Bakeru is first and foremost a love letter to Japan, from Japan. Good Feel, the developers of Kirby's Epic Yarn and Yoshi's Woolly World make an original IP themed around a tanuki fighting to save Japan from a villain who wants to throw an unending festival. As you might imagine, it is somewhat as silly as those games.
There are Goemon influences here and I am not experienced in Goemon enough to identify them. But what is obvious is your journey is a road trip through all of Japan, each stage based on some prefecture in Japan each capturing some local flavor of the area. Each stage utterly brimming with charm and soul. On the bleach, blindfolded enemies try and fail to whack watermelon enemies. On the cruise ship, enemies running along sweeping the floor in elegant formations. While the game tends to be quite easy, every stage will put a smile on your face, which is quite good as they are not going to be doing very much to stop you from clearing them. True to the developers other games, Bakeru is not a hard game at all. Your main goal each stage is to break down three lanterns to put a stop to the festival, and these are strewn fairly linearly throughout the level. But what you will ACTUALLY be doing, true to the genre, is turning over every single inch of the level for the usual sort of deranged collectibles; each stage has souvenirs of your Japan road trip as well as trivia tidbits that start as being about the regions you are visiting but considering they had to throw in a couple hundred of these, you can forgive them for eventually drifting to talking about nosehairs, vegetables, stew, and whatever else the writer felt like talking about. (Mercifully, whoever translated this game left most of the Japanese references in these as is, even if the puns do not land in English.)
However, that is not to say Bakeru lacks in action. Our crafty tanuki hero Bakeru is armed with two magic drumsticks, and combat is built around you mashing LB and RB in succession to drum on your enemies. LB, RB, and both can also be held to charge up different command moves depending on the buttons you held. You also have a dodge and a guard that both offer timed counter-attacks, resulting in a combat system that has a surprising degree of sophistication, even if it is fairly undemanding and most of your time will be sending mooks flying mashing LB and RB. Bakeru gets "Henge" transformation powers that allow him to trivialize combat with overpowered forms based off Japanese folklore heroes, so if for whatever reason your little brother cannot figure out the combat, even he can use these as a win button. Bosses are certainly more interesting on average than the equivalents you see from Nintendo, which just as much character as the rest of the game to go with their attack variety. Unfortunately, most of the bosses are giant mecha fights, which are all far too slow for what they offer outside of the same goofy, grinning charm the rest of Bakeru offers.
Few games give me just such a wonderful feeling of joy as Bakeru. It is hard to put into words, but Bakeru captures the breezy joy of a Kirby game, but with a bit more purpose and direction in its mechanics. It is quite a shame western developers are incapable making games that love their country as much as Bakeru loves Japan.
