Brown Long-eared Bat Grows a Dandelion, Then Parries Through a Dance Battle and Boss Rush

KEMONO FRIENDS — Brown Long-eared Bat played the short indie game The Dandelion Endures (Japanese title: Tanpopo wa Taeru) on Nov. 3. What began as a gentle plant-growing game turned into a dance battle against a drunk man and then a boss rush, and she cleared both.

She opened by announcing she wanted to live a dandelion’s life for once, and the game took her through seasons and years: collecting light, water and carbon dioxide orbs to grow, upgrading the plant, sending seeds off on the wind, and picking up dandelion trivia along the way. A grandmother and a man blowing soap bubbles supplied water, and a black cat wandered in. She said the game looked like an emotional, cinematic one, and chat agreed with comments like “I never knew a dandelion’s life was this hard.”

“I’ll survive even in a world with no just parries.” — Brown Long-eared Bat, midway through the boss rush

The tone changed when the game introduced a hold-to-endure button and the parry. Brown Long-eared Bat said parrying is the thing she is worst at in any game, and that she had always avoided it, even clearing Armored Core without parrying. In the cat fight the plant was knocked out once before she got through it. Ten years later in the story, a drunk man challenged her to a dance battle, and she spent roughly 16 minutes on it, parrying to the beat. “Parry!” chat shouted, and one viewer wrote that it was “too much of a party night.” She won, announced that she had shown everyone a dandelion’s rainbow, and said she had no idea how the man had come to start the fight.

A boss rush followed against a baby, a cat and a salaryman. She took heavy damage, lost her life bar to half, then to a sliver, and said at one point that she would survive in a world without just parries. She cleared it after more than 20 minutes and called it a hot game, saying she had expected a quiet, emotional one and got a parry game instead.

She finished with a chat stream and mailbag. She said she planned to stream from about 6 p.m. on Twitch the next day, that she hoped to play the Resident Evil 2 remake once it was approved, and that she wants to hold a drawing stream with her new drawing tablet. The stream drew nine Super Chats.