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.