Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot (Gamecube)

 After a long run of excellent games right from their formation, across the Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, Playstation, N64, and Game Boy Advance, Treasure entered the twenty-first century with a lot of goodwill from a lot of people. Unfortunately, they quickly squandered it with a bunch of games like Wario World that weren't bad, but they also weren't up to the high standard people had come to expect from Treasure. (And there was also Stretch Panic, which was bad, but weird enough that people were willing to overlook it a little.) Dragon Drive is one of their games from this era that didn't get released outside of Japan, and as a tie-in to a long-since forgotten anime and manga, probably would itself have been completely forgotten by now were it not from such a famous developer.

 

The first thing you'll probably think upon starting the first stage of Dragon Drive is "hey, this is like Panzer Dragoon, but in the modern day and also one of the free range stages from Lylat Wars!", which is fairly accurate. You start the game as a kid dangling underneath a baby dragon, flying over a modern city, shooting at other dragons. The dragon quickly grows to full size, and you have a boss fight. Then there's a linear rail shooting stage, to make things even more like Panzer Dragoon! And those are the three main stage types in the game: free range-style stages where you fly around an enclosed area shooting down enemies, linear rail shooter stages, and boss fights, which are like the free range stages, but there's only one enemy that has insane amounts of health.

 

The plot concerns a competitive virtual reality game about dragon piloting, and the bosses you fight are the other players. I do find this kind of plot pretty weak, especially in a videogame: I'm already playing a game, why am I playing as someone else playing a game? Where are the stakes for the characters here? However, it does allow for some variety in where the stages take place, without having to justify all these different locales. In the couple of hours I played, I saw the aforementioned modern city and attached highways, as well as a desert decorated with giant monster skeletons at sunset, a fantasy castle town at night, and a small jungle island. And of course, the sight of huge dragons flying and shooting breath weapons at each other is really cool.

 

There's power-ups too, in the form of various cards you can collect in the stages. You can hold up to four of these, each assigned to a direction on the d-pad for use. They come in three flavours, too: red ones increase your attack power for a while, green ones restore some of your health, and yellow ones do various different things, like having a big explosion emanate from your dragon, damaging all nearby enemies, or creating a holographic copy of your dragon to draw enemy fire. The use of cards in this way feels very much of-its-time. A lot of Japanese kids shows that weren't specifically about card games had some kind of card element to them around this time: Digimon Tamers, Kamen Rider Blade, and so on.

 

Dragon Drive D-Masters Shot is a decent enough game. I've definitely played much worse rail shooters, and if it were developed by someone like Tamsoft or Sandlot, it'd probably be enjoying a re-appraisal as a forgotten classic of the Gamecube library. Unfortunately, it's by Treasure, and like the aforementioned Wario World, it's one of those games that broke the spell they had over a lot of people around the turn of the century, by being merely okay instead of the excellent games we'd grown accustomed to them releasing. The biggest shame is that they don't seem to have ever recovered from this era. They haven't released any new games in over a decade (another kids' anime tie-in on 3DS, Gaist Crusher God), though they announced a comeback in 2022, we've seen nothing of that yet. Anyway, this game's pretty good, you probably won't regret seeking it out and playing it with the recent translation patch applied.

Kinnikuman Nisei - Shinsedai Choujin vs. Densetsu Choujin (Gamecube)

 So, this game did get a western release, under the title Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs. New Generation. I played the Japanese version instead, though, since I read somewhere that the western publishers removed the character creation mode. Now I'm not so sure whether that's true or not, but really it doesn't matter much either way, since the character creation mode isn't very good.

 

I had high hopes for it, since a character creation mode in such a cartoony-looking game seemed like it could be really interesting. Unfortunately, you just select a head, torso, arms, and legs from a pretty small selection, and they're all obviously meant to be matched together in sets, and mixing them up really does look like you just mixed up parts from different characters. Also, you can't use them in the game's main single player mode, only in one-off fights.

 

It's a simple wrestling game based on the anime Kinnikuman Nisei/Ultimate Muscle, obviously, and it really is very simple: there are no pinfalls or submissions, you're just trying to get your opponent's health to zero in every match. Furthermore, the game is mostly controlled using just the analogue stick for movement, and three buttons: strike, grapple, and jump. Each character has a short string of strike attacks, a couple of wrestling moves done with the grapple button, as well as a mid-air strike and grapple each. There's also a super meter, and by holding the left trigger, you can expend one segment of meter to perform a more powerful strike, two segments for a more powerful grapple, or all three to perform a big super move, which is like its own little cutscene where you do some big crazy impossible wrestling move on your opponent.

 

There's a ton of characters and stuff to unlock (including a gallery of photos of over four hundred keshigomu figures!), but the preblem is that all the characters feel the same when you play as them, and they only have very few moves, and it's pretty boring seeing the same couple of moves over and over during each match. Take into account that a single-player playthrough comprises five consecutive matches, and it's even worse. 

 

As it is, the game attempts to occupy a space between fighting games and wrestling games, but while each genre has its own complexities, this game kind of eschews both, leaving you with a great-looking, but repetitive and over-simple game. I can't even really recommend it for multiplayer, since the main skill you need is the ability to press the attack button before your opponent does. It's a shame, since it mostly feels okay to play and it has a lot of charm, but it's just so completely unexciting that it's not worth bothering with.

Curiosites Vol. 15 - Ohenro-san (Gamecube)

"Walking Simulator" is a disparaging name often given to non-violent, narrative-driven games, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. Though the term didn't really exist in 2003 when Ohenro-san Hosshin no Dojo was released, it's a mantle that fits the game perfectly. Ohenro-san is literally a game about walking across Japan and visiting temples and that's it. It's meant to come with a special controller with buttons for left and right steps, as well as a pedometer so the walking you do in your day-to-day life can be transferred into the game, but I had neither of those things, so I was just pushing forward on the analogue stick to progress.

Because this was meant as a substitute for a real pilgrimage, aimed at the old and infirm who couldn't make the journey themselves, everything is represented as a slide show of photos of the real locations, rather than being a polygonal rendering for you to walk through and explore in real time. Of course I understand why it was done in this way, but it's not very impressive, and it really doesn't give the impression of walking from place to place: when I say it's a slideshow, that's all it feels like, there's no sensation of movement at all.

Once you're at a temple, you can do various things like light a candle, get a talisman, do some reading, and so on, but really, that's all there is to this. It's not a game, and it's not intended to be played like one, and so it wouldn't be fair to judge it as one, either. I'm just posting about it because it's weird and obscure and there's probably not many people who know about it.

The nature of this thing is that recommending it or not recommending it is kind of meaningless, though I will say this: unless you can read Japanese and you really, really love seeing photos of Japanese temples, I can't imagine how you'd get anything out of this at all.

Dreammix TV World Fighters (Gamecube)

So, when Super Smash Bros Melee came out on the Gamecune and proved to be a massive hit, way bigger than its N64 forebear, there were a few me-too platform fighting games that tried to ride its coattails, mostly licensed from popular anime of the time like Digimon, Groove Adventure Rave or Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Dreammix TV World Fighters is even more of a Smash Bros wannabe than those games, as like Smash Bros, it's a big crossover, and it actually pre-empts the more famous series in two ways: it's a multi-company crossover, and it features Solid Snake as a playable character!

Yes, it's a crossover featuring characters from the videogame publisher Hudson Soft (providing characters from Bomberman, Bloody Roar and others), the toymakers Takara (represented by Transformers, Beyblade and some dolls) and the pachinko machine manufacturers* Konami (who probably have the most recoginsable line-up, having characters from Gradius, Twinbee, Castlevania, and some baseball series alongside the famous Mr. Dave Snake). Like most of these games, it doesn't use a traditional health bar system, instead having fights decided by a convoluted system involving coins with hearts on them.

How it works is this: at the start of a fight, coins with hearts on them will rain from the 'bove, and all the character present will scramble to collect as many as they can in the few seconds before they disappear. During the fights, taking damage means dropping coins, until, when you have no coins left, you'll shrink down to a tiny size and a big glowing heart will come out of you and float around. If you can catch that heart before anyone else, you're back in the game, but if not, you're no longer able to win, but you can still move around in your shrunken form, like a small useless ghost (Iguess this is so players aren't left with nothing to doing after getting eliminated). The last player left at their full size is the winner, of course.

The actual act of playing is very similar to Smash Bros: you have buttons for jumping, normal and special attacks, throws and blocking. You do different attacks by pushing the analogue stick in the right direction while pressing one of the attack buttons. The most flagrant thing is that the shoulder buttons are used for blockng, and while blocking, you character crouches and gets surrounded by an impenetrable bubble. Shameless!

I'd feel unnecessarily harsh referring to this as a poor man's Smash Bros, as I enjoyed as much as the "real thing" (although to be fair, I do consider Smash Bros to be a bit of a poor man's Power Stone 2 to begin with), plus it has a bit of a more exciting roster than its consolemate Melee, especially if you don't particularly have a great interest in many of Nintendo's first party titles or their style of character design. I guess all I can say is that if you like Smash Bros, but you'd like to see Optimus Prime and Tyson from Beyblade fight Bomberman and a Moai head, then you should definitely play this game. If not, then probably not. What a boring copout!


*SATIRE~!