The repetition is grating and the game’s refusal to acknowledge and react to it frustrating. It’s not a game without merit, it just doesn’t know what to do with itself. That it’s constructed around a groan worthy damsel-in-distress plot, which culminates in the woman you’re rescuing effectively becoming your own prisoner, is only more bothersome and shows a hesitancy for Karateka to move past its archaic beginning. I’m not exactly sure who this version of Karateka is for, but as someone without any amount of nostalgia for the first it clearly wasn’t me.

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