Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball (Game Boy Color)

 The first thing that needs to be addressed in this review is the game's title: yes, it will make your dad laugh if he asks what you're playing and you answer "Pocket Billiards". Don't worry about it. The other thing is that GameFAQs lists this as being published by Tamsoft, which struck me as odd, since they're more of a developer, and the only games I know of that they published were also developed by them. My suspicions were correct, and this game was published by a completely unrelated company called TAM, Inc., and the people maintaining GameFAQs are incompetent buffoons.

 

Anyway, this is a billiards/snooker game, but not only should you cast out of your mind the image of boring men wearing tuxedos and chainsmoking, but it's been specifically designed with the intention of casting those men out of your mind! Instead of a traditional look, Funk the 9 Ball instead takes its aesthetic cues from vaguely contemporaneous rhythm games, like Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, and so on. The devs must have had their fingers on the pulse, too, as the first game I was going to mention in that list was SNK's Cool Cool Toon, which didn't come out until six months later! But anyway, there's lots of cute/weird characters, the place in which you play isn't a smoky bar but some kind of brightly-coloured night club with a DJ, and not only can you collect cans of paint to recolour the club and the table, but you can collect Minidiscs to give the DJ more BGM selections to pick from!

 

The game itself, as far as I can tell (as someone who has never played snooker), is mostly a fairly normal game of nine ball, and controls in a fairly traditional manner, in which you aim the cue ball, and then use a timed power meter to shoot. I say "mostly", because while it uses the rules of that game, it's also in the now pretty much dead genre of silly sports games. While playing, various creatures will use their magic powers to effect the course of the game in various way. Some of the creatures live in the pockets, and their powers activate when a ball goes into the pocket they call home. Other creatures are put inside the balls somehow by the players pre-match, and their powers activate when you hit their ball after holding the button down for a few seconds.

 

The creatures in the pockets will have powers that equally help or hinder both players, like destroying one of the lower-numbered balls, or making all the balls invisible. The ones in the balls, obviously, use their powers to specifically help the player to whom they belong (because there is also a vague aspect of monster collection in here too!), and they do stuff like give you the ability to re-take a foul shot, make a ball jump into the nearest pocket, and that kind of thing. They also all cause a little animation to play when they're activated, and not only are these animations all weird, but the way they come into play is amusingly over-dramatic: just before the cueball hits its target, time will stop, and the screen will cut to a strange cutscene of like, a chorus of angels in heaven, or a little guy drinking tea, or something. I think it's meant to evoke a kind of sports anime-esque drama? It's silly and time-consuming, but I do like it.

 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball is a decent enough game. I don't think I would ever want to play it on a TV screen, but on a handheld, it's a fine way to keep your hands busy while watching TV. It also has an English translation patch, which you wouldn't really expect. If it appeals to you at all, you should give it a try! Definitely don't pay £400 for a real copy though. Four hundred entire pounds! Madness.

Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai (Game Boy Advance)

 I was first drawn to this game because it was an RPG with an east Asian fantasy setting and also a lot of really nice pixel art. There's also some nice full screen cutscene pixel art, though it only shows up fairly rarely, because of the way the game's structured. Which brings up the big surprise I got from playing Oriental Blue: it's an open world game! On the Game Boy Advance! Like is so often the case, western publishers were very short-sighted and didn't bother translating it. The post-Pokemon/Tokyopop English anime and manga boom was still ongoing, as was the post-Final Fantasy VII RPG boom, and here's a really high quality RPG owned by lots of kids, with a sertting they'd love and an amazing selling point, and apparently none of them were interested. 

 

Luckily, it did get a fan translation a few year later, so you (and I) can play it without having to read Japanese. There's a lot of plot threads, but it all starts in a large city, where a big ritual is about to take place, and there's apparently also conspiracies afoot. The ritual fails, and there's also monsters roaming the streets, and bad stuff happening across the land, too. One particularly interesting thread I picked up involved the Oni. They're depicted as a stand-in for indigenous people (which is also done in the TTRPG Tenra Bansho Zero, which was orginally published a few years before this game. Is this a common trope, or is there a specific bit of direct inspiration going on here?)

 

The Oni are suffering some severe oppression at the hands of humanity: forced to live in a barren mountain village, subject to raids by slavers, and treated like dirt if they go to human settlements of their own volition. One of the first quests I got myself involved in was trying to re-claim a stolen Oni artifact from a human lord's palace, but it turns out to have been stolen again from him by a mysterious theif/murderer. I as worried that the Oni stuff would have been some passive background thing, just "that's how it is, I guess", but during that quest, one of them joins your party, with a view to improving the lot of his people and faning and getting their treasure back.

 

Unfortunately, I eventually ran into a big problem: I was finding the starts of plot threads and questlines, but I wasn't able to actually advance any of them. Ships were stuck in docks, valleys were blocked by boulders, and other barriers stood in my way in various places, all making it so I couldn't go to new towns, in each of which I was sure at least one "next thing" I needed must be waiting. I'm sure eventually I'd be able to figure some way of making progress, but having so many brick walls being put up all at once, in seemingly every direction really killed my desire to continue playing.

 

If you've got more patience for this kind of RPG stuff, you'll probbly get a lot more out of this game than I have, and if it sounds like it would appeal to you, you should definitely give it a try. It's clearly a very high quality game, with tons to do, places to go, systems to figure out and so on. It also definitely feels like one of the strongest examples of a vague concept I've been chasing for years: the "portable world", a handheld game that feels like it contains a full world inside it. If it had goten an official English release, there'd probably have been a print strategy guide for it, and the problems I encountered wouldn't have been so insurmounted. Oh well, never mind.