Saturday 6 April 2019

Nishijin Pachinko Monogatari 2 (SNES)

So this game was recently fan-translated into English, so I thought I thought it might make for an easy foot-in-the-door to get into the once-big genre of pachinko videogames. Unfortunately, I found pretty much as incomprehensible as I ever have, but I'll share my experience with you anyway.

As you might have gathered, this is a pachinko game with a story, and that story is one of gross irresponsibility: the protagonist, having lost their job due to the waning post-bubble economy, has decided to make a career out of playing pachinko instead. Like most forms of gambling, this might be a somewhat viable, if risky option. Unfortunately, this shmuck was under my control, and I have no idea how pachinko works, so he ended up just pouring all his life savings into some noisy ball-bearing dispensers.

There is a kind of practice mode that lets you play any of the four machines in the game as much as you like, and even gives very lengthy instructions for them, but even these instructions rely on you knowing the basics of the game. Instead, my eyes just glazed over as screens full of text about the relationship between red and green digits, and probability variation mode scrolled by. I did play for a little over an hour, but every time I thought I'd figured out how something worked, attempts to replicate it proved that I hadn't.

As it is, I don't really feel qualified to recommend or not-recommend this game. If you're completely unfamiliar with pachinko, it won't do much to teach you, but it does look nice, and for while I did get to watch a cute little story about a baby chick saving a mermaid play out on one of the machines. So, it exists, and it's now in English. Try it if you want, I guess? See if you can get more out of it than I did.

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