Fighting Road (NES)

 Something that really interests me in regards to game design is iteration and evolution: adding new ideas to existing concepts, as well as early experimental steps towards what would later become popular genres. Fighting Road represents an attempt to add more complicated storytelling to an early Yie Ar Kung Fu-style fighting game. It feels like such an ecolutionary step towards the style for which SNK would later become known that I even went to check that Takashi Nishiyama wasn't involved in its creation (as far as I can tell, he wasn't).

 

The story told in Fighting Road would fit right into a 1970s kung fu movie: the protagonist goes looking for his brother, fighting various other martial artists along the way, as well as learning that his brother has joined an evil gang. It's told via some great-looking cutscenes that make use of blocks of text and still pixel art. Technological limitations do kind of dampen the excitement in that in the first six stages, you fight three different opponents, as well as recoloured versions of those same opponents meant to represent different characters. To be fair, the characters are big and well-animated for a NES game in 1988, so they probably did take up a lot of space on the cartridge, meaning that a completely new opponent for every stage would have been an expensive prospect, and may even have forced compromises in regards to the cutscene art, which seems like it was probably a big selling point for the game.

 

To make matters worse, as well as repeated opponents, each stage consists of two fights against that stage's foe, which a cutscene in the middle. Clearly, a problem with the game was that the designers had a very specific concept for it, and they were desperately trying to juggle their intentions regarding storytelling, keeping the cost of production down, and ensuring that the game wasn't so short and easy that players finishd it the same day they bought it. But thirty-seven years later, shorn of that context, what you've got in Fighting Road is a conceptually interesting game that's turned out to be more than a little bit boring in practice. 

 

Another problem is that it doesn't really feel good to play. I mentioned before that the animation was surprisingly good, but it's unfortunately too good. There's too many frames for every action you might take, meaning that there's a bit too much of a delay between you pressing the button and your character executing the action. You've also got a pretty big repetiore of moves at your disposal, and most of them are easy enough to figure out, but you've got a power meter that theoretically allows you to fire a projectile attack once it starts flashing. However, even after looking up the command for this attack online, I've not been able to successfully pull it off even once.

 

I really wish I liked Fighting Road more than I do. It's an interesting game that's a few years ahead of its time, but unfortunately those few years do make a difference, and the technology and the concepts in game design just weren't there yet to support the kind of game that it wants to be. I'd say it's worth a look out of curiosity, but not really much more than that.

Card Captor Sakura: Clow Card Magic (Playstation)

 While there's a very well known Playstation puzzle game that's a Cardcaptor Sakura tie-in (Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart), but this one, which is an entirely orignal game, rather than a themed re-skin of an existing one, is not so celebrated. Having now played it, I can see a few reasons for that. Not that it's necessarily a bad game, but it definitely doesn't have the broad appeal that "Tetris with characters you love" does. 

 

The biggest problem the game has is something I'll get to later, but the second biggest is that upon first playing it, it's not really clear what you're supposed to do. You choose to play as either Xiaolang or Sakura, and each stage sees your chosen character walking along a long transparent grid-marked road in the sky. Ahead of you, you'll see spinning Clow Cards in four colours: red, green, blue, and yellow. You shoot magic at them, and they disappear. Sometimes, you'll shoot one card, and a whole bunch of them will disappear, awarding you points.

 

What's happening here is that there's a kind of rock-paper-scissors circle involving the four colours, whereby shooting one colour will cause adjacent cards of the next colour in the cycle to disappear too, and they trigger the next colour, and so on. The cycle goes Red-Green-Yellow-Blue. In easy mode, it doesn't matter which button you press to shoot at a card, while in normal mode, each of the four face buttons is assigned a colour. If you shoot the wrong colour at a card in normal mode, it spawns a card of that colour. So, if you're smart (and dextrous), you can strategically place new card among the pre-existing formations to link together massive chain reactions and get many more points.

 

There's also a bit of a meta element to the game: each stage also has a meter for each of the four colours. The meters fill up as you vanish cards of their respective colour, and when filled to the top, you capture one of the Clow cards. Capture all four cards in a stage and afterwards you'll also get a fifth one. Get all the cards across the ten stages in story mode and you go on to play the extra eleventh stage and see the real ending (unfortunately, all the story scenes are the same with both characters).

 

Now, onto that biggest problem previously mentioned. What it is is that there's no playable modes other than the story mode (in which the stage layouts are identical every time), in easy or normal difficulty. I think it's a game that would have really benefitted from an endless score attack mode, or maybe even some kind of competitive mode. But you'll play through what there is in a few hours at most, and there's not much else in there, which is a shame. If you can read Japanese, there is some extra value in the very extensive Clow Card Uranai mode, which allows you to have your fortune read by various characters from the show, on a variety of subjects, using the Clow cards for cartomancy rather than the tarot.

 

Clow Card Magic is an incredibly cute game, and it's definitely worth the time of any Cardcaptor Sakura fan, since it does such a great job of capturing (ho ho) the look and feel of the show and its world. For anyone else, though, it probably won't hold your interest, and the re-themed Tetris is probably a better bet for you. (Apparently, the mode that appears in later Tetris games that builds on the ideas of that game is considered one of the great monumental challenges for Tetris players!)

Kanon Defence Force (PC)

A while ago, I reviewed Gensokyo Pro Wrestling Muscle Tag Match, a game which dared to ask the question "what if Touhou characters were in Kinnikuman Muscle tag Match?", and in that review, I mentioned that putting Touhou characters in things was the more modern version of putting characters from visual novels in things. So here we have Kanon Defence Force, a game that puts characters from the visual novel Kanon into an Earth Defence Force game. Or rather, an isometric 2D approximation of an Earth Defence Force game.

 

I don't know anything about Kanon, because I have no interest in visual novels generally. But from an oursiders perspective, I think it might be about sad little girls dying of tuberculosis or something? Anyway, this game has you playing as a selection of those little girls, and you go around shooting what appears to be a huge army of people in frog mascot costumes. Interestingly, these frogpeople do parallel the bug monsters from the EDF series. They start with regular frogs who shoot yellow stuff at you (like EDF's ants), then there's ninja frogs who jump around throwing webs (like EDF's spiders), and though I haven't been able to get more than about eight stages in, I really hope there are kaiju frogmen and centipede frogmen later in the game. I guess there's an incentive for me to keep playing, right there!

 

There's not much more to it! Rather than the item-based progression system in EDF, it's got a more traditional levelling up system, whereby you get a bunch of experience points at the end of each stage, gradually getting more HP and MP, and sometimes unlocking more weapons. Structurally it's just like EDF, though, with you picking a difficulty level and a stage, then returning to the menus after you complete the stage (or fail to). Best of all, just like in EDF, most of the scenery is destructible!

 

Regarding the scenery, as mentioned, I have no knowledge of Kanon's canon. So, for those of you who do have that familiarity, I have a question: is it explained in there why all of the stages in this game are covered in snow? And why some of the stages take place in Egypt, also covered in snow? Or is it just yet another case of an otaku game developer inserting into their work stuff they thought was cool that they'd seen in Mu magazine?

 

Kanon Defence Force is an incredibly okay game. For this review I've played a couple of sessions, each more than an hour in length, which is absolutely not the best way to play it. I'm sure it's a lot more enjoyable playing a stage or two now and then in isolation over a long period of time, but plaiyng it like I did, it's really worn on me. But if you were to play it, I'm sure you wouldn't be doing so after days of failing to find a suitable subject for review on your wekkly-updated blog. Even so, if you do intend to play it, I'd say get it from the Internet Archive, rather than hunting down a physical copy. (On the subject of physical copies of doujin games, I found out the other day that copies of Platine Dispositif's Comiket 87 STG sell for significantly more than what I paid eight years ago. But I'm too stubborn to sell.)

Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Verdict Guilty (PS4)

 For some reason, when I first saw this game, I assumed it was developed in Brazil, but it's actually Scottish! Also, it's set in future South Korea? Plus it's all very very purple. It takes from the classic western school of iterative game design as seen in Mortal Kombat and Kid Chameleon: it takes an existing game and says "but wouldn't it be cool if it had this and this and this?". Of course, the inspiration here is Street Fighter II, just like it was for Mortal Kombat all those many years ago.

 

Verdict Guilty has a lot of ideas in it, but the main one around which the game is built seems to be "what if the Guile handcuffs glitch was an actual mechanic that more characters could do?", and in fitting with that, the game's got a cops/agents versus criminals theme to it. It's also got an unusual five button control scheme because of this: two punch and kick buttons each, plus the fifth handcuff/throw button. You've got to be close to your opponent to use it, and depending on your character, successfully pulling it off might handcuff your opponent (making them unable to attack, not even kicks or other attacks that don't use the arms), or it might do something different, like strapping a time bomb to them.

 

There's more mechanical weirdness to enjoy, though. Each character seems to have a special that's executed by holding one of their attack buttons for a second and releasing. You can do the holding while being hit, while performing other moves, even before a round starts! Normal attacks all come out insanely quickly, and they do a lot of damage, too, so rounds tend to be short. The game attempts to stop spamming certain moves by having them use ammo, and doing the move when ammo's depleted wastes a little time reloading instead of doing the move. Looking the game up online, it seems that there's a glitch in the PC version that prevents player two from using certain specials if they're using a controller. Amazing.

 

Thematically and aesthetically, it's also a mixed bag. There's some weird stuff like a character being a secret agent with stretchy arms and electricity powers (no-one else in the game seems to have any powers at all). Another character is a seenteen year old boy with his job listed as "terrorist" and his likes listed as "bombs". Something I really like is that there's technically no mirror matches: if both players are the same character, player two will instead be a headswap with a different name! Similar stuff is done in Battle K-Road and Toshinden 3, but it's still unusual enough to be a cool oddity when it turns up. As mentioned (and as you can see in the screenshots), the game's very purple, and couple with the urban setting resulting in lots of nice cityscape backrounds, I really like the way it looks in general. Though having said that, the characters are a little ugly. The worst thing I can say in this section, though, is that only one of the eight characters (or two of sixteen if you want to be pedantic about it) is a woman, one of her specials is called "panty shot", and it involves her doing the splits upside down in midair. Tiresome, embarassing nonsense.

 

Verdict Guilty isn't a great game that you'll be having lots of exciting, tense battles in with your friends, but it is silly enough to be a bit of fun, and the insane strength of normal attacks might make it a game to play with those poor unfortunate freaks who never learned how to play fighting games. Definitely do what I did and wait for it to go on sale and pick it up for a pittance, though.

Mon Mon Monster (MSX)

There's two particular types of nonsense that have long since been exorcised from the language of modern games design. Rick Dangerous nonsense is when a game's made up of nothing but memorising the locations of invisible threats, and then demonstrating that knowledge to avoid them in succession (because they're invisible, and it's impossible to avoid them without foreknowledge of their locations). The other is Tower of Druaga nonsense, whereby progression through a game is blocked by obstacles that need to be tackled in a certain way, with no in-game clues as to what those means are, or often even that the obstacles themselves even exist. Mon Mon Monster (also known as Mon Mon Kaibutsu) is an example of the latter kind.

 

The first stage is pretty normal, to lull the player into a false sense of security. It's split into a few segments, but each one just has you going from left to right fighting enemies and punching blocks, until you find the door to the next one. Eventually, you'll reach the boss, and can punch him to death. The second stage is a lot less clear. It seems to take place on one massive map, there are doors that lead nowhere, doors that send you to an earlier part of the stage, and the boss awaits in a hidden room, behind two destructible walls that don't stand out in any way, and have no clues pointing towards them. The third stage seems to take a moderate place between the previous two, being semi-linear with dead end passages if you take a wrong turn. Though I haven't yet been able to reach the end of stage three, so maybe there is more nonsense to look forward to there.

 

I should probably also describe the game itself, right? Well, other than the implementation of Druaga Nonsense, it's a pretty typical eight bit platform game. You play as a little Frankenstein's monster guy, and you can punch and jump. When you punch, you also shoot out a projectile attack. Enemeis can be hurt by punchs and projectiles, but bosses and blocks have to be punched up close. Sometimes blocks have items in, that might power up your projectiles, restore your health, or give an extra life. In terms of quality, it's not up there with the big names of the era, but it's still a little above average. It mostly feels good enough to move around, jump, and so on. There's a weird technical quirk that means your projectiles are sometimes invisible, but they still hurt the enemies, so it's not a big problem.

 

That's all I really have to say about Mon Mon Monster, to be honest. It's a robust enough platformer, especially considering its age, but I just don't have the patiences to keep searching for invisible routes to progress. Other than that stuff, though, it's not that difficult a game! If only the developers had designed their stages without the assumption of clairvoyance on the part of the player, this would have been a much better game.

Olivia's Mystery (SNES)

 

 Ages ago, I tried to review a Saturn game entitled Cube Battler, but for some reason, I just couldn't get into it at all, and couldn't force myself to play it enough to write a review of it. I was a puzzle game, that saw you moving and rotating cubes around to make a jigsaw puzzle, which was an animated FMV constantly looping in little bits on the faces of the cubes. Olivia's Mystery predates Cube Battler, and the pieces are 2D rectangular tiles rather than 3D cubes, but it is also a game about solving jigsaw puzzles in which the pieces all have a little bit of animation looping on them.

 

From what I remember, Cube Battler also had some kind of competitive element to it, too, which Olivia's Mystery doesn't have. Instead, Olivia's Mystery tells a story. The game's structure is incredibly simple: you read a passage of text telling a part of the story, then you solve a jigsaw puzzle depicting a little animated scene from that chapter. And that's the whole game! You can pick up the pieces, move them around, and flip them horiontally and vertically. There's also doubles of some of the pieces in each stage, and when you place a fake one in the correct position on the board, it explodes and vanishes.

 

Of course, this only wastes a few seconds, as you can just pick up and place the identical remaining piece and put it in the same place. It's actually pretty helpful, as when a piece explodes, you know you're going in the right direction, since they only explode in the right position and orientation. The start of each stage can feel a little overwhelming, with all the pieces scattered around at random, all playing their little loops discordantly. 

 

The story is pretty whimsical and episodic, feeling a little like it's being made up on the fly by a particularly imaginative child. It concerns a kindgom facing a water shortage, but you find water on the moon, along with an abandoned civilisation, but the moon water contains parasites that make the princess ill, and so on. There's apparently three endings, with the amount of time you take to get through the game determining which one you get.

 

This is an okay, mildly interesting game. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a massive jigsaw enthusiast buying at full price on release, and I'm sure there's no-one on earth who could muster up the enthusiasm to pay the prices for which it sells online these days. But emulating also means you can play the fan-translated version, and read the story, which is nice. You'll probably get an hour or two of distraction out of it before you get bored.

Bugs vs Tanks! (3DS)

 One of the less popular titles in Level-5's Guild series, far behind the likes of Crimson Shroud or Attack of the Friday Monsters, Bugs vs Tanks puts the player in the jackboots of a Nazi panzer battalion's leader. However, the battalion isn't (in this battle, at least) fighting against the allied forces, as the title suggests, bugs. Because they've been shrunken down really tiny by some unknown force. "Bugs" in this case covers a lot of zoological ground, too, as apparently all the minibeasts of the forest in which your roman-saluting protagonists find themselves instinctively know that fascists are the enemies of all life, and team up against you. You'll even fight a spider boss backed up by fly bodyguards at one point!

 

So, the actual game has you driving a tank around, fulfilling various missions: secure resources, rescue lost comrades, destroy ant hills to make things a little safer for yourselves, and so on. Every now and then, there'll be a defence mission, during which you just have to kill all of the bugs beseiging your base until they're all dead. Proressing through the game, new kinds of bugs get gradually introduced alongside new mission types, and if you go looking for them, you'll also find more shrunken tanks lying around waiting for you to comandeer them. The obvious comparision to make for this game thematically is to the Earth Defence Force series, and it turns out that structurally, Bugs vs Tanks has a lot in common with Simple Series games in general, too.

 

An interesting mechanical point is that by default, you don't have a fire button. Instead, as long as there's a shell loaded, you'll fire as soon as an enemy is in your line of fire. It works well enough that there's no reason to change to the manual firing control scheme, either. Instead, your focus is to be more on strategically placing yourself in such a way that you avoid damage in those few seconds between shells being fired, and as you progress through the game, also making  decisions as to whether it's worth fighting an enemy (or a swarm of enemies), as opposed to just trying to speed past it towards your goal as the clock ticks down.

 

It's a pretty fun game! The way it handles shooting is a little annoying at first, but once you get your head around what it's trying to do, Ithink you'll come to appreciate the game for what it is, rather than being chagrined about what it isn't. It's not really relevant in 2025, but Bugs vs Tanks actually also has streetpass features, and back in the olden days when that was a relevant thing, I actually did get a hit on it once, making it maybe the most obscure game I ever got one on.

 

This is the last time I'll mention this (unless I forget), but Nintendo themselves have ensured that if you want to play a download-only 3DS game that you don't already own, you have to pirate it. Taking that into account, Bugs vs Tanks is definitely interesting enough to be worth a look for free. But, as implied above, I did actually buy this on my original 3DS many years ago, and I definitely never felt ripped off through having done so. It's not as good as those more popular Guild games I listed at the start of the review, but those games are great, there's still plenty of room beneath them for Bugs vs Tanks to be considered a good game.

Prop Cycle (Arcade)

 There have been times in the past where I've put disclaimers at the start of arcade game reviews, because I was emulating, and the original game had some kind of specialised control scheme or gimmicky cabinet that I couldn't possibly replicate at home. Prop Cycle represents a particularly big case of this, as the original cabinet had a whole exercise bike on it, plus fans blowing wind into the player's face. But that elaborate cabinet full of moving parts is almost thirty years old now, and there are very few arcades around in the west that aren't just full of worthless garbage like coinpushers and fruit machines, so it's very unlikely most of us are ever going to encounter a functional Prop Cycle and be able to play it. So, I'm here to ask (and answer) the pertinent question: is it worth emulating, and could it have worked as a Playstation game back in the day?

 

For those who don't know what this game is, it's a game in which you pilot a pedal-powered aircraft around various stages, popping balloons for points or extra time. In easy mode, you pick one of three stages, and you're just playing for a high score in that stage. In advanced mode, you play each of the three stages, with a tighter time limit, balloons in more difficult positions, and to progress from one stage to the next, you have to hit a score quota. Advanced mode has an exclusive fourth stage, the floating continent of Solitar, but unfortunately, even through practice, turning down the difficulty, and using continues, I haven't managed to get there.

 

It might sound like scant material for a home release, but a lot of Namco's Playstation games in those early years were pretty brief. I think it wasn't until Soul Edge and Tekken 3 that they really started to pile on the extras for the home audience. Plus, it's the quality of what's in there that really matters, and that quality is very high. The game takes place in an idyllic world, obviously inspired by Laputa (as so many great videogames are), and it's all realised in some of the most beautiiful low-poly graphics you'll ever see. It's prefectly directed, too: for example, the second stage has you fly into a tunnel inhabited by (peaceful) giant worms during daylight, and as you emerge from the other side, the music changes and you're flying around a little mining village beneath a beautiful starry sky.

 

The one problem with playing through emulation is that I haven't been able to figure out a way to perfectly map the controls of the cabinet to a controller. The best I'e been able to manage (using a Dual Shock 4) is to map steering to the left analogue stick (like you'd expect), and using L2 and R2 to decrease and increase the speed of the pedals turning. It's far from perfect, but it is good enough to make playing the game an enjoyable, if slightly fiddly, experience. Of course, the theoretical Playstation port that doesn't exist would have been able to come up with something more bespoke for the game, maybe even coming up with a scheme that involed Namco's NeGcon controller. But that's just me making educated guesses on other stuff Namco did around the same time.

 

Prop Cycle is a great game, definitely worth your time to emulate, and in my opinion at least, it would also have been a worthwhile Playstation port at the time, and I think it's a shame it wasn't one. I've never been able to play it on an actual cabinet, but hopefully that'll change someday. I do know that in recent years, there's been at least one Prop Cycle-like game, complete with bike controller and fans, released by a Chinese company, but the only cabient I've encountered of that was way too small for my giant long legs to comfortably be able to pedal.

Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen (PS Vita)

 I actually wasn't going to review this, as I didn't think it was really obscure enough, so it's been mentioned in the monthly Patreon posts where I talk about other games I've been playing that I didn't review. But then I realised that despite its big budget look and feel, it's the sequel to a late-era PS2 game that wasn't massively popular, plus it's a game I've never seen anyone talk about, and finally, fourteen years after its release, it's still an exclusive to PS Vita, a console that never got the attention it deserved from most people.

 

It's a ninja-themed stealth game, and it's by Acquire, so the obvious comparison to make is to the timeless classic Tenchu Stealth Assassins on Playstation. It does feel quite a lot like that game, and you do do a lot of running along rooftops, then jumping down to silently kill some hapless guard who never even knew you existed. The big way in which it feels different, however, is that it feels a lot more like it's designed around speed. You have a run button, you can perform stealth kills while in midair, and the way you use special items and your grappling hook is different.

 

In Tenchu, all of your items were displayed on a bar at the bottom. You switched between them with the shoulder buttons, and you pressed triangle to use them. For items that needed to be aimed, like the grappling hook, you held triangle, aimed with the d-pad, and released triangle to use. In Shinobido 2, You only have four items equipped at a time (though you can swap three of them out at any time). They're each assigned to a direction on the d-pad, with the grappling hook always assigned to down. To use the grappling hook, you just tap down on the d-pad, and you'll throw it at the nearest appropriate surface in the direction you're facing. Again, you can even do this in midair! For thrown weapons, you can lock on to an enemy that's in your field of vision and throw directly at them. 

 

It all adds up to a game in which you're speeding around, killing your enmeies and it all feels so good and satisfying. The only real downside is that there's very few different stages to play in, and they're reused for different missions, with different enemy layouts and different objectives for you to complete. Outside the stages, there's a few things to get your attention too. There are three factions vying for power in the region where the game's set, and you can pick missions to complete for any of them. If you stick with one faction, they'll gradually grow more and more of an appreciation for you, resulting in higher payouts and other benefits. Similarly, if you've got it in for a certain faction for some reason, you can keep accepting missions where they're the target, and if you eventually dwindle their resources down, you'll be hired to assassinate their leader, after which that faction will just no longer be a part of the game!

 

I'm sure there are other ways to get endings (Acquire are also the developers of the Way of the Samurai series, after all), but once there's only one faction left, you'll get the ending that shows them taking power in the region, and also expressing their thanks for your help. The other big extra-curricular activity in which you can engage is alchemy! You don't often find ready-made items in the field, but instead there are lots of weeds and mushrooms with various effects lying around. You can put a bunch of these into a jar (generally they all have to have the same effect, which is enhanced by putting more and more in the jar at once), and then you can extract the ingredients as either elixir (which you drink to gain the effects), sushi (which you leave around for enemies to eat and gain the effects), and bombs (which you throw to cause the effect). The effects are stuff like HP recovery, speed increase, confusion, fainting, explosion, and so on. All the effects can be put into any of the three forms, so you can make a healing grenade or a potion of makes you explode. There's also mechanical dolls for distracting enemies, but I think that these are mostly found, bought, or received as gifts.

 

I've played through this game once, and though I've deleted it now (I'm too lazy to get an SD2VITA card so I'm stuck with a mere 16GB on there), I'm sure I'll go back to it in the future to seek out other paths and endings. It's an excellent game, and even though it's fourteen years old, and I've owned a Vita myself for almost a decade now, it's still amazing to me that a handheld game can look so good! I highly recommend giving Shinobido 2 a try, should you have access to a PS Vita, especially since it's one of the system's few exclusives.