Video Game / Kero Blaster

Comomo: ...What exactly is his job again?
Sasuke: His job...? Hmm...
Sasuke: ...Custodial Sciences.

— Regarding Kaeru, who's blasting his way through the first level

Kero Blaster is a Run-and-Gun action Platformer for PC, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Switch made by Studio Pixel, starring a frog salaryman. It is his first major game since Cave Story, and features a similar gameplay style, though it ditches the Metroidvania-lite design in favor of discrete levels.

The plot of the game is fairly simple. You play as a frog salaryman named Kaeru, who works as Cat & Frog Inc. (the "cat" part being fulfilled by his boss, President Nanao), a company that produces and manages teleporters. His current assignment is to clean up blocked teleporters in four major areas, though it quickly becomes clear that there's a far bigger problem to deal with. An update to the game added an extra storyline where Kaeru handles an inordinate amount of work to prepare for a company vacation.

It can be purchased here. Also worth checking out are the freeware side games, Pink Hour and Pink Heaven, both of which star Comomo, a side character from the main game.

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Tropes found in Kero Blaster:

• 1-Up: These can be found in some obscure or tricky-to-reach locations, and are randomly but rarely dropped by enemies. You can also buy 1-ups outright with coins, but it costs 1,500 coins each.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Played straight with Kaeru. His job is officially listed as "custodial sciences" (read: janitor) and his only real job is to go out and clean teleporters. However, since the teleporters are housed in areas that are apparently quite hostile, he's armed to the teeth, and seems to do the most actual work around the company (he's even half of the name).
  • Pink Hour and Pink Heaven show that Comomo the secretary is just as skilled with a blaster as Kaeru.
• Arrange Mode: There are two alternate modes unlockable after clearing the main game. The first, "Zangyou Mode" (technically the second since it was added in an update, but post-update it's the first to be unlocked), is a remixed campaign that includes a new story, with much higher difficulty, tougher bosses, and a completely new final level. Clearing that mode allows you to create a save file for "Omake Mode", which is a more standard alternate mode where you go through every level of normal mode with all weapon upgrades carried over and health reset to a single heart, though more health can still be bought. This mode ends with a Boss Rush with all of the main game's bosses, and the game's Infinity +1 Sword, the Kuro Blaster, can be found and upgraded in new secret areas.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Dark 2's weak points are its orange lumps.
• Author Appeal:
  • Pixel has always liked cats and frogs. The Cave Story fansite has a collection of pixel artworks by him dating all the way back to 2003 titled Neko 100, which features 100 different pixel artworks of cats, one of which is clearly a frog wearing a cat mask (and also a tie, giving him a significant resemblance to Kaeru).
  • A lot of the theme and story concept of the game appear to be inspired by the many years Pixel spent working at an office job with a company that produced (non-game) software.
• Auto-Revive: Dying from regular damage (as opposed to pits/crushing) while holding a Heart Jar will revive you with four hearts. This powerful item can be bought at a shop, but you can only hold one of them at a time.
• Bag of Spilling: Zangyou mode takes place after normal mode, but despite that, Kaeru loses all of the equipment and their upgrades he acquired over the course of normal mode and has to obtain and buy them again.
• Beam Spam: The third form of the first weapon is the Lazer, which fires a powerful Death Ray which on a clean hit is the deadliest single projectile in the game, but has a slow rate of fire. The fourth and final form is the Lazer Uzi, whose shots are very slightly weaker individually but can fire more than twice as fast.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him:
  • In the final level of normal mode, Kaeru's boss has been fully possessed by the Negativus Legatia and the only way to turn her back to normal is by beating her up in a boss fight.
  • In Zangyou Mode, Nanao's former boss is possessed by the Work Producing Machine salesman. Defeating him in battle will free him and allow him to take a much needed nap.
• Blob Monster: The "Negativus Legatia" are black circular blobs with red eyes that can fuse together to form a bigger blob. Also known simply as the "things".
• Body Horror: Nanao gets horribly swelled up and deformed as a result of being possessed by one of the "things".
• Book Ends: A musical example. The final level has the same music as the first.
• Boss Bonanza: The final level of Zangyou Mode contains three boss battles almost back-to-back, and the last of them has three forms. Normal Mode limits it to just a two-phase penultimate boss and a final fight.
• Boss Rush: The final challenge of Omake Mode is a gauntlet of fights against all eight main bosses from the normal mode. Since all your upgraded weapons are available during this challenge, the earlier bosses will melt to your attacks much faster than they would during a Normal Mode playthrough.
• Brick Joke:
  • In Normal mode, Comomo is motivated to help out by the possibility that if the problem of the negativus legatia is solved, it'll put an end to overtime work. Given that Zangyou mode's name translates to "overtime work", guess how that pans out.
  • The C&F employees order drinks in a cutscene in Zangyou mode. The drinks don't come until the ending...just as everyone is leaving the room.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Omake Mode is actually pretty easy due to having all your weapons from the start... except for the secret areas, which combine Checkpoint Starvation with outright defiance of the normal rules of the game by featuring invisible enemies and platforms that may or may not be safe footing.
• Bubble Gun: Bubble/Balloon/Star Mine, the third weapon you unlock. Of the fully upgraded weapons, the Star Mine is the weakest damage-wise, but it also fires the fastest, and the bubbles bounce along the ground and off walls, giving it different coverage than the other weapons. Because of the way the projectiles bounce off walls (and, in the same way, off the protagonist) and have a fairly long lifespan before dissipating if they don't hit an enemy, it can be very deadly in tight spaces as the area becomes saturated with bubbles; it can be less about hitting the enemy and more about laying down a bunch of bubbles where the enemy is going to be.
• Cartoon Bomb: There are green and round bombs with fuses. When they explode, they cause fire to cruise along the floor.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In Normal mode, the boss of the Train Station level is followed by two birds on a handcar. In Zangyou mode, the train you'd normally ride while fighting that boss passes the station instead of stopping, so you ride the handcar instead. The birds and their handcar show up in the last level, too.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Usually, every new screen is a checkpoint as long as you have at least one life. However, dying in the secret areas of Omake mode will take you back to before you entered the secret area. For other games, this might not be out of the norm, but the usual generosity of checkpoints combined with these areas being Brutal Bonus Levels makes it hard not to feel a little checkpoint-starved.
• Chest Monster: A few of the money safes in the game have menacing faces and jump at Kaeru to attack. They still drop tons of money upon defeat. A boss variant appears in White Laboratories in Zangyou Mode.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: If Kaeru gets squashed between two solid objects, like a moving platform and a wall, or even just two parallel platforms passing by each other, he instantly dies regardless of health left.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each weapon has a distinct color to help distinguish them when swapping. The Pea Shooter is yellow (white as the Lazer Uzi), the Fan is green, the Bubble is blue (purple as the Star Mine), the Fire is orange, and the Kuro Blaster is black and blue/teal.
• Cool Shades: Nanao wears some nice shades, though a flashback in Zangyou Mode shows that she didn't always have them.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Downplayed. Simply dying merely puts you back at the beginning of the screen you were on, losing almost no progress. Running out of lives does put you all the way back to the beginning of the level, but you get to keep all your coins and upgrades, and any minibosses you've beaten will stay dead when going back through the level, thus essentially Inverting Unstable Equilibrium and Continuing is Painful. However, there is an achievement for beating the entire game without ever running out of lives.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: The final boss. Deconstructed, as it results in the protagonist spending the epilogue in the hospital wearing a body cast. Oddly enough however, the other employees of C&F Inc., who were inside said boss at the time of the explosion, emerge with no serious injuries. As for normal enemies, only the Negativus Legatia are exempt from this.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The first boss shows up as a mook twice in the final level of Normal mode. Also, in Omake mode, a glitched version of the second form of the final boss of Zangyou mode is an enemy in one of the secret areas.
  • The boss of Pink Hour is a a Giant Mook version of the Negativus Legatia. This variant appears in Kero Blaster as a bulky enemy found in later stages.
• Developer's Foresight: Normally, it's impossible to acquire the Kuro Blaster parts in Normal Mode, because you need to have equipment from later levels to get them. However, it's possible to get the jetpack at the end of the OXOX Hotel, reopen the closed boss door, and move back far enough in the stage to die and get a game over, allowing you to start the stage over with the jetpack. Pixel thought of this, and should you use it to go to the secret area, you won't find anything except Mizutani commenting on how impetuous you are.
• Didn't Need Those Anyway!: As you damage the Work Producing Machine, it loses its claws and then its face.
• Diegetic Switch: The first thing you hear at the beginning of the final level is the chime of the train that dropped Kaeru off. The chime repeats as more melody lines are added to the background and it becomes the "ToTo Station" theme.
• Disc-One Final Boss:
  • "Dark 2" (the giant Negativus Legatia blob) appears to serve as the final boss of normal mode, where it's supposedly the source of the Negativus Legatia, but after defeating it, Kaeru's exit is interrupted, and the problem becomes infinitely worse by the time he makes it back.
  • Since Zangyou mode contains redesigned levels and a completely different storyline with a new final boss, the final boss of Normal mode is not the ultimate threat of the game overall.
• Doppelgänger Attack: The final boss's second form splits into four identical copies before continuing its assault. Each clone can give and take damage, and all of them need to be shot down before moving on to its final phase.
• Double Jump: The jetpack grants a second jump while Kaeru is in the air. Notably, depending on how you're moving when you activate it, it'll either work as a diagonal boost or an upwards boost.
• Expy: The first boss, the Shield Plant, is a reskin of Omega from Cave Story. Aside from being a giant plant monster instead of a sand monster, it has the same attack pattern from Omega: immune to damage until the two halves of its shell open up to expose its weak points and fire projectiles into the air.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Fire/Burner/Melter, the final weapon gotten in a normal playthrough. It's got the worst range of all the weapons even at max level, and is also useless underwater, but it can destroy certain projectiles, deals damage pretty quickly, and gains an Orbiting Particle Shield as the Melter. It's also the only weapon that can destroy ice obstacles.
• Foreshadowing: The first screen of Stage 6 has some clocks. Its boss is also one.
• Funny Animal: The protagonist is a bipedal frog wearing nothing but a necktie, and his boss and scientist co-worker are both talking cats that stand on two legs and wear a suit and a lab coat respectively.
• Furry Female Mane: Nanao has a full head of hair, despite being a cat. None of the other characters have hair.
• Flies Equals Evil: As Nanao's possession worsens with each subsequent cutscene, she becomes surrounded by more and more flies in addition to suffering from Body Horror. They even serve as attack animals in Nanao's boss fight.
• Flunky Boss: Dark 2 drops Negativus Legatia blobs from the ceiling.
• Flying Saucer: The final (and only) boss of Pink Heaven is the round flying saucer that beamed up Tsubasa at the start of the game.
• Gainax Ending: Zangyou mode. The final boss shifts through some pretty bizarre forms. When the boss is finally defeated, a phone appears which somehow calls the company Nanao worked for in the past, causing the overtime work to disappear from the present.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In the hard mode ending, if you beat the final boss while wearing the jacket (which is one of the game's achievements), you will continue to wear it during the ending cutscene, and other characters will comment on the fact that it is too hot to be wearing that.^note The final level of Zangyou Mode takes place in the vicinity of a beach resort.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: The mini-boss of Hekichi Plateau ("Dark 1") is a Negativus Legatia blob that hides up in the vents of a frozen factory. There are five vents in the arena, and the boss can appear out of any one and fly to another. Shooting the boss slows it briefly, but it becomes faster as it loses health, produces a spread of "things" whenever it retreats, and periodically drops down from a vent and rolls across the floor.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The Work Producing Machine seen in Zangyou Mode appears to be primarily based on a laser printer, but its pincer-like appendages and the little legs that prop up its giant body make it reminiscent of this trope as well.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Several of the bosses pop out of nowhere and attack Kaeru for no reason. Most strikingly, the Trayne Station boss is a bizarre alarm clock/bird monster that you fight from the back of a train while it chases the train.
• Have a Nice Death: If Kaeru loses all his lives, he typically wakes up in a hospital room where he can choose to continue and buy health items on the way out, although he may end up in other, functionally identical locations in later stages and modes (such as the C&F kitchen in Zangyou mode). If he refuses to continue, a lighthearted Game Over sequence plays out:
  • In Normal mode, Sasuke congratulates him for working hard, basically letting him rest.
  • In Zangyou mode, Sasuke and Kaeru try to go on their vacation anyway (the continue prompt now asking Kaeru if he wants to keep trying his work or just take off with the other two for vacay) to the hot spring, but get chewed out by President Nanao and are refused entry. The game over screen proper features Sasuke and Kaeru back at the office doing heaps of work instead of the cozy vacation they planned.
    President Nanao: (incoherent screaming)
    Sasuke: ...We had that coming.
• Heart Container: The Heart Boost item permanently extends your maximum hit points by one heart. Bonus points for it being an actual heart.
• Hearts Are Health: How Kaeru's health is represented. This extends to enemies dropping healing hearts and the Auto-Revive item being called a "Heart Jar".
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The hard mode is known as Zangyou Mode. ^note "Zangyou" is Japanese for "Overtime work".
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Lazer Uzi, the final upgrade to the Pea Shooter. While it doesn't do quite as much damage as the Kuro Blaster and only fires straight ahead, it's still the strongest of the four base weapons at maximum level, requires less effort to obtain, and can be used in all three modes.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The game's only secret weapon, the Kuro Blaster. It's the strongest weapon in the game damage-wise, and the only one that passes through walls, but obtaining and leveling it requires accessing three well-hidden secret areas that can only be reached in Omake Mode.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Nanao. Her subordinates seem to understand what she's saying, but the player only sees a dialogue box filled with squiggly lines instead of text.
• It's All Upstairs From Here:
  • The lead-up to the final boss of Normal mode involves ascending to the roof of the C&F building.
  • The final section of the final level of Zangyou mode consists of a tower leading to a boss, then a ladder of office furniture leading to the final boss, after which a platform lifts you to the boss's second phase, and then further into the clouds for its final form.
• Level in the Clouds:
  • The setting of Pink Heaven is in the sky, where most of the walls and floors are made of clouds.
  • In Zangyou mode, the arena for Phase 2 of the final boss is made of only a few small platforms levitating high in the sky, while the final phase makes you jump across several floating platforms mounted above the clouds.
• Lighter and Softer: Surprisingly, the story of Zangyou Mode has a less serious plot relative to that of Normal Mode. It revolves around a shadowy figure and his mysterious "work producing machine". It has some creepy elements, but not to the same extent as Normal Mode's story.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Repeater (the first upgrade to the Pea Shooter) is outclassed by the Fan overall, since it deals roughly the same damage with a bigger projectile size, and it costs less to upgrade overall; the other two weapons introduced afterwards also have wider roles than the Repeater. However, putting money into the Repeater upgrades it to the Lazer for a massive damage upgrade, which can then be upgraded to the Lazer Uzi, making it the strongest weapon of the main four.
  • The Kuro Blaster starts with great damage, but has the range of the starting Pea Shooter. Finding the other parts of it drastically increases its usability by adding range and damage.
• Mean Boss: Nanao, crossing over with Cats Are Mean. Ultimately subverted, though, as when she's not possessed she's not actually mean, just sorta grumpy and irritable. She's fairly unpleasant most of the time, but when the final boss' Defeat Equals Explosion lands the protagonist in the hospital, she visits him and brings him flowers.
• Minus World: The "glitched" Kuro Blaster areas in Omake Mode pay homage to this phenomenon. There are three hidden pitfalls that can only accessed with a weapon or item that isn't available at that point in the game in Normal mode. All of them drop Kaeru into a world made of an incoherent mess of platforms, backgrounds, and enemies, while the background music switches between a random soundtrack, silence, or an eerie buzzing noise after each "room".
• Mook Maker: The sea anemones spit out swimming fishbones.
• Musical Spoiler: Dark 2's battle theme is just the normal boss battle theme. It's not the final boss.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The second hard mode level in Pink Heaven looks very similar to the Sacred Grounds from Cave Story.
  • The Trayne Station level is a winding cave full of half submerged rooms, red spikes, and red droplets that drip from the ceiling and deal damage on contact, just like the Last Cave from Cave Story.
  • In Cave Story, the theme "Zombie" plays during the final battle when the Doctor possesses Sue, Misery, and the Undead Core. In Kero Blaster, an extended remix of this theme titled "Zombeat" plays during the second to last battle when Nanao is completely possessed by the Negativus Legatia as well as the second to last battle in Zangyou Mode when Nanao's former boss is possessed by the salesman of the Work Producing Machine.
• Nameless Narrative: Most of the game doesn't reveal any of the characters' names. The company president is simply known as "The President", while the protagonist and his co-workers don't even seem to have a title they are referred to by. However, there is a secret cast roll (found after finishing the final glitched area in Omake Mode) that lists names for the characters, and the bosses have names listed in the code (the names can be found on this page).
• New Game Plus: Omake Mode, which is unlocked by clearing Zangyou Mode and telling Mizutani that you weren't satisfied with your playthrough when he asks. He sends you back to the start of Normal Mode with all your weapons and the jetpack, but only a single heart (health can still be upgraded). Other than a few harmless, invincible creatures being added to the levels, the only major difference is that the final level lets you access Cat & Frog Inc.'s basement floor, replacing the normal final bosses with a Boss Rush initiated by Mizutani. There's one other addition; by using later items in earlier levels, it's possible to get past some barriers and discover three different "glitched" bonus levels, each of which houses an upgrade for the Kuro Blaster.
• No-Damage Run:
  • Each game mode has an achievement for winning the game while wearing the jacket, an item that serves as a one-hit shield. There's a jacket to be found in every final level, so the main challenge comes from defeating the final bosses without taking any hits.
  • In Normal and Zangyou modes, the "one-credit clear" variant (play through the whole game without running out of lives and continuing) is also an achievement.
  • In Pink Hour, you need to keep the Important Document intact for the best ending. The document shields you from damage and breaks just like the jacket does.
• Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: It's not entirely clear what the protagonist's job actually is, except that it apparently involves lots of running around shooting stuff. This is lampshaded early in the game, where one of his co-workers asks another what his job actually is. Apparently his job title is listed as "custodial sciences", which sounds sorta like a euphemism for "janitor".
• Oddly Small Organization: Cat & Frog, Inc. is based in a spacious 4-story office building, yet seems to consist of only 6 people: Its president, the frog protagonist, his scientist co-worker, the pink Office Lady, and two shopkeepers.
• Office Lady: Comomo serves as the receptionist for Cat & Frog Inc. It's not clear what exactly she is, except that she's pink.
• One-Winged Angel: The final boss of Zangyou mode takes on a completely different form for the third phase of the fight, abandoning his previous roughly humanoid form to turn into a giant angry face that shoots telephones.
• Orbiting Particle Shield:
  • Using the Melter (the fire weapon's final upgrade) causes two fireballs to start orbiting around you. They damage enemies and block some enemy projectiles, and can themselves be launched as projectiles by releasing the trigger.
  • Kurono surrounds himself with a shield of spinning phones in his final phase, which block bullets and deal contact damage. To get rid of them, Kaeru needs to activate the rotary phones that appear on incoming platforms, which will destroy the shielding phones after a delay.
• Or Was It a Dream?: Pink Heaven appears to have been a dream of Comomo, until Tsubasa returns her parasol to her and brings up what happened yesterday.
• Palette Swap:
  • Kaeru's color changes depending on the game mode. In Normal Mode, he's green, in Zangyou Mode, he's blue, and in Omake Mode, he's yellow.
  • In the first six of Zangyou mode's seven levels, the bosses are heavily based on their normal mode counterparts. Visually, some (but not all) of these are just simple recolors.
  • In the train station level, the NPCs at the shop, and also at the hospital you end up at if you run out of lives, use a weird inverted color palette.
• Parasol Parachute: Comomo gets a parasol that slows down her falls in Pink Heaven if you choose a certain option while talking to Mizutani at the end of Stage 1. It’s required to get the better of the two endings.
• The Pawns Go First: The boss fight in the Greenery Zone starts with Kaeru fighting the one-eyed mudmen enemies that appear late in the level as they pop out of the mud; killing one takes off health from the boss's life bar. After enough of them are killed, a King Mook version of the mudmen (known in the code as "Gorgon") burrows out of the ground, and uses the rest of the life bar as its health.
• Pinball Projectile: All forms of the Bubble bounce off of surfaces indefinitely until they hit an enemy or a fixed period of time has passed, and the final upgrade for the Fan shoots a spread of 4 shurikens that can each ricochet once.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Comomo the pink office lady befriends the blue Tsubasa.
• Pet Monstrosity: Nanao's office pet is a Negativus Legatia, a dark blob monster that grows massive and glitchy over the course of the story. It eventually swallows up your coworkers and Nanao before becoming the final boss of Normal Mode.
• Pet the Dog: Nanao is usually fairly unpleasant, but during the epilogue, when Kaeru is recovering in the hospital from his recent injuries, she shows up to bring him flowers. This is by far the nicest thing she does in the entire game (though to be fair, she spends most of the game posessed).
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Defeated bosses get wracked in explosions before disappearing in an expanding ring of explosions.
• Prequel: Pink Hour takes place shortly before Kero Blaster starts (and came out at least a month before the game to serve as a demo). Of note is that it features a hostile Negativus Legatia, which ties into Kero Blaster's plot.
• Punny Name: The Kuro Blaster. "Kuro" is the Japanese word for "dark" (fitting for a weapon powered by the "Negativus Legatia"), but it's also very close to the game's title.
• Recursive Canon: Kero Blaster is a game in both Pink Hour and Pink Heaven. Pink Hour is a game in Pink Hour.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Negativus Legatia are black and have red eyes.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: On normal mode, the final boss's second form is fought under a red sky.
• Retraux: Would hardly be a Studio Pixel game without this. It has low-res pixel art graphics and chiptune music.
• Rooftop Confrontation:
  • The final bosses of normal mode, the President taken over by the Negativus Legatia and the Boss Plate, are confronted on the roof of the Cat & Frog Inc. office building.
  • The second to last boss of Zangyou mode is found and fought on the roof of a nearby electrical tower close to the hot springs.
• Salaryman: The frog protagonist is characterized as a necktie wearing employee of a small corporation headed by a cranky boss. Unlike most salarymen, he deals with paperwork by blasting it to bits and hunting down the one responsible for spawning all the overtime paperwork in his office.
• Schizo Tech: A relatively minor example — in this setting they've invented teleporters and ray guns, yet they don't appear to have invented cellular phones. In fact, all the telephones shown in the game appear to be 1960s-style rotary phones.
• Sequential Boss:
  • When you come to the end of the final level, first you have to fight the possessed, horribly deformed company president. Then, after defeating her, she reverts to a less-freakish, less-swelled up form, but gets a new health bar and continues the fight with a completely different attack pattern. When you win this fight, she completely returns to normal which would make you think that it's over. However, she then shortly afterward is eaten by a glitch monster, which is the true final boss. However, as a mercy, if you run out of lives and have to start the level over during the third phase, when you get back to the end of the level you don't have to re-fight the first two.
  • The final boss of hard mode is a three-phase fight. Unlike in the normal mode, you must beat all three phases in one life.
• Shielded Core Boss: In her first phase, possessed Nanao only takes damage when hit directly, which requires shooting off all of the Negativus Legatia blobs covering her body. They reform after Nanao pushes herself back to the opposite side of the screen.
• Shout-Out: The crab enemies in the train station level, which get angry and charge at you when hit, appear to be a reference to the "Sidestepper" enemies from Mario Bros..
• Single-Use Shield: The jacket is a rare item that can usually be found before the final boss gauntlet of each mode. In addition to protecting you from a single hit, it's also warm and quite dapper!
• Skippable Boss:
  • The start of White Laboratories features a fake bottomless pit at the very start, and falling into it triggers a fight with a jetpack-wearing, rock-tossing mole. If you manage to jump across the pit the first time, the mole can be avoided. There's little reason to not fight it, since it's weak, it drops a money bag when it dies, and its room features one of the secret areas in Omake Mode.
  • In Omake Mode, the bosses and mini-bosses of Hinterland Fort, OXOX Hotel, and White Laboratories can be skipped by taking the alternate routes through secret areas. You still have to fight a Shield Plant in Hinterland Fort's secret (the difference is that it's invisible) and White Laboratories features an alternate boss fight with a glitched version of Kurono's second phase.
  • In Pink Hour, this applies to the boss at the end of the game. You can bypass it by just jumping over it.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Hekichi Plateau has various ice and snow-based enemies and hazards, on top of some parts of the level involving slippery frozen floors.
• Some Dexterity Required: A fairly minor example, which isn't strictly necessary to complete the game — while all weapons are capable of fully automatic fire, all weapons, especially when upgraded, can fire a good deal faster when repeatedly mashing the trigger button than when simply holding it down. While this sometimes allows to wear down a boss's health bar more quickly, it can also make it harder to dodge and attack at the same time, especially since you can only strafe^*that is, move backwards without changing the direction you're aiming while holding down the trigger.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Cave Story. Both are Run-and-Gun platformers with Retraux graphics and soundtrack, but diverge thematically in several ways:
  • Cave Story is exploration-based and you sometimes backtrack to areas you've previously visited. Kero Blaster is stage-based and expects you to keep going, with no way to return to a previous stage short of starting a new file.
  • Cave Story features modern elements (The Doctor, and killer robots in the backstory) invading a fantasy setting (a floating island home to rabbit-like Mimigas and magicians). Kero Blaster features fantasy elements (the Negativus Legatia) invading a modern-day setting (a corporate office and various areas that you get teleported to including a modern-day laboratory and a hotel under construction).
  • In Cave Story, weapon upgrades are earned by collecting experience point crystals dropped from enemies, and you can lose EXP and levels by getting hit. In Kero Blaster, you buy the upgrades outright, and they are permanent for the rest of the playthrough.
• Spread Shot: The Quad, the second upgrade for the Fan, shoots out four projectiles in a spread, and the same goes for the final upgrade. The Kuro Blaster's final form also has a bit of spread.
• Stealth Pun: The protagonist's boss ends up being a boss fight.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Kaeru can stay underwater indefinitely with no ill consequences. Ditto Comomo in Pink Hour (there are no underwater areas in Pink Heaven).
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: This colorful, silly game is about a salaryman frog who cleans his company's teleporters by shooting the daylights out of any critters who disrupt its operations or get in his way. You wouldn't expect it to have the hero being transported to an unknown, dark cave full of broken clocks and red liquid, a swarm of Blob Monsters nearly bringing about the downfall of civilization, and the protagonist's boss getting possessed and horribly deformed by one of them. It develops a vaguely ominous feel fairly early on that grows creepier as the game progresses, but the whimsical tone keeps the game from straying into horror story territory.
• Tick Tock Tune: The music for the Trayne Station level starts with a steady ticking sound before the music proper starts. The track is titled "Time Table", and the level has a lot of clocks lying around. Then at the end of the level, the sleepy "Train Station" track includes the sound of a clock slowly but steadily ticking in the background.
• Traintop Battle: You fight Clock Man on a train.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Omake Mode has three secret sections full of fake platforms and surprise pitfalls that require either luck or multiple tries to navigate through safely. Take one step in the wrong direction and you'll find yourself short one life and right back at the beginning of the entire level.
• Turns Red: Most of the bosses of each level will pause, glow red, and switch to a more aggressive attack pattern once their health is brought down to a low enough threshold.
• Underwater Boss Battle:
  • Dekaigyo the giant fish is fought in a half-underwater arena. Going underwater to attack it is faster than staying above, but it's also much harder to dodge while swimming.
  • Puddie, the Train Station mid-boss, is entirely underwater. However, when it's fought in Zangyou Mode, it's in a dry room, and the fight changes to accommodate that.
• The Unintelligible: Nanao's speech is total gibberish at the start of the game, leading the player to suspect something is up early on. After the final boss, it's revealed that no, she just talks like that all the time.
• Vehicular Assault: N577 is a missile-launching car driven by a Negativus Legatia.
• Warm-Up Boss: Shield Plant is the first and easiest boss. His jumps are easy to avoid and you can easily shoot down his fireballs.

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