Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai Taisen Puzzle-dama (SNES)

When looking out for more obscure material for this blog, it sometimes pops up in some strange places. In this case, for example, there's a file on textfiles.com from 1992 which lists the anime airing at that time on Japanese TV, including the times and channels, along with a short description of most of the shows. Most amusingly, Dragonball Z is described as "arcade-style beat em up", but another one that stood out to me was the description to a show I've never seen and had never previously heard of: Tsuyoshi  Shikkari Shinasai, described as "family anime with The Slap". A little bit of searching revealed that the show itself didn't look interesting at all, but that it did have a SNES game.

 

The game itself is so generic that you could almost consider it the platonic ideal of competitive puzzle games. Coloured orbs fall from the 'bove in pairs, and if three of the same colour touch, they disappear. The main tactic is to set up chains so that lots of junk blocks fill up your opponent's pit. The one unique mechanical touch is that the junk blocks take the form of the regular orbs trapped in transparent cubes. The cubes disappear when orbs are cleared next to them. As a result, any character that dumps junk blocks all in the same colour is at a massive disadvantage, since if three of the same coloured orbs get freed from junk blocks together, they'll also match up, and they'll free the ones next to them, and so on. This kind of thing can instantly change the tide of a match and destroy an opponent in one go.

 

The presentation of the game is unique in its blandness, though, which is a direct result of the license: all the characters are friendly, middle class suburbanites in jumpers. Plus a dog. It's kind of funny that some people in the west have this stereotype of all Japanese cartoons being crazy, loud action shows, when here we have an anime license that looks like it could be based on some kind of animated adaptation of a cosy BBC sitcom. 

 

There isn't really anything else to say about Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai. Mechanically, it's so generic that the only reason you'd ever want to choose it over literally any other competitive puzzle game is if you're a big fan of the source material, and I can't imagine there's many readers of this blog that fit that description.