Heavenly Guardian is a positively hellish attempt to continue the Pocky & Rocky series

destructoid.com:

I only knew two things before purchasing 2007’s Heavenly Guardian on PS2. First, it was going to be a game in the Pocky & Rocky series, only maybe not really. It looked to be aiming more at Kiki Kaikai, which the Pocky & Rocky games are the sequels to, but I’m not going to get into the finer details of why they’re almost two separate series. The quick version is this: Kiki Kaikai is Taito; Pocky & Rocky is Natsume. Yes, this means that Pocky & Rocky with Becky is more a part of the Kiki Kaikai series.

Anyway, that’s boring. The second thing I knew about Heavenly Guardian going into it is that it’s considered to be kusoge.

According to articles leading up to the release of Heavenly Guardian, the title was originally going to be Kiki Kaikai 2. However, Square Enix bought up Taito in the midst of development and decided they didn’t want a new Kiki Kaikai game. So, Starfish canceled it. Then they revealed Kiki Kai World, which you’ll notice is one “kai” away from copyright infringement. They insisted that wasn’t just the canceled Kiki Kaikai 2 renamed. That might be true since Heavenly Guardian does have a lot of identifiable differences from the early screenshots. However, palette swapping the heroine and dropping a “kai” doesn’t mean it’s not a little too close to an existing license. So, eventually, we wound up with Heavenly Guardian.

I raised the question of whether or not this was more of a Pocky & Rocky successor or a game closer to the Kiki Kaikai arcade game, and the answer is: no. It’s neither. It’s a mess.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a top-down run-and-gun like the other games in its would-be series. Its influence is clear. The power-up system is similar, and the enemies are taken from Japanese folklore. It’s just a