Yokushin: Gigawing Generations (PS2)

 Alongside Gunbird 2, the Dreamcast port of the original Gigawing was one of the shooting games that really got me interested in the genre. At the time, I'd seen nothing like it before: not only was it my first danmaku STG, with enemy agression like I'd never seen before, but it also had some other elements that added their own spice. The story scenes between stages, where characters melodramatically despaired about the cruelties man inflicts upon man, as well as the specific horrors of the war unfolding before their eyes. There's also the soundtrack, while not exactly to my tastes, does a great job of setting the mood, not just while you're playing, but also with specific situations, like how the game over music is so calm and relaxing compared to the noise and chaos of the game, and cuts in so abruptly as soon as you die, giving the feeling of a soldier dying on the battlefield and immediately finding themselves in paradise. The most important, and most famous ingredient of both the original Gigawing and the series in general, though is its scoring and self-defence system, that are intertwined as one.

 

By holding the fire button for a few seconds, you emit a forcefield that reflects enemy bullets back at them, doing big damage, and turning them into medals. Each medal you collect increases the value of every subsequent medal, and also the multiplier constantly applied to your score. By the end of the first stage of the first game, you can easily get your multiplier into the millions, with your score already reaching the tens of trillions. The second game leant really hard into a bombastic look and sound, with a WWII-like fantasy setting. It also added an optional "reflect laser" weapon, which converted enemy bullets into auto-aimed laserbeams instead of directly reflecting them. It also added cascades, whereby having a large amount of medals onscreen at ones would magically cause big golden waterfalls of hundreds more medals appear out of nowhere.

 

That absurdly long preamble, despite not mentioning Yokushin Gigawing Generations, says so much about it. The unfortunate fact is that, as much as I love the first two games in this series, I just don't care for this third entry. Now, I don't particularly dislike it. It plays fine, and it can get its hooks in your for an hour or so here and there like any half-decent STG can, but it makes me feel nothing. It's just there, existing. It doesn't have the melodrama or the aesthetics of the previous games. Though the numbers have gone up in regard to the multiplier and the score, the cascades and reflect laser are both gone, too, and that really feels like a step backwards.

 

Everything about this game looks, sounds, and feels cheap in a way that its forebears didn't. To use a cinematic allegory, think of the ninties live action Addams Family movies. The first two were theatrical releases, with lavish production design, great scripts, and perfectly-cast actors. Then a few years later, there was a third, straight-to-video movie entitled Addams Family Reunion. Barely anyone's heard of it and even fewer have seen it, there are no returning cast members, and it looks like an episode of a kids TV show (because it's actually a pilot for one, the somehow even cheaper The NEw Addams Family). Yokushin Gigawing Generations is the videogame equivalent of Addams Family Reunion: it's not painful to watch or anything, and while it's a massive step down from what came before it in every way, if you really want some more Gigawing, that's what you technically get here.

Bad Boy Brother (Switch)

 This game has another title, and once you know it, you'll also know why I was so excited to pre-order it as soon as I knew it existed: Simple Series for Switch vol. 5: Yankii Bros! The Simple series is back (and has been for four previous entries)! With a beat em up about juvenile delinquents! It's almost like they made this game specifically because they knew I was finally going to get a Switch this year or something.

 

It's not just in name only, either, as this is a game that really does keep the Simple spirit alive, for all the good and bad that implies. It's a game with several (too many?) ideas that all tie together well thematically that was also clearly a passion project for its creators. Also, it's got a whole bunch of randomness and grinding, and a ton of stuff to unlock, including both stat upgrades and new special moves. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad. And also: videogames are a creative medium, and most of the things we consider good practice are "rules" rather than "laws". (Of course there are some exceptions: real money shops and gambling are always indefensible and to a game's detriment, as are the dark patterns present in almost every modern phone game. I can't imagine there ever being exceptions there.)

 

What the game is is a beat em up, that uses a vague roguelike structure to facilitate some traditional Simple asset reuse and playtime extension. Each stage has five segments, the first four of which will see you fighting many enemies. They'll either give you a quota of enemies to beat, or an amount of time you have to survive/beat as many enemies as you can. The fifth segment will always be a boss fight, though the bosses are randomly chosen from a small pool for each stage. Before each stage, you'll be dealt a hand of twelve mahjongg tiles, which correspond to various stat and ability uprades. The upgrades increase exponentially when you get matching tiles, and even more if you're able to form scoring hands with them. After each segment, you're given a chance to swap out tiles from your hand with a random selection of four. After you complete a whole stage, you keep all the tile and hand-based upgrades you had at the end of it, then get dealt a whole new hand to get further upgrades.

 

Furthermore, there are aliases. Theses are made at random when you score triple sevens on the roulette at the top of the screen, which turns when you fill up a meter by hitting enemies a lot. They're made at random from words that enemies "drop" (also at random) as you're fighting them. They're always made up of an adjective half that determines their effect, and a noun half that applies a multiplier to the effect. Also they're always nonsense like "Jobless Chihuahua" or "House-Moving Sinbad", because of the multiple layers of randomness involved in their formation. There's also a shop to access between runs, where you use coins earned by defeating lots of enemies to buy more advantageous tiles to add to the pool, special moves performed by bosses you've beaten, and more.

 

Like I said, there are exceptions to many "rules" of what makes a good game, and while I usually hate randomness and upgrades in action games, Bad Boy Brother feels good enough that I can easily overlook them here. It's also admirably committed to its setting. You might expect a budget game that happens to include an English translation to be dry and functional, but all the text, even stuff like the game telling you it's loading or saving your savefile is written "in character", with a little cartoony tough guy edge to it. The most insane (and probably most expensive) bit of flavour is that there's a constant expository rap going on as you play, too. It's always in Japanese, and you'll be too busy playing the game to read the subtitles, but they are there, and it's just another sign of the commitment and passion the developers had for this game.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but I really like this game, and I enthusiastically recommend it. It's just a ton of fun to play! It's got a worldwide release as a download, but even if you import a cartridge copy from Japan, it includes English and Chinese language options. Not only is it a good game, but it also gives me hope that the Simple series is truly back, and in the hands of people who are willing to keep up its silly, fun, experimental tradition.