To preface: I'm not the biggest fan of mechanical prestige games, like speedrunning is cool and I admire people who get really good at a game's mechanics and prefer that kind of thing to the rest of the medium's capabilities, but it's not always for me and that's ok. I'm on a time limit, I have other things to do and I'm not gonna write 500+ words on how a game's frame timing works or whatever, so I'll slip in a few hours and enjoy my time and then move on when it looks like the reward will just be more of the same reflex challenge, but faster and with more frame-counting. This sounds like I'm about to get harsh, but I promise I enjoyed this game and I think it's worthwhile if you like anything you've heard or seen from it.

Sanabi is a decent mix of that mechanical prestige presentation and a more casual-friendly focus on story and art, providing an interesting skill-based mechanical basis and attempting to work a narrative around those mechanics. Obviously, we can make several direct lines to Katana Zero, and the devs are well aware of their place in a post-K0 world, and Sanabi does a good job being its own thing artistically and mechanically, but it does start to wane when the mechanics are buffered by cutscenes and dialogue that feel more like a half-baked excuse to get the player going from A to B than a meaningful, original story. That's fine, but I think the game would benefit a lot more from a classical arcade approach instead, providing an outline for what you're doing and why, and then letting you go wild for an entire zone before giving you a break with a short cutscene and some exposition on your brooding protagonist's connection to the game's core conspiracy. I think it would suit the piece just fine to remove some of the padding and setpiece justification, and compromise a few of its hit-or-miss anime "serious protag, energetic girl" jokes in favor of some punchy illustrations and a paragraph or two of text after a boss.