Guardians (Arcade)

Also known as Denjin Makai II, this is a game that I'm not totally sure about including. It's very well known among arcade fans, but conversely, it's almost totally unknown to everyone else. There's some reasons for this, like it being a beat em up that came out just a year or two after that genre's original heyday was on the wane. Plus it's in at that level of technology where it was way too advanced for a port to the Mega Drive or SNES (in fact, the game to which it's a sequel got a SNES port for which a lot of compromises had to made, so this one had no chance), but a lot of people would have ignorantly stuck their noses up in the air at a port to Saturn or Playstation.

 

It's a massive shame too, as it might well be the best beat em up from before the recent genre renaissance. You constantly have a whole bunch of attack options, and it offers superior solutions to some long-standing problems the genre had back then. There's a whole bunch of characters to choose from, all of whom are wildly different in design: there's a ninja and a kung fu guy, a big triceratops-man, a very Shiar Empire-looking bird-girl, a muscle-bound soldier, and more. Though the controls are the same for all of them, they all feel very different to play as. Not only do they have different attacks, and different speed/damage/etc. stats, but there's little things, too, like how they utilise weapons, or how much meter their different specials consume.

 

Because this is a game that has both special moves and meter. There's three action buttons in the game: melee, jump, and projectile. Like pretty much any other beat em up, you can repeatedly press melee for combos, and you can also press it with a direction while you're jumping for a few different air attacks. None of that uses up meter, of course, but you have several different options that do. There's the traditional all-around emergency attack, and it did feel pretty liberating once I realised it uses meter rather than health, and there's the projectile attack, which is very useful and uses the most meter for most characters. Finally, each character has a couple of special moves, performed by holding the melee button and either moving the stick side-to-side or up-and-down. That might be a slightly awkward-sounding input method, and in a fighting game, I think it would be (it brings to mind Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), but in a beat em up it works really well. You can quickly learn to hold the button at the end of a combo and immediately go into a special.

 

As well as mechanically, there's lots to love in the game's theme and aesthetics, too. The setting is some kind of futuristic dystopia, though not one that's suffered environmental collapse, as locations include various kinds of big cities, a theme park, a moving train, a forest, a military base in the desert, and more. They all look amazing, with lots of super-detailed pixel art. The enemies are very varied, too, with futuristic soldiers (including what appears to be some kind of penal regiment with their wrists in pillories), a few different superhero-like characters, and weirder things like big-eyed humanoid crocodile monsters. The one weak point I can think of in this area is the boss music, which sounds more like it should be on the options screen of a sports game.

 

Obviously I recommend playing Guardians, it's excellent. It works fine in both MAME and Final Burn Neo, and since Hamster have put out a few Banpresto games already, it'll hopefully turn up in the Arcade Archives series someday. How nice it'll be to finally play a legal version of this game on a home console, a mere thirty years late!

Hataraku Chocobo (Wonderswan Color)

 So, this has been unplayed in my Wonderswan folder for quite a while. The main thing I knew about it was that it's a board game, and most board game videogames follow a very time consuming roll-and-move money accumulation format, presumably due to the populatiry of Game of Life in Japan. So I was putting off playing it. But it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool this whole time, because against my expectations, it's a pretty fast-paced Euro-style worker placement game! Which is doubly surprising, as it came out in 2000, and that wasn't a particularly common or well-known genre in actual board games back then, let alone in videogame board games!

 

The premise is a little unsavoury: humans have "discovered" a continent inhabited by chocobo, who, while they can't talk, they are capable of using tools and following instructions, so can be considered sapient. Of course, the humans (including you) set about enslaving the indigenous population and stripping the land of resources. So, you start each map with three chocobo in your employ, and you assign them a job (there are four jobs, each of them gathering a different resource), and take them to the part of the map (there are eight such locations to a map, with your homebase in the centre square) where you want them to do that job. Each space has a different yield of each resource, and each turn there's a weather effect that will also affect these yields, usually increasing one of them. You can also find wild chocobo roaming the map, that you can capture to increase your stock of workers.

 

The four resources are greens, logs, water, and ore. The more chocobos you have, the more greens you need at the end of each turn: if you don't have enough, there's a chance that one of your chocobos will run away. Water determines how many things you can do in a turn. Walking around is free, but most actual actions (capturing a chocobo, distracting chocobo belonging to one of your rivals, assigning a chocobo to a task or location) will use some of your water. Logs and ore are also consumed when assigning tasks to chocobo. So you have to use these resources to actually get anything done, but you're also given coins for how many you have left over at the end of each turn. The player with the most coins at the end of the game wins!

 

Between turns, there's also two additional things to deal with: auctions and trading. Auctions are the part where you can really make some big profits if you're lucky, as you can often trade one resources for multiples of another. Since they're all worth one coin (I'm pretty sure), you can really bolster your takings here. Trading is more of an act of desperation. If you really need a particular resource, you can trade two of another resource for one of the one you want. Interestingly, the bank with which you trade also has a limited supply of each resource, so you might sometimes have to hope that someone else trades in the one you want or else you'll just have to go without.

 

Interestingly, winning isn't particularly important. Obviously, it's more satisfying to win, and it unlocks new stages quicker, but really, all you have to do is ensure that the total score of all the players is above a certain amount fo the game to be considered a success. This kind of "communal competition" kind of brings to mind the 2019 board game Red Outpost, though I doubt that the designers of that game ever played this one to be influenced by it. Turn order in both the game itself and the between-turn economic sections is affected by your current ranking, too (the highest-ranked player goes last, and so on), so you might want to hold back early in the game, so you're able to go first and place your chocobo in the best locations before they fill up.

 

Hataraku Chocobo is a really fun game! It's pretty unique as far as videogames go, too, so it's a shame that it's never been ported to anything else besides the Wonderswan, and that it only exists in English thanks to a fan translation. Hopefully someday Square will remember they made it and put a new version on Switch, maybe with multiplayer and maybe also a new, less uncomfortable storyline! Until then, it's definitely worth your time to emulate!