Kameo
Kameo: Elements of Power is a 2005 action-adventure video game developed by Rare and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The player controls Kameo, a 16-year-old elf princess, who must travel across a fantasy land and its realms, rescuing her family while collecting Elemental Sprites and Warriors in a beat 'em up style combat system, in order to defeat the troll king Thorn and her treacherous sister Kalus. Kameo's ten elemental powers let her transform into creatures and use their varied abilities to solve combat-oriented puzzles and progress through the game's levels.
Kameo is known for its prolonged development cycle, which spanned four Nintendo and Microsoft consoles. It was conceived as a Pokémon-style game of capturing and nurturing monsters, but traded its lighthearted Nintendo overtones for darker themes more befitting of Xbox audiences when Microsoft acquired the developer. In this process, Kameo was repurposed from a fairy to an elf—a transition the game's director later concluded was unsuccessful. While nearly finished for the original Xbox console, the title was delayed to become an exclusive launch title for the upcoming Xbox 360. Rare used the extra time to improve the game's audiovisuals, including Rare's first orchestral soundtrack, and add a local cooperative multiplayer mode. Kameo released alongside the Xbox 360 launches: November 2005 in North America and several weeks later in Europe.
The game received generally favorable reviews and sales estimates ranged from subpar to par. Reviewers praised Kameo graphics as setting standards for the new console, and noted its vivid color palette. Their criticism focused on the gameplay, in particular its repetition, awkward controls, easy combat, disorganized introduction, and overbearing tutorial. Reviewers found the story and Kameo's character lackluster, but largely liked the other characters and the core morphing concept. They had high praise for the orchestral score and other technical features, apart from the game's camera. Rare released several cosmetic downloadable content packs, and a free online cooperative mode upgrade.
Retrospective reviews remembered the game for its bright and impressive graphics. Kameo was included in Rare Replay, an August 2015 compilation of 30 Rare titles for the Xbox One, alongside documentary-style videos about the game's development and its planned sequel. The sequel was canceled after a few months of production due to both poor sales of the original and Microsoft's new focus on games for its Kinect peripheral.
Gameplay
In the third-person action-adventure game Kameo, the player controls the titular character, an elf who inadvertently sabotaged her older sister Kalus' reputation before her coronation, causing Kameo to be given the crown and the Elemental Powers that come with it instead. Feeling slighted by this, Kalus frees the troll King Thorn and forms an alliance to take back her crown and the remaining elemental sprites. Kameo uses elemental powers to transform into creatures with different abilities, which she switches between to solve puzzles and advance through the in-game world. The player controls the player-character with the left analog stick, the game's camera view with the right thumbstick, and the character attacks and abilities with the controller's triggers. The Xbox 360 controller's face buttons swap between three active, elemental powers.These ten "elemental warriors" include a fire-breathing creature who lights torches, a gorilla who climbs walls and throws foes, and a plant who punches opponents. There are two each of five element types. Some enemies have specific weaknesses and can only be affected by specific elemental powers or hazards in the environment. The game is structured such that new character abilities unlock just as their benefits are needed to solve a puzzle. Thus the game's puzzles depend on combat more than logic. Each of the elemental forms has several ability upgrades, which the player can redeem by collecting and delivering fruit to a sacred tome called the Wotnot book. The Kameo character, herself, can move faster than the elemental warriors but has no special ability apart from breaking crates.
The game begins as Kameo advances through a castle—with the help of three elemental powers—to rescue her family. As the tutorial prologue ends, Kameo loses her elemental powers and is ejected from the castle into the Enchanted Kingdom to grow stronger and try again. Kameo travels through four themed worlds at the outskirts of the Badlands, the overworld that connects the areas. Each of the worlds are interspersed with townsfolk and combat-oriented puzzles. Kameo can either travel to the worlds through the Badlands, where the elves and trolls skirmish, or warp from the Enchanted Kingdom. A help system built into the game provides hints or direct solutions for struggling players. Throughout the kingdom, Kameo finds and defeats the seven shadow creatures each guarding one of her elemental powers, while saving her family earning the other 3.
The player can slow time by landing successive hits and kills on enemies to fill an on-screen meter. The player can return to levels to attempt a higher score. The game's action sequences, more than half of the game, require the player to defeat groups of enemies before proceeding to the next room, and ultimately leading to a boss battle. Kameo has a two-player, split-screen cooperative gameplay mode in which players can fight alongside each other during the action scenes. Rare added support for online cooperative play as a downloadable patch following the game's release.
Development
's protracted development of Kameo spanned four consoles: Nintendo's Nintendo 64 and GameCube, Microsoft's Xbox, and ultimately, the Xbox 360. The game became known for its long development cycle—IGN wrote that the game had received more IGN editor coverage during its development than "almost any other single game". In the final game, a recipe can found that reads "Take one Cube of ice… Add two beetles from a Box of Creepy Crawlies… Heat to 360 degrees…" which alludes to the development cycles on each console. Shortly after Rare finished work on Donkey Kong 64, Kameo began as a game in which the player catches and evolves creatures. In lead designer George Andreas's concept, the creatures would follow the player and act of their own volition. This version had a "Nintendo feel" and Pokémon-like concept: the player nursed little monsters into adults. Kameo spent several years in development for the GameCube and Rare shared an early version of the game at Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual video game conference. In the meantime, Microsoft acquired Rare in September 2002 for a record price of $377 million. Kameo lost many of its Pokémon elements when development transferred to the Microsoft's Xbox. Rare's Phil Tossell liked the Pokémon-style concept but ultimately felt that the platform change was a positive move for the game.The team distilled the original concept into the core gameplay mechanics that players preferred, namely the abilities to morph into characters and to fight. In what became the core gameplay, the player would use a combination of Kameo's elemental warriors to progress through levels. Rare later expanded the concept to that of an adventure game, though its story was secondary to the gameplay. Kameo was designed for fluidity—the team tried to minimize player chores and player waiting times. The team simplified the set of characters from a hundred to a dozen, and expanded the skill sets of those remaining. Tossell designed these characters, and started with a boulder-like animal. These creature designs later became Kameo's morphing forms. As the game transitioned and Rare attempted to distance itself from its mawkish reputation for "cute characters with big eyes", the team struggled to repurpose Kameo into an elf from the fairy of the original concept. Tossell felt that this task was impossible, as Microsoft simultaneously wanted to widen its base while it did not give Rare the room to grow out of its cutesy design. The Kameo character transitioned through a "tribal" look before becoming an elf, and her own attacks were ultimately repurposed into the elemental warriors'. Kameo became an Xbox 360 launch title and received a graphics upgrade in the process. The game had been about 80% complete for the original Xbox, but the transition freed the game's vision from technical constraints.
With their timeframe extended, the development team added extra attacks for the ten characters, day–night transition interactions, in-game scores and leaderboards, a cooperative multiplayer splitscreen mode, and a post-release update that extends the cooperative mode over online and local network. The team revisited level ideas that did not fit on the previous console, and transitioned from synthesized music and a text-based story to an orchestral soundtrack and voice acting. The cooperative mode was also added retroactively, which challenged the already finalized level design. The most pronounced improvements were in the game's graphics and upgrades. Levels on the Xbox 360 could hold thousands of characters on-screen at once. The team playtested the feel of each elemental warrior and spent extra time refining the gradual difficulty increase in the opening level. In reflection, the project's biggest influences were ultimately Nintendo, Pokémon, and Resident Evil.
Around the time of Kameo release, lead designer George Andreas felt that the original Kameo concept of finding and using monsters had evolved and carried through to the final product. He said that there were enough ideas for a sequel within the new intellectual property if players were interested. Years later, Andreas reappraised and said that the game should never have been released and remains a sore subject for him to discuss. Since the project was nearly finished, they had opted for launch title release instead of starting over. Andreas felt that the effort to conceal the fairy Kameo as an elf was unsuccessful and that the character did not match the Xbox's first-person shooter demographic.
Rare and Microsoft Studios released Kameo alongside the Xbox 360 console as a launch title: on November 22, 2005, in North America, and December 2 in Europe. The game was available for purchase in retail stores ahead of the console's launch date. At release, it was sold at a lower price than other Xbox 360 games. In advance of its February 2, 2006, Japanese release, Microsoft Japan held a Kameo promotional press event with celebrities and Kaori Manabe in late January 2006. 1UP.com reported the event as "subdued" but appropriate for Japanese games journalists to test Kameo, as the Xbox 360 had been selling poorly in the region.