Gachapin Challenge DS (DS)

 Gachapin is a character from Japanese children's TV. Portrayed by someone in a green monster costume, I guess he goes around participating in various sports and activities? That's what I gather from the premise of this game, as well as the gallery contained therein of actual photos of him doing these things. Wikipedia also tells me that he's able to do all this stuff because of seven energy balls on his wrists, that provide him with carbohydrates. Oh. 

 

This game has you playing as Gachapin, as he takes part in various sporting activities. I think the plot has something to do with TV ratings and trying to take a regional show national, but of course, I can't read any of the dialogue, and can only go by what I see happening. There's a lot of these activities, and most of them play completely differently from each other, while all of the racing ones play slightly differently from each other. Even better, all of them are played in that beautiful style of 3D particular to the DS.

 

There's minibike, go-kart, and quad racing, as well as motorcross and hovercraft time trials. Two fooball games see you triyng to score goals past a bunch of slowly-moving targets or playing keepy-uppy on your own, a trampolining game combines timing button presses to bounce higher with quickly tapping dirrectional inputs to do tricks, and a kung fu game has you quickly reacting to button prompts to fight off attackers. None of them are particularly mind-blowing, but nor are any of them terrible. 

 

In the game's main mode, the racing games will have an opponent for you to defeat, while all of the others have a score or time limit for you to beat. The difficulty of all of these is pretty perfectly set, too: some of them might take a few attempts to beat, but none of them are going to be frustrating to get through, nor will they force you to replay a particularly difficult game to the point of fostering resentment. Having said that, a couple are way too easy, the goal-scoring game in particular feels like it's near-impossible to fail at.

 

I did eventually get to a point where even though I'd met the clear conditions for every game that was available to me, the story wouldn't proceed, and as a result, there's three games that I haven't been able to play, and don't even know what they are! But I do have more to talk about, as this game was devloped by Hudson Soft, and for some reason, they included a Bomberman mode. And by "mode", I mean that it's more fully featured than some entire Bomberman games that sold for full price on home consoles (yes, I am talking about Bomberman Act Zero, here).

 

This mode, called Gachabon, features all-new sprites of Gachapin wearing different-coloured Bomberman costumes as the player characters. It's got five different stages to choose from, and can be played against CPU opponents, or with up to four human players (so it doesn't make the DS Bomberman games obsolete, at least, since they went up to eight players). You play until one player has won a certain amount of matches, all the power-ups are in there, and it is just a fairly complete battle mode from a Bomberman game, included as an extra in this licensed game, completely unrelated to Bomberman beyond sharing a developer. Bizarre, but welcome, I guess? If there's just one group of mid-00s Japanese kids out there who spent hours playing this mode together, having never heard of Bomberman otherwise, then it was all worth it.

 

Gachapin Challenge DS probably doesn't have a lot to offer to anyone who isn't a small Japanese child in the 00s. But it does look really good, it's got a lot of charm, and it's inexplicably also got a Bomberman game in it. And some photos of a weird green thing doing a bunch of sports in real life.

The Wild Rings (X Box)

 This is a game I've been wanting to play and review for over a decade, but haven't had the means to do so until now, which is kind of exciting. Japan-only games on the X Box and 360 are inherently interesting, I think, since they were kind of doomed from the start, because those consoles had such small userbases there. This one is also interesting in its own right, being as it is a kind of game that represents a specific time and space in wrestling that, as far as I know, doesn't have a lot of videogame representation. It's a wrestling game that seems to have been inspired by the Inoki-ism philosophy, that as I understand it posits the wrestling ring to be the pinnacle of all combat sports, and the natural gathering place for practitioners of all martial arts to meet and compete.

 

As a result, the roster is split into various arts, including Japanese, American, and Mexican wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, MMA, Sumo, and more. As well as fighting in their respective styles, the left trigger on the controller also has a different action, specific to each art. MMA guys have an alternative grapple there, boxers can dodge with their upper body, luchadors can do a dodge roll, and so on. Oddly, American wrestlers get an extra taunt, which makes for some of them. You can have combatants from any style fight each other freely, obviously, since that's the whole point of the game. You can also have tag and trios matches, and an eight-man battle royale, though the game's clearly not really designed around the battle royale, and it's a bit too chaotic and not very fun.

 

The single, tag, and trio matches do work perfectly fine, though, and there's a few interesting quirks, too. Like how boxers can't grapple or grond attack, or any such stuff, so if you set up a singles match between two boxers, it essentially becomes a boxing match played with the controls of a wrestling game, complete with the referee counting whenever one of the two goes down. The game generally plays kind of like a slower version of Yukes' wrestling games, with an attempt at a Fire Pro-inspired timing-based system for grappling and performing throws. This takes the form of a sliding meter at the bottom of the screen, with areas for weak, medium, and strong moves for the attacker (as well as a button assigned to each), and countering for the defender. Ther problem is that unlike Fire Pro, you don't get just one attempt to hit the timing right, so you can just hammer the button as soon as the meter starts, so you'll likely be the the one pressing it when it goes over the appropriate line.

 

Possibly as a way of balancing the game so that practitioners of arts that don't allow for a lot of different attack options, each fighter only has a few moves, which makes playing through a bunch of consecutive matches as the same guy (like in the championship mode, for example) really repetitive. It might be a little unfair to compare any wrestling game to the absolute pinnacle of the genre, Fire Pro World, but that game also allows you to create fighters from different sports, and the catalogue of moves available includes various strikes and such that can come out of grapples, so there's no need for a boxer or karateka to have the main meat of the game closed off to them, as in The Wild Rings.

 

There is a character creation mode in this game, too, and you can make guys (and only guys! No girls allowed!) for all of the arts, which is good, since sumo and boxing in particular only have two representatives each on the default roster. However, inkeeping with the game's very serious Inoki-inspired premise, the options for doing so are somewhat limited: essentially, you can only really make guys who look like real combat sport participants, with the lucha libre masks being the only concession towards the fantastical. In times of old, I might have considered this a massive downside, and admittedly, I didn't really find much of interest to catch my imagination in there. However, I think it's actually a good thing that this game was made with a specific identity and aesthetic in mind, and that the developers had the confidence in that to stick with it, and to limit the player to creating characters that fit into it. I appreciate the sincerity and vision, there.

 

Like I said at the start of the review, this is a game that acts as a time capsule of a specific wrestling scene in Japan around the turn of the century, and while that might limit its appeal in the eyes of a more mainstream audience, I think that's what makes it still interesting to play and look at, all these years later, where a wrestling game aimed at general audiences might have just been a generic also-ran that could safely be left buried by history. If you're interested in that era of wrestling, or in combat sports, or in deliberately constrained game design, you should definitely give The Wild Rings a look. It won't ever become your go-to wrestling game, but I think it'll at least make you think about what a wrestling game can be.

Deep Shinonome Yin Yang Maiden (Switch)

 

 Upon seeing the screenshots of this game, and apparently not bothering to read the description, I bought it assuming it was a more horror-themed Kikikaikai-style shooting game. Other than each starring a young female exorcist, however, the two games have almost nothing in common! What Deep Shinonome: Yin Yang Maiden (which is the name it's given in the Switch's UI, while Shinonome Abyss: The Maiden Exorcist is what's on the title screen)actually is is a stage-based survival horror game, centered largely around your character's physical vulnerability, and the management of extremely tightly limited resources.

 

Each stage is a building, represented by a grid of (mostly) square rooms connected by doors. Some rooms will have torches or firepits, some will be traps: a spike pit surrounded by only a thin ledge, for example, some will have nothing, not even a light source. And of course, there's items to pick up in some of them. Sound is just as important as vision, though, as you can hear monsters in adjacent rooms, and can make noise yourself to attract their attention.

 

This is essential, since though you have a gun, ammunition is incredibly scarce, and really, it's only effective against the weakest monsters. But the monsters aren't particularly intelligent, and you can lure the corporeal ones into firepits and other traps to destroy themselves, and the spiritual ones through sealed doors or into shrines for similar effects. There's other, single-use weapons found lying around, too, like shurikens that can kill most monsters in a single hit, and grenades, that can clear out entire adjacent rooms.

 

 

Though you're an exorcist, your aim in each stage is only to enter through the front door, and eventually exit through the back. You don't have to destroy every monster lurking therein, though if you don't you'll be spending a lot of time avoiding them, and as well as weak and fragile, you're also pretty slow, so that's a difficult act to keep up for an extended period. So the meat of the game is surveying the situation very carefully, figuring out which monsters are where, and also where the resources needed to destroy them are. 

Of course, this means that it's heavily structured around playing stages repeatedly. Not only so you can get the lay of the land enough to actually complete them, but there's also a strong emphasis on scoring, with a complex rundown at the end of each stage, showing the points you scored for item use, destroying monsters, and finishing quickly. That doesn't mean they've skimped on the size of the game, though: there's a ton of stages, starting out moderately difficult, and judging by the star scale used on the selection screen, gradually moving up to inconceivable difficulty for superhuman genius players.

 

I like this game! It's compellingly addictive, to the point where I don't want to leave a stage I've started unfinished, trying over and over until I figure it out (and successfully eecute that solution), then often foolishly starting the next stage straight away and getting drawn in for another series of failed runs. It also definitely works as a piece of horror, being atmospheric and gruesome with relatively simple graphics and sound, and tying the horror into the mechanical design of the game itself, rather than just being a macabre skin draped over a generic action game. Definitely recommended. (Note: a lot of places online seem to have the game listed as a roguelike, but that's just an optional sidemode, the main game is a series of specifically designed and balanced stages).