For years, Kemco has been nothing if not consistent in their slate of published games. They've been a mobile gamer's one-stop shop for budget JRPGs, largely filtered through the lenses of four separate developers, each one doing as much as they can with as little time and as few fresh assets as possible. To be fair to the company, there's a demand for those kinds of games and not many are rushing to fill it on iOS anymore, with the way things have shifted in the market towards free-to-play social games. But even the most ravenous of niches can hit a saturation point if you push hard enough, and it almost feels like Kemco was intentionally looking for that line. Perhaps they finally found it, as 2017 has seen the publisher branching out in more new directions than they had in the previous four years combined. Yodanji [$2.99] is the latest fruit of those labors, and like its similarly-minded stablemate Djinn Caster [$4.99], it's quite good.
Yodanji is, as it says in its title, a roguelike. Specifically, it's a Japanese-style roguelike in the vein of games like Shiren the Wanderer, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, or Rogue Ninja. Instead of going with a more typical fantasy vibe, Yodanji is all about yokai, mythical creatures drawn from Japanese folk tales. Most long-time gamers have some experience with particular kinds of yokai, given that they're frequently included as enemies in Japanese games. The word itself has been thrust into a little spotlight thanks to Level 5's Yo-Kai Wat...