Wired Soul (PC)

 I've been saying that the past few years have seen something of a renaissance for the beat em up genre, with the likes of Streets of Rage 4, Ninja Saviors, and Fire Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei all being excellent games that both revived the genre after years and years of diluted efforts, as well as bringing their own new ideas to the table. But Wired Soul predates them all, having come out in 2015 (according to its DLSite page, there might have been a physical release before that). 

 

I've got some bad news and some good news regarding Wired Soul, though. The bad news is that it's not as good as any of the games listed above. The good news is that those games all set an incredibly high bar, and it's still a good game that's definitely worth playing. On first sight, it'll all seem very generic and basic, with the "girl getting kidnapped" plot and the strange lack of grappling or throws, but the more you play, the more you realise that there's a little more under the surface.

 

I guess the devs disregarded grappling to focus on combos, since as you'll eventually discover, you can chain a bunch of attacks together, and it's very satisfying to do so. It also manages this with only one attack button! You get your regular string of attacks by going up to an enemy and repeatedly pressing attack, and obviously, there are running and jumping attacks, too. But you can also perform more powerful autocombos by holding the attack button to fill a charge meter, then releasing when an enemy's in range. Not only that, but you can actually attack twice while in the air, plus you can hit an enemy once while they're on the ground.

 

With a bit of skill, timing, and aim, you can, for example, perform your charged autocombo before jumping up and kicking the enemy another two times before landing beside them and getting a sly ground punch in before they get up. It'll take a fair bit of practice before you can do that kind of thing reliably, but it's very satisfying every time you do pull it off. The only real problem the game has is the difficulty, that feels slightly unfair. For example, it seems like enemy attacks, regardless of whether you're doing a special or who attacked first or anything else like that, always have priority over your attacks. Furthermore, a bar of health doesn't seem to go very far, either: it'll only take a few hits for you to lose a life, especially against bosses. They aren't game-killing problems, but they're a bit annoying, and they stop the game reaching the upper echelons like the ones listed above.

 

Wired Soul is a game where the positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I do still recommend it. It was clearly a passion project for the developers, and not every game has to be a senses-shattering instant classic. If you like beat em ups, go and buy it. it's good.

Dragonball Z: Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu (Saturn)

 Back around the turn of the century, when Dragonball Z was just starting to air on British TV, me and my friends were a bunh of teenagers with no money, so we mostly relied on the various software pirates in our vilage to supply us with videogames. Unfortunately, the only Dragonball game any of them had available was Dragonball GT Final Bout on the Playstation. Despite having great-looking gouraud-shaded graphics, Final Bout was almost unplayable garbage. Still, we played a ton of it anyway, and I even remember one weekend we didn't see one of our group because he'd decided to stay home and try unlocking a whole bunch of characters by completing it on hard mode nine consecutive times without losing a round. The method he was following turned out to be an April Fools joke from a popular fansite. Anyway, we longed for better DBZ games, and in the ads for importers that were printed in magazines at the time, the title "Dragonball Z Legends" always stood out. We had no other details on this game other than that it existed, it was too expensive for any of us to buy, and it had to be better than what we had.

 

Cut to about a decade later, and I've recently gotten a 4-in-1 cartridge for my Saturn, and I'm shopping around online for cheap imports that I can actually play. Amazingly, I find a copy of that mysterious Dragonball Z game for less than ten pounds, so I buy it straight away! I wasn't sure what to expect, but nonetheless, what I got was a pretty big surprise. Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a fighting game, though it's unlike any other fighting game I've ever played. For a start, most of your attacks don't damage your opponent at all. Instead, there's a momentum meter at the bottom of the screen, and attack moves it in your favour. When it goes all the way to one side, a member of the team that has the advantage will perform a super move, doing significant damage (usually about a third of their total health) to one of the members of the opposing team.

 

I should clarify the basic structure of the fights before I go any further. The fights are two-sided, with up to three combatants on each team, and they take place in a massive 3D space. You only control one team member at a time, though you can switch between them whenever you like with the left shoulder button, and you're always facing one of your opponents, among whom you can switch with the right shoulder button. You don't really control your movement in a traditional manner, instead up and down move you towards or away from your opponent. Your teammates you're not controlling will be controlled by AI. As well as just winning the fights, you can also unlock secret characters for the two player versus mode by re-enacting specific events from the show: having characters die in the right order, or having them be killed by specific moves, and so on. 

 

The whole re-enacting thing is a little too fiddly for me to have bothered with, to be honest, and I wasn't planning on playing versus mode anyway. However, of all the Dragonball Z games to do it in, this is probably the right one. The very unusual way it plays is probably the most faithful attempt I've ever seen of emulating the very specific way in which Dragonball Z fights play out. It even goes so far as having every attack deplete your ki meter, so you have to charge it up pretty often, just like what happens in the show! Despite how that sounds, it really does work in the game's favour, honest.

 

Dragonball Z Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a game I definitely recommend to anyone who's ever been a fan of Dragonball Z, and who doesn't mind playing something that's a little out of the ordinary and takes some getting used to. I guess the Xenoverse games and Battle of Z are the closest modern equivalent, but for all their graphical splendor, they don't capture the feel of the show in the way that this game does.