Oh dear, here we go again. Yet another licensed property game title. And predictably, it’s awful, but just how awful it is could almost be considered a good point. Tenkai Knights: Brave Battle is more of a weak battle if you ask me.

The game’s basic plot pretty much mirrors the events of TV series, and is about four young boys who are granted the power to become the Tenkai Knights, a group of robot mecha pilots that fight against the evil Vellius in his bid to awaken the Tenkai Drago, presumably to control it and take over the galaxy. This is despite failing the first time. Apparently he thinks his strength and willpower are improved enough to do manipulate the creature. This also has the side effect of Planet Quarton crashing into the Earth. So of course the heroes need to stop him. There are bits of story in-between each level, but unlike the show, they lack any depth, as it’s a bunch of talking character head portraits and dialog boxes. There also is very little accompanying voice acting to help with this. Since this is a kid’s show, a lot of dialog will have corny one-liners like ‘becoming Tenkai toast’ and the like. Not terribly interesting stuff, and not done particularly well, even in game form. As for the gameplay, this is where things go completely south.

The gameplay consists of having your chosen fighter battle enemy forces and complete various objectives to move on to the next story mission, although you can do side missions as well. The battles themselves take place in small arena like settings where they are vaguely reminiscent of Smash Bros. Only they are not nearly as fun. The troubles start once you actually begin moving. Movements are stilted, and slow, although you can dash boost to get around faster. Attacks are somewhat varied but they all pretty stiff in animation or execution. It feels like there are missing frames of animation, which makes for awkward attacks that can sometimes fail to connect. Jumping is equally off, with you being unable to control your jumping once airborne, although you can use jump jets to get some degree of course correction. The combat is just pitiful though, poor controls can easily leads to cheap hits and quick deaths. Oh, and failing means starting over missions from the beginning. That’s right, no checkpoints for getting to the other phases of a mission. At least dialog can be skipped. Like I mentioned earlier, there are various goals in each mission but most of them are just variations of ‘kill x amount of bad-guys’. You can also pick up weapons and other materials to upgrade your gear. Not that you’d want to invest in the extra time needed to meaningfully upgrade them, as it will take a bit of effort in that regard.

The audio-graphical detail in the game adds to the lackluster gameplay and story, looking like a poor game even by DS-era standards. Voice acting in particular is mostly inaudible because the music and sounds are set too high on default settings. Even then, it’s still eerily low. It’s like the developers didn’t do any decent sampling or sound checking before green-lighting the game. They at least made sure the game was free of any game-breaking bugs apparently, as I never encountered any. With the awful combat and lackluster presentation, avoid this cheaply made cash-in title of an otherwise mediocre TV property. Kids deserve better as well.

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