So do you wanna play Mario 3 again, and wanna do it with even more japan in it? That's this game.

Kitsune tails is a very on point recreation of the mario 3 gameplay, down to the jump height, hang time, and sliding off ledges to your death cuz you had too much momentum. Feels just like I'm comin home. I'd be surprised if there weren't some Mario 3 fan hacks in this games history.

Stepping away from nintendo though, this is a good game. It's easy on beginners, teaches you it's mechanics well, and has a good if slightly erratic difficulty curve. I think it's worth a buy on the gameplay alone It's a fun romp through an 8 bit rendition of picturesque japan. I like the art, it's expressive, beautiful, distinct, all those fancy words for 'art good'. There's a lot of little details, like some of the 'pipes' being wells, and the back-flips those jerk raccoons do when they throw knives into my fox. They look good too, even if I hate them.

Gameplay wise, it's good. It captures what I love about old platformer game, and gives me about 30 new levels to play it in. They're straight forward, well designed challenges that feel rewarding to get through. The game does have a bit of uh... difficulty jump some times though. It loves enemies that simply run at you, specifically a spiky fish and, way more annoyingly, a weird drooling ghost which is the bane of my assistance. They love to sucker punch you with these lil annoyances, and they can put you in no win scenarios. You can stealth past a lot of them, but sometimes they're just force one on you and those levels are the hardest and cheapest difficulty spikes. That one level? With the ice walls and the ghost you can't avoid? Hardest part of the game, blew right past the following levels no sweat but that one? Hecc that one. The tanuki and dog enemies are also really aggressive. They near instantly throw fast projectiles right at you, and they’re really hard to dodge. You can’t get away with anything with them, and I wouldn’t say in a good way. The rest is sound though.

After you 'beat' the game the first time though, they make you play through it again to reach the real ending. It's a retelling of events from the point of view of what could generously be called the antagonist. If you squint. The game turns into an entirely different beast at that point. Same mechanics, same game play. Same levels. But the game invites you to take a sword to the poor unsuspecting game design. It's great. This second character comes with a full suit of unique abilities, including several areal dashes that reset when you hit something with them. I probably died more playing as them because my overwhelming urge to go fast couldn't be reasoned with. You are technically more fragile most of the time so uhh.... There's also some questionable hit boxes on some of the bosses, where it looks and feels like they were no where close to hitting you when they did. You'll know em when you see em.

This game does have a cute story to it. You get short, voiced cut scenes between key levels playing out the lil radio drama between the leads. I like the added context and character building moments. The voices are noticeably over-acted, but the voice choices are quite good. I can see the cast going far with some more training and practice.

Now, to pull mario 3 off the shelf again, I'm gonna make a few personal comparisons. These aren't marks against or praises of the game. I'm just an old grandma on my chair mentioning how I miss the taste of country dust on my bread. So, for a game about foxes, there's very few places for me to poke my nose into for curiosity sake. The original Mario game had a lot of strange elements and places and paths to get distracted with. The level design in this game is very clean, more like the "new' super Mario games than the NES games. Nothing is wasted, and that feels like a bit of a waste to me.
I love the town that they added to it, it's shockingly fun to run around in a 3D space with the momentum curve. They also have an arcade house with a lot of arcade games in it. I like that I can take a breather to play break out or dig dug for some coins to buy power ups with. Also you can bet on horse races. That's fun too. Kinda puts some life into the formula that wasn't there before.
As far as I can tell, after you play the katana part of the game, there's no way to switch characters to replay levels. You're kinda stuck with the mario fox girl from then on. I could be wrong but I couldn't figure it out if it is there.
The games a good bit smaller than mario 3. There's no branching paths, you play all the levels, and even then it feels like you play less than the original game. Even a first time play through of both runs of the game won't take you more than 5 hours though, and that's including losing your infinite lives alot to the hard bits too. The games at a good price for that level count though, so, you know, dust on the bread.

All and all, I fully recommend this game. It's a good little game and I love it.