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.