Undercover Cops Gaiden - Hakaishin Garumaa (Game Boy)

 It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel unfortunately, but it did get this: a Game Boy exclusive spin-off that's a kind of board game/RPG thing.

 

So, you pick one of the characters from the original game (but let's be honest: everyone's going to pick Rosa. Can you even remember the names of the other two guys without looking them up?), and you traverse a board game world with branching paths and differently-coloured squares and a few special squares here and there. Movement takes place in the same manner that would be used in Sonic Shuffle years later: you have a hand of cards bearing different numbers. You pick a card, and then there's a roulette that can land on a number up to that of the card you picked, telling you how many spaces you'll move. White squares do nothing, grey squares give you a little money, and black squares result in a battle (or occasionally a whack-a-mole minigame).

 

The battles are turn-based, and a little more complex than you might expect from a 1993 Game Boy game. First, you and your opponent will pick a card, with the highest number determining who is the attacker for the current turn. If that's you, you pick a body part, then pick another card from your hand, and you might do some damage, or maybe nothing will happen. If you're the defender, you only have to pick the top or bottom half of your body to defend, and again, you pick another card. Then you might take damage or you might not. This carries on until someone runs out of hit points, which can take ages, since it seems to be completely randomly determined whether or not damage is dealt each turn. It doesn't take much strategy to ensure that you're almost always the attacker, at least. Especially as you level up, which puts higher-numbered cards in your deck.

 

There is a kind of mindless compulsion that can keep you playing this game. Like it's mostly luck-based, but there's also a lot of really nice pixel art in here, and there is even a plot running through the game. But that's all there is, and if you're going to play on real hardware, you won't have access to save states or a fast forward button, which will also really dampen the game's appeal. What really killed my enthusiasm for it, though is the fact that the branching paths don't lead to different routes or even alternate storylines. What they lead to is dead ends. You can't scroll ahead, so if you do end up going down the wrong path, you have no choice but to go back and then go down the right path. 

 

The problem here is that the process of moving is incredibly slow. As described above, you pick a card and then you spin the roulette and then you move. And then if you land on a grey square, you've got long seconds of reading the line of text telling you about the tiny amount of money you've picked up. And the black squares don't go away after you've landed on them, so the incredibly slow and random number generator-based battles are something you'll be enduring again and again. 

 

The pixel art in the battles and cutscenes is really nice, and near-miraculous when you consider this is only a couple of years into the lifespan of the original Game Boy. But unfortuantely, that's really all this game has going for it, and the mountains of tedious timewasting through which it puts the player is unforgivable. I'm glad it got a translation patch, because it was a game that had caught my attention and my cuiosity a long time ago. But I don't recommend actually playing it.