Undercover Cops Gaiden - Hakaishin Garumaa (Game Boy)

 It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel unfortunately, but it did get this: a Game Boy exclusive spin-off that's a kind of board game/RPG thing.

 

So, you pick one of the characters from the original game (but let's be honest: everyone's going to pick Rosa. Can you even remember the names of the other two guys without looking them up?), and you traverse a board game world with branching paths and differently-coloured squares and a few special squares here and there. Movement takes place in the same manner that would be used in Sonic Shuffle years later: you have a hand of cards bearing different numbers. You pick a card, and then there's a roulette that can land on a number up to that of the card you picked, telling you how many spaces you'll move. White squares do nothing, grey squares give you a little money, and black squares result in a battle (or occasionally a whack-a-mole minigame).

 

The battles are turn-based, and a little more complex than you might expect from a 1993 Game Boy game. First, you and your opponent will pick a card, with the highest number determining who is the attacker for the current turn. If that's you, you pick a body part, then pick another card from your hand, and you might do some damage, or maybe nothing will happen. If you're the defender, you only have to pick the top or bottom half of your body to defend, and again, you pick another card. Then you might take damage or you might not. This carries on until someone runs out of hit points, which can take ages, since it seems to be completely randomly determined whether or not damage is dealt each turn. It doesn't take much strategy to ensure that you're almost always the attacker, at least. Especially as you level up, which puts higher-numbered cards in your deck.

 

There is a kind of mindless compulsion that can keep you playing this game. Like it's mostly luck-based, but there's also a lot of really nice pixel art in here, and there is even a plot running through the game. But that's all there is, and if you're going to play on real hardware, you won't have access to save states or a fast forward button, which will also really dampen the game's appeal. What really killed my enthusiasm for it, though is the fact that the branching paths don't lead to different routes or even alternate storylines. What they lead to is dead ends. You can't scroll ahead, so if you do end up going down the wrong path, you have no choice but to go back and then go down the right path. 

 

The problem here is that the process of moving is incredibly slow. As described above, you pick a card and then you spin the roulette and then you move. And then if you land on a grey square, you've got long seconds of reading the line of text telling you about the tiny amount of money you've picked up. And the black squares don't go away after you've landed on them, so the incredibly slow and random number generator-based battles are something you'll be enduring again and again. 

 

The pixel art in the battles and cutscenes is really nice, and near-miraculous when you consider this is only a couple of years into the lifespan of the original Game Boy. But unfortuantely, that's really all this game has going for it, and the mountains of tedious timewasting through which it puts the player is unforgivable. I'm glad it got a translation patch, because it was a game that had caught my attention and my cuiosity a long time ago. But I don't recommend actually playing it.

Hokuto no Ken 6 Gekitou Denshouken - Haou heno Michi (SNES)

 Though I think nowadays, when people think of Hokuto no Ken games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, they're more likely to think of the ones on Master System and Mega Drive, there was a series of them on Nintendo's consoles, too. And while the Nintendo games carried a sequel number across seven games (so yes, this is apparently a part of the same series of games as the Famicom beat em up Hokuto no Ken 2 that I reviewed long ago), they don't seem to have much else in common. Of course they started with beat em ups, then there were a few RPGs, and the final two, six and seven, were fighting games. 

 

Hokuto no Ken 6 represents an interesting and very narrow point in time in the genre's evolution, too. It's clear just by looking at it that the developers were familiar with Street Fighter II and its massive success (as I think everyone involved in videogames would have been at the time), and they were able to copy the general screen layout, and the large character sprites. But the mechanics and the feel of Street Fighter II were far beyond their capabilities at that time. The regular punches and kicks feel very stiff and clunky, and it's near-impossible to string multiple attacks together into anything feeling like a combo. Furthermore, instead of having motion-based special moves, the players have two meters beneath their health meter, and all specials are performed via the shoulder buttons, in conjunction with these meters.

 

The first meter, AP, works almost like the momentum meter in Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu: it goes up when you land hits, and it goes down when you take hits. When it's full, you can press the left shoulder button to perform a move so special, it's name will also appear onscreen if it lands. You'll recognise these as each character's signiature move from the comic/TV show. The other meter, TP, is less interesting: you hold the right shoulder button to fill it, and when it fills up, you can release to shoot a projectile attack. And that's pretty much the entirety of the game's special moves. (There are apparently even more powerful signatures if you manage to fill up the AP meter twice before using it, but I haven't been able to do that.)

 

The character line up is a little strange, too. There's Kenshiro and Rei, like you might expect, along with a bunch of villains from late in the series like Raoh, Souther, and so on. But what makes it weird is that there's a stage clearly meant to be Shin's throne room in Southern Cross, but instead of being occupied by Shin, it's the home stage for Heart! I guess he's kind of an iconic character, but he's also a comedy jobber who dies very early in the series! It's a shame I can't read the dialogue text that appears at the start of each story mode fight, as I'd love to know what happens in Heart's conversations with those god-like man-tyrants who make up most of the cast.

 

I actually did enjoy Hokuto no Ken 6. I can't recommend it, because it just doesn't really feel good to play. But somehow, I did get some joy from having these character awkwardly flail at each other. It's definitely helped by having such nicely drawn, detailed sprites, as well as other little details like Raoh being unable to crouch (because of course, the king of fists would never bend a knee). But it's very simplistic, very stiff, and it's on a console that has a ton of better fighting games (including several others that are based on anime and manga. Though Hokuto no Ken 7 isn't very good either, unfortunately). The best I can say is that it's a game that can be found very cheaply, and if you've got friends who can appreciate a good bad game, and who also love Hokuto no Ken, you might get a decent hour or so out of it.

Simple 1500 Series vol. 99 - The Kendo ~Ken no Hanamichi~ (Playstation)

 Something interesting about budget hames in particular is the way in whih the best of them manage to get a maximum amount of game with a minimum amount of resources, especially when they manage to do it without resorting to boring grinding or other timesink tactics. And The Kendo is a good example of that! Most of the characters in the game are represented by the same model with different coloured versions of the same textures. And yet, there are three single player stories, a survival mode, and a versus mode for one or two players.

 

The story mode is the most interesting part of the game, in my opinion. Everything's in Japanese, but it's easy enough to understand what's going on anyway. As mentioned, there are three stories, and they're all told with kendo matches interspersed between visual noval-style dialogue scenes using static character portraits and textboxes. The first story is about a teenage boy entering a kendo tournament, and along with winning the tournament, he also hopes to beat his bishounen rival to impress his girlfriend. 

 

Finishing that story lets you play the second, which stars a young policewoman, apparently investigating a kendo crime ring. So she corners suspects in a shady boiler room-style place and uses kendo skills to make them confess, eventually leading her to the mob's headquarters, and its leaders: a curly-moustached European knight and a sinister figure in a suit and hooded mask. The boiler room fights are done in a single hit, rather than the two-hit fights in the previous tournament story, so it's clear that the developers were doing what they could to add a little variety to what could have easily become a very repetitive game.

 

The final story mode has as its protagonist a man in his late forties, who seems to be working in some kind of industry that's a combination of pro-wrestling and kendo, complete with a sleazy McMahon-esque promoter and the involvement of organised crime. Unfortunately, this is where my Japanese illiteracy causes problems: it seems like in this story, you have to ensure that specific things happen in the match to progress, and I'm not sure exactly what those things are. I manage to eventually luck my way to the third stage, but it eventually became clear that I wasn't going to get any further.

 

The actual kendo action is pretty good. You can move forward and back, as well as into and out of the screen, and each of the four face buttons represents a different offensive or defensive move. You can even feint by pressing two buttons in quick succession, letting you stop one move midway and immediately perform a different one. The obvious comparison to make is to the SG-1000 game Champion Kendo, since it's both a game I love and as far as I know, the only other kendo game. The Kendo focusses on one-on-one matches that are decided by first-to-two-points, as opposed to Champion Kendo's five-on-five elimination matches. It's also a lot more fair than Champion Kendo, which, as much as I love it, does seem to rely a lot of randomness. There's definitely a lot more skill involved in this game. 

 

Whether you speak Japanese or not, this is a game I think is worth playing. Despite being tehnically a better game, it won't replace Champion Kendo in my regular rotation, but that's because I like that game's more arcadey score-chasing structure. But this game is a smartly-conceived and well-executed exercise in game design, and in getting the most out of limited resources. So I do recommend it, especially if you are interested in videogames as a creative medium.

Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure (Mega Drive)

 

 Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures. For a couple of short years, I loved the TV show, the comic, and when it came to pass that a Mega Drive game was coming, I became obsessed with wanting to play it, even using the screenshot maps in the second issue of Sega XS as a substitute until I was able to. As was the fashion at the time, the game would obviously be a platformer where you defeat enemies by jumping on their heads.

 

There would be a second Tiny Toons Mega Drive game a few years later, a comedy sports title. But by the time it came out in 1994, I'd long since lost interest in the show. Buster's Hidden Treasure though, I did get to play, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a pretty good, and very well presented iteration of the generic Sonic-wannabe game. Buster can run really fast, even to the point where his legs start revolving in a circle like Sonic's do, and the first few stages take place in grassy plains, and the final ones in industrial factories.

 

There's some weirdness in here, though. Tiny Toon Adventures was a silly comedy show, so while they managed to use a villain from the show, Dr. Gene Splicer, there's no enemy army to populate the stages. There's a recurring eney who's supposed to be a character from the show named Rhubella Rat, though they look like her (and also there's lots of them). Big muscular dog character Arnold also turns up a bunch of times as an enemy. There's also some cute little bats and birds and other normal animals. Then there's a ton of weird things. Like little blue goblin creatures, werewolves, egg-shaped guys who defy gravity and release circles from their mouths to attack, and so on. I was all ready to talk about how these things were clearly made up last minute, and how they didn't fit with the aesthetic of the series' world, but on doing a bit more reasearch, every one of them actually is from the show, even if they only had a single appearance each.

 

The plot's also kind of over-written, too. Buster Bunny finds a treasure map in the attic at Acme Looniversity, so he and Montana Max race to get the treasure (which could have been the plot for a somewhat more unique game, with Spy VS Spy/Trap Gunner/Dashin Desperados=style sabotage-action gameplay), and also the evil scientist Dr. Gene Splicer has been kidnapping Buster's friends to put brainwashing hats on them. I guess that doesn't really matter, though.

 

Most importantly, the game itself is pretty good. As mentioned before, the strong pointi s definitely the presentation. Buster himself has a ton of animations that all look great. There's even animations that aren't even really necessary, like in areas with low ceilings, he'll walk around with his ears hanging low instead of pointing upwards. But there's also a tons of great-looking animations for crawling across the ground, zip-cording down ropes on his ears, and hanging from horizontal ropes by his hands. The backgrounds all look really nice, too, though unfortunately, it feels like a bizarrely long segment of the game takes place in a series of caves.

 

It also plays pretty well. As already mentioned, it's definitely a Sonic imitator, with fast-paced platforming, and lots of ramps and slopes and momentum-based shenanigens. There's a couple of things that kind of let it down, though. Sonic can easily and quickly smash through enemies by rolling, initiated by the player pressing down on the D-pad. Buster, to make things slightly different, slides along the ground, an action initiated by pressing the B button. It only works when he's at top speed, and assigning it to a button rather than down makes it a little less intuitive, just enough that you forget to do it, and just run into the enemies and get hurt. It's not helped by the fact that unlike Sonic's roll, it's only a short move, and it slows you down, you can just keep going with it. Also, those cave stages that take up such a long segment of the game's middle parts are also very cramped, slowing affairs down to a crawl (much more than, for example, Marble Zone does), and they're also a lot longer and more difficult than the stages preceding and following them.

 

Buster's Hidden Treasure is a decent enough Mega Drive platformer. It's worth playing for the excellent graphics and animation, but if it stops being fun in the caves, there's no real reason to feel bad about quitting there. It's unfortunate that as well-made as it is, I'm not sure it would even get into the top twenty Mega Drive platformers, and definitely not the top ten. It's fine, though.

Blood Lines (Playstation)

 Everyone loves to read about Japan-exclusive Playstation games, but Blood Lines is part of a much rarer breed: PAL-exclusive Playstation games! Despite that, someone at Sony Europe must have had some faith in it, as I remember playing it on a magazine demo disc back at the time. I especially remember the line "LOSING BECOMES YOU!" that one of the characters shouts after winning a round, in an exagerrated posh accent.

 

But after winning a round of what? A combination of tig, and a four corners strap wrestling match. Also, it's set in some kind of dystopian future. How it works is that you and your opponent start in the middle of a small 3D platform stage, at strategic points of which are a bunch of energy field things. These fields start off green (neutral), until the first player touches one. Then, that field changes to be their colour, and they become the active player, so they can touch the others to make them their colour. Turn all except one of the things to your colour to win the match.

 

If you're not the active player, you've got to chase them, and when you catch them, you'll do a wrestling move to them and become the active player yourself. All the while, both players can keep tapping square to shoot little homing projectiles at each other, the effect of which isn't exactly clear, but I think the active player getting hit brings them a tiny amount closer to their opponent, and the passive player getting hit sends them a tiny amount further away.

 

It's an interesting idea to make a gritty sci-fi version of a game most people left behind in primary school, and it kind of pays off? Like, this is a pretty fun game! I imagine, if you could somehow convince someone to play it with you, you'd both have a good time. And, in an even more far-fetched scenario, you might even set up a multi-tap and get three other people to play with you, in the four player party mode. In this mode, there are obviously four characters in play at the same time, and two can be active at any times. THe aim is still to turn all but one of the fields your colour, though. It really seems like this could be a nice bit of chaotic fun if you could get it running with the right group of people. I do wonder if it's ever actually been played with a full cohort outside of the developer's offices, though. 

 

Blood Lines is a fun game! It's decent enough as a solo player and though I can only speak on multiplayer from a theoretical standpoint, like I said: if you've got a group that's willing to try out something a little strange and different, I think you'll get a lot out of it.

The Terminator (Mega CD)

 It might seem a little odd for me to be writing about a game that's a tie-in to an incredibly popular mainstream movie. But there's a few mitigating factors at play here. Firstly, it's a Mega CD game, and almost every Mega CD game can be considered at least a little obscure. Not only that, but it's also a platformer on the Mega CD, and it was released in 1993, and to the magazines of the time, that was an unforgivable crime. Around about 1993-94, even games now considered universally-beloved classics like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier were getting bad reviews for being "just platformers", and to exacerbate this, critics at the time had somehow gotten the idea that the Mega CD was some kind of wonder consoles that would change the very meaning of videogames, giving us hyper-realistic graphics and games that were indistinguishable from playable movies, and anything that fell short of this was lambasted. Except Thunderhawk, for what I'm sure are totally legitimate reasons.

 

The Terminator, then, is "just a platformer", and it's definitely not as good as those Treasure games I mentioned above. But what it does do is utilise the strengths of the Mega CD to create a big, exciting audiovisual experience. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think it's using a deeper colour palette than the stock Mega Drive would normally support, and there's a few subtle bits here and there in the way certain sections scroll and such that probably wouldn't be impossible on a cartridge, but would at least been a bit of a hefty test of skill for the programmers. There's also clips from the movie played between stages, and the very dark lighting and muted colours of the movie really make for a good fit into the very limited FMV capabilities of the Mega CD. I haven't gotten through the entire game (though I have played more than half way), but it seems like none of the clips used contain any spoken dialogue, which is interesting. Even moreso when you reach the Tech-Noir nightclub, where the BGM is a track made up of little samples of the movie's dialogue. "It's just me.. and him. Cyborg. Cyborg. Cy-cy-cybernetic Organism." and so on.

 

The music is a high point in general, with the aforementioned track being a very of-the-time kind of electronic dancy type thing, and a lot of the other stages being backed by some also very early nineties American-style hair metal instrumentals, mixd with a little movie soundtrack epic bombasticity (you can really tell I'm not used to writing a lot about music here, can't you?). The music was clearly an intentional selling point, too, as three of the five big bullet points on the back of the US case mention it. (It's also credited to Tommy Tallarico in the intro, but in the year 2026, what does that even mean anymore?) The back of the Pal box doesn't mention it at all, with a much more standard, flavourless paragraph just describing the game. I do want to mention that the front of the boxes are very different, somehow, though: the PAL cover is simple, but effective. The Terminator logo and the classic portrait of the T-800 on a black background. The US cover is deranged, however: that same portrait, but copied and pasted around a few times, with a different filter on each one in a very silly and cheap-looking manner.

 

As for how the game plays, it's pretty good. You play as Kyle Reese, and the first few stages have you running around post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and Skynet's base, killing lots of evil robots, until you get to the time machine. Then you're in 1980s Los Angeles, killing lots of punks and hair metal fans. It's kind of similar to the movie tie-ins that Acclaim were putting out on SNES and Mega Drive at around the same time: well-animated sprites, enemies that can take a few hits before dying, lots of ladders to go up and down, and a dark colour palette. It's simpler than those games tended to be in good ways, though: you armed only with your standard machine gun and grenades, rather than having a bunch of gimmicky weapons with limited ammo to swtich between, and while the enemies do take a bit of a beating, so do you. Best of all, you pretty much only ever have to make your way in a generally rightwards direction, with exploration beyond that being optional and rewarded with power-ups. No getting lost in vast labyrinthine stages.

 

There's a few very distinct enemy types in each era, with maybe one or two new ones introduced per stage at most, and they all have very learnable behaviour, another thing I consider a big positive. It's satisfying to see a bunch of enemies you're about to fight, you know how to fight them, and then you execute that. Another cool thing is that you get a whole new look after you time travel! In the future, Kyle's in his military-like resistance outfit, with a futuristic machine gun, then after the jump (since nothing can be brought through the portal orb thing), he gets a trenchcoat and rifle, and his grenades are replaced with molotov cocktails. These 1980s weapons still handle exactly like the 2020s ones, but it's still a cool visual touch.

 

I recommend trying out The Terminator, and make sure you do so with the volume up high. It seems almost as if someone at Virgin (presumably Dave Perry) had the idea of using the Mega CD to adapt the movie into a kind of playable concept album, and in my opinion at least, it's an idea that really paid off. I'll assume it wasn't much of a commercial success, though, not only because it's on the Mega CD, but also because it's apparently one of the rarer games on the system nowadays. What a shame. It'll probably never get ny kind of modern pot or rerelease either, for many reasons. So you know what to do.

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher (Switch)

 The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar. I do remember, probably more than twenty years ago, spending an afternoon playing one of the GBA Monster rancher games via emulation, keeping the fast forward button held down almost constantly. Even further back, I remember people complaining online that there weren't enough female characters in the anime about whom to write yuri. I am, however, a little more familiar with Ultraman, and with kaiju in general, and right from the announcement of a Monster Rancher game about raising Ultraman kaiju, I was interested. So it was among one of the first batch of physical games I bought shortly after I finally got a Switch late last year.

 

Once I started playing the game, it quickly became one that started taking up big chunks of my time. It's not a game I'm always craving, and not one to which I return every day. But when I do load it up, I'm usually there for well over an hour. The game's got a prertty repetitive design, but in a way that just kind of feels good and eats up time? It's split into weeks, and each week you choose what your kaiju is going to do: rest, train, fight in a tournament, or when they're available, fighting a wild kaiju or exploring a maze-like valley full of treasure. When you train, you pick one stat to increase, or two stats with the downside of slightly lowering another. Tournaments and wild kaiju fights are pretty obvious, and I'll get into combat more later. And all the other things make your kaiju tired, so resting is something you'll just have to do every few weeks. The treasure mazes aren't particularly interesting. You move your kaiju through a simple maze, until you find a place they can dig for treasure. They'll get a few items, occasionally one that might advance the plot a little (if you're even interested in the plot. You could easily play this game for a long long time and never even touch it). 

 

But how do you get a kaiju? The series has, since its start, been famous for the system whereby you put a music CD into your console to generate a monster, and that aforementioned GBA game had you inputting words to make them. In this case, there's something that's kind of a middle ground: the game has an inbuilt database of artists and song names, and at the summoning altar, you search for and select a song that'll probide the basis for your kaiju. The database isn't great, and it really doesn't seem like there's much metal representation, unfortunately. But it's still a decent enough compromise that keeps ties to the series' roots and isn't as boring as just typing in a word, like the GBA game.

 

The combat is interesting, a middle ground between action and turn-based that adds a little extra depth to precedings in a few ways. You can control your kaiju by making them walk towards or away from their opponent. At the bottom of the screen, there's four icons representing attacks, at different distances away from your opponent. You have one attack button, and pressing it will make your kaiju pergorm the attack represented by the icon over which they're curently standing. So distance management is important. Each attack consumes a certain amount of a resource called guts. This is constantly increasing at a speed determined by a few factors. I think (but I'm not sure) that your kaiju's speed stat affects it (it also affects your kaiju's chance of dodging attacks), but their current anger level definitely affects it: the angrier they are, the faster it increases. (Anger generally goes up when you make your kaiju train, and goes down when they win fights. If it reaches its maximum, your kaiju goes on a rampage, which could trigger a few different events).

 

Furthermore, the time limit for all fights, tournament or wild, is sixty seconds. This is actually more important than it sounds as knockouts are relatively rare, and if you're fighting an opponent that vastly outclasses you on paper, you could win a time out victory with a ombination of skill and luck. If you've managed to chip a little of a powerful foe's HP off, and they've missed every attack, you might try to run out the timer with lots of weak attacks, each eating up four or five seconds whether they hit or not. It might not be particularly noble, but it's still very satisfying to pull off.

 

I don't know enough about the Monster Rancher series to say whether the use of kaiju in this one is anything more than a thematic and visual gimmick or not. But even if it is, it's a good one. The ranch menu, that has you overlooking a sweeping vista which your kaiju looming over it is cool, and the battles between the big, lumbering beasts also look and feel cool (and their massive forms make the slow pace of their movement and the time spent waiting for guts to recharge feel appropriate, too). I've had a lot of fun with this game so far, and it's pretty clear when I look at everything I'm yet to achieve that I've barely scratched the surface, and that I'll be coming back to it for a long time to come. I definitely recommend picking a copy up.

Moero! Justice Gakuen (Dreamcast)

I know this game isn't particularly obscure, but this is a special case. This is specifically the Japanese version of the game also known as Project Justice, and a big difference between the two versions is that Moero! Justice Gakuen had a whole mode that was removed from Project Justice. That mode is Nekketsu Nikki (Hot-Blooded Diary), a character creation mode, combined with a board game with a tiny bit of dating simulation in there for flavour. A translation patch for it recently got released, and since, along with the life sim modes that were cut out of its Playstation forebears, this has been one of my most-wanted translations for as long as I've known that fan translations existed, I thought it worthy of a review.

 

With that in mind, I won't be speaking much on the actual fighting game here. Most of you have played it, and know that it's excellent already. It was a big obsession for me as a teenager, and because I couldn't find any copies in the shops in my town, I'm pretty sure it was the first game I ever ordered online (at a friend's house after school, as I had neither a PC nor my own bank account at that time). Instead, let's first talk about how character creation works. You name your character, choose their gender and their school, as well as their haircut, eyes, nose, and mouth. It's slightly disappointing that there's no customisation at all beyond that: it would have been cool to be able to make a character who's made a few minor changes to their uniform, or even to give them a different body type or hair colour than the default. But never mind, I think it's still possible to make characters into whom you can breathe a little life. (I have to admit that it was pretty clever of Capcom to use the conceit of all the characters being uniformed students to make a character creation mode possible, while justifying not having to model hundreds of different clothing items.)

 

You also choose their best school subject and three words from a selection. These choices affect your character's starting stats, and if you're boring, you can look at gamefaqs to find ancient guides written around the time of the game's release to find out the most optimal choices here. But, keeping with the spirit of the game, you should really think of the character you're making, and choose based on the personality they have in your imagination. What you notably don't get the freedom to choose are any of your character's special moves, or even their fighting stance and normal attacks. They'll be decided during the board game, which is themed around a school festival. 

 

The board game takes place over forty turns (it goes by quicker than it sounds like it would, as long as you only giver yourself one CPU opponent), and takes place on a big path of squares, laid out like a school festival. Most of the squares will slightly increase one of your stats when you land on it, some represent class credits (which I'll explain later), others give you cards, some are there to dish out special moves, and there's a rare few that reduce your stats. You spin a spinner each turn to see how far you move, though you can choose which direction you move in. Also, there are actual characters from the game wandering around, and if you land on the same space as one, you get to have a little interaction. Keep doing this with the same character, and you can befriend or even romance them (The whole series, in these console-exclusive modes, assumes that everyone is bisexual. Which is nice.). Though, chasing them arond the board would get in the way of trying to win the game or make your character stronger, so it's something to which you'd have to really dedicate a run and a junk character. An interesting thing about the special moves: though most of them are the moves of characters in the game, there's also a few moves that are only in this mode, plus the entire moveset of Street Fighter's Sakura Kasugano (who was a guest character in the first Rival Schools, but not this one). 

 

Regarding the class credits, those are the way you win the game, and if you do a good enough job, they'll be a big contributor towards your character's stats and their access to burning vigor moves. You get a randomly generated bingo card at the start of the game, with the spaces being these class credits. So, you've got to go around the board landing on them to fill your card. Getting a full row either increases all of your stats by one level, or gives your character a BV move. Furthermore, you get points for getting them, and at all times, one of them is a special space that gives an extra fifty points for landing on it (at which time another class credit space becomes the special one). After the fortieth turn, there's a CPU-controlled fighting tournament for all of the characters that were in the board game, which dishes out more points depending on where characters placed. And after that's done, the character with the most points is declared the winner, and gets to choose either another BV move (or their first if they didn't get any before this point), or a boost to all of their stats.

 

Then, you can save the character and play as them in all the actual fighting modes the game has! It's really a massive shame Capcom couldn't be bothered to translate this mode back at the time of the game's release, because I know as much as I played the English version as it was, with this mode, it would have gotten hundreds of hours of play. I know my friends at the time would have enjoyed creating characters and playing the board game, maybe even going so far as to each have our own custom trios to fight against each other in versus mode! We missed out on so much back then, didn't we? That's before you even get into the massive amounts of lore for this series that was printed in Gamest Mooks and never translated. But now we do have this mode, and it's excellent. And a (very) little bit of the extra lore got translated in the artbook Udon put out last year. Obviously, I very highly recommend playing it, and I hope that the existence of this translation is a good omen that we'll get the lifesim mode from at least one of the Playstation games translated in the near future.