The Anime Super Remix: Kyojin no Hoshi (PS2)

In case you don't know, Kyojin no Hoshi is a baseball anime that aired all the way back in 1968, and it's one of those old anime that was massively influential on all that came after it. Unfortunately, I don't know much of the exact details, because only the first episode has ever been translated into English. I do know that it was to first appearance of that BDSM-looking "training suit" that you see in a bunch of anime, including an early episode of Pokemon, where some guy puts one on his Sandshrew.

Anyway, this game came out in 2002, alongside another "Anime Super Remix" game, based on the 1980 boxing anime Ashita no Joe 2, and it, as far as I can tell, tells the story of the anime through a mixture of video clips (which are amazingly high quality, considering the age of the source material), still images with captions, and minigames re-enacting certain iconic scenes.

The minigames are all very difficult, and completely unforgiving, even on the easiest difficulty. Well, the three of them I was able to play were, anyway. You only start with two minigames unlocked, and by playing them, you can earn points, which allow you to unlock more minigames, as well as more story scenes. However, to actually get the minigames, you'll have to grind no matter how well you play. Each minigame costs nine hundred points to unlock, and successfully completing a minigame on its hardest difficulty will get you between 150 and 200 points each time. So you'll have to complete 4 successful runs on hard to get the next game at the very least.

And I'm not exageratting when I describe the difficulty of these games. They basically boil down to different configurations of press a button once or twice with perfect timing, and pressing a button as many times as possible in a very short amount of time. The timing-based tasks aren't so bad once you get into a bit of a rhythm with them, which is possible even through emulation. The button-tapping tasks, however seem to vary, seemingly at random, between "pretty difficult" and "literally impossible, even Meijin Takahashi can't press a button this fast". I know these olden days sports anime were all about tragedy and despair, but to complete these absurdly hard tasks, with the only reward being a fraction of the way towards getting the next one is a bit dispiriting.

Though retelling the story of an old, reknowned TV series through a series of minigames recreating specific scenes is an interesting one, the actual execution here is so bad, and so antithetical to having a good time, I can't recommend this game at all.

Ridegear Guybrave (Playstation)

It's a beat em up, and it's not an arcade game, or on a console released before 1994! So, I'm sure you all know what's going to happen, and yes, there are both experience points and equipment shops. But it's not all bad, as the weapons you buy actually all have not only their own models that actually appear on your robot, but their own animations too! So you are actually getting a bit of fun out of them besides the numbers going up.

And yes, it's also a game about robots. Giant ones, though they're also super-deformed. Which is probably actually more realistic than big tall, slender mecha. The setting is an island in what I assume is some kind of newly colonised frontier world, as everything manmade seems kind of ramshackle, though there isn't any of the environmental devestation you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic world, with stages taking place in deserts, plains, caves, forests, meadows and so on.

The RPG elements don't just stop at the stat-raising stuff, either: there's towns where you talk to people, buy stuff, and so on. In fact, the towns conspire with the game's navigation system to create some offensively aggregious padding, which actually detracts from the game's quality a lot more than the stats stuff. There's a point early on in the game, where you have to talk to a guy in the second town, then go back to the first town to talk to another guy, then return to the original guy in the second town. The problem with this is that there are two stages between those two towns.

Now, the game's world map doesn't let you just pass over cleared areas, but instead, each area, whether it's a stage or a town, has two exits, one at the left and one at the right. When you leave via one exit, you can only go to the opposite exit on the next stage in that direction. So, how the above quest goes is that you initially leave the first town, and go through the two stages to get to the second. Then you leave the second and go through those two stages again, but backwards, to get back to the first town. Then you have to go through those same two stages for a third time to get back to the second town. I can't remember the last time I played a game with such little respect for the player's time. The combat was actually pretty fun at first: crunchy and satisfying, and with the novelty of trying out new weapons now and then, but after this nonsense, I'd lost all goodwill I once had towards this game.

I think if me and my friends had gotten copies of this from our local totally legitimate import games dealer around the time of its release, it might have been one of our favourites that we'd occasionally talk about to this day. As a more discerning adult with access to emulation and so on, I can't recommend it. If you want action games with nice low poly robots and cool anime character portraits, you can easily find many others that are a lot better than this.