Kowloon High-School Chronicle is Buried Treasure
Or, "Kowloon High-School Chronicle is the best game I've played so far in 2025 and it's not even close".
Here's what I knew about this game before I played it:
- It originally came out in 2004 on the PS2 in Japan only.
- It got an updated version in 2006, also Japan only.
- It got a global remaster for Switch in 2020, with other platforms in 2022.
- The remaster is based on the original, not the update, due to the amount of work involved in reconstructing the assets.
- It's a Wizardry-style first-person dungeon crawler.
- Assuming from the title, there's a high-school.
Based on my cursory searching, the bulk of documentation on Kowloon High-School Chronicle in English is of the "What a wacky and weird game! Anime, am I right?" category. Whilst I usually roll my eyes at such sentiment, I don't know if I can really deny it with this game. It is certainly "anime", and I do not say this as a pejorative; it never ceased to surprise and delight. I had a genuinely great time. Honestly, it sucks that I didn't play this until after Cohost died, because they would have fucking loved this shit.
When you hit "New Game" (by shooting the button with a crosshairs like you're picking your stage in Time Crisis or some shit), this is what pops up:
It only gets better from there. Kowloon is an incredibly goofy, devil-may-care kitchen sink of a game, and it's some of the most fun I've had in ages.
Obviously, the prologue of the game gleefully cribs from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You are a Treasure Hunter (and the game treats the phrase "Treasure Hunter" throughout as if they are saying "Jedi Knight") in Cairo, delving into ancient ruins of buried cities with your aged local guide. But that Indy guy was obviously a loser, because these ruins have two Arks of the Covenant! Indy didn't even fight an ancient tomb guardian spirit by dumping his SMG's clip into its head!
Upon exiting the ruins and having your treasure stolen by the Nazi-coded organization of evil treasure hunters ("Relic Dawn"), you are informed by the organization of good treasure hunters ("Rosetta Society") of your next assignment: investigate the ancient super civilization ruins found beneath Kamiyoshi Academy in Shinjuku, Japan... as a transfer student. Of course.
Kowloon High-School Chronicle feels like an evolutionary step between the first three Persona games (that being 1, 2, and 2) and the modern installments (3 onward). That said, I want to be clear that this game isn't some kind of mysterious "missing link", as much as it feels like it. The core creatives are responsible for the Tokyo Majin series, which (including spinoffs) has something like a dozen entries that have remained in Japan and only one that's been localized in the US. Alas, I'm no Kastel or Indie Tsushin; I can only talk about what I, a monolingual jackass, have experienced.
How can you expect the librarian to respect you if you don't know about ancient super civilizations?
The game is broken up into distinct chapters akin to watching a 12-episode anime, complete with OP, eyecatch, and ED. I love this affectation and wish more games would do it (play Asura's Wrath), mostly because it calibrates your expectations. You intuitively know how an episodic anime works: there's some wacky hijinks at school (occasionally involving an offensive 2004 stereotype), the villainous Student Council Enforcer of the week is established, and you open up the dungeon to shoot some monsters with your gun for the big action finale. Then do it all again next week.
And just like a 12-episode anime, Kowloon is buckling under the weight of how many ideas they wanted to cram in, especially as it starts to ramp up to the climax and scrambles to tie up every plot thread. You can feel the turn coming. Ep7 is about the last point you can faff about before the Plot starts and we switch from aliens and cryptids to ancient curses and malevolent spirits. When I complain about actual 12-episode anime swerving like this, it's usually because what was fun about the show has been abandoned in an attempt to create stakes. But Kowloon takes on this structure willingly and consequently is in on the joke. Its self-aware melodrama is endearing and hilarious.
Most of the incidental assets are obviously cobbled together from photo reference and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Kowloon flagrantly takes inspiration from just about anything and everything. Director Shuuhou Imai cites stuff I've never read like Hideyuki Kikuchi's Treasure Hunter series, but there's also the obvious influence from Indiana Jones and The Mummy. The game's oddly robust crafting system was inspired by MacGyver. While Kowloon never reaches outsider art levels matching Deadly Premonition or Metal Gear Solid, there's still something enjoyably novel about playing an anime game where you're using a whip to fight giant snakes in an ancient Egyptian pyramid. As the kids would say these days, it commits to the bit.
You're a student, so, naturally, you don't have a character sheet. You have a report card. You determine your starting stats by picking which club to join. Do you want to get better at jumping so you can clear larger gaps? Better beef up your grades in Physical Education. Can't decipher the ancient text carved into stone tablets to figure out puzzles? Time to study History!
Quests for dungeon treasures are claimed from semi-anonymous clients such as "Black-haired Widow" or "The British Museum". Weapons are either purchased from a black market website via your Rosetta Society connections (and gated by your grades in English) or created via the the game's bizarrely robust crafting system. There are dozens of bespoke food items to combine in various combinations. A defining moment was streaming to friends and us finding out in real time that we could put a rock and stick together to get an axe. In 2004!
Even black market gun shops need FAQ pages to answer dumb questions.
As for bread-and-butter gameplay, Kowloon's first-person, grid-based dungeon crawling akin to Wizardry or the original Revelations: Persona is surrounded by visual novel style school segments where you talk to your classmates and increase their relationship values by telling them what they want to hear. There's no time management like modern Persona, only scripted break points where you explore the school and see what the characters are up to at the moment. However, there's enough going on under the hood that it's possible - even easy - to blunder right past conversations key to specific characters. My party member phone book was barely two-thirds full when I finished the game.
Kowloon re-uses a concept from the Tokyo Majin series called the "Emotion Input System". When your silent protagonist is addressed, a dialogue wheel pops up with eight different emotions with which to respond, including options like "Love", "Grief", and "Amity". Since it's difficult to parse the results other than the immediate response and accompanying relationship points jingle, one gets the sense that this system is masquerading as something far more complex than it actually is (this ain't Gunparade March). Still, I found it surprisingly intuitive and was often surprised by what the game accepted as an appropriate response.
Shin Megami Tensei taught us there's always something goofy about just pulling out a fucking gun in an RPG. Kowloon goes the extra mile by not just being a dungeon-crawler and visual novel, but also a first-person shooter. Pulling out your gun just throws a crosshair onscreen to aim as you will, and all enemies have designated weak points somewhere on their sprite. Combat is all about moving carefully around the grid map to keep monsters in firing range while also covering your vulnerable back. In a world where video game systems become ever further standardized, it was delightful to play a game from 20 years ago and experience a novel combat system.
Some party members give you clues about the puzzles and some just comment on random shit.
Other Fun Things I Did Not Have the Energy To Fold Into Proper Paragraphs Because I've Already Spent Too Much Time On This Post
- Pretty much every time a character brings up a new concept, you get the same dialogue prompt, and it's funny every time:
- I know about [X]
- I don't know about [X]
- Characters join your party by giving you their phone number, including a goofy print club sticker of their face.
- Fetch quests are randomly cobbled together like Mad Libs so you'll get stuff like a young girl from an undeveloped country asking you to find a Hazmat Suit to cheer up her sheep.
- There's a multi-hour subgame that's its own entire mini-Wizardry clone by way of Indiana Jones. Playing it gives you stat boosts in the main game.
- Any location with multiple people has an accompanying relationship chart showing what they think about you and each other that changes over the course of the game.
Really, "delightful" is just how I'd describe the entire game. It's obviously not without its problems - largely sorted into the categories of "you can die in like three hits" and "2004 anime is unkind to anyone not considered conventionally attractive" - but man. Man. What a good time at a bargain price.
My 2025 pivot to checking out old dungeon crawlers hasn't failed me yet. Who knows how many other hidden gems are out there?
Image Gallery (out of context spoilers)
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