Upon beating the game and watching the credits conclude, Haneda Girl leaves the player with well-earned hope: “Alone you go far, but together we go further.” There’s a pleasant undertone of teamwork that runs along the game’s foundation. When I had finally completed the game, I felt triumphant but exhausted.
For most players, Haneda Girl will likely recall the split-second, one-shot gameplay of Katana Zero, but it diverges with notably more complex mechanics. You play as both Chichi Wakaba, an especially skilled arcade gamer who enters the Digital Kingdom as Haneda Girl and you have access to a powerful mech suit known as M.O.T.H.E.R.
This makes for two different playstyles and combat mechanics. Haneda Girl is agile and sticks to walls with ease. Sometimes too easily. I felt like I had to button-mash to shake her off a wall. She comes equipped with a temporary “ghost mode” which allows her to turn invisible and a sword that can be used for stealth takedowns or super dashes, which hold a maximum of three charges, that will cut through multiple enemies as she zips forwards. She’s also only got one health point, so zip carefully. M.O.T.H.E.R. handles much more slowly, but with the perks that typically come with a mech: a railgun, light hovering, and forward slam. As the game progresses, levels will not only test your mastery of movement and ability but will also limit the ways you can use each manoeuvre. For example, it becomes common that M.O.T.H.E.R. will be blocked from specific areas or that you’ll have to leave M.O.T.H.E.R. on a pressure plate to open up a path forward.
Both are extremely well-calibrated and the level design beautifully tests your skill with their abilities. It’s immensely fun blitzing through enemies, finding passageways to get behind the bigger enemy robots and to cut them down with the super dash or quietly land behind a grunt and perform a stealth kill. M.O.T.H.E.R.’s range makes it possible to clear out rooms at a distance before traversing further into a level. You’ll fight opposing mechs one-on-one, and those fights are invigorating.
Switching between both characters is easy enough, but the controls don’t overlap perfectly, which means that it took me much longer to attain muscle memory or flow state than something like Ghost of Tsushima or Katana Zero. However, once you figure it out, it is a sweet feeling to successfully input dodges and commands seamlessly and see a room of enemies and hazards reduced to ashes. Victory is refreshing after a long bout against a densely packed level.
But that enjoyment comes after trial-and-erroring through levels to memorise enemy placement and shortcuts. To complete a level, you’ll have to kill every enemy and then navigate the environmental hazards to the end. In the latter half of the game, Haneda Girl liberally puts enemies in troll locations or explosions right where you think it’ll be safe to land. They sit just out of sight, or at the end of a narrow corridor that only Haneda Girl can access, or immediately at the destination end of a portal. Without checkpoints, this means that your progress gets reset often. It got so bad at one point that I would immediately spawn in M.O.T.H.E.R. whenever I was whisked away to a section of the level I couldn’t see before entering, just to tank damage and see what I was up against for a future attempt.
Thankfully, levels are short. With the final level as an exception, rarely did a level take me longer than three minutes to complete, and that’s when I was being overly cautious. Despite that short length, immediate threats fill every nook and cranny of each level and it’s nearly impossible to finish a level without several setbacks.
The short level length plays well and ensures that Haneda Girl does not overstay her welcome. There are 15 worlds with one to three main levels each. If you’re doing your math, three minutes per 42 levels would only be about three hours. It took me twice as long to complete the game due to its difficulty. Having short levels and a quick restart time made it much easier to keep grinding at the levels that required more effort. And thanks to each world only having a handful of levels, if you feel stuck on a particular mechanic introduced in a world, the flavour of the week passes fairly quickly. In short, Haneda Girl has incredible mechanical pacing. So while your moveset won’t change, with the exception of some mods you can unlock and equip, the game constantly feels fresh. Each world has collectibles and unlockable optional challenges.
I found the optional content to be incredibly engaging. The designs may be predictable, with some missions barring the player from using M.O.T.H.E.R. or Haneda Girl or having to save civilians before an enemy dispatches them. The incentives are the real draw, though. As you collect discs, rescue people, or get a gold rating for higher on a level, you can open up the side levels, and in return, you get a suite of modifications for Haneda Girl or M.O.T.H.E.R. To be honest, I didn’t pick up a whole lot of them after I found mods that I loved. The movement is just that satisfying that Studio Koba could really throw most things at you and it will be a good time. The final two worlds are tough as nails, and you’ll need to prepare mentally for the many, many brick walls you’ll have to charge through to succeed.
Haneda Girl is the follow-up to Studio Koba’s Narita Boy, and it exists parallel to the studio’s debut. Haneda Girl is a recruit of Professor Nakamura to fight off Hackernauts in the Data Empire. This may sound like we’re gearing up for a deep dive into the game’s world-building, but the reality is that Haneda Girl focuses much less on the intricacies of, say, the Trichroma Sword, and more on the duo of protagonists. As a fan of Narita Boy, this came as a shock to me. The 2025 game leaves behind the jargon-soaked monologues filled to the brim with 80s pop culture references of the former game and instead relays its stories in short vignettes between Chichi Wakaba and Professor Nakamura. Before entering a new world, the player will watch a short debrief of the mission.
Rather than detail the tasks for the missions, Haneda Girl will ask Professor Nakamura a question that addresses some real-life concern that she’s had. Chichi Wakaba is a primary school-aged girl, so she’s mostly thinking about how hard math class is or what her parents are doing. A gruff programmer, Professor Nakamura quickly, but sincerely, responds before sending his warrior into the depths of his arcade game to take on more Hackernauts. Occasionally, she’ll prod about the morality of her tasks, if killing Hackernauts is really justified. These conversations amount to excellent characterisation.
By the time I entered the fifteenth (and final base game) world, I had a much better sense of who the two characters were, their motives, and how they worked as a team. However, I was looking for something to break or some sort of plot development. I found none. Although Haneda Girl is first and foremost an action platformer, with careful and deliberate writing that tees up potential ruminations beyond Chichi Wakaba’s day-to-day, I was expecting something to happen. It ends predictably and a bit shallowly.
Haneda Girl’s top priorities are its player movement and level design. For an action platformer, the result is a smooth play with fantastic game feel, despite the slow start getting a handle on everything. By the time the game ended, I slinked backwards in my chair, my muscles loosening and my brain disconnecting from the game, partially fried, unaware of just how tense I had gotten coursing my way through the last Hackernaut holdouts.
Verdict
Haneda Girl is an action platformer for the diehards. It’s got a sizable learning curve with its controls but the level design paces its difficulty just ahead of player ability, hitting the sweet spot between overwhelming challenge versus easy mastery. While the characters are likeable, the story stalls out early on and never really recovers, an about-face from Studio Koba’s debut.
- Release Date
- 23rd May 2025
- Platforms
- PC
- Developer
- Studio Koba
- Publisher
- Studio Koba
- Accessibility
- Turn off screen shake and key rebinding.
- Version Tested
- PC
Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

About the author
Jacob Price
About the author
Jacob Price
Jacob Price aka The Pixel Professor is an indie super fan. Having played games his whole life, he studies and teaches the literary merit of games as a university instructor. You can find him on Bluesky here and listen to him and his co-host Cameron Warren on the Pre-Order Bonus Podcast, and well as catch him live part-time at https://twitch.tv/chipdip18.