Keriotosse! (Saturn)

I'm tagging Keriotosse as a fighting game, like I have with a few other similar 32-bit oddities in the past, but it's a very tenuous tag, as this game lacks most of the trappings of what you'd consider to be a real fighting game. There's no healthbars, no knockouts, almost no special moves, and no punching. What it actually is is a somewhat silly contest in which four characters on a small circular stage all try to kick each other off the edge. The last one on the platform wins the round, and the first to win three rounds wins the match.

Thinking about it a little more, the stages themselves actually suggest a little inspiration from the Bomberman games, as each one is slightly different, whether it has interactive playground equipment, running water, strong winds or other such features, that all have some kind of effect on the proceedings. An annoying feature that every stage has is that no matter what kind of surface they take place upon, all the characters slid around as if it were a traditional platform slippy slidy ice stage. Obviously the devs were thinking this would aid in characters kicking each other around, but it's mostly just a nuisance.

The characters are a weird, incoherent selection, seemingly made up of anything that came into the designer's heads. Your starting selection includings a harpy boy, a deep-voiced alien woman, a beer-loving bunnygirl, and an aging buddhist priest. A few stages into single-player mode, you'll also start encountering other weirdos, including robots of both faux-Gundam and faux-R2D2 flavours, a weird masked princess, and others. They all mostly play identically to each other, with the exception being the special attacks. I assume these characters can be unlocked, though unfortunately, I haven't yet found out how.

Special attacks are limited-use (typically once per round, though if the round goes on long enough, they do eventualy recharge), and each character's is totally different. For example, the harpy boy can fly around for a short time, taking him out of reach of attacks and allowing him to swoop down and claw at his foes. The monk surrounds himself with a ring of hearts, that knockback foes much further than the normal kicks. The bunnygirls can offer a pint to an opponent, that leaves them drunk for a short time, and the R2D2-like robot can trigger a large explosion. It's nice that the special attacks aren't just slight variations on the same few effects, but it does mean that some characters have massive advantages over the others. In my experience, the priest and the harpy boy are by far the best equipped of the initial few selectable characters.

Keriotosse isn't a bad game, but it's not a very good one, either. It's incredibly average. The only reason you should really play it is to see the very nice low-poly stages, and the slightly less nice low-poly characters. I mean, I can't think of any better kicking-people-off-platforms games, but it's not a very exciting concept to begin with, either. After this and JSWAT and that awful game with the pig, I should really try to seek out a forgotten Saturn game that I can be a bit more positive about, shouldn't I?

Maze Action (PS2)

It wasn't long ago that I proclaimed Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita to be the worst game ever featured on this blog, but in Maze Action (Also known as The Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 8: Gekitou! Meiro King), I've found a fairly robust challenger to that title. It does fall short, though, in that while playing Maze Action is a completely miserable experience, and it's a pretty cheap-looking title, even for a Simple Series game, it does at least feel like it's just a bad game, and not a personal insult from the developers directed at the player. (Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita really was that bad).

The plot and the mechanics both seem to have been inspired by the popular comic Hunter X Hunter, specifically the hunter exam story arc. You are one of the four of this year's candidates to have reached the final exam at the hero academy, but there can only be one graduate, so you've got to face each other in a contest of skill and strength to determine who that'll be. So single player mode has four stages: you face off against each of the three characters you didn't pick, and then you fight a copy of your own character. It seems likely that there's probably a fifth stage with a final boss character, but you'd honestly need the patience of a saint to bother playing long enough to find out.

The mechanical influence from HxH is also from the hunter exam part, as the contests in which you're place see you running around a maze, trying to be first to find three matching keys and getting to your opponent's starting pad. The twist is that while you need three red keys and your opponent needs three blue, you start with a blue key and they start with a red. So, just like that part on the island where all the hunter candidates have to run around trying to steal each other's number badges, while protecting their own, you will be forced, at some point, to fight your opponent. There are various items littering the mazes, along with the keys. There's weapons, of both melee and projectile varieties, and there's traps. There's also some traps permanently planted around the place, too.

This could have all addedup into a fairly decent game, but the problem is all in the execution. Moving around feels awkward, combat is haphazard and unsatisfying, and it just generally doesn't feel very good to play. It's frustrating, because it also feels like the developers were really inspired and really wanted to make a simplified videogame version of the hunter exam, but they just didn't make it enjoyable to play.

So yeah, Maze Action is a terrible game and you definitely shouldn't play it. But I can see what they were trying to do, at least. That's something, right?