Eojjeonji Joheun Il-i Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok (PC)

So, that long title apparently translates to "A Night Where Good Things Are Bound To Happen", which is also the name of the comic on which it's based, which was the first professional work (as far as I can tell) of Lee myung-Jin, who later went on to create the fantasy comic Ragnarok, which he'd then abandon after that comic's spin-off MMORPG turned out to be wildly more profitable. Boo. This comic apparently got an english translation under the name "Lights Out", which is interesting, I guess.

The comic's apparently about juvenile delinquents and gangsters, and the game is a belt-scrolling beat em up! It's also a bit of an anachronism: despite coming out in 1997, it's a DOS game, rather than Windows 95 or something. At the opposite end of the scale, it also suffers from that beat em up disease I'm sure you're all sick of me complaining about: experience points! You get points for beating up enemies, and at the end of each stage segment, you get a chance to spend those points on things like increasing your max HP, improving your moveset, and so on. You really need to choose wisely, since you'll probably only be able to afford something every couple of visits, and your health doesn't recover between stages unless you pay for it (there's an option to increase and refill your health bar and a cheaper one to just refill it). Also because this game is merciless in its difficulty.

Well, it appears to be on your first play, as your health bar goes down in huge chunks, and after only a few hits from enemies it'll be gone. Obviously, you'll want to upgrade it pretty soon, but there's something else at work that you won't notice at first, that I'll refer to as the "stubbornness" system for the sake of convenience. How stubbornness works is that once your health bar is completely depleted, you start flashing red. While you're in this state, you can keep taking damage indefinitely, as long as you never get knocked off your feet. So it's a cool little last chance type of dealy. It'd be a lot cooler if there were health items every now and then or free healing at the end of the stage, as it'd motivate you to try your very hardest to struggle to the next item, but it's still nice. Some enemies also have the stubbornness trait too, but it's not just a way to make the game even harder, as you get a small amount of experience for every hit you land on a flashing enemy, so, depending on your skill, courage and tolerance to boredom, you can milk these guys for experience indefinitely.

It would be remiss to let this review end without mentioning how great this game looks. The character sprites aren't anything special, but they're nice enough, and more than made up for by the backgrounds, which all look excellent. The game's got a gritty urban setting, and that coupled with the high-quality pixel art almost lets you envision a world where there was a Saturn entry into the Streets of Rage series. A nice little touch is that there's billboard ads for the Ragnarok comic series in some of the backgrounds, too. Anyway, I'm not going to say that this game is an absolute essential that you need to track down, but if you do, and you give it a chance, you won't regret it.

Seigi no Mikata (PS2)

Most tokusatsu-themed games, whether they're based on actual shows, or just inspired by the genre's aesthetic and concepts, are fighting games or beat em ups. That's what I was expecting from Seigi no Mikata, but it turned out to be something completely different: an adventure game that attempts to simulate the entire role of a main character in a tokusatsu show, not just the parts where they're transformed and fighting enemies. In fact, the game emulates the structure of a tokusatsu TV show in general: there are episodes rather than stages, and each episode had opening and closing sequences and an ad break in the middle! Furthermore, your goal isn't necessarily to win every instance of combat, but to achieve a minimum percentage of the TV ratings each week.

Before you get to doing any of that, though, you do get to choose the look of your hero's transformed state. It's not a super in-depth character creator, since you can just mix and match parts for arms, legs, torso and head, but it interesting in another way. All the parts you can pick are blatant homages to classic tokusatsu and anime shows like Gatchaman, Kikaider, and even going all the way back to the likes of Gekkou Kamen, the first Japanese TV superhero from all the way back in 1958.

So, if it's not all combat, what does this game actually entail? Mostly, wandering around a small Japanese town (as a side note, if you like low-poly renditions of small Japanese towns, and I know some of you do, this is a pretty good one), talking to people and sometimes helping them with small problems, like herding their cats, finding their dropped contact lenses, and so on. Talking to people and solving their problems gives very tiny ratings boosts, while standing still doing nothing causes them to plummet. Every few minutes, though, there'll be an event, which means you have to go to the right location before it starts. (Amazingly, for the entire first episode, I managed to do this every time, entirely by chance. After that though, I went and found a guide, just in case). An event might be just a conversation with the other characters on the show, a battle with some mooks or a villain, or sometimes both. During the conversations, there are usually multiple choices, that can affect the ratings, though they'll slowly rise all the time an event is happening no matter what you do.

As for the combat, it's a disappointment. It starts with a little button-mashing minigame to do decide who goes first, then whoever does go first gets to pick their ten attacks (they can be punches, kicks or throws). After that, the other side tries to guess which ten attacks the attacker chose so they can defend. The whole thing then plays out, and if both sides are still standing, it starts again, but with the roles of attacker and defender reversed, until one side falls. It's not exciting at all, but since this isn't an action game generally, I guess they didn't want any difficulty walls for the adventure game fans that were probably going to buy it. But even Shenmue's branching path-style QTBs were better than this.

Seigi no Mikata is a game that I really wanted to like, as it's clear a lot of love went into its creation, and it is of a very high quality and full of ideas. The problem is that it's just so boring to play! A lot of your time is spent wandering around waiting for the next event to happen, and the events themselves aren't particularly exciting, either. You might level the same criticisms at Shenmue, but I'd say the difference is that in Shenmue, you have to actually investigate to make the events happen, plus its depictions of 1980s Japan and Hong Kong are so richly textured and full of life that it can get by pretty well on its atmosphere alone. In summary, play Shenmue instead of this, sorry.