Game Story Explained: Katana Zero

Released in 2019, and nominated in the same year as Best Independent Game at The Game Awards, Katana Zero is a platform game set in a dystopian future in a neo-noir style, with a very challenging combat system. However, as its plot involves characters changing multiple timelines, the story can become confusing and difficult to relate each cinematic to different moments; So, when this becomes more intense during gameplay, we’re in one location and then appear in others, thus the notion of space and present time is distorted.

The affected notion of time is very closely related to the mystery that surrounds the game's protagonist. In a search for the truth about the events in his past, we will unravel in Katana Zero a story about the use of military drugs, the lack of ethical control in research into super soldiers, abstinence and war crimes. Here, I will explain everything that happens throughout this game, which is a delight for both platform game players and cyberpunk lovers.

We start on a mission with the protagonist, who is known to some characters as Dragon. He is a war veteran, who has a supposed gift known as precognition, where he can plan all his movements to then be executed in the next few seconds; thus, it allows him to perform actions considered impossible by any ordinary human being, such as reflecting bullets and facing enemies armed with a katana. This is the main mechanic for overcoming the game's stages: using precognition to eliminate all the enemies in an area, since any hit results in death. But what exactly would this mission be? Eliminating a target designated by his employers; therefore, Dragon acts like a hitman.

The missions carried out by the protagonist are given to him by his psychiatrist, who he meets regularly after each of them is carried out; This ends up becoming mandatory for the protagonist, since only in his weekly sessions does he receive the medications to treat his amnesia and supposed head trauma that he suffered in the war. Among his symptoms, it’s common to experience nightmares at night, which he believes are related to his forgotten past; the psychiatrist believes that these are side effects of the medication. The work consists of executing targets that are related to the distribution of a new drug in the city, and with this, we begin to obtain new information about what’s really happening, as this is never made clear by his employers.

The content of these nightmares is very important: the dream involves a cabin in the countryside, where a child is hiding out with a scientist; a military man enters the house, and murders them both, also destroying a research machine in the background.

In one of these missions, the main character is assigned to eliminate a DJ who is supposedly distributing this drug. When arriving at the place, he’s warned by the psychiatrist that he’s prohibited from talking to Electrohead. Obviously, this suspicion only brings greater interest in talking to the DJ; Upon finding him, he is scared and believes that you are the one he stole the new drug from, and using it, he no longer knows what is real, in addition to allowing him to see time slow down. When questioning the psychiatrist about this, he becomes enraged and clarifies that, in fact, precognition is one of the effects of the drug, and it’s this supposed medication that we receive in every session.

As the missions progress, we meet an interesting character: V, who is a drug dealer, and knows a lot about this new drug we are investigating. Strangely, he also has great admiration for the swordsman, especially for his ability to commit murder and not feel remorse. In one of our missions, V manages to find our designated target before the protagonist, both get trapped in a room, and V notices something different: it’s virtually impossible to assassinate the protagonist, because every time he dies, he uses precognition to avoid the future in which he is killed. Then he says: “How many times have I killed you? You’re also a Cronos addict then, I knew it.” Now we know the name of the drug, and that more people use it.

After escaping and chasing V down the road, causing unimaginable chaos in the city, he’s finally cornered. Then something strange happens: another Katana swordsman appears and murders the dealer; apparently, this is the supposed Dragon, and the main character only assumed that the enemies called himself Dragon, and there was no other swordsman involved. More questions are raised: who is this Dragon? What does he know about Cronos? Is he also a user? With all of these questionings, we head to the weekly session with the psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist is furious again with all the commotion caused in the city, but soon our attention turns to something else: we go back in time, to when V had trapped the swordsman in a warehouse. Time gets confusing, and V says that right when our withdrawal from Kronos hits, our time will stop, and we will stay infinitely stuck at the same moment in which the Drug left his bloodstream; his speech is interrupted by receiving the injection from the psychiatrist, and we return to the present time. Now, we must kill the Dragon.

We meet Dragon, but we discover that he has a partner in military clothes, and they are both seeking revenge against someone; the Dragon escapes and his partner is killed, and we are led to a new mission: eliminating Leon, the creator of the Cronos drug. Upon arriving at the laboratory and talking to him, we find out that he was involved in a government-funded process called project NULL, where super soldiers were created using the Cronos drug, which allowed people to go back in time and perform impossible missions. However, withdrawal increases exponentially in those who use it, and users become insane over time, trapped in time loops of their death infinitely, if they no longer use the chemical.

We arrive at the psychiatrist again, and our sense of time is almost nonexistent due to the intense withdrawal that the protagonist is suffering; tired of the lack of answers, the swordsman brutally murders the psychiatrist to obtain Cronos, and takes the dossier from the table; the next target was Zero, a remaining supersoldier from the war… but does he look like the swordsman? When we get home, we discover that we’re wanted by SWAT and run away. In this final quest, the true content of the nightmare is revealed: the soldier who murders the scientist and the child is actually Zero, which is the name of our protagonist. After leaving the house, Zero meets the Dragon, both supersoldier partners from the war who committed unimaginable crimes, and had their memories wiped. There was no head trauma, Zero was just a soldier who needed to maintain his addiction to Cronos so as not to succumb like the others. And just like that, the game ends

It wasn’t possible to elaborate on all the facts that happen in the game; there is a relationship of affection and fatherhood that Zero establishes with a child who lives in the neighboring apartment, in addition to the countless hallucinations that occur during the game; two masked figures, death and life, sometimes appear so that decisions and philosophical questions can be addressed. These and other theories and information are all complemented by playing the game.

The big difference in this story full of twists and turns is mainly how it’s presented to the player; it’s done in an intriguing way, where we always seek to become more interested, carry out the next mission and try to understand where each thing fits in to the larger picture, and all of this is revealed as the plot develops, so I believe it’s a unique experience, which is only truly experienced by playing, so it’s highly recommended to experience this entire story in gameplay.