Kaikan Phrase - Datenshi Kourin (Playstation)

I've covered a lot of anime license games on here before, but this might be the game licensed from the most obscure anime so far. Released during the late nineties bishonen boom alongside the likes of Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no Matsuei, Kaikan Phrase is a show about a Visual Kei band made up of handsome young men. It's never had an official English release, and the only fansubs around as far as I can tell are rips of ancient VHS tapes!

 

Fitting with the theme of the show, the game is a rhythm game, in which you play the songs of the fictional band  Λucifer (which also became a real band, so singles and such could be released). There's only four stages in single player story mode, but each stage you pick one of two options. Though it's not a branching path, there are only two options for each stage no matter what, and the options only change the cutscenes that play before and after the stage. There's also only six songs in the game, and worst of all: they pad out the play time by making you grind to unlock them!

 

When you start a stage, you choose a song and a band member to play as. Since each member plays a different instrument, they each have different charts for each song, and naturally, different difficulty levels. To unlock more songs, you have to gain New Release points, which I think are scored 1:1 on the number of successful notes you play in a song. So picking a harder chart means more potential for points, but if you fail a stage, you get nothing. No matter what, though, when you start playing, you'll be hearing the first song at least three times before you unlock the second, and the gaps between unlocks only get longer and longer.

 

As for the game itself, it's incredibly simple: there's a bar on the lefthand side of the screen. Note markers appear on the bar, and a line travels down it. Although the markers appear in a number of different colours, you only ever have to press the X button when the line reaches them, and that's it! There's a meter next to the bar that fills up gradually as you hit notes, and if it's full at the end of the song, you pass the stage! As you progress through the four stages of a single player playthrough, that meter gets longer, but there's no other complications added.

 

Despite the grind problem, I still had a pretty good time playing this game. The songs are decent, and actually playing it is mindless and stress-free to the extent that it's a nice relaxing game to zone out to and play for 15 minutes or so. Obviously, it gets better as you unlock more songs, too.

Punch the Monkey - Game Edition (Playstation)

This game's got a pretty strange title, but it's there for a reason, as it's a pretty strange idea. Punch The Monkey was an album released in 1998 which featured a bunch of remixes of songs from the various animated adaptations of Monkey Punch's universally-beloved character Lupin III, and this is a videogame adaptation of that album, released in 2000.

Of course, it's a rhythm game, and it's an incredibly simple one at that: the song plays, an animated FMV is shown in the middle of the screen, and Playstation face buttons travel across the bottom of the screen. In the middle of the screen at the bottom, there's a little crosshair, and when a button reaches it, you press the button. There's also a set of colours at the top of the screen, showing how well you're doing, ranging from red (the worst) to blue (the best). At certain points in the song, if you're not in green or blue, you fail and have to start again. It's so simple, it's the kind of thing that you'd see as a minigame in an RPG or something, rather than its own whole game.

Simple doesn't mean easy, though, and it took me about six attempts to get past the first stage. It seems that this is a question of balance, rather than overall difficulty, though, as I breezed through the next few stages without problems. There are some other odd decisions besides the stage order, too, like how you don't actually get to hear most of the songs you're meant to be playing along with, as your button presses all make very loud noises that drown everythig else out, from bullet ricochets on some stages, to doorbells and animal sounds on others. Interesingly, the general presentation of the game is very much a part of a certain aesthetic things in the late 1990s/early2000s had when they were cashing in on 1970s nostalgia. Some of the fonts and swirly background patterns seen at certain points in this game are very reminiscent of the UK VHS and DVD releases of the 1970s Japanese TV show  Monkey/Saiyuuki that came out at around the same time.

Unfortunately, there isn't much more to be said about the game itself, though. There are apparently a series of minigames, unlocked by completing the main game on all difficulties but the easiest, and through those minigames, FMV clips can be unlocked to watch at your leisure, but it's just not worth playing through such a simple and unengaging main game. So all I have left is this little bit of trivia: it was developed by the company Kaze, who I associate more with their two excellent pinball games on Saturn, Last Gladiators and Necronomicon. Two years later, they also released Akira Psycho Ball, a very experimental and strange pinball game on PS2, which, like this game, was licensed from a popular classic anime, and also featured heavy use of FMV clips in little windows. How interesting!