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. 

Yoyo's Puzzle Park (Playstation)

 There's some slightly odd circumstances surrounding the release of this game. Firstly, it's one of those games with a massive gap between its Japanese release (1996) and its western release (1999). Also, in Japan, it's called Gussun Paradise, which is a better name for it than Yoyo's Puzzle Park for two reasons. The first is that it lets you know that it's a spinoff from the Gussun Oyoyo series of puzzle games, and the second is that the reason it's a spinoff and not one of the main entries is that it's not a puzzle game. Instead, it's a Bubble Bobble-like: a single screen platformer in which you have to kill every enemy to progress, and also you score more points by killing multiple enemies in one go.

 

Unfortunately, every game in this genre is expected to have its own novel way of killing its enemies, that allows for that multi-kill high score play, and by 1996 the well seems to have been running dry. How it works here is that there are enemies going around, and they kill you if you touch them. You can stun them by shooting at them with one of those cone-shaped party poppers, which also knocks them back a little bit, so you can (labouriously) get them where you want them to be. There are also living bombs with faces that just kind of passively sit around. You can't shoot them with your popper, but you can go right up to them and kick them, or you can jump on them from above or headbutt them from below. Any of these nudges them a bit, and lights their fuse. Naturally, their explosions are pretty big, and they kill anyone caught in them, friend or foe.

 

It's awkward, slow, and just generally not fun at all. The worst part of it all is that the bombs regenerate where they exploded, and while you can kick them off of the edge of platforms, but there's no way to get them back to higher parts of the screen. Meanwhile, the enemies, when not stunned, can jump up to higher levels at will, meaning that you'll spend a lot of time stunning enemies and kicking them down the stage to get them to the bombs that are stuck down there. There's some interesting power-ups, at least, in the form of vehicle/animal/rubber ring things that go around your waist and give you new abilities, like flight or long-range shots. I don't think there's any that just let you directly kill enemies, though, like there are in most games of this type.

 

Though I found playing the game itself fiddly and tedious, there are some things I liked about the presentation. The map screen, from whence you pick which set of stages you're going to tackle is a very nice bit of pixel art. In fact, the game's premise is a stamp rally around the various different areas of a theme park, and it really commits to this concept in things like the save and load screens and such. Stages will do gimmicky things based on where in the park they're meant to be, too: in the aquarium, there's rising and falling water levels, with some enemies floating at the top of it, on a flight simulator, the entire screen tilts, and so on. Something else nice is the unusually human way the options are phrased: instead of "new game" and "load game", there's "play from the beginning" and "continue", while "play on my own", and "two of us play" take the place of "one player" and "two player". It's immediately noticable and adds a lot of charm.

 

Like you might have figured out, I didn't enjoy playing Yoyo's Puzzle Park, and I don't recommend it. At least, I don't recommend playing it and expecting a fun game. Give it a quick go to see how nicely presented it is, though. Then you can properly lament what a chore the actual game is. I'm surprised to learn, from a quick look at ebay, that copies are less than a hundred pounds, but still a lot more than I'd recommend paying. 

Happy! Happy!! Boarders in Hokkaido Rusutsu Resort (PS2)

 The first thing that stands out about Happy! Happy!! Boarders upon starting it is the way it sounds and looks: it's going to be a feast for those "Y2K Aesthetic" appreciators out there. Then, with the snowboarding game I've played most of being another PS2 game, Alpine Racer 3, it's striking how much slower and more realistic this game is. You have quite a lot of control of your boarder in this game, where they go, and you've also got to make them keep their balance. A big contrast to AR3, which is a very videogamey racing game, in which you mainly just have to go as fast as possible down linear tracks while avoiding obstacles. (It might get its own review here someday.)

 

So, this more of a sim-type game. Not just in the relatively more realistic snowboarding action, but also it's a tie-in to a real skiing/snowboarding resort in Hokkaido, and it's kind of a bit of a sim of being there, too. Well, a little bit. You access the menu for saving, changing your board, and some other things by returning to the hotel, at least. Also, the loading screens have some very nice, scenic photos of the real slopes, and there's also a gallery full of unlockable photos of the hotel's interior, for some reason. 

 

You start off with access to only one course, and a point quota. You get points by snowboarding, by doing tricks, by boarding between flags on the course, doing little speed challenges and for some reason, by stopping to talk to certain people who are loitering around on the course. Once you reach the points quota, you can go to the second course, which is a lot more interesting, since it's got a few branching points that kind of make it four courses in one, and you get a new points quota. For some reason, though, I didn't unlock a third course upon reaching this quota. And one of the big problems with playing and writing about obscure games is that there are no guides online to help you, so a little ulterior motive in writing this review is to ask the internet: anyone know what i'm doing wrong?

 

It really is a shame, because I was getting into the game before getting stuck like this: once you get the hang of the controls, it's a lot of fun going down the slopes, and as mentioned, it looks great too. They really did a good job of making this resort feel like a cool, fun, luxurious place to be! Plus, it seems to be almost entirely inhabited by attractive young people. Which makes sense, since from what little English writing there is about this game online, there's supposedly a romantic aspect to it, too, which I never picked up on at all! 

 

If you can read Japanese, I recommend giving this game a try! It's fun to play, and it really seems like it's got a lot going on to make it stand out in the genre. If you can't speak Japanese, I still recommend giving it a try, I've really enjoyed what I've been able to play of it, and maybe you'll be able to figure out how to get past the second course and make me look like Booboo the Fool. Who knows, maybe I'll figure it out myself? I can only hope.  

Taiketsu! Ultra Hero (GBA)

 Can you believe it's been over two years since I wrote about a tokusatsu tie-in game here? And even that's if you're liberal enough to count Power Rangers as tokusatsu. Don't worry, though: there's going to be more than one post on this subject this year, I'm pretty sure. This one is an Ultraman fighting game! There's been many of them, some notoriously awful, some sneakily having little cult followings. This one is closer to the first group, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's awful.

 

It's got a pretty big roster of characters, with a bunch of Ultramen selectable in "VS Mode", which is actually what you'd normally think of as arcade mode, and tournament mode, where you only fight against other Ultramen. There's also a Free Battle mode, in which you can select any of the monsters that you fight against in VS mode, including a screen-sized representation from one of the great old ones of the Cthulhu mythos, Ghatanothoa (or rather, "Ghatanothor", as the Ultra series officially spells it), who apparently appears as the final enemy in 1996-97's Ultraman Tiga (which I unfortunately haven't seen). More importantly, yes: you can play as Dino Tank in this game.

 

There's some things that are very strange about this game. Firstly, there's the balance. All of the monsters are massively more powerful than all of the Ultramen, in every mode. They do more damage with their attacks, they receive significantly less damage from attacks, and most of all, they can use their special infinitely. Ultramen have a power meter at the bottom of the screen, representing their Color Timer. It slowly goes down constantly, with special moves taking chunks out of it. There's even some "all or nothing" specials that can immediately win a fight if they hit, or lose it if they miss! So, this imbalance is clearly a deliberate choice to add tension, and stay close to the lore of the TV shows. It makes for a worse game, but a better adaptation. What a conundrum!

 

Another weird thing, that can't be so tidily excused, is the way special moves are performed. Instead of having move inputs like a normal fighting game, instead you hold a shoulder button and press a face button to perform specials. So every character has a maximum of four specials, and it's not really possible to make combos with any of them. While the face buttons are each assigned punch and kick, the shoulder buttons don't do anything when pressed on their own, so I wasn't even able to figure out this weird system on my own! Instead, I saw that there must be specials in the game when I saw CPU opponents performing them, and went looking online. Luckily, there is a guide on gameFAQs (written in 2004, a mere six months after the game's release!). It doesn't work well, it's not fun to do, and it's not very intuitive. 

 

There's good things about the game, too. Like how it looks: all the sprites are really well-drawn and animated. And while it's technically a bad game, there's still a little bit of entertainment to be had from having monster vs monster fights in free mode. And then learning that it's still hilariously poorly balanced, since any monster that has a projectile with full screen range can just spam it with impunity. If you fire up the ROM, I'm sure you'll be amused for like, half an hour or so. That's fine, right? I haven't been able to find a copy for sale, so I don't know what the prices are like for it, but whatever it costs when it does emerge: it's not worth it.