Kaikan Phrase - Datenshi Kourin (Playstation)

I've covered a lot of anime license games on here before, but this might be the game licensed from the most obscure anime so far. Released during the late nineties bishonen boom alongside the likes of Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no Matsuei, Kaikan Phrase is a show about a Visual Kei band made up of handsome young men. It's never had an official English release, and the only fansubs around as far as I can tell are rips of ancient VHS tapes!

 

Fitting with the theme of the show, the game is a rhythm game, in which you play the songs of the fictional band  Λucifer (which also became a real band, so singles and such could be released). There's only four stages in single player story mode, but each stage you pick one of two options. Though it's not a branching path, there are only two options for each stage no matter what, and the options only change the cutscenes that play before and after the stage. There's also only six songs in the game, and worst of all: they pad out the play time by making you grind to unlock them!

 

When you start a stage, you choose a song and a band member to play as. Since each member plays a different instrument, they each have different charts for each song, and naturally, different difficulty levels. To unlock more songs, you have to gain New Release points, which I think are scored 1:1 on the number of successful notes you play in a song. So picking a harder chart means more potential for points, but if you fail a stage, you get nothing. No matter what, though, when you start playing, you'll be hearing the first song at least three times before you unlock the second, and the gaps between unlocks only get longer and longer.

 

As for the game itself, it's incredibly simple: there's a bar on the lefthand side of the screen. Note markers appear on the bar, and a line travels down it. Although the markers appear in a number of different colours, you only ever have to press the X button when the line reaches them, and that's it! There's a meter next to the bar that fills up gradually as you hit notes, and if it's full at the end of the song, you pass the stage! As you progress through the four stages of a single player playthrough, that meter gets longer, but there's no other complications added.

 

Despite the grind problem, I still had a pretty good time playing this game. The songs are decent, and actually playing it is mindless and stress-free to the extent that it's a nice relaxing game to zone out to and play for 15 minutes or so. Obviously, it gets better as you unlock more songs, too.

Kinnikuman Nisei - Shinsedai Choujin vs. Densetsu Choujin (Gamecube)

 So, this game did get a western release, under the title Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs. New Generation. I played the Japanese version instead, though, since I read somewhere that the western publishers removed the character creation mode. Now I'm not so sure whether that's true or not, but really it doesn't matter much either way, since the character creation mode isn't very good.

 

I had high hopes for it, since a character creation mode in such a cartoony-looking game seemed like it could be really interesting. Unfortunately, you just select a head, torso, arms, and legs from a pretty small selection, and they're all obviously meant to be matched together in sets, and mixing them up really does look like you just mixed up parts from different characters. Also, you can't use them in the game's main single player mode, only in one-off fights.

 

It's a simple wrestling game based on the anime Kinnikuman Nisei/Ultimate Muscle, obviously, and it really is very simple: there are no pinfalls or submissions, you're just trying to get your opponent's health to zero in every match. Furthermore, the game is mostly controlled using just the analogue stick for movement, and three buttons: strike, grapple, and jump. Each character has a short string of strike attacks, a couple of wrestling moves done with the grapple button, as well as a mid-air strike and grapple each. There's also a super meter, and by holding the left trigger, you can expend one segment of meter to perform a more powerful strike, two segments for a more powerful grapple, or all three to perform a big super move, which is like its own little cutscene where you do some big crazy impossible wrestling move on your opponent.

 

There's a ton of characters and stuff to unlock (including a gallery of photos of over four hundred keshigomu figures!), but the preblem is that all the characters feel the same when you play as them, and they only have very few moves, and it's pretty boring seeing the same couple of moves over and over during each match. Take into account that a single-player playthrough comprises five consecutive matches, and it's even worse. 

 

As it is, the game attempts to occupy a space between fighting games and wrestling games, but while each genre has its own complexities, this game kind of eschews both, leaving you with a great-looking, but repetitive and over-simple game. I can't even really recommend it for multiplayer, since the main skill you need is the ability to press the attack button before your opponent does. It's a shame, since it mostly feels okay to play and it has a lot of charm, but it's just so completely unexciting that it's not worth bothering with.