titled goddess herself, but a group of lowly humans fleeing a world of strife. Surrounded by fog, their hazy memories blur into the background. Despite an echoing warning to turn back, they press on. They walk, lifeless and void of hope, until an unexpected foe greets them: the armed hoodlum Ishimaru. With no other option, a quivering samurai in the group turns to fight… until a tipsy girl in ornate attire graces the scene. After an offhanded comment comparing her to a child, she promptly smacks Ishimaru off the bridge, before walking back to the banquet to reacquaint herself with “the joy of intoxication”. Once more ignoring advice to turn back, the group follow the girl in hopes of finding food, and it’s here things start to go wrong for our small heroine. The humans work their way through the capital, eventually stumbling across the many offerings of rice and sake for the celestial ruler Lady Kamuhitsuki. In trying to chase them off, Sakuna ultimately knocks over a candle, setting the offerings ablaze, and landing herself in a whole heap of trouble. Her punishment? Banished from the capital, her life of luxury comes to an end, allowed to return only upon ridding the Isle of Demons of… Well, its demons, quite unsurprisingly. With the humans by her side, they set sail for a new life.

I adore the opening sequence. From the music, to the art style, to the voice acting, and even the smaller touches like the story of our human group being told silently as they walk across the heavenly bridge, it’s stylistically marvellous and entirely gripping despite presenting you with very little in actuality. You learn of the two realms, the Lofty and Lowly realm, you learn of the harvest goddesses, you learn of the humans and their plight, and finally, you learn of the spoiled goddess, now separated from her inherited wealth. It sets the stage wonderfully and swings open a delightful door for character development, because let’s face it, Sakuna isn’t a great person.

The monster culling of the game is set in a 2D side scrolling environment oddly reminiscent of Umihara Kawase for its grappling mechanics. Using Sakuna’s Divine Raiment, you’re able to grapple onto walls and enemies alike, propelling you in whichever direction you find yourself latching onto. Add to this a relatively standard mix of light, heavy, and customisable special attacks, and you have a surprisingly robust side scrolling experience, though one I admit didn’t quite gel with me at first. In the beginning especially, the game feels slow. Levels are sparse as you learn mechanics and things are steadily introduced, and while I do appreciate why this is, it made me yearn for something to make it go faster. A dash, a double jump, if nothing else just something to blindly occupy me as I walked through the slower initial areas. I am glad to say this is short-lived though. Once past the first few areas, you struggle to find yourself without something to do on a screen. Be it a platforming challenge, a particularly tricky grapple, or even a more standard encounter of the demon kind, your time is filled in a meaningful way, and it only gets better as you play more. You grow from a clumsy childlike player to something much more as you come to terms with the controls, learn the combos, and unlock more special moves to mix in. It is insanely satisfying to pull off strings of attacks as you dodge and grapple around demons like the cannon fodder of Attack on Titan. This sense of clumsiness and growth go deeper than the combat though, and seep into every aspect of the game.

As a farming goddess, it should come to no surprise that the other half of this game is growing rice. While the combat areas are side scrolling 2D environments, your base camp embraces something more modern, and comes in the form of a stunning 3D mountaintop to freely roam. It’s here you can talk with your new human buddies, rest for the night, eat for stat bonuses, and, as mentioned, grow rice. Starting out with a small field just in front of the cosy shack of a house, the game throws you in at the deep end with the most basic of instructions, before berating you for doing it wrong. I love it. Plant the seeds it said. Well, that’s all it said. You live in the inexperience of Sakuna, and as frustrating as it is to be told you’re not doing a great job, it again leads to this sense of growth. You’re not going to get it perfect the first time, and that’s fine, at least to an extent. My field of sporadically-placed seedlings did ultimately thrive, and I knew I could do better next time. Stick with it and the game rewards you. After a few fields of strewn seedlings, Sakuna gained a skill that put a little grid down for me to see the ideal spacing. After pulling so many weeds, Sakuna gained a skill to spot them more easily. You put in the effort, and you get something for it, not to mention the actual benefits of farming rice. You see, there’s no formal level up system in this game. Instead, your strength comes straight from the quality of your grain, and there’s a brilliant number of factors that go into a perfect harvest. How do you want to balance your fertiliser? Do you want your rice to focus on growth or bonuses when eaten? How close together were your seedlings? Did you pull every weed? Did you harvest soon enough for the crop to dry? It’s so hard to get a perfect result, but it should be. It’s in the etching closer to it where the joy of the game is found.

Clearing out monsters and progressing is a fairly simple process. Each area comes with a list of objectives, and in clearing these, your exploration level increases. As your exploration level increases, you can venture further out, unlocking new areas, and in turn, gaining access to more objectives. These objectives are comparable to the stars of Super Mario 64; you don’t need all of them, but you can skip over a few less desirable ones if you decide to collect everything early on. What you’ll need to do varies from map to map, but it usually boils down to an assortment of “collect X of this”, “defeat X of this”, “find a secret treasure”, or “clear the final part of the area”. While the variety isn’t all that impressive, it doesn’t feel repetitive thanks to the area design. You’ll have some focusing on a gimmick, like launching enemies into things, others with a spotlight on platforming, vertical stages standing out to me in particularly here, and others with multiple zones to work through, sometimes even with a boss at the end. Varying in length and complexity, the game manages to feel fresh without necessarily reinventing the wheel every other stage, and the mix-ups it does throw in keep you engaged in a way where they’re a bonus, in oppose to a focus. A nice example of this is a boss that’s made available to fight right at the start of chapter two. You can fight it right out of the gate, and hey, with enough skill and dedication, you can more than certainly beat it, but you can just as easily fight it and get completely wiped out. You’ll reach a point where you have to pick between going all in to outplay it, or just explore the other areas available to you while you also work on building your strength with farming.

Since each season lasting just three in-game days apiece, it’s easy to shift focus when you find yourself stuck. With the seedlings being planted at the start of spring, harvested at the end of summer, and left to dry throughout autumn, faming is a year-long process, so I’m glad it’s not drawn out too much. While still a primary mechanic, it’s streamlined to the point where it doesn’t feel a chore. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but I feel it’s done well here. I found myself in a circle of demon hunting until I hit a roadblock, farming in a Rocky-style training montage, and returning to thwart the evil, rice power in hand.

Really, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a great game. I struggle to summarise it better than that. A unique idea blending two fond genres in farming and 2D fighting, it’s a joy to play, and one I’m more than happy to have waited for.

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/akaso-keychain.1581/

Cameras find themselves in a strange place nowadays. Unless you’re a professional eager to throw down hundreds of your chosen currency, you’ll often find a smartphone more than able to fulfill your needs. With the good majority of flagship phones capable of 4K and beyond in their video recording, and some midrange devices putting a particular focus on their cameras, it’s easy to resign yourself to thinking a device like they Keychain just doesn’t have a place. 

Straight out of the box, the Keychain has a certain air of quality. Featuring a pivot stand and mount, a magnetic board, a clip, and a handy case, as well as the camera itself, you have everything you need to get stuck right in, regardless of what you plan on recording. The packaging is sleek and simple, much like the product itself, and getting started is as simple as following a few steps on a short manual. The Keychain sports a compact design, its 63x33mm dimensions apparently making it the smallest 4K camera on the market. The device is relatively limited in its hardware buttons, featuring just two on the right side, positioned similarly to a phone volume rocker. To the bottom, you have a compartment home to the USB C charging port, as well as a Micro SD card slot. Finally, the back of the device houses a relatively strong magnet, this used to secure the Keychain in place on a variety of accessories, or prop it on an unassuming fridge should the need ever arise. 

Following the steps on the aforementioned manual to get going is brilliantly simple. You charge it up, plop a Micro SD card in, and that’s all you really need to do. Hold the top button to turn it on, followed by the bottom button to start and stop recording. Just point and shoot, and you’re on your way. It is worth mentioning here that the Keychain won’t function at all without a Micro SD card, and I did find it a little picky with the ones it’d accept. I tried every one of my available Sandisk cards, and none of them worked. As my go-to brand for Micro SD cards, I had a lot of them lying around to test. It ended up being a rogue Kingston card that did the trick, so it might be worth keeping in mind should you decide you want to try this camera for yourself. 

With so few buttons, you may be left wondering just how many options a camera can have, and you’d be right to wonder. You see, to get the most out of the Keychain, you’ll be needing a smartphone handy, as well the AKASO Go app. To connect to the device, you hit the top button until it starts flashing yellow, and connect your phone to it as a WiFi source. I’ve not used a device like this before, so it took a bit of getting used to, but once I’d done it a few times, it became a somewhat trivial process. This setup does mean you can’t use WiFi while being connected to the camera though; a note maybe worth mentioning. Mobile data still functioned as normal though. Through the app, you get a live display of what the camera is pointing at alongside a myriad of fun options to pick between. The most important of these for most will likely be the quality settings. You have the touted 4K/30fps option as default, but looking down the list, there’s plenty more to choose from. To give you the full rundown, you have: 4K/30, 2.7K/60, 2.7K/30, 1080/60, 1080/30, 720/120, and 720/60. On top of these, you also have a few options for slow motion recording, time lapses, and a neat loop mode, that’ll record videos of a set duration that’ll delete earlier recordings as storage fills up. 

Before looking at my limited selection of video clips, I will just preface this by saying we’re currently in a national lockdown, so I haven’t been able to get out much. With that in mind, please enjoy a few clips of me in my back garden on a good spread of the Keychain’s available quality settings. The portrait videos were recorded with the camera mounted to the strap of my backpack, as you might have when hiking, and the landscape ones are just with the camera in my hand. I unfortunately lacked a headband I could clip the camera to see how it’d look. It’s also worth noting that YouTube doesn’t support 120fps videos. I decided to include them either way to give a look at the image quality in a reasonably well-lit setting.

As a quick breakdown of quality, it’s a mixed bag. To my untrained eyes, I’d say the camera excels when in motion, and less so with slow panning shots. I tried to do a few spins and jumps in a futile attempt to show a bit more action, but unfortunately I am somewhat limited in what I can record. I can see the camera doing well attached to a sportsperson, or overlooking something a bit grander than the garden fence, but the current climate makes getting that kind of footage a fair bit more challenging. 

The app does also come with a surprisingly robust set of editing tools, allowing you to splice and dice your clips on the go. Perhaps the best part of this is that the app is free, and is something I would genuinely recommend checking out if you just want an easy way to crop, trim, and combine clips without any kind of real learning curve or effort. Sure some of the filters have untranslated Chinese text under them, but with how much is available given you have no obligation to actually buy an AKASO product, I’m impressed. 

Looking back at the camera, I did find a few notable issues in my time using it.  The most significant of these was the camera simply freezing; there is no way to turn it off if this happens. During my testing, I found myself recording short ten second videos in each of the camera’s available quality settings. Switching between these in the app is easy, but on selecting the 4K option, the app became unresponsive, along with the camera itself. From here on, nothing I did had an effect. The app wouldn’t connect to the camera, and neither of the camera’s two buttons responded to my wide range of pressing and holding. With no other option, I set it to one side and went to bed, hopeful the battery would be drained by the morning. Now this only happened to me once, but it’s a significant issue considering the camera’s point and click ethos. It’s supposed to be a camera that you can rely on to work when you need it to, and incidents like this, no matter how infrequent, sully the confidence I may otherwise have. The camera does have a reset button of sorts in the form of a pinhole hidden next to the USB C charging port, but it didn’t seem to do anything in this instance. I’d also argue it somewhat unreasonable to expect people to be carrying a pin for the event their camera stops working, but maybe it’s just me that doesn’t carry such a commodity in this day and age. 

Recording in low light is somewhat grainy, but passable all the same, just as long as you stick with 30fps to record. On higher fps settings, you’ll find your footage much darker, though this is more to do with recording at higher framerates than the camera itself. The more frames recorded in a second, the less time the shutter is open for, and the less light is available to each individual frame–that’s the gist of it anyway. While this may just be a quirk of recording at higher framerates, it does pose an interesting issue for the minimalist camera; you need a phone handy to switch between these quality settings. With the two buttons on the device only capable of so much, you’re left in an awkward spot. To me, the Keychain should be the kind of thing you can just throw in a pocket, or in your bag, and use in a pinch. It’s the kind of thing I might want to take with me to record exciting moments, but it gets to a point where you have to question why you aren’t just using your phone. I want to defend the idea as a product you can take with you where you might not want to risk your excessively expensive phone, but I struggle to even do that when a phone is required to access the majority of the camera’s features. You’re left in an awkward place where you have to compromise to achieve what I believe this camera’s intent to be, and it just isn’t ideal. It’s as if they went overboard with the clinical minimalist look and forgot that people might not want to have to fumble around connecting their phone every time they want to switch between simple settings. Even having the option to store two presets to the device would go a long way in mitigating this criticism, but as it stands, it just falls into a weird place for me. 

The AKASO Keychain is an interesting device, I’ll give credit where due. It’s tiny, capable of 4K video, and has a plethora of useful accessories. It’s likely great for climbing, for sports, for recording the great sights you see on a hike, but I simply lack the confidence to want to use it for any of these things. If it decides to freeze up, then what? You’re stuck with a breathtaking view, or a magnificent accomplishment, and no way to share it… Except maybe your phone, which you’ll likely be carrying with you anyway to get the most out of the Keychain. At $99, it may yet be worth a punt as an affordable and relatively versatile little camera, but when it comes to longevity and overall reliability, I’d be hesitant to recommend it.