Akanbe Dragon (MSX)

This is a game with an interesting premise, and the quick and easy way of describing it would be to compare it to a combination of chess and the Game Gear game Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki (though it predates that game by a few years). Unfortunately, it scuppers all the goodwill generated by the concept through a few terrible design decisions.

I have to make an admission here: I never got past the first stage of this game. I played for hours, and made many attempts, and I did come close a few times, but in the end, the odds are stacked way too heavily against the player. But I should get onto actually describing the game. There's a map with a grid on it, and each square contains a different kind of terrain: mountains, plains, water, and so on. At the top and bottom of the map, there are two groups of monsters, the player at the bottom, and the enemies at the top. Each type of monster not only has four stats: HP, strength, speed, and jump, but they also have a chess class, which affects how they move on the grid (and like in chess, the aim is to kill your opponent's king).

When two monsters try to occupy the same space on the map, the game has them engage in a real-time, side-view, no time limit battle to the death. All the monsters attack by shooting stuff, though there's still a fair bit of variety in the attacks: some can fire a bunch of shots that quickly go in a straight line, others might only be able to fire off one shot at a time that takes a more wibbly path that's harder to dodge. Though the AI seems pretty good at moving its monsters around the map to keep a tactical advantage, in battle, the enemies all seem to just randomly bounce around the screen shooting at random. They'll still win a lot though, due to the game's biggest flaw: no matter what the situation, the enemy monsters always have significantly higher stats and more HP than your own, making every battle a precarious and miserable slog. Making things more annoying is how the strength is dealt out among your own monsters, with your pawn (amusing mis-spelt ingame as "porn") being second only to the king in strength, while your queen and knight are so weak as to be almost completely useless.

An interesting aside is that entering battle with the enemy king does something slightly different to normal enemies: he has his own specific battleground that overrides whatever terrain type on which you encounter him, and the battle feels more like a boss fight from a platform game. As far as I can tell, the best strategy to take is to get as many of your monsters to fight the king and wear him down before sending your king in to finish the job. I almost won with this method, but I guess the enemy had the same idea, as by the time the enemy king had taken out all my underlings, my king was weakened doing the same. On my last attempt, my king succumbed with only a sliver of the enemy king's health left. Unfortunately, I'd completely lost all patience with the game by this point, and had no desire to make any further attempts.

It's honestly a shame, as I really wanted to like Akanbe Dragon, but the atrocious balance means that I can't recommend it at all. If only playing it didn't seem like a futile uphill struggle, it mgiht have been a hidden classic.

Ane-San (PC Engine)

It's a mystery why I haven't written about this game sooner, it combines two things I love (beat em ups and sukeban), and I've known about it for years. But I'm writing about it now, and that's all that counts, isn't it? Anyway, for the same reasons it caught my attention also make it a bit of a rarity: there's not many beat em ups on the PC Engine (despite the console's heyday coinciding with the genre's), nor are there many sukeban-themed games on any system. (In fact, to my knowledge, about a third of all that exist are just romhacks of games in the Kunio-kun series.)

So, you play as a trio of tough girls, out to make themselves the leaders of all the tough girls in the country, not through democracy or inspirational leadership, obviously. In the world of juvenile delinquency, power is obtained through the successful application of physical violence: you beat up entire gangs, before beating up their leaders. The first two you beat, an idol and an overweight ballet dancer who acts as an unpleasant fat joke, even join you as playable characters! The combat is fairly typical, and by the game's release in 1995, would have been pretty primitive for the genre. There's no weapons, very few attacks, no big supers or anything, just your attack combo, grab attacks and a throw, a jump attack, and a ground attack. The one thing that really makes the game stand out is that, at the start of the game at least, both you and your enemies are very fragile, going down after only one or two combos.

I say "at the start of the game", as Ane-san features an item shop between stages, and with that comes that eternal bugbear: the negative difficulty curve. I've written about this concept many times before, so I won't bore you by doing it again, but I actually feel like it doesn't hurt this game too much, even though it means you can easily complete the game without using continues in under an hour. The reason for this is actually due to a criticism usually levelled at beat em ups by their detractors: that the genre is nothing but style over substance. It works because Ane-san is rich in style, thanks to its near-total commitment to the sukeban aesthetic.

The stages are all in slightly seedy-looking urban areas at night, with docks, public parks at night, closed shops with the shutters down, docks and so on all appearing in the background. The music for most of the game is a very Japanese interpretation of a kind of 50s America-inspired rockabilly/surf rock sound, which fits the action pretty well, but the final stage ramps up the drama massively, featuring a mournful whistled tune most of the way through, followed by chanting monks for the final boss. It's all very atmospheric, and successfully draws the player into the game's world. There's really only two flaws I can think of, thematcially speaking: the aforementioned "fat joke character", and the fact that the ending is all about one of the characters having a big fancy white wedding in a church. That's not cool or badass or rebellious at all! It's really jarring and ill-fitting with the fun, tough world in which the rest of the game takes place.

Despite its faults, Ane-san is a game that I totally recommend playing. Like I said, the atmosphere and aesthetic are strong enough to negate the cracks in its mechanical armour, and though it only lasts an hour, it's a really great hour, and I can definitely see myself playing it many more times in the future.