Gachapin is a character from Japanese children's TV. Portrayed by someone in a green monster costume, I guess he goes around participating in various sports and activities? That's what I gather from the premise of this game, as well as the gallery contained therein of actual photos of him doing these things. Wikipedia also tells me that he's able to do all this stuff because of seven energy balls on his wrists, that provide him with carbohydrates. Oh.
This game has you playing as Gachapin, as he takes part in various sporting activities. I think the plot has something to do with TV ratings and trying to take a regional show national, but of course, I can't read any of the dialogue, and can only go by what I see happening. There's a lot of these activities, and most of them play completely differently from each other, while all of the racing ones play slightly differently from each other. Even better, all of them are played in that beautiful style of 3D particular to the DS.
There's minibike, go-kart, and quad racing, as well as motorcross and hovercraft time trials. Two fooball games see you triyng to score goals past a bunch of slowly-moving targets or playing keepy-uppy on your own, a trampolining game combines timing button presses to bounce higher with quickly tapping dirrectional inputs to do tricks, and a kung fu game has you quickly reacting to button prompts to fight off attackers. None of them are particularly mind-blowing, but nor are any of them terrible.
In the game's main mode, the racing games will have an opponent for you to defeat, while all of the others have a score or time limit for you to beat. The difficulty of all of these is pretty perfectly set, too: some of them might take a few attempts to beat, but none of them are going to be frustrating to get through, nor will they force you to replay a particularly difficult game to the point of fostering resentment. Having said that, a couple are way too easy, the goal-scoring game in particular feels like it's near-impossible to fail at.
I did eventually get to a point where even though I'd met the clear conditions for every game that was available to me, the story wouldn't proceed, and as a result, there's three games that I haven't been able to play, and don't even know what they are! But I do have more to talk about, as this game was devloped by Hudson Soft, and for some reason, they included a Bomberman mode. And by "mode", I mean that it's more fully featured than some entire Bomberman games that sold for full price on home consoles (yes, I am talking about Bomberman Act Zero, here).
This mode, called Gachabon, features all-new sprites of Gachapin wearing different-coloured Bomberman costumes as the player characters. It's got five different stages to choose from, and can be played against CPU opponents, or with up to four human players (so it doesn't make the DS Bomberman games obsolete, at least, since they went up to eight players). You play until one player has won a certain amount of matches, all the power-ups are in there, and it is just a fairly complete battle mode from a Bomberman game, included as an extra in this licensed game, completely unrelated to Bomberman beyond sharing a developer. Bizarre, but welcome, I guess? If there's just one group of mid-00s Japanese kids out there who spent hours playing this mode together, having never heard of Bomberman otherwise, then it was all worth it.
Gachapin Challenge DS probably doesn't have a lot to offer to anyone who isn't a small Japanese child in the 00s. But it does look really good, it's got a lot of charm, and it's inexplicably also got a Bomberman game in it. And some photos of a weird green thing doing a bunch of sports in real life.
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