Futari wa Precure Max Heart Danzen! DS de Precure Chikara o Awasete Dai Battle (DS)

So,there's quite a few licensed beat em ups on the original DS, and a lot of them seem to be based on superheroes: The Mighty Thor, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, and so on. This game, with what might be the longest title of any game I've ever featured on this blog, against all odds, might well be the best of them, and an actual worthy entry into the genre in general.

Of course, it's based on one of the earlier iterations of the long-running magical girl franchise Pretty Cure, and it seems like the developers decided to eschew contemporary conventions and, instead of making "just a licensed game" or "just a game for little girls", actually bothered to make a good game that happened to be based on a license for little girls. AS already mentioned, it's a beat em up, and it's firmly in the time-honoured belt scrolling style. You know how it goes: you go from left to right, fighting enemies, picking up food off the ground and occasionally fighting bosses.

Of course, it's not that simple, and PreCure brings a few new ideas to the table to help it stand out. For example, friendship is a big theme in the TV series, so whichever of the two characters you choose to play as, the other one will also be present, controlled by the CPU to help you. (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a 2-player co-op mode, which is a huge shame and one of the very few black marks against this game's name). But the friendship theme doesn't end there! There's a super meter, which can be used to perform powerful, full-screen team up moves, plus something I don't think I've seen in any other beat em up before or since: when one character gets knocked down by an enemy, if the other is in the right position on the screen, they'll catch their fallen partner efore they hit the ground, restoring a little health and gaining a little bit of super meter. It's cute, it's original, and it fits the game's theme perfectly.

Some other good points, that aren't innovative, but they do stand out from the game's contemporaries are the omission of various hated  "features" seen in many twenty-first century beat em ups. The biggest is that there's no levelling up, there's no equipment, and there's no skill shops: you actually get to just play the game, without grinding or losing interest towards the end because of a negative difficulty curve! In a beat em up released in 2005! Can you believe it? The other, lesser omitted albatross is one that I was actually only reminded of recently, when I tried to play the aforementioned Thor and Go-Busters DS games: constantly having the action stopped by text boxes telling the player "press B to jump!", after you've already spent the first two seconds of the game pressing the buttons to see what they do. This one doesn't seem to crop up in action games so much any more in 2019, and it definitely isn't missed.

Other than the lack of multiplayer, the only other real problem this game has is that it's a bit too easy. I know it's a kids game, but an optional hard mode would have been nice, at least. But besides that, this is a legitimately good beat em up, with nice sprites, that isn't thematically reliant on nostalgia for the 80s or 90s, and brings new gameplay ideas to the genre. I definitely recommend it.

Plus Plum (Dreamcast)

Also sometimes spelt as "Plus Plumb", this is a pretty low budget-looking, Japan-only competitive puzzle game. Of course, it's about matching coloured blobs, but it does at least bring some new ideas to the table, even if they're not good ones.

Like you might expect, Plus Plum has you arranging coloured blobs into matching sets of three, which then disappear. What's different is what happens when they disappear: not only do the blobs above them fall down, but all the blobs touching them also change colour. So to make combos, you not only have to take into account where the blobs will fall, but what colour they'll be when they do. Luckily, the colour changing isn't random, and the six colours are in three pairs: red and blue, white and purple, and yellow and green. The blobs also only fall one at a time, and rather than changing shape or formation like you would in most puzzle games, you can move that one blob around, and change it to its opposite colour.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's pretty simple once you've got the hang of it. I think with a bit more work, it might have led to a decent puzzler, but this game has one massive problem: it's incredibly slow. I haven't had a single game, win or lose, that's taken less than four minutes. The blame for this falls at the feet of PP's other oddball mechanic: the playing fields of you and your opponent are on some kind of counter-balanced platforms, and the game is lost when either one player's platform has been lifted high enough that their blobs touch the top of the screen, or their platform is so weighed down that it hits the bottom. Compare these four minute matches with the likes of Magical Drop (my personal favourite competitive puzzle series), where matches can be won or lost within seconds of them starting, and Plus Plum feels like a meandering, tension-free bore.

I can't recommend tracking down Plus Plum at all. There might not be as many competitive puzzle games on the Dreamcast compared to the Playstation, but there's still plenty that are better than this one. Strangely, though, it was apparently popular enough to get a sequel, Plus Plum 2. However, that was released on the original XBox, in Japan only, so it presumably sold about seven copies.