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Released in 1993 for the Super Famicom, Sanrio World Smash Ball mixed elements of tennis, soccer, and breakout, with some absolutely devious level design to create a surprisingly competitive title. Despite its Japan only release, it has since gained a cult following internationally, with a fan translation and rebalanced Tournament Edition hack now available. It's even drawn a respectable crowd at my local fighting game meetups.
Now, 33 years after the release of the Super Famicom game, Sanrio Characters Smash Festa has released, a modern sequel that expands the roster, refines the mechanics, and packages it up in brand new 2D artwork. I'm not sure what led up to this, but I'm happy to report that it carries over everything that made the original so exciting.
The mechanics are largely unchanged from the original: you can hit the ball from either the left or the right, with your relative position changing its trajectory, and when your special meter fills up you can unleash a powerful spin that sends the ball forward at a high speed. Various blocks and obstacles populate the stage, forcing you to repeatedly chip away at your opponent's defensive wall, and redirecting your ball in different directions.
New to Smash Festa is the ability to lob the ball, which can be used defensively to slow down the ball, or to toss it over players and certain obstacles. You can't lob the ball over destructible blocks, so you won't bypass defenses with it, but it's useful for changing the pace of a match.
Smash Festa’s special meter is split into three segments, with a single segment used for lobbing the ball, and a full meter required for your high speed smash. The three segment requirement means smash attacks are less frequent than the original, keeping matches from devolving into races to see who fills their meter first, and creating a calculation between cheaper defensive specials and risky offensive ones. The original also required you to hold a button while standing still, but in Smash Festa this has been simplified to simply standing still, relieving some tension on your thumbs.
The real game changer is the addition of doubles. Smash Festa now allows four players, in teams of two, to face off, which changes the dynamic and allows for some nasty new level designs. A duo can now transition between attacker and defender positions, double down on defense, or double up on another player to bully them and try to score before their defensive wall is broken.
Several stages have unrestricted movement, or use breakable blocks to restrict movement, allowing you to run right up to your opponents’ goal and pressure them. Other stages restrict movement so that getting to another side takes a long time, encouraging one player to hang back and play goalie.
Each player has their own special meter, which changes the meter dynamics. Do you play it safe and each spend it defensively, split into offensive and defense roles, or risk it all and both go for two powerful smash attacks?
The team dynamics are bolstered by the variety of new cast members, now sporting dedicated roles. There’s the usual mix of balanced, speed and strength roles, alongside one dedicated to building meter faster. The total number of playable characters is now 21, up from the measly 4 in the original game. The new roster corrects the previous massive oversight of not including a playable Hello Kitty, adds more recent favorites like Kuromi and Cinnamoroll, as well as adding a good number of popular, but less recognizable Sanrio mascots. A good number of the characters were unknown to me, but seem to be pretty popular in Japan according to recent popularity polls.
Smash Festa starts with more characters than Smash Ball, but the majority will need to be unlocked by playing through the 50 stage single player campaign. (Hilariously, Kuromi is the last character unlocked, as if they knew a good portion of players would be in it just for her).
The campaign is thankfully not very difficult, taking about two hours to complete, and giving you a good tour of the various stage layouts, punctuated with a number of doubles games. Completing it allows you to challenge it again on higher difficulties, but otherwise there isn’t much else to do on your own, aside from creating custom matches with the CPU.
With that said, Sanrio Characters Smash Festa is still a welcome surprise. A sequel to a cult classic SNES game, released 30 years later, with everything that made the original compelling intact, updated with a modern cast and modern artwork. It’s something I’d daydream about while playing the original, and somehow it’s here and playable.
The only wrinkle is that the game is currently still Japan only, appearing on the Switch eShop and Steam, but strictly region locked on PC, with no English translation or announced plans to bring it over. It’s still relatively accessible if you’re willing to create a Japanese eShop account and buy eShop credits through a third party, which is how I played it. The amount of text is also minimal, with menus being easily navigable through trial and error or translation apps.
My first session with Smash Festa turned out to be an immediate hit, with matches becoming surprisingly competitive right away, with the ease of play and appeal of Sanrio characters providing an easy in for everyone. It’s easily a worthy successor to the original.
With an advanced machine gun controller and story following an elite anti-terrorist squad, Ghost Squad takes the aesthetics of tactical military shooters like Rainbow Six and brings it to the arcades. Alongside a simulated recoil, and a firing mode selector Ghost Squad’s controller sports an additional “action” button that performs various contextual actions such as rescuing hostages, destroying mines or parrying knife attacks. Between the varied interactions and tense situations Ghost Squad puts you in, it sells the idea of being an elite soldier able to surgically dismantle the enemy force, but in a high speed arcade package that’s uncommon among tactical shooters. Thankfully, that’s balanced by a hammy, over the top presentation common among SEGA arcade games, keeping it from steering into the ultra serious, propaganda like tone that many similar shooters fall into.
Lightgun technology is often the first association when it comes to arcade gun games, Ghost Squad uses an infrared pointer to track your aim, allowing precise positioning via an on screen cursor. Compared to lightgun shooters, which need to allow a certain amount of leeway to account for imperfect calibration and aim, Ghost Squad allows more precise hitboxes. As a comparison, early entries in House of the Dead--SEGA’s most recognizable lightgun series--have encounters happen at closer range, creating larger targets that allow some imprecision in high tension situations. Ghost Squad has a wider field of view, with targets appearing at longer distances, and as a consequence of its more precise aim, allows it to emphasize headshots as a tactic for fast takedowns.
To show this off, the airplane stage features a hostage situation where the boss uses a human shield, and you only have one chance to land a headshot and take him out. The imprecision of lightgun technology might cause you to accidentally hit the hostage if not precisely calibrated, but because you can see the single point where your bullet will land, landing the shot is almost trivial, with a short timer instead providing the tension for the situation.
Other setpieces break up the pacing and put the technology to good use, with precision sniping sections, a helicopter takedown where you need to continually track it to acquire a lock on, and the aforementioned bomb disarming, hostage restraining, and melee sections where you quickly use the action button to perform context sensitive actions while looking out for enemies. The addition of a second button and pointer controls allows Ghost Squad to break up the typical arcade shooter pacing, and gives you more ways to interact with the world aside from firing a gun.
Don’t let that fool you into thinking that the gunfeel is lacking. Ghost Squad’s gunplay aces both the audiovisual and physical feedback. Shots cause enemies to flinch based on hit location, with the same kind of snappy reactions that made House of the Dead so satisfying. Score popups reward you for quick and precise shots, and environments are littered with destructible objects that turn the area into a mess over the course of a gunfight. The controller itself is heavy, imitating the look of the real life MP5, with punchy, machine gun-like recoil that encourages you to stabilize your aim by pushing the stock against your shoulder. The addition of the action button and firing mode selector give both your hands something to do, and lean into the fantasy of holding a powerful weapon.
The original cabinet ran on the SEGA Chihiro board, an arcade board based on the specs of the Xbox, with the later revision, Ghost Squad Evolution, using the Lindberg arcade board, both which saw titles like Outrun 2 and Virtua Fighter 5 show up on them. The original version had an unlock system that allowed players to use a player card to store save data, with successive plays unlocking new weapons and costumes, and increasing the difficulty of the missions. Evolution added more options, and additionally unlocked weapons, allowing North American players to play with them, since they previously did not have access to the cards used to save data. In my personal experience I also found that Evolution had more responsive cursor tracking, but that could have been due to poor calibration on the original cabinet.
Despite being based on Xbox hardware, Ghost Squad never received a port to the Xbox or other home consoles of the generation, likely due to the difficulty of adapting the IR aiming. The Wii ended up being the one console to bring the game home, with the IR pointer capabilities of the Wiimote providing a perfect substitute. The home version obviously can’t replicate the physical experience of the arcade cabinet, with the Wii controller being absolutely dwarfed by the heft of the gun controller, and lacking the intense mechanical feedback. Paired with a Wii Zapper shell, however, and it does provide a good enough facsimile of the experience to appreciate the unique qualities of Ghost Squad. There’s also no shortage of Wii controller shells with detailed recreations of firearms, including one modeled off the MP5.
The Wii version also finally allows English speaking players to engage with the unlock system, with enough options to keep you playing for hundreds of sessions. Thankfully, the game runs about 20 minutes, keeping the pacing snappy, and preventing fatigue from the constant high tension action. With arcade cabs becoming increasingly uncommon, the Wii version provides a more than suitable replacement for most people, and even outside of original hardware, emulation can replicate most of the experience, with even more pointer precision.
With the tacticool trappings of military shooters, and a campy presentation that lightens the baggage associated with them, Ghost Squad is a perfect demonstration of rail shooter excellence--fantastically paced, varied, and making excellent use of its technology to break out of the usual genre trappings. Its mechanical precision makes further playthroughs more rewarding, and it can be completed in only a little more time than it takes to read this article.
Originally released in arcades, Silent Scope differentiated itself from other gun games by focusing exclusively on sniping. Using a unique dual screen setup and taking place within Chicago and its surrounding areas, it’s a unique entry in the rail shooter genre, one that required some atypical solutions during its translation to home consoles.
Unlike the familiar lightgun setup, which detects flashing hitboxes to confirm shots, Silent Scope pairs a full size screen with a mounted sniper rifle replica, sporting a small screen embedded in the scope. The main screen displays a general overview of the situation, with a sniper cursor giving you a general idea of where your gun is pointed, and the scope displaying a zoomed in view for acquiring targets. Set at the correct distance, the two screens sell the illusion that you're looking through one screen into the other.
I suspect the actual mechanics involve something similar to LA Machineguns or other rail shooters like Space Harrier, where the controller communicates its absolute position on the swiveling mount to determine where it's pointing, not unlike an analog joystick.
The illusion is further sold by the heft of the controller, which weighs enough that you'll want to brace it against your shoulder, and even practice breath control to keep your aim steady. With your eye up to the scope you can quickly switch between the two views by opening and closing each eye. In my case, I used my left eye to watch the larger situation on the large screen, switching to my right eye to “zoom” into the cursor for precision aim, all without having to shift my body position.
For maximum efficiency you'll also want to develop smooth and confident targeting. The clock is always ticking, and each kill earns a few seconds, so being fast is essential to completing a run, since even if you get through an area you might find yourself running out of time during the boss fight.
Silent Scope doesn't fully simulate bullet physics, but bullets do have travel time, requiring you to lead moving targets, and creating small delays before hits are confirmed. Given the strict timing, I learned to carefully line up shots, pull the trigger, then immediately move to the next target, having them lined up as the bullet hit. It takes a certain amount of discipline and physical technique that many other arcade gun games don't emphasize, giving additional satisfaction to the process of developing muscle memory.
I’m lucky enough to have access to the arcade machine thanks to Galloping Ghost, an arcade located in the Chicago suburbs, and the cabinet felt oddly at home with the assortment of Midway titles created in the city. As for the actual depiction of the area--it’s not particularly accurate. Chicago’s downtown streets are oddly wide and spacious, and the highways and football stadium don’t have any notable characteristics, and as you chase the terrorists into Wisconsin, up through Milwaukee and Green Bay, there aren’t many notable locations. Still, it’s a neat bit of scene setting, especially with the area map that appears between stages, showing your route through the states as you progress.
The stages themselves are smartly paced, and branch into three different areas after the initial downtown battle, bringing variety to the start of each playthrough. After the downtown shootout you can either chase the terrorists across the rooftops, highway or football stadium. The stadium is the highlight, with one of the terrorists comedically carrying away the President’s daughter, as football players attempt to tackle him.
As you enter Wisconsin your ability to search for targets is tested, having you search through hotel windows to find hidden terrorists among civilians, then enter a mansion at night, using night vision to pick out targets in the dark. The night vision section is particularly exciting, as enemy flashlights can give away their positions, but alongside flares can temporarily blind you, making timing your shots tricky.
The variety of situations keep Silent Scope expertly paced and varied over its short run time, and keep its methodical gameplay full of tension. It did thankfully receive a number of console ports, though not without some compromises.
The one lightgun translation came with Silent Scope Complete, which ported the entire series, and came packaged alongside a rifle controller. The limitations of this controller give some insight into the difficulty of translating the game to standard lightgun setup. The scope functionality wasn’t replicated, but instead required you to sit at a certain distance from your TV, and look through the hollow scope into the scoped view on the TV. It does seem to track your movements, but requires the brightness of the TV to be set to the point where the colors are entirely blown out.
Because of the limitations of lightgun technology, most console ports are instead controlled with a standard controller or ,when possible, a mouse. The Dreamcast and PS2 ports both support the mouse, though oddly this isn’t mentioned in the packaging or manuals. It’s by and far the preferred method, and when mastered allows you to hit targets faster than even the arcade game.
Like the arcade game, a general targeting reticle shows your current cursor position, and hitting the right mouse button will zoom into the scoped view, with the left mouse button naturally firing. It’ll come naturally to anyone familiar with PC FPS games. The controller buttons are largely the same, with the analog stick instead moving the controller, and the option to add modifier buttons to speed up and slow down the cursor for more precision. It’s perfectly functional, but not ideal during moments where the camera is in constant motion.
Curiously, there’s even a GBA port. Like the console ports, it relies on a standard control scheme, but without any alternative control options due to its portable nature. Like many GBA games, it uses prerendered graphics, translating each scene into a static renders that fade between screens, and none of the dynamic camera movements of the arcade game represented. It also removes all the references to real world locations, most likely due to the original game coming out in 1999, while the GBA port released in 2002.
Unlike other lightgun games like SEGA’s House of the Dead series, Ghost Squad or LA Machineguns, Silent Scope didn’t receive any ports to the next generation of consoles, which ironically would have been perfect for it. The Wii’s infrared pointer technology would have been a perfect substitute for the arcade controls, similar to the way that Ghost Squad’s infrared tech was translated for the Wii port. Games like Time Crisis received both dedicated infrared pointer controllers, as well as PS Move support, and going a generation further, the Wii U had similar scope implementations in games like Star Fox Zero. Even the DS could have provided an upgrade to the GBA version, with its basic 3D capabilities, and built in dual screen setup, which could have allowed fast aiming with the touch screen, and simultaneous displays of the scoped and unscoped views.
Currently, the arcade versions of Silent Scope are not emulated, so the Dreamcast and PS2 ports remain the best way to experience. Thankfully, they provide a complete experience and are easy to emulate as well. It might even be preferable to playing on original hardware, since I found that the PS2 is picky about which USB mice it recognizes, since anything but the most basic, wired mouse without extra buttons would cause the game to malfunction.
Easy to pick up and put down, Silent Scope represents the spirit of a quintessential arcade shooter, but offers enough nuances and variation to keep it fresh for a long time. It easily ranks alongside the best of the arcade lightgun games, even if the series remains buried compared to its contemporaries.
An uncanny mix of aesthetics and design sensibilities, The Citadel is bathed in an oppressive atmosphere. Cold, monolithic structures loom over the horizons, patrolled by cultists, drone and stormtroopers, rendered with hand drawn billboard sprites that starkly contrast with the harsh 3D of the environments.
Combat mixes the movement and level design of early FPS games, with a modern gun fetishist’s arsenal. Enemy attacks can be dodged or shot out of the air, and your character can move at the speed of an F1 car. But claustrophobic corridors and precarious drops make careful movement a necessity, and limited resources mean running and gunning is a long term liability.
Health points are severely limited, with your maximum values draining with your hunger, and oxygen limits your ability to move quickly, requiring you to constantly keep your resources stocked up to avoid being stuck in a desperate situation without the resources to escape it. Ammo drops are frequent, but armored foes tank enough hits that landing headshots is near mandatory for preventing weapons from running dry. Pistols and shotguns need to individually reload bullets, and fletchettes come in large quantity drums that can be accidentally tossed if reloading carelessly. Stages need to be completed in a single run, with checkpoints only available when spending your limited amount of lives at checkpoints.
It creates a survival horror-like economy where managing encounters with fodder enemies is key to keeping resources stacked for more dangerous encounters. I found myself peeking around corners, taking cover, carefully lining up shots, and compensating for gravity over long distances.
As the campaign continues, your arsenal grows, and weapon and movement upgrades begin to shift the balance in your favor. The horror then shifts from the desperate terror of survival, to the devastation that you visit upon the enemy. You might still be vulnerable, but the catastrophic effects even basic weapons have on the enemy begins to overwhelm the initial terror you had when facing them.
Bullets cleave their skulls into fragments, ejecting rib cages, limbs and innards across the environment. Surfaces become streaked with blood, and alt fire modes cause enemies to twitch and scream and their bodies are electrocuted or burned over the course of several seconds. This culminates in mech sections where you’re armed with boosters for generous vertical movement, anti-personnel rounds, artillery and explosives that shred through the opposition.
All of this is rendered in high detail sprite work, the garish colors and organic forms of each piece of viscera contrasting with the cold, harsh lines and colors of the environment.
Each enemy’s face is obscured by robes or masks, part of their fanatical dedication to the organization. It’s only in their deaths that you get a glimpse of their humanity. Fragments of their faces are left behind, caught in grimaces of pain, tears in their eyes as they stare back at you. The dissonance of seeing a grotesquely illustrated anime girl erupt from militaristic uniforms creates its own uncanny discomfort, which carries into the designs of the bosses you’ve been sent to obliterate.
Known as Angels, each boss represents a facet of humanity, twisted into body horror idols, worshipped and weaponized, at times against their wishes. One even begs you to put her out of her misery, kept alive for the religious agenda, unable to stop herself from attacking you. The Citadel’s storytelling is sparse, but the few details point to a suffocating future, with a fanatical spirituality driving both the enemies and the protagonist, The Martyr.
The Martyr is described as a human from a past world, with none of the cybernetic modifications that have become common in this world. She’s depicted in a fetish wear styled outfit, which alongside the religious themes brings to mind the aesthetics of Aeon Flux, which the developer has cited as an influence.
Unfortunately, this design, along the anime art style, seems to have been enough to trigger accusations that The Citadel is a work made to satisfy a sexual fetish, causing a wave of harassment against the developer and labeling the game as a guro game. The accusation doesn’t hold water, and seems to come from a strange Orientalist revulsion that doesn’t apply to Western artists who more explicitly combine sexual and horrific imagery.
For all its excess, The Citadel has a considered, even tactical approach to violence. Compared to the joyous fountains of blood in many modern games, it even feels restrained, keeping the violence impactful through its whole run time.
As I played through The Citadel I kept thinking about the War on Terror era military media. The paranoid fear of being deployed in a place where every civilian could turn into an enemy, where any space could collapse into a fireball from an IED. The dissonance of their tacticool depictions of military discipline and technology, where trained operatives cut cleanly through the enemy, supported by shock and awe campaigns of remote surveillance, drone strikes and superior firepower that can literally liquify inhabitants, remove their homes from the map, and reshape borders.
The Citadel carries similar contradictions. It’s a layered terror. A horror taking place at both ends of the barrel. A revolting spectacle that you can’t tear your eyes away from.
With so many games now touting photo modes, videogame photography has now become part of the culture. It’s a good way to slow down, engage with the game in another mode, and appreciate the tremendous amount of labor and artistry put into the worlds of modern videogames.
Lushfoil Photography Sim turns this into the entire focus of the game, focusing on exploring and photographing meticulously rendered slices of real world landscapes. A lack of wildlife or NPCs keeps the focus on finding subjects within the environments and architecture, and using the camera simulation to create expressive scenes. The simulation part is emphasized, with a variety of fixed and variable focal lengths, with manually adjustable settings like aperture, shutter speed, ISO and filters. Each environment also has an old digicam or drone to find, allowing you to photograph the scene from different angles or give it the old low resolution point and shoot look.
Importantly, Lushfoil brings an element of physicality and uncertainty to the act of taking photos. A typical photo mode gives you total control, allowing you to pose characters, place the camera anywhere, and even change up the lighting conditions, and pressing the shutter is basically a screenshot button. Lushfoil simulates the act of exposing the photo, and while the camera can give you a real-time preview of what your applied settings might look like, the final shot will look different depending on your settings. It could end up brighter or darker, or with more parts of the image out of focus than you intended.
Shots also need to be taken from your physical position. You have to walk to an area to get a shot, working the angles when there isn’t a path you can stand on. You also need to plant your feet to crouch or lean, keeping the analog stick precisely held to keep your position. You can’t lie prone either, so extreme low angle shots require some tricky positioning. Even when you find the drone, it has a limited range it can move away from you, keeping you physically restricted in the shots you take.
Small tutorials help you learn the basics of photography, and give you examples of how to apply the technique. The long exposure tutorial was great for helping me understand how to capture motion blur, which I applied to capture the effects of wind. It eases you into looking at the environment with those concepts in mind, and how you can manipulate the image to express the feeling of what you see.
The game part of Lushfoil directly contradicts the lax, easy introduction to photography. Lushfoil starts with a limited number of locations to explore, with new locations and variants unlocked after finding collectibles and recreating particular shots. Cheats can be used to bypass this, but even with this option it unintentionally creates a tourist-like experience, where you’re pushed to capture specific scenes and vistas, leading to a guided, homogenous experience instead of a creative one.
I attempted to ignore this aspect, but occasionally I’d accidentally recreate shots, making me feel as if I’d wandered into a theme park, where I was tracing steps on a guided path the developer laid out for me. I’d rather have snapshots and collectibles be optional objectives for completionists, with simple exploration unlocking new areas.
Exploring areas is rewarding enough by itself, with dense detail put into recreating each location. Photography invites you to slow down and take in those details, but walking through them is joy enough.
Enough time in each however, and the same limitations that make it creatively challenging, begin to feel, well, limiting. Despite being based on real locations, each area is only a small, cordoned off slice of the area, and the theme park style construction of it begins to show through.
That’s where Lushfoil Photography Sim has an advantage over other simulation games -- you might not be able to drive a truck, fly a plane or run a farm, but photography is still relatively accessible. You likely already own a device with a decent camera, and even smartphone cameras allow you to use various apps to gain more manual control. I can’t pick up a drone on a whim, or travel to any of the places featured in Lushfoil, but I can pick up a camera. So I did.
I’d dipped into photography as part of other projects, but being able to play with the myriad options in Lushfoil convinced me to finally give it a serious effort. I managed to find an old entry level DSLR for a reasonable cost, and started applying ideas I’d learned in the game.
Lushfoil manages to convey a real passion for photography, and successfully makes an argument to try it out, with guidance on exactly how to do that. It allows you to play around with a lot of tools, find what you like, without any of the real life pressures, and plenty of beautiful views to try them in.
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LIPService is a series that puts a spotlight on notable ROM hacks and fan works.
A total conversion hack built upon Super Metroid, Super Junkoid takes the mechanics of its base game and creates a new game out of it by radically altering the context and aesthetics of all its parts. Bosses, abilities and sounds are reused, but by remixing their placements and artwork Super Junkoid creates its own original adventure that uses the player’s familiarity with the original work to create an uncanny atmosphere.
The story begins with a young girl named Junko saving a snake from dying in the sun. Becoming obsessed with her, the snake follows her everywhere, eventually even into her dreams, where it worships Junko as a goddess, and creates a dream realm dedicated to her, trapping her within.The game begins with her waking up, her bed mysteriously caught in the middle of snowy forest scene.
Super Junkoid carries the vibe of an RPG Maker horror game. It begins with mundane environments like snowy mountains and distant cityscapes. As you descend deeper it evolves into disturbing temples dedicated to Junko, lakes of blood, haunted laboratories and the labyrinthine guts. The obsession of the snake grows clearer as you descend, going so far as to attempt to replicate her, with mangled duplicates of Junko populating its depths.
Junko herself is rendered as a cute young girl, a magic wand replacing Samus’ arm cannon, with whimsical substitutes for each of her abilities. The morph ball turns into a rat transformation, complete with the cute touch of Junko holding the wand in her mouth. Missiles turn into baseballs, and the various suits turn into amulets and trinkets. The more “moe” artwork for her character provides a contrast with the horror of the situation, amping it up.
The environmental art is the real star, reusing parts and motifs from Super Metroid, but more often transforming tilesets until they’re barely recognizable, with deep, saturated palettes that add to the surreal atmosphere. Hatches are changed into the crow doors from Doki Doki Panic, the new context making entering their mouths threatening, as if each door you pass through brings you further into being digested by the snake, with the increasingly organic environments adding to the feeling.
The environments paint a clear picture even without direct narrative, with tableaus decorating the backgrounds. Images of Junko repeat throughout in statues, stained glass windows, and eventually replicas of Junko, living, dead and partially animated. A few areas even require you to intentionally take damage, gritting your way through as your health depletes, only able to catch your breath at the hot spring safe rooms.
The snake’s appearances throughout are all desiccated and rotting, with leftover parts of it forming the entrances to deeper parts of the map. It’s clear that the snake’s idea of worship is one with no care for Junko herself, but one of control, and even consumption. These feelings eventually coalesce in chimeras made of exposed skeletons and viscera, warped by the snake’s obsession.
The chimeras are the best demonstration of Super Junkoid’s uncanny recontextualization of Super Metroid’s parts. Many of the original game’s most iconic bosses are used for the chimeras, with their patterns and behaviors immediately recognizable even in their transformed forms. It adds to the feeling that this is wrong, that something is out of place.
That extends to the moveset, which has its order remixed, and sports small tweaks to change their restrictions or make them easier to use. The wall jump is now a dedicated upgrade intended to be used frequently, Speed Booster can now only be used when in rat form and likewise Shinespark now uses ammo, but can be done anywhere, without the need to run and charge it up first. It’s all enough to throw off someone familiar with Super Metroid, but ultimately how you use them in Super Metroid is how you use them in Super Junkoid.
The jumps have the same strange nuances of the original. Air time is long, and you’ll get a somersault variant if you’re moving, which changes your jump physics and is required to pull off moves like the wall jump. Wall jumping works against your muscle memory from other platformers, requiring you to somersault into the wall, then push away from it for a second before pressing jump, rather than performing the inputs together. Once the rules are internalized it’s satisfying to pull off, but knowing those quirks are essential.
Notably, pulling the wall jump off consistently was one of the few times I felt the latency of my emulation method mattered. I originally played Super Junkoid on a lower end emulation device, and the inconsistent latency made it difficult to perform the wall jump with any consistency, due to the tight timing requirements. Switching to a more modern emulator like BSNES quickly removed that issue.
The level design is where Super Junkoid distinctly pulls away from its Super Metroid origins. Super Metroid and its contemporaries tend to push for more sprawling map designs, extending horizontally, with labyrinthine corridors to create the sense that you’re exploring a massive space. Super Junkoid’s maps are dense, layering on top of each other, and repeatedly looping back to connect to previous areas. Instead of creating a sprawling space by giving you a large area to walk through, it extends into the background, showing you other areas you can’t reach, hinting at an endless dream space.
Areas begin split into a tier of surface levels, before leading you deeper into the dream. The wings of the map funnel into a buried hub area, before pushing you further down, and down once again for the final confrontation. The emphasis on your vertical descent amps up the threat of the latter half of the game, and alongside the progressively more threatening environments, lends to that feeling of being consumed.
Progression in Super Junkoid isn’t strict, with many areas allowing multiple approaches. It ended up making walkthroughs hard to reference, as I’d often find I had reached certain items before progressing to the point the other player was currently in. This was unintentionally exacerbated by various major updates to the game, including the new DX version, which added several features as well as majorly reconfiguring parts of the level structure. Until I realized this, it made even recorded playthroughs of the game seem unreliable, as I’d hit the same area the player had reached, only to realize that it was structured completely differently. It was as if we shared the same dream, but recalled it differently.
That dreamy, half remembered feeling is what makes Super Junkoid successful to me. A few moments show its limitations as a ROM hack, but it’s largely successful at using any familiarity with the original game to add to the uneasy atmosphere it builds. The progression from the cute, fantastical surface areas to the gory, disturbing depths never feels edgy or unearned, and the escalation drives home the desperate obsession of the dream’s creator. Super Metroid’s strengths are put to good use, with only small changes for a modern audience. Super Junkoid was clearly made with love for the original’s quirks, and a desire to preserve the character its friction creates.
Many contemporary entries in the genre struggle to find their own identity, having to come up with novel takes on abilities, layering RPG elements upon their progression, or providing deep, complicated combat to keep your attention.
Super Junkoid manages to create its own identity without any of these, telling a new story with pre-existing parts, building upon them with original visuals, rich atmosphere and layered level design. It manages to impress through the technical work needed to refashion the original game, and its many outstanding artistic choices. It’s a collage that a keen eye can comb through to see its original parts, but combines in a way that adds to a cohesive, blended whole.
CANON FIRE is made possible by the contributions of generous readers like you. Thank you! You can support more writing like this on Patreon.
LIPService is a series that puts a spotlight on notable ROM hacks and fan works.
A ROM hack for Rockman 7, Rockman 7 EP presents a complete overhaul of the Super Famicom game, remixing stage layouts and bosses, adding new weapons, gadgets and mechanics, and packing it full of playable homages to other games. Developed by Puresabe, famous for Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, Rockman 7 EP brings a similar philosophy, pushing the limits of the game engine and hardware.
A playful spirit runs through EP, with a philosophy similar to Kaizo Mario hacks, where expectations are continually subverted as part of the humor of the game, often at the player’s expense. The difficulty is more tempered, not reaching true absurdity until the final stages, and prevented from hitting unreasonable levels by a continuous stream of resources the game feeds to you. Refusal to use them can make the game seem insurmountable, but acceptance will result in less deaths than the vanilla game. It’s a challenge that comes not from a desire to create a punishing and restrictive game, but as a consequence of the sheer number of limit pushing spectacles that Puresabe has crammed into the game.
The base power level of the player and enemies starts way higher. Enemy counts are increased to the point where they often hit the Super Famicom sprite limit, bosses have new attacks and patterns with increased health, and endgame encounters need speedrun level skills to complete without spamming Energy Tanks.
To “balance” that you’re immediately given a full set of restorative items, full lives, and constantly have your health refilled after big encounters, with a full set of items available at the shop for nearly no cost. Spikes no longer instant kill, and several powerful gadgets are provided from the start, including ones that shield you from damage, rescue you from pits, or home in on enemies. The most powerful of these are limited, but judicious use of items allow you to plow through any area.
Health and energy can now also be filled to 200%, slowly draining to 100% over time. A last hit mechanic makes it so you can survive any attack that drains you to zero health, turning it into an almost Sonic style ring system, where having a single point of health will allow you to continue fighting no matter what hits you.
A new quick select system allows you to immediately switch to a weapon or gadget with a face button and direction combo, meaning you rarely need to enter the menu to change equipment. Each of the eight directional combinations corresponds to the boss’ placement on the title screen, making it easier to remember what slot each weapon is placed at.
The amount of new tools and weapons make EP{ a way faster, technical and exciting game than its vanilla incarnation. You can blast through huge groups of enemies with the right weapon or gadget, and by the end you get powerful burst movement that allows you to trivialize even more of them. The revamped weapons have way more utility, and you’re supplied with so much weapon energy you don’t need to be stingy using them, which makes your arsenal feel more like a complete moveset than a set of situational tools.
One of my favorites is King’s Slash, the revamped Slash Claw. It can now be used to cut through bullets, and no longer drains unless it hits an enemy, making it safer to mash. The tip of the attack also causes a critical hit, multiplying its already substantial damage. With the right spacing you can now rack up several critical hits in a row, deleting health bars. The improved utility moves it from a niche tool to an outright replacement for the Mega Buster.
Burn wheel turns into Self-Burning , a high cost, high damage weapon that causes contact damage to enemies, allows you to walk through fire or lava, and boils enemies in water. Bullets can still cause you damage however, and the high cost means you’ll want to avoid using it in areas filled with projectile enemies, where it’s hard to sustain for long periods.
Freeze Cracker is transformed into Silver Bullet, which immediately splits into an 8-way burst that does high damage, and can be used shotgun style to hit enemies and bosses with every shot at the same time.
Even weapons like the Proto Shield, which required a lot of effort to obtain but weren’t very useful, have been given a big overhaul. Here it’s a boomerang style weapon that blocks bullets, can be rammed into enemies to cause damage, and can be thrown and held in place to cause continuous damage, at the expense of causing you to take more damage yourself.
Boss invincibility frames have also been dramatically decreased to allow you to stack damage, too. Traditionally, bosses have long periods of invincibility between hits, but in EP you can stack damage as fast as you can hit them. It changes the dynamic from being about timing a small number of big damage hits to choosing weapons with the right trajectories to counteract boss patterns. It’s a more tactical, rather than puzzle-like approach.
The relentless new pace of the game is occasionally broken up by new stage gimmicks, once again pushing the technical limits of the engine, and bringing the gameplay structure closer to that of the Playstation Mega Man games. There’s a Beat area where you navigate through a spike maze while fighting against gravity, almost like Flappy Bird or Balloon Trip. There are several SHMUP stages, complete with Gradius homages, and even one with a ranking system. And there’s even the return of the dreaded snowboarding sections, though this time missing a jump doesn’t mean instant death, and you can even cheese the entire area by intentionally falling and having Beat carry you past obstacles. My favorite gimmicks are the less drastic ones, like Shademan’s stage, which is now a Castlevania homage, complete with staircases and destructible candles that drop items.
The sheer number of new gimmicks is astonishing on a technical and creative level, though how enjoyable they are to return to is variable, leading to severe highs and lows. One of the biggest problems with EP overall is how it prioritizes showing off over playability, leading to huge difficulty jumps between areas.
You can brute force any area with the resources you’re given, but it encourages sloppy play. Learning areas is less rewarding when you can spend a tool or recovery item to bypass the area, especially when it’s often faster than trying to play properly. By the end of the game Rockman 7 EP gives up entirely on providing a proper challenge and absolutely spams enemies and obstacles at you, prioritizing spectacle while giving you near infinite resources as it hits you with nearly impossible attacks and actual bullet hell patterns.
The infinite resources even reveal themselves to be part of the game’s thematic core, as it hits you with a very late title drop that reveals what the “EP” part of the game means. The capitalistic theme continues into the final credit roll, where it reveals previously hidden statistics the game has been tracking, corresponding achievements, and the financial cost of every life, weapon and item you’ve used throughout the game. If there’s any place that incentivizes a replay, it’s here, where you can attempt to cause Dr. Light as much or as little financial damage throughout a playthrough.
Rockman 7 EP also manages to be greedy in the amount of new dialogue it adds. The original Rockman 7 was wordy by Mega Man standards, but EP has magnitudes more, with new original dialogue, complete with an abundance of narrative flavor and irreverent jokes and references. It borders right on the edge of too much self-awareness, but it has just enough earnestness to get by.
This is also where the second layer of patches come in, as the hack was originally created in Japanese (hence Rockman 7 EP, and not Mega Man 7), and requires an additional translation patch by Zynk Oxhyde. Without it you might still be able to enjoy the sheer technical effort on display here, but a lot of the finer details are less self-explanatory, making the translation essential.
Rockman 7 EP is easily one of the most impressive ROM hacks I’ve had the pleasure of playing through. EP is both a technical and design showcase, with a radical approach with ideas that push the boundaries of the original game and what the larger series could look like. It intentionally reaches unreasonable levels of chaos and difficulty in pursuit of spectacle, but in the process creates one of the most mechanically satisfying takes on the series.
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Telling the story of a woman trapped by the mysteries of her childhood home, Go Home Annie builds an adventure wrapped in the narrative world of the SCP Foundation. Bits are chosen from the community created horror project, for flavor, puzzle inspiration, and scene setting. Annie, our titular protagonist, is a former criminal working under the SCP Foundation’s Anomaly Replication branch, involved in various projects attempting to understand and recreate the supernatural effects of anomalous objects.
After committing an unspecified crime following the disappearance of her father, she’s recruited to run trials in a replica of her childhood home, revisiting it again and again as the Foundation attempts to extract all the anomalies haunting the house. As is often the case, a containment breach occurs, sparking the events of the game and giving Annie a chance to return to her real life home and finally put her trauma to rest.
Go Home Annie doesn’t provide a satisfying answer to the many questions it asks, resolving with an anticlimax that leaves arcs incomplete and no concrete direction for what happens next. But along the way it does manage to deliver some memorable story beats and surreal imagery.
Most of the game’s puzzles involve a complicated spot the difference, finding details in the environment, then assembling the parts to recreate the scene. The first half of the game revolves around using a camera and videotapes, viewing haunted scenes as you walk through the place where they occur, then recreating details to reveal parts of the house previously obscured.
It’s a great mechanical and narrative device, tying the traumatic past to the present and giving it a way to become physically realized in the present. The way it splits attention between two viewpoints, and seamlessly transitions from the mundane to the surreal is very impressive, giving the adventure a dreamlike quality where the grounding of reality can give way at any time.
Annie’s tether comes in the small but likeable supporting cast, who have preestablished relationships atypical of the usual foundation and D-Class dynamics, clearly invested in seeing Annie achieve her goals despite their positions as her overseers. They provide a touch of humanity and even genuine bits of humor between the high tension chapters of the story. There’s even a few anomalies that Annie’s developed a friendly relationship with, their positions as objects controlled by the Foundation providing a common link to bond over.
The second half of the story propels itself towards a conclusion, barreling into escape sequences, set pieces and eventually dropping the camera mechanic to focus on delivering more surreal moments. Some of its best imagery is here, and you get the sense that this moment is one that this is a final performance that Annie has been rehearsing for, as she continued to live through her trauma during her time at the Foundation.
A few new revelations come to light, but ultimately leave additional questions that the game doesn’t take the time to provide an answer for. After some great build up, it grinds to a halt with a series of mirror and light puzzles that lead to an abrupt conclusion. It was so abrupt I thought it had to be a fake out, but there’s only a small post credits scene that doesn’t lead to anything else.
Even with those issues, the relatively short run time kept those last few slow moments from becoming truly tedious. There’s enough inventive imagery on display that the disappointment was more about how much the game leaves on the table, rather than what it delivers. As a self-contained story within the SCP universe, it manages to be compelling through its own narrative and atmosphere, without relying on your recognition of the greater universe to provide motivation.
055: Absolum brings the arcade spirit of its fantasy inspirations roaring into the modern age
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This piece contains minor mechanical and plot spoilers.
The latest from Guard Crush Games, one of the main developers on Streets of Rage 4, Absolum takes plenty from their work on SEGA’s brawler. The skeleton of the game can be seen in their experiments with Mr. X Nightmare, SOR4’s roguelike mode. The abilities, status effects, items and alternative movesets all appear in a less developed form there. Absolum builds an original RPG world around those same ideas, complete with equipment and magic systems, and a detailed history of its many fantastical factions.
Fantasy conjures the image of a sprawling adventure, but where Streets of Rage 4 was built primarily on SEGA’s console series origins, Absolum takes to the arcades for its inspirations. Absolum’s action takes place in runs of an hour or less, using the familiar modern structure of roguelikes to resurrect an arcade playstyle that’s fallen out of favor in the mainstream. Death means starting from stage one, and while you can grind your way into a few more chances, clearing the game will require you to fight your way from the start at least twice, with the conditions around these winning runs further demanding you get into that arcade mindset.
To synthesize its setting and structure, Absolum builds on the legacy of Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups. Capcom’s Tower of Doom and Shadows over Mystara earned a reputation as some of the most complex arcade games, with diverse character classes, branching paths, a detailed stats and equipment system, and real time inventory management. Each was designed to recreate the feeling of a tabletop RPG session, with each run having the potential to grow into a new adventure.
Absolum’s drawn comparisons to Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown, and that’s for a good reason, since Dragon’s Crown draws on the same legacy, with director George Kamitani even serving as director on Tower of Doom. But while Dragon’s Crown leans heavily into the DnD’s party based RPG elements, Absolum builds on the arcade mentality, and redesigns Capcom’s systems to streamline all the moments of downtime and push its speed and momentum.
The slow inventory management has been replaced with a single item slot, with item limits and frequent drops encouraging liberal use of them, and incorporating them into combos. Loose gold is hoovered up, rewards are always spawned with enough choices for both players, to prevent arguing and item theft. The branching paths play a major part of the journey, splitting and converging, with more areas and questlines revealing themselves on subsequent runs. Camps appear on different parts of the map, giving you downtime to heal, buy equipment, and hear more about the world.
Layered upon this is a free flowing combat system that builds on the technical complexities of its predecessors, but arms each character with a toolkit that opens up the creative possibilities. Absolum’s universe moveset includes light, heavy, special and super attacks, paired with varied movement and defensive options. If Streets of Rage was Street Fighter, then Absolum is Darkstalkers.
Every character can dash, sidestep, and parry, rapidly able to change their positioning and cancel into defense at a moment’s notice. Even the dedicated bruisers can travel fullscreen in a second, and build air combos that keep enemies in a prolonged juggle state. Absolum’s basic combo system builds on Guard Crush’s work on Streets of Rage 4, allowing you to extend combos even further by pushing enemies to the edge of the screen, or attacking them while downed.
With so many options to continue a combo, a hard limit has been imposed to prevent infinites and tedious exploits, in the form of the Overpressure system. As you continue a combo, Pressure builds up, eventually putting enemies into an Overpressure state, where the next hit nets bonus damage and ejects the enemy into a hard knockdown where they can’t be hit until they recover.
Repeating moves incurs a penalty and ends a combo sooner, discouraging looping the same attacks, but the limit can be intentionally exploited in your favor. For example, a common beat-em-up loop is the jab reset, where you do the first few hits of your combo, then wait to reset back to the first part of the chain, keeping enemies perpetually in hitstun.
Absolum allows three loops of this resets (or similar ones done by resetting the chain with dodge attacks) before it triggers Overpressure and ejects the opponent. But since the goal of the jab loop is generally to keep an enemy out of the fight and unable to retaliate, the hard knockdown from Overpressure achieves a similar effect, with less tedium. Eventually, you can even find items that extend, or remove these combo limits, or incorporate Overpressure tactics to inflict some special state.
Absolum’s combat is full of nuances like this, and the unlockable movesets only give you more to consider. Long after I beat the game I was finding new details that changed how I play. Cider, the dedicated combo machine, can pull themselves or the enemies closer depending on if you tap or hold the special button. Karl, the dwarf grappler and gunner, has a reload ability that can not only juggle with its startup and recovery, but can also be used as an active reload to cancel the recovery of some special moves and gain half a bar in the process. Brome’s air combo can be used to both pull and push enemies depending on how many hits you do, allowing you to choose between extending damage or creating distance.
The juggle system from Streets of Rage 4 returns, allowing you to wall bounce enemies against the edges of the screen to continue the combo, and any move can be used to hit knocked down enemies, creating many combo routes.
Elite enemies and bosses will tank your initial hits, preventing you from freely comboing them, and forcing you to learn their patterns and defend appropriately. Reacting appropriately will set up a punish combo, allowing you to rack as much damage as you can before they enter a hard knockdown and recover. Even the final boss can be comboed like this, allowing combo fiends to wreck a boss within a few good openings if they’ve got tight defenses. It’s a familiar rhythm for fighting game fans, and it allows boss fights with a noticeable bump in difficulty from standard enemies, without invalidating the skills and expression built up in the rest of the game.
The same meticulous care has been put into its developing Absolum’s world. The story begins in media res, introducing you to the stakes and players within a few minutes, implying a long history between its characters and world, without any lore dumps or long winded scene setting. We get the ideas of who the characters are in short snippets of commentary and dialogue, optional descriptions of vistas, and fireside chats between runs. Every character and faction has a history with the world, even if they only show you a fraction of it.
The environments are illustrated in an almost ligne claire style, with bold colors and sharp lines, but with deep shadows and small touches of movement and parallax to maintain visual clarity.
Secret areas open and close between runs, encouraging you to pay attention to the environment and test which parts of it are interactive. There have been so many points where I attempted something out of curiosity and was surprised that it worked. Many secrets are hidden in plain sight, with only experimentation or community knowledge making them obvious. The very first screen of the game has a secret, easy to miss on the initial runs. Discovering the expansive number of secrets is a community effort, and I found myself constantly exchanging notes and trading information with friends. It lends a sense of world much bigger than the fighting grounds you travel through.
Like the Dungeons and Dragons games it pulls from, Absolum is packed with detail that pulls from an eclectic set of sources. Dungeons and Dragons is now seen as a bog standard medieval fantasy, but I can imagine that at the time of Capcom’s arcade games the Forgotten Realms still had plenty to capture the imagination, with hybrid creatures such as the Gnoll and Owlbears, monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Beholder that provided new takes on classical beasts, and the incorporation of cosmic horror in the bestiary, it’s hard not to see why it drew players in, and inspired works like Record of Lodoss War.
Absolum aims for that same fresh perspective on fantasy, remixing the familiar for the modern age. Absolume borrows hybrids like the Gnoll--human-hyenea hybrids--and adds its own, like the axolotl-human hybrids and mushroom trolls. Typical power structures and roles are revisited: goblins are now the tree dwelling race, spiritually connected to the forest they’re birthed from, with an insect-like lifespan that prioritizes their community over individual lives.
Elves have become a sort of hybrid with dark elves, worshipping death and building a lavish capital near the gateway to the underworld, growing into a holy site for pilgrims to journey to. Their spiritual practices build on the memories of the deceased, with their knights channeling energy from the underworld, and strengthening themselves with those memories.
The dwarves are not born of flesh and blood, but forged by a patriarchal figure known as the Underking, guided to create the most advanced civilization, then driven to near extinction when the Underking succumbed to madness.
Cider and Brome give insight into the fantastical view of identity, something modern fantasy finds itself experimenting with as awareness of real life gender identities expands. Cider is initially presented with a confused identity, referred to with gender neutral pronouns, and interchanging between using “I” and “we”, while referring to themselves. Through later conversations we learn that this is a literal “we”, as Cider was once a master thief who dived into the afterlife to retrieve her soul, but came out with a second one, both occupying a clockwork cyborg body.
Cider occasionally makes reference to missing body parts, has visible prosthetics, and their disability is reflected in talk of their frailty and having the lowest health values. Their body ironically makes them the most mobile, with a high run speed and the ability to traverse distances with their grappling arm, not unlike Devil May Cry’s Nero, who also prominently features a prosthetic arm.
Brome’s situation is a bit more mixed for me, as the details of his story are awkwardly revealed by Karl straight up asking “weren't you a female?” before Brome praises him for being able to tell, and confirms it. Brome’s transition turns out to be one of desperate survival, laying eggs then changing to a male form in order to fertilize them, out of fear that he was the only surviving member of his race, and that it would die out with him.
Brome’s identity is tied to the state of the world itself, with his people being born of the world’s magic, and his relatively recent birth meaning he was born into a world that had already been systematically eliminating his people before he was alive. His change to a masculine identity comes with a desire to protect, and an unbridled hatred for his oppressors, reflected in his dialogue and the naming of each of his special attacks. It also reflects the real world physiology of frogs, with some species able to change their gender.
It’s a clear effort to represent a diverse crew of characters, even within a fantasy setting, and while many of the details add a charming wrinkle to the usual presentation, it sometimes feels like a gotcha to pre-empt the inevitable arguments. Cider isn’t non-binary or plural--they are literally two people. Brome is transmasc, but that’s because it’s biologically accurate. It’s messy, but at the very least, Absolum isn’t taking a safe approach, and isn’t scared to commit to a complicated worldview.
That complex approach extends to the structure of the game. Initial forays have a familiar roguelike structure, unlocking more tools, areas, abilities and upgrades to create more variety and make it easier to survive. By the time I completed the game, I had most of the upgrade paths maxed, not because they’re strictly necessary, but because I relied on those tools to bail me out due to my lack of knowledge of enemy patterns and defensive mechanics. These upgrades expand the margin of error, giving you multiple changes to fail before ending your run.
This is where the second loop comes in.
After beating Azra, the oppressor forcing his tyrannical rule on the world, he rewinds time, revealing Absolum, the true final boss--a cosmic horror gestating and ready to be born. To challenge Absolum, you’ll need to complete another run--remixed and more oppressive--and if you don’t make it with an extra life to spare, your run will end when Absolum opens the fight with an unavoidable, instant kill attack.
Reaching the final area has a merchant warning you of this opening attack, and offering you the chance to buy an additional life, albeit at a higher cost than any other item in the game. Meaning if you haven’t saved some gold during your run you might be out of luck.
These requirements initially seem brutal, but they reflect a more lenient take on the “second loop” and “true final boss” concepts seen in many arcade games. To reward skilled players for reaching the end of the game, some arcade games will loop, allowing you to restart from the beginning of the game, often at a higher difficulty.
Some games will even hide a second final boss behind this second loop, requiring a tremendous display of skill to even see them. Hibachi from the DoDonPachi series is a notorious one, having strict requirements for accessing the second loop, and being difficult to defeat in a series that is already known for its high difficulty. Absolum’s instant kill attack can even be seen as an homage to Shadow Over Mystara’s final boss, Synn. For comparison, Synn has three difficult to avoid instant kill attacks that occur during the start of each phase, with little warning or time to get to safety.
Defeating Absolum will require you to alter your playstyle. You’ll need to learn proper defense, and start balancing equipment purchases with the opportunity to earn an extra life. To make things harder, the world changes after you first beat Azra, opening up new events, and creating portals within stages that bring in enemies from other areas, as well as new bosses, drastically altering the enemy formations you can expect to see. To balance this you’ll also have the chance to use Azra’s time magic, with several powerful new abilities.
Beating Azra is difficult, but the ability to extend your lifebar and earn the ability to start with two extra lives gives you an ever increasing margin of error. The second loop ratchets up the stakes and squeezes down on those margins, asking you to prove that you’ve been paying attention.
I admit, I was kind of being carried during that first loop. I was able to beat Azra on the first try, taking some big losses, but able to get through thanks to the generous clash frames on Galandra’s special attacks, and landing some extended combos. But even the simple change of putting late game enemies into the early stages, before I had built up my character with equipment and abilities, revealed how much I relied on outpacing my enemies with damage to survive.
Having an extra life effectively subtracted from me, without any other considerations, put enough pressure on me that I became aware of my remaining health, and engaged in actively defending myself, learning enemy patterns, and routing my journey with consideration for the difficulty and rewards of each path.
The second loop successfully plays into expectations of both the arcade and roguelike mindsets. Roguelike players generally expect to do multiple runs in order to see everything, and arcade players often make clearing the game without continuing their goal. The roguelike genre has been responsible for repopularizing the idea of a run based game, and Absolum uses this to push the player towards the arcade ideal of a one credit clear.
Dedicated arcade gamers often mark the completion of a game not by seeing the end, but by doing so without continuing. Initial runs are considered data for this goal, scouting enemies and bosses, and planning routes for proper attempts to clear the game.
Because arcade games were designed around the economy of player time and money, many would allow you to see the end by simply feeding credits into the machine, without properly learning the game. That made seeing the ending trivial, if expensive. Home ports and emulation further trivialized the difficulty of clearing an arcade game, since the penalty for failing was effectively removed. And as the arcade style structure fell out of popularity in favor of longer play times, the idea of the one credit clear became something only die hard players chased after.
By presenting itself as a roguelike, Absolum takes the expectation of death resetting progress, softens it by slowly giving you more leeway and variety, then challenges you to demonstrate your mastery after your initial victory. The room for error is still relatively large, but it sets up similar stakes.
Even the stages are designed with this goal in mind. Level layouts are largely static aside from a few detours and the order you see them, and you can reliably expect a certain formation of enemies or set of items when traversing the same area. It gives you a set of obstacles that you can prepare for. Absolum’s overall roguelike philosophy is to be predictable to change your approach, but dynamic enough that you’ll constantly be changing your approach.
But the world of Absolum isn't static. As the story progresses parts of the world will change, causing new routes to open up, new characters to arrive and quests to reveal themselves. It’s a world that persists through death, and reacts to it, framed in a narrative of two great powers--a maternal immortal whose philosophy is built around natural chaos, and a paternal authoritarian who rewinds time to put things back in their place when disrupted. Characters are trapped in a cycle, but that doesn’t prevent them from growing and changing.
Absolum’s deep consideration of the inspirations it draws from and the world that justifies it all, comes together in a perfectly tuned synthesis of modern and arcade sensibilities.
I’ve said before that action games are like pieces of music, defined by their rhythms, breaks, and the instrumentation they play with. And if the arcade brawler’s thumping rhythms mirror rock, and the modern roguelike mirrors the improvisational grooves of jazz, then Absolum is a pitch perfect jazz fusion album. A double LP in a beautifully illustrated record sleeve, with a world of beautiful details that reveal themselves on repeat plays.
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After giving Phantom Breaker a second chance at localization with Phantom Breaker Omnia, Battlegrounds, the beat-em-up spin off that found unexpected success over a decade before, has received its own refresh, bringing the brawler to yet another generation of consoles. Rebuilt in the Unreal Engine, Ultimate adds some graphical enhancements, additional features, and rebalances the entire game. It doesn’t initially seem like a big change, but the rework does a lot to make what was once a good looking slogfest into something that lives up to its potential.
Without repeating too much of my previous thoughts on the original, Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds comes from Masotoshi Imaizumi and Masaki Ukyo, collaborators from Fil-in-Cafe and Treasure who’d co-develop Mad Stalker, a PC brawler which would become the basis of many influential fighting games and beat-em-ups, including Asuka 120%, Yu Yu Hakusho Makyo Toitsusen, Guardian Heroes and Panzer Bandit.
Battlegrounds follows closely in the format of Panzer Bandit, synthesizing many of its ideas with Phantom Breaker, the fighting game that preceded it. Alongside these concepts comes an RPG-style progression system, complete with experience points, stats and skill trees. This remained the largest issue with the original Battlegrounds, even after the updated Overdrive Edition, which added new mechanics and reordered the skill tree.
Where Panzer Bandit and Guardies Heroes gave you all your tools at the start and relied on you learning and incorporating them as you progressed, Battlegrounds teases you with them, then strips you of even the basic options, then makes you agonizingly earn them back, grinding experience points and rationing them out between new abilities and stat upgrades you need for basic survival. It dragged down the whole game, and meant hours of tedious grinding each time you wanted to try a new character.
Ultimate rebalances the whole game, with director Masaki Sakari describing the approach as throwing in anything they thought was fun, then fixing and balancing it after. New moves have been added, enemy numbers have been increased, their formations mixed up, and it now runs at a higher resolution, with a wider viewing angle and support for more players.
The tweaks here have created a drastically different flow from the original. The sheer number of enemies and item drops creates an aesthetic experience closer to something like a Vampire Survivors style game. Enemies flood the screen until they overlap each other, experience gems and powerups rain down, rapidly filling meters that allow a constant barrage of powerful moves that tear through crowds to unleash even larger cashouts. Playing with more players can ramp up the chaos even more, as the enemy count scales and the screen fills with even more extreme moves. In later stages, the flow of Ultimate is closer to something like a 2D Musou game, where individual enemies no longer matter, and the focus is instead on picking out the problematic enemies and controlling crowds to give yourself some breathing room.
The increased drops also drastically speed up the RPG progression, and alongside the reworked skill tree, gives you earlier access to most of your skills. It could take nearly the entire game to unlock all of your important attacks in the original Battlegrounds. In Ultimate, nearly every important move, including your most powerful ones, can be unlocked by stage 2, leaving the rest of the game to seek defensive skills, upgraded versions of existing skills, or increase your baseline stats.
Ultimate also adds co-op with bots, allowing up to 3 CPU players at a time, letting you grind experience for multiple characters at the same time. It’s more a bandage than a fix to the underlying problem, but combined with the increased experience points, it no longer feels like you’re starting from zero whenever you choose a new character.
It’s a big boon, since Ultimate greatly expands the playable cast. In the same spirit as Treasure games like Guardian Heroes or Bleach Dark Souls, Ultimate makes every enemy playable without regard to balance or viability. Fodder enemies with only a few moves, boss characters that obscure the screen or even the bonus truck whose only abilities are driving slowly and ramming the opponent. Any of them can be brought into co-op or versus mode, and even leveled up to increase their stats. Running co-op mode with 3 onmyoji variants casting a storm of elemental attacks, or running a stage over with a crew of boss characters is incredible fun. It adds a small sandbox element that allows you to tune your approach to stages, keeping me playing long after I’d seen the credits.
Ultimate even adds a new DLC character and stage, collaborating with internet personality Kaho Shibuya, and featuring an LA stage where you fight through riot cops at LAX before chasing a Donkey Kong parody to the convention center. It’s a bizarre combo, but like the rest of Ultimate, it seems to be tuned for fun first, with making sense of it a minor concern. Kaho herself is a baking themed magical girl, smacking enemies with a baguette, forming shields from sliced bread, tossing toast like shurikens and turning enemies into cupcakes. It makes the wacky tone of the original feel downright reserved by comparison, and is accompanied by some of my favorite voice lines and animations.
The voice lines are now presented in both Japanese and English, with the game receiving a few more touches to its localization thanks to publisher Rocket Panda, who brought Phantom Breaker Omnia to English, and returns with the same voice cast. Like Omnia, it receives a remixed OST as well, bringing three excellent variations to the soundtrack, though my favorite is still the FM synth style one.
Ultimate also benefits by the greater context of Phantom Breaker being playable. Seeing how directly Battlegrounds translates the mechanics of Phantom Breaker to the beat-em-up genre gave me a much better appreciation for the effort that went into building Battlegrounds’ systems, and I was even able to apply my experience with the fighting game to better use my available tools, and understand what all the unlockable skills were.
It made crowd management and navigation easier, and helped me find a rhythm that involved more than blocking and waiting to land a big combo. I understood how to slip past enemies who were locking me down, or use my various air options to escape and reposition. It even made the versus mode more appealing, since I could exploit the mechanics in high difficulty fighters that demanded use of the full moveset. Higher difficulties became about more than grinding enough stats, and mobs became fodder to style on. The same way the expanded cast gives you a sandbox to mess with, the rebalanced game flow turns Ultimate into a sandbox to explore various mechanics inherited from its fighting game predecessor, filling in a missing link in Mad Stalker’s legacy.
Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds isn’t fundamentally different from its previous iterations. Mechanically, you’ll be using a lot of similar tactics, similar combos and fighting similar enemies. But after a decade of refinements, with a massive effort to rebalance the game, Ultimate brings you to Battlegrounds’ best parts much faster, cutting out nearly all the tedium that dragged down the original release.
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An obscurity in the English language fighting game scene, Asuka 120% is one of those games whose influence continues to reverberate through many beloved fighting games and beat-em-ups. It was always quietly revered by those in the know, and recently started to gain some recognition in the mainstream. But even more obscure is its spiritual successor, Phantom Breaker, which managed to simultaneously be too forward thinking, and behind the times, across multiple releases.
Developed by original Asuka 120% designer Masotoshi Imaizumi, and adventure game powerhouse Mages Inc., who brought us Corpse Party and Steins;Gate. It’s a bizarre team for a fighting game, with their biggest action games up until this point being ports of Cave’s bullet hell shooters, and Bullet Soul, an original shooter in a similar style.
Director Masaki Sakari even notes in the developer diaries for Phantom Breaker: Omnia, that Mages didn’t have a huge amount of experience with the genre, with it initially being presented by an external company. (Delta Factory and Release Universe Network--Masotoshi Imaizumi and Masaki Ukyo’s independent company--are both credited on the original release). Regardless of the motivations behind the development, Mages aimed to differentiate themselves through their setting and unique battle system, which removed special attack motions, added a unique chain combo system, and folded in clash and guard break mechanics refined from the Asuka 120% series.
Unfortunately, Phantom Breaker had the bad luck of originally releasing in 2011, putting it up against serious heavy hitters. Super Street Fighter IV and Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, which impressed with their high production mix of 3D graphics and 2D gameplay. And on the other side was BlazBlue and KOF 13, which dazzled with their high definition, elaborately animated 2D sprite work. Every one of these was riding the wave of the new fighting game renaissance, with people hungrier than ever for highly technical fighters that they could spend a lifetime learning.
For the few who went out of their way to try it, the low budget a comparatively less impressive visuals and systems didn’t seem to offer much against the competition, and it was an even harder sell then, as the original release of Phantom Breaker never received a localized version, with the only way to play it being to import it. Apparently, South Peak Games was initially in talks to bring it to English audiences, but that fell through, leaving a Japanese only obscurity.
What did manage to get an English release was Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds, the 2D pixel art spin off that came out two years later, made in collaboration with both Masotoshi Imaizumi and Masaki Ukyo, the other half of the Mad Stalker design team, who would go on to be a driving force at Treasure on titles like Guardian Heroes. The downloadable title was made very much in the same style of those beloved beat-em-ups, and combined with its impressive pixel art and co-op play, proved popular enough to earn multiple re-releases, paving the way for a modern rerelease of Phantom Breaker, over a decade later.
The new version, Phantom Breaker: Omnia, consolidated a lot of mechanics and story from the two previous releases of the game--Phantom Breaker, and Phantom Breaker Extra--with new additions and refined systems on top of it. Unfortunately, this time Phantom Breaker managed to come out feeling slightly archaic, with many of its unique ideas now a part of the mainstream design language for fighting games.
Its unique chain based combo system saw similar applications in Dragon Ball FighterZ and Melty Blood: Type Lumina’s autocombos, one button specials were now being seen on both sides of the scale, with niche fighters like Blade Strangers, and Power Rangers:Battle for the Grid, and big budget releases like Granblue Fantasy Versus. In addition, rollback netcode had now become the standard for online play, with older titles starting to be retrofitted with it, and new titles being dismissed outright if they dared to release without it. With a small team and budget, the rework needed to make Phantom Breaker: Omnia operate with rollback was far beyond the scope of the release.
Despite the circumstances of its release, it’s clear that Phantom Breaker was a passion project. In the dev diaries preceding the release of Omnia, director Masaki Sakari talked about the struggle to give the game a worldwide release, and the joy of being able to return to its world and give it a more refined version with a version more people can play.
Even after all this time, and with many of its ideas proliferating the genre, Phantom Breaker has a unique rhythm that sets it apart. Like its predecessor, Asuka 120%, it remains unique in how it presents its ideas, even with many of them now commonplace. Attacks constantly clash, allowing you to counteract offense with your own, low cost guard cancels give you tons of options to slip by enemy attacks when on defense, and attacks, specials and supers flow into each other easily, allowing improvisation in its many high tension situations. Combos are relatively short compared to modern anime fighters, and corner dynamics are drastically different, due to opponents being able to tech early when pushed into a wall.
It’s a dynamic that keeps you active even during serious disadvantage states, keeping you looking for a gap to break out and retaliate. Many fighting games reward a steady, disciplined, or even passive defense, barricading yourself against the pressure until it naturally ends and it becomes your turn to go on the offensive. Doing the same in Phantom Breaker will subject you to a nearly endless barrage of offensive, constantly changing up the tempo until you inevitably slip up. Instead, proper defense means actively overpowering your opponent, and taking advantage of the many systems that change the rhythm in your favor.
The basics are familiar, but their applications are very different.
Phantom Breaker uses a 4 button system, with Light, Medium, Heavy, and Special Attack buttons. As noted before, there are no special attack motions, so special attacks are instead done with a combination Special button and a cardinal direction. Asuka 120% had a similar system in later entries, and it’s not unlike the setup in Granblue Fantasy Versus, but here this control scheme is the only option, a deliberate choice to keep it from feeling like veteran fighting game players are playing a different game.
One issue this creates is that variations of special attacks now require a two button input. With special motions you generally perform the motion, then end with an attack of the desired strength to choose the variation. In Phantom Breaker, the Special button always performs the “Medium” strength special, and pressing it with Light Attack gives you another variation--typically faster with different utility--and pressing Special with Heavy Attack gives you the EX version, a Super Attack variant that has high priority and does big damage.
Normal Attacks follow a chain system, with the rules for them varying depending on which of the three styles you choose, Quick, Hard, or Omnia. In Quick and Omnia styles, these attacks can chain into themselves up to three times, before being canceled into a chain of higher strength. Hard Style only keeps the Heavy chains, but gives additional command normals to compensate. These Normals can then be canceled into a Special Attack, which itself can be canceled into an EX Attack.
Each of the attacks in this chain sequence are their own unique moves, with their own animations and properties. And while most 2D fighters only allow chains or autocombos to continue when you hit the opponent, these chains can be done regardless of if they hit or whiff. Compared to the standard implementation of chain attacks, this means your turn doesn’t begin when your opponent misses an attack, since they can continue the sequence to clash with your attacks, or continue with another option. It turns engagements into a constant series of mindgames, where each side needs to weigh their options and decide what risks they’re willing to take, and when to time them.
Thanks to inheriting the Guard Cancel system from Asuka 120%, defense is just as tricky and powerful as offense. Compared to Asuka there’s more restrictions, but in exchange there’s a wider set of options.
Pressing Special Attack when not holding a direction performs a Counter Burst, which can clash with attacks and be held to enhance it. Counter Burst can be canceled into like a Special, ending offense early and attempting to catch an opponent trying to mash out of blocking. With good timing it changes into a Reflect, a parry which can stun the opponent or force a gap that leaves them vulnerable.
Phantom Breaker also has more traditional parries in Evasive Actions, which are done by tapping forward right before an attack hits, in the style of Street Fighter III. In Quick and Omnia Style, this turns into Slip Shift, a spot dodge that makes you invincible to strikes, and in Hard Style this activates Protection, which doesn’t have an animation, but slightly freezes the opponent and keeps you close to retaliate.
At any point during blocking you can perform the aforementioned Guard Cancels, which ends the blocking animation. Guard Cancels can be performed by super jumping, dashing, backstepping, parrying, or performing specials and supers. Each option can give you varying invincibility, making it a powerful way to escape.
This gives you a huge amount of options on defense, compared to the typical 2D fighter. Generally you’ll have a few options that can create distance, or high risk moves that leave you vulnerable to big damage if done at the wrong time. The addition of invincibility frames makes a lot more options viable.
Defense isn’t a matter of what options you have available, but which of them will work in this context, and how you think your opponent will respond. Will a dash take you far enough to slip past an opponent and escape the corner. Should you super jump to escape vertically, and potentially be able to air tech if you do get hit? Is a backstep better in this situation, or should you spend the meter in a risky attempt to land big damage?
An aware opponent can turn any blocked attack into a chance to reverse the momentum. It creates an almost judo-like flow, where each player looks for a solid fulcrum point they can use to turn the momentum in their favor.
Bolstering these options are the style systems, which alter the system mechanics. Quick Style trades damage for combos, movement options and the ability to use Clock Up, a special state that allows you to cancel out of other actions, and chain nearly any move into another for extended combos and pressure.
Hard Style trades combos for damage and defense, with fewer chains, additional command normals, parries, and the ability to cancel into Solid Armor, which turns you into a walking tank able to absorb multiple hits and continue attacking.
Omnia combines elements of the two, and rolls in ideas from Battlegrounds, including a more standard auto combo that goes through all your available chain attacks by hitting light attack. The biggest upgrade is the ability to stock twice as many bars of meter, giving you way more opportunities to use defensive and offensive techniques.
Each style has their own super attacks that can be done with full meter, with Quick and Hard style gaining individual Phantom Breaker attacks, and Omnia getting a universal Outrange super, which fires homing lighting orbs, similar to the attack in Battlegrounds.
With such a wide range of system mechanics and alternative styles, there’s a huge space to express yourself in. If there’s a weakness in the game, it’s in the cast. There’s a decent number of playable characters, but it’s dragged down by a number of clone characters, and some awkward looking additional characters which use prerendered 3D models, which look awkward next to the high resolution 2D characters of the original cast. It’s not quite on the level as the mix in say, Angel Eyes, but it mars the presentation of a game that already struggles to compare with its more impressive contemporaries.
The character designs are rooted in typical otaku culture archetypes, without any real specificity in fashion inspirations. There are gothic lolitas, maids, magical girls, schoolgirls, miko, and imperial uniforms but each is more like a generic cosplay than a unique outfit. They don’t have the overdesigned, fetishistic specificity of Blazblue, or the straightforward urban cool of Under Night. Even compared to its predecessor, Asuka 120%, which was made up entirely of high school club characters, Phantom Breaker is less memorable, and lacks the humor of turning club choices into unconventional combat movesets.
The characters are at least still fun to play. Rin is a secretary who can toss her dual blades like boomerangs to trap opponents between them. Waka is a spear wielding miko who can combo from extended range. Fin zones enemies out with mice bombs and missiles. Sophia has a double ended spear that she can ride on like a snowboard. Infinity and Artifactor are two magical beings who use their normal attacks to create solid walls of projectiles that keep enemies from approaching.
The cast has plenty of enjoyable movesets and animations, and I particularly enjoyed the Phantom Breaker supers, which had me trying characters in multiple styles so I could see the individual variations.
The game is fantastic at selling the power of each hit, especially during clashes, where hitstop reaches its peak frequency, adding a little extra drama and anticipation between each hit. Between the continuous sparks of hits, clashes and guard cancels, there’s always a chaotic shift in momentum, with little down time to catch your breath.
As a followup to the legendary Asuka 120% series, Phantom Breaker Omnia successfully translates a lot of what made Asuka enjoyable, with strong system mechanics, an expressive and dynamic flow of battle, all refined for modern sensibilities.
Phantom Breaker does lose something in the refinement process. The more predictable mechanics and focus on meter management bring more long form strategy, but it loses some of the explosive energy of its predecessor. It’s a controlled detonation, instead of a surprise chemical explosion.
It makes Phantom Breaker more of an alternative interpretation than a direct successor to Asuka 120%. The Asuka series has had direct sequels announced since Omnia’s release, but with long radio silence on what exactly that looks like. If that ever comes to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see what another modern successor to the series looks like, and if they’ll take any of the ideas played with in Phantom Breaker.
Abandoned by his deadbeat aunt and uncle, Hikaru Nishime finds himself stranded on the remote Okinawan island of Toyotoki, unwelcome, broke, and homeless. Taking shelter in a field, he meets Lilun, a strange foreign girl claiming to be a witch.
Combining real Okinawan culture with a fictional magic history, Tales of Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch is a story of a group of people caught under the weight of tradition. Initially cast as outsiders, Hiakru and Lilun eventually draw in a group of friends, all constricted by tradition and expectation. Even their status as outsiders wears away, as it’s revealed that they might be more connected to the history of Toyotoki than they believed.
Despite the heavy premise, Tales from Toyotoki is comprised mostly of lighthearted slice of life comedy. Its small cast is immediately endearing, each making a memorable first impression and unraveling into deeper characters as you explore their personal histories.
Akari Akatsumi is the self proclaimed Island Idol, bursting into the game in a spectacular fashion, derailing the story by playing a joke with the very format of the game.
Kiriko Kunsanden, her rich girl rival, follows soon after with an absolutely embarrassing face off at the talent show, with Joe Kaneshiro as her crony, a local delinquent with a serious case of chunibiyo.
In the aftermath of Akari and Kiriko’s face off comes Higa, a charming but deeply incompetent adult whose inflexible principles keep her in a cycle of failure.
Hikaru and Lilun are of course the heart of the story, playing off each other’s ignorance and challenging each other’s worldviews. Taken in by his aunt and uncle after his parent’s deaths, Hikaru is dedicated to stoically suffering through everything with gallows humor, until he meets Lilun, whose foreign attitudes make him reconsider his long held assumptions about the way these are supposed to be. Lilun’s mix of ancient knowledge, harsh pragmatism, and refusal to accept common values bring her into conflict with Hikaru and others, but also act as permission to fight against the fates characters had resigned themselves to.
The cast is small, but their personalities carry the story. I found every one of them likeable and endearing, and grew very fond of them by the end of the relatively short run time. Tales of Toyotoki is incredibly economical with its storytelling, void of repetition or extraneous detail. The lean budget means only the main characters get illustrated sprites or voicework, with few fully illustrated events, and backgrounds made almost entirely of filtered photographs. It makes incredible use of those voices, and every character had several lines I found worth replaying for their delivery. There are so many funny lines elevated by the voice acting, and even incidental dialogue that are delivered with extra personality. Even among the excellent VNs I’ve played it remains top tier.
The supporting cast is no slouch, either. Even without any voice lines or illustrations, there’s plenty of characters that are written with such clarity that it’s easy to picture exactly what they look and sound like. My favorite was definitely Suzuki, the hotel manager Hikaru ends up working for, who delivers the harsh attitude of a Southern grandmother. She hides flashes of compassion behind a hard ass attitude, with a deep focus on tradition that would have you assume she’s a native born Okinawan, until it’s revealed she’s actually from South Korea.
The supporting cast is full of small wrinkles like this, giving them a fuller history and keeping them from turning into one note narrative devices. Toyotoki might be fictional, but its people give it a real history.
The same history weighs on all the people living on the island. With deep traditions and an aging population, the residents of Toyotoki immediately shun Hikaru and Lilun. Through sheer luck and determination they make a life for themselves, and build friendships with the other young people of the island. That’s when Akari and Kiriko’s lighthearted rivalry is suddenly interrupted by their families’ demands that they be inducted as priestesses in an ancient ritual. The situation escalates to the point where Lilun reveals her own magic to solve the problem, and from there her and Hikaru find themselves pushed deeper into the menacing history of the island.
Lilun and Hikaru become the unintended trouble shooters of the group, talking others through their struggles and diving into the arcane when every other option becomes exhausted. Everyone is tied down by their own circumstances, forced into roles, fighting against expectations, and having to find a new purpose when they fail, or have those roles taken away. Each character is lost in some way, and in their wandering they find each other, creating a found family that supports them in ways others in their life can’t, or refuse to do.
The slow, tender build up of those relationships makes the finale that much more explosive, when all the debts deferred to create an unstable peace need to be paid, and everything is thrown into jeopardy.
The finale doesn’t last anywhere near as long as the others’ stories, but the severe increase in stakes makes it agonizing, with a relentless series of heartbreaking scenes lined up that had me holding my breath until the conclusion. It’s a suffocating contrast, but it’s earned, bringing so many elements simmering below the surface to a violent eruption. The final conclusion is absolute catharsis, like taking a breath after several minutes underwater.
When I started Tales of Toyotoki, it drew me in with its lighthearted slice of life scenes and a touch of mystery, magic and some light Okinawan tourism. I was disarmed by its goofy, big personalities, and the frankly unnecessary number of jokes about characters’ boob sizes. But by the end I’d been drawn in by its characters and worlds, which manages to say a lot with relatively little, leaving plenty of space to be filled by what’s left unsaid. Tales of Toyotoki is a tender story, a story about the purpose assigned to us, the connection we yearn for, and the peace we try to find when all that is taken away.
+007: Hunter x Hunter Nen x Impact is a fighting game from another era
Addendums, Archives and Appendecies is extra, off topic writing in addition to the regular CANON FIRE entries. You can support more writing like this on Patreon.
Developed by legendary fighting game studio 8ing, Nen Impact carries both the worst and best of 8ing’s catalog. Formed from the remnants of the legendary shooter developer, Raizing, 8ing’s portfolio boasts both legendary fighters and no budget, quick turnaround licensed titles, with games often being both.
8ing’s rapidly iterative approach has resulted in expressive and experimental titles that buck convention, and their sheer output has given rise to an unofficial reputation as “kings of kusoge” thanks to the many absolutely broken fighting games that have come as a result. That approach is also what makes so many of their games beloved, with titles like Fate/Unlimited Codes, Kamen Rider Climax Heroes, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 developing dedicated followings that still see tournament play to this day.
Nen Impact is a direct successor to that lineage, with many direct analogs to mechanics in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Marvel 3, and staff from the latter leading development. That doesn’t keep Nen Impact from trying its own radical experiments, altering the controls, dynamics and power levels in absurd ways.
The most immediate change is the move to one button specials, tossing out traditional motion inputs and pruning the extensive movesets characters could have in previous titles. Specials are performed with a combination of buttons and directions, easing the burden of execution, though arguably only moving that complexity elsewhere, with many characters receiving stances that variations can be performed out of. It’s a very modern approach to creating movesets, not unlike the approach used in smaller budget fighters like Blade Strangers or Power Rangers Battle for the Grid.
8ing’s approach elsewhere is decidedly old school, giving characters dramatic strengths and weaknesses that no modern competitive title would dare implement. Modern fighters are so precariously balanced that character strength often doesn’t vary wildly, and small changes to frame data and hitboxes can have communities declaring they’re now broken. Nen Impact decides to cut to the chase and give everyone something that feels broken.
You’ve got glass cannons like Kurapika, Machi and Kite, who can die in a single combo, and are terrible at close range, but compensate with ridiculous movesets that can totally wall out opponents. Kurapika sports massive normals that cross nearly the entire screen, and the ability to quickly heal any recoverable damage with a special that cancels from nearly anything.
Machi can barely reach the opponent’s with her standard attacks, but has an 8-way dash attack that can combo into itself and her web traps multiple times, dragging them in any direction.
Kite is one of the most belligerent zoners since probably Marvel vs. Capcom 3, with several normals that erupt into gunshots, allowing you to cancel into a more powerful gun specials that cover other directions should you whiff, and a super that’s easy to confirm into from anywhere, and combos into itself on the ground, allowing you to snipe opponents from anywhere for making a single mistake.
On the other side you have characters like Morel, with massive normals that let him get a combo from anywhere on the screen, following it up with an armored lariat, and turn that lariat into a super that can also be followed up, all while sporting special move assists that he can layer upon his teammates’ existing assist pressure. The Chimera Ant King, Meruem, has a unique combo system where he can’t chain more than two normal hits, but he can do them in any order, making heavy attacks safe, or transitioning into specials that can instantly teleport him to his opponent’s position.
Chrollo has already become infamous purely due to his level 2 super, Indoor Fish, which summons two skeletal fish that home in on the opponent, hit multiple times, and don’t dissipate when he’s hit, allowing him to act safely and independently to open up the opponent, and even breaking combos if he does manage to get hit.
Those unique restrictions and absurd strengths give characters unique combo routes and ways to approach, keeping the otherwise freeform system from turning uniform. Characters are often self-sufficient, able to put out enough damage to take down teams on their own, with access to nearly every combo extending resource without the need for an assist. Each of them also has multiple assists, one for each direction held when called, allowing characters to serve multiple supporting roles at the same time, creating an even more freeform approach to team building, where choices aren’t limited by synergies.
All of this is before you layer on the active tag system, which allows you to switch to a character any time during their assist, and even call them in instantly for a super attack before taking over. For a point of reference, Cable in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has what is considered one of the best supers in the game, Air Hyper Viper Beam, because it starts up fast, hits fullscreen, can be canceled into when blocking to instantly punish your opponent, and even loops into itself. In Nen Impact, multiple characters can do this, and unlike Marvel vs. Capcom, you don’t need to be blocking or doing a super to call them in. If someone whiffs an attack on the other side of the screen, you can make them pay for it.
It all adds up to a chaotic, hard to parse visual experience, where tracking who you’re even fighting is a skill itself. Enjoying it relies on you being able to create and deal with unfair situations, and the patience to sit through your opponent styling on you when you eventually fall for their equally unfair plays. Every match is volatile, with only a few bad moves needed to totally lose the lead and have your whole team wiped. It leads to frustrating losses, but enables those dramatic shonen manga comebacks if you can force an opponent to leave you an opening.
Unfortunately, like the shonen manga source material it draws upon, Nen Impact is also unfinished. Even putting aside the total lack of single player modes fighting games usually include, animations lack the dramatic flair that traditionally sells 8ing’s games. As enjoyable as it can be to play, it repeatedly underdelivers in aesthetic impact, and everything from animations to backgrounds don’t live up to the standards of 8ing’s best.
The movesets are based primarily on the 2011 anime, leaving out over a decade of (admittedly intermittent) source material that has come out since. It’s especially noticeable with characters like Kite or Chrollo, whose abilities are based on having a variety of weapons and techniques at their disposal, but are instead stripped down to a single one. Chrollo particularly stands out, with his ability to amass techniques by stealing them not appearing at all, instead having three variations of Indoor Fish.
In every seam you can see the places where 8ing’s ideas and ambitions were brought to a screeching halt by the limitations imposed on them. Its inevitable comparisons to tag games like Dragon Ball Fighterz, even other licensed titles like JoJo All-Star Battle, Demon Slayer, or even 8ing’s own works, show how much it falls short in translating the hype and characters of its source material. Which makes it a difficult sell for a fanbase that’s already had few videogame adaptations, none of which were localized.
If there’s one respite, it’s that the modern fighting game landscape means that a game’s development doesn’t end on release, with Nen Impact having at least another year of development and character drops confirmed. It’s unlikely this will translate to a second chance to address its major issues, given the sparse resources 8ing is likely working with, but it’s not unprecedented, with fellow tag game Battle for the Grid having its own disastrous launch before being built up to a multi-season, beloved cult classic.
Maybe there’s a chance for Nen Impact to be polished into sparkling form in the future. But for now, like the manga it draws from, Nen Impact remains unfinished, loved by its dedicated fans, uncertain if it will ever reach a satisfying conclusion.
A strange product of strange circumstances, Slave Zero X is a prequel to the long dormant 90’s third person shooter, Slave Zero. Even stranger is the massive genre shift to a 2D character action game (with its own prequel in the form of a free Quake mod). Like Spec Ops: The Line, the only mandate here was to build something within one of the existing worlds of publisher Ziggurat Interactive’s back catalog, with total creative freedom given elsewhere.
The result is a wildly ambitious brawler that’s highly technical, unforgiving and laced with the turn of the century dystopian anime aesthetics. The story follows Shou, a freedom fighter engaged in a war with the Sovereign Khan’s totalitarian US regime. Seeking justice and redemption, Shou goes rogue and fuses with the biomech prototype known as X, then cutting his way up the hierarchy of the SovKhan’s generals.
Biorganic machines keep the city’s life blood pumping, environments mix industrial slums and baroque ostentation, and characters are rendered in Yoshitaka Amano-esque watercolor forms, with bishounen men engaged in intimate conversations against the grime and despair. The in-game graphics mix high resolution sprite art with low poly 3D environments rendered at a low resolution, giving them the atmosphere of a lost Sega Saturn game, or early software rendered PC game.
It’s an arresting design, and that’s before you get into the meat of the combat. Eschewing the usual conventions of beat-em-ups and character action games, Slave Zero X uses a single 2D plane for its 3D environments, keeping simplifying the available space while allowing dramatic camera moves. It builds on the ideas of Masotoshi Imaizumi developed action games like Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit, with systems more akin to a single player fighting game (and would themselves inspire many of the standards of modern anime fighters).
Slave Zero X puts a heavy emphasis on fighting game fundamentals and combo crafting, with an elaborate moveset, a detailed juggle system, clashing, EX moves that modify attack properties, dash, jump and Roman cancels, bursts, multiple grenade types and even an SF3 style parry.
You might be able to get through the game with the basic chain combo and the dodge button, but mastering the moveset will open up many more opportunities to inflict maximum damage and control the flow of crowds. You start and end with the same. moveset, but by the finale it felt like I was controlling a different character, purely off of the amount of new options and routes I had learned.
Protagonist Shou’s moveset initially feels limited and sluggish, with the oppressive challenge level and lack of proper tutorials making it even harder to get to grips with the myriad systems at play. Chain combos can be inflicted with your Light Attacks, and Heavy Attacks pull off your special moves, and ordinance can be thrown to control crowds. You can chain Lights into Heavies, but past that, attacks don’t seem to have any natural follow ups, and mashing will quickly see you put into stun lock as multiple enemies mercilessly close in on you. I’ve even seen experienced action game players fail to grasp what the game was asking of them.
The key here is to lock into what the game calls “The Golden Circle”--a state where your two main resources feed into each other to keep you continuously in Fatal Sync, a powered up state where meter limits are removed and attacks flow into each other with little restriction.
The EX Gauge is your main resource, used to cancel out of attack animations, power up special attacks, and ultimately reach Fatal Sync when topped out. During Fatal Sync you’re allowed unlimited dash cancels and EX Specials, special attacks chain into each other, and damage inflicted during the activation will be turned into recovered health when Fatal Sync ends. Play well enough and you’ll also regain your Burst. Burst can be spent to escape enemy combos, but used during a combo or neutral state it turns into a Gold Burst, which instantly refills your EX Gauge when hitting an enemy.
This Golden Circle keeps you in a state of constant, violent momentum, mirroring the bloodlust of the game’s dual protagonists, and letting you bulldoze through situations despite your wounds. It opens up the whole system, letting you cancel out of the recovery of attacks, close down distances near instantly, and open up a whole new array of aerial movement that can keep crowds at your mercy.
It never goes that well.
With so many enemy types, and the introduction of armored units that need to have their armor broken before they can be stunned or juggled, keeping track of enemy patterns and positions will become overwhelming, and you’re bound to make a mistake and eat a combo that will stop your momentum dead. Slave Zero X demands you not only learn its systems and moves, but optimize them and apply them on its terms--or be violently repelled.
After a lot of experiments, return trips to the tutorial and training mode, and pure stubbornness, I did exactly that. I learned how to extend my chain combos with crouching attacks, approach with divekicks and slides, extend juggles with forward heavy’s second hit, when to go for a floor bounce or Inazuma Drop, and how each of these routes could be extended with Heavy cancels and EX moves.
The EX Moves I never got comfortable with. By the end of the game I was pulling them off more consistently, but Slave Zero X chooses to go for an unorthodox system of rapidly pressing Light then Heavy attack rapidly to perform the. Unlike the standard fighting game input you cannot press them both at the same time. It adds a layer of uncertainty to your inputs and goes against genre convention, and even what the game itself tells you in its loading screen tips.
The input has been commonly criticized, but even after several updates it seems that there's no intention to change it. It's a small detail, but one that speaks to an unorthodox vision that sticks to design decisions even if they're off putting.
I found myself frequently frustrated with it, or outright disagree with its design choices, but even then it felt like those were the right choices.
The world of Slave Zero X is oppressive and hopeless, and demands a directed fury to push through. It refuses to ease you in, and makes you struggle through its entire runtime. Learning to play is learning to survive, learning to find openings in unreasonable opposition. By the end of the game groups of enemies grow to swarms so large they fill the background, unable to fit into the foreground, overlapping into indistinct masses of terror.
But Sho is never alone. X's violent provocations push him forward, and Ayesha--a young hacker girl he meets early on--acts as his guerilla PR against public apathy. She opens the literal and figurative doors for Sho, pushing against the regime's propaganda as he dismantles their organization. The improvisational alliance of the three carries a riotous energy, spurned by righteous bloodlust and a need for immediate action.
As Sho fights on these impulses clash with the Calamities, the SovKhan's elite enemy bosses. Every enemy boss has their own ideology, many in opposition to each other, but united by a collective hunger for power.
General Thorman is a particular highlight, a patriotic patriarch voiced by SungWon Cho, who deserves to be enshrined as an all time villain alongside characters like Metal Gear Rising's Senator Armstrong. Thorman berates you and your goals, lecturing you on American greatness and pride as you climb the impoverished slums to reach him. When you finally clash he yells phrases like “LET FREEDOM RING” and “MY COLORS WON'T RUN” as he attacks.
Each Calamity has their own equalled detailed motivation, and even when the script gets jumbled, the vibes and stellar voice performances continue to carry it.
Each also brings along a huge difficulty spike, as you're forced to reckon with a more powerful opponent that can shrug off your initial strikes, with movesets that turn simple mistakes into painful punishments. It's like playing a one on one fighting game match, but you've got to learn a match up you've never played before, against an opponent who has already mastered the character's tools.
If the overwhelming mobs hadn’t already made the game feel unfair, these boss fights will. Some sections of the game took me literal hours to complete, multiplying what would otherwise be a three hour run time. Whether it was grinding for a more optimal strategy, fighting against any flaw in my gameplan or cursing an unlucky shot that sent me into several seconds of unbreakable combos, I stubbornly continued through the frustration.
I kept fighting with one thought in my mind: even if I fail a hundred times, I only need to succeed once to make it through.
By the end of the game it becomes clear that this struggle will not end in a definitive victory. Even after this fight, the pieces have already been put in place to keep the system alive in the absence of its operators. Victory only means that the work can finally start. But Sho is reminded by the man he loves that the purpose of resistance isn’t to bring peace for yourself, but to ensure peace for the future. In the murky mass of violence, larger than life caricatures and exaggerated anime metaphors, I found this scene strangely poignant. It gave a voice to the frustration, the real life struggle of queer love in a world of fascist resurgence. It was a call to continue fighting, not only in the digital world, but beyond.
If Maiden Cops was a cheeky pin up poster, Fight n Rage is pure fetish art. The detail and attention it lavishes on every aspect of its play and presentation is downright pornographic. There’s a lascivious eye for the arcade image, obvious before the game even starts. The opening blasts you with eye searing CRT and phosphor effects, and the opening loading screen mimics the startup sequence of Capcom’s CPS arcade games.
Fight n Rage is obsessed with the feelings of the arcade, and to that effect it opts not for a strict recreation of the era’s pixel art, but an exaggerated one, emphasized with high resolution scaling effects that squash and stretch the art to add impact, and layered transparencies and parallax to create thick atmosphere. Character design follows suit, with thinly clad women sporting figures so bouncy and buxom they could make members of Team Ninja blush. Men are perfect inverse pyramids, rippling with so many muscles some of them are literal animals.
Mechanics and aesthetics pull from a wide range of inspirations, combining the mutant mayhem of TMNT, Streets of Rage’s urban chaos, and Alien Vs. Predators’ massive enemy swarms. The 90’s edgelord worldview is on full display, presenting a world where mutated animals have upheaved the current order, corralling humans into warehouses to be slaughtered and enslaved, led by a fascistic leader named The Boss, and his crew of lieutenants. Blood and bodies litter the landscape, and enemies explode into clouds of blood and bones when finished off.
Not only does it look the part, but it plays the part, too, creating a hybrid of all its inspirations that plays at a blazing speed. There’s a full training mode--complete with ranked combo trials--and it definitely has the technical depth to justify it. Each character drastically changes how you approach the game, even if they fall into the usual archetypes of (say it with me) fast, strong and all rounder.
Your basic moveset is fluid, with dashes, dash jumps, sidesteps, grapples and a variety of chain combos and specials that double as movement tools. Attacks have tons of cancel routes, giving a huge variety of methods to build combos, allowing you to improvise to fit the situation. Chain combos can end in forward or backward throws, be canceled into dashes, jumps or specials, each option providing utility for crowd control or extending damage.
In a system inspired by Streets of Rage 3, Specials change depending on direction and character state, and are powered by a rapidly filling special meter---or your health if you’re desperate and can’t wait. By removing the strict health cost, it turns what are usually panic moves into integral parts of your moveset, allowing conservative players a free combo breaker, and daring reckless players to trade their health to go for even bigger damage.
The freedom of options is counterweighted by the sheer difficulty of the game. Enemies arrive in swarms, and a bad move can be punished by smaller enemies locking you down, or strong enemies pulling off full combos or command grabs. Fight n Rage demands good genre fundamentals, asking you to constantly pay attention to spacing and enemy patterns among the chaos.
You can use your aggression and the generous continue system to progress through the game through attrition, but staying calm and playing defensive loops back around into rewarding you with big damage thanks to the addition of grab techs and Street Fighter III style parries. Tapping jump when grabbed will allow you to break out of a grab and repel the enemy, and pressing forward right before an attack hits causes a short freeze and instantly refills your special bar, allowing you an invincible reversal that will totally deny their momentum.
By the end of the game it was almost as if I was playing a fighting game. I’d look for patterns, and intentionally bait out attacks to go for a parry or grab tech, allowing me to blow through their armor and start a big punish combo, or eating one myself for my arrogance.
Admittedly, my initial playthroughs were made harder by my choice of character, Gal. She’s positioned as the main protagonist by the key art, and represents the extremes of Fight n Rage, with an endless well of tech to explore, but the lowest health and harshest punishments for failure. Runs are extremely volatile with only two or three bad moves able to get you killed. It makes learning the basics of the game more difficult, but with more experience she can be at almost any area of the screen in mere moments, transitioning between the ground and air at any time.
F. Norris, the ninja with a very familiar looking face, is the crowd control specialist of the game. He has three variations of his Hurricane Kick that can reposition him quickly, draw in groups of enemies, or get him out of trouble. His slide and divekick allow him to weave in and out of crowds, where his flying suplex gives him an escape option or big AOE damage. He doesn’t have the easy multi-hit confirms of Gal, but there’s plenty of tech that requires decent execution to pull off, and his burst damage on pulling off a grab tech or parry is fantastic.
Ricardo, the minotaur man, is the simplest of the three and the game’s dedicated grappler. He has a slow walk speed and short dash, with a more limited moveset that relies on using his grab to reposition the crowd, and his lariat to escape pressure and extend combos. Even he’s got some powerful burst movement though, with the momentum of his dash able to be canceled into a jump to launch him across the screen. From there he can pound in the enemies’ heads, bouncing up to follow with a dropkick and lariat, or landing to start his vortex of grabs.
Ricardo’s plight also reveals Fight n Rage’s surprisingly earnest take on its edgelord aesthetics. Human slavery, meat factories and brutal betrayal lend the game shock factor, but the game plays it all straight. Ricardo’s fight to end the violent regime of other mutants is given genuine gravitas during his story, and through other character stories we even find out he’s been organizing alongside human survivors. It’s simple, but it doesn’t play at any irony, and kind of reveals Ricardo to be the real protagonist of the game.
Ricardo’s story makes up the main throughline, but there’s a total of 56 variations routes for the story, with small changes to the dialogue and eight possible endings, depending on which character you play, if you’re solo, teamed up with another character, or have all three characters together.
A full run can be completed in less than thirty minutes, but you’ll likely spend hours reaching that point, since even on normal Fight n Rage is going to require clean pl;ay to see the end. You’re provided with three lives, and you can force your way through but the process is going to be tedious unless you learn its mechanics. Thankfully the game has a host of modes to learn all its tricks, and even an unlockable turbo mode to make future playthroughs even faster.
Fight n Rage is a gamer that initially set my standard for the genre when I originally played it, with many modern brawlers falling flat in comparison, unable to compete in presentation or player expression. Returning to it years later and I can feel my appreciation for it grow stronger, as my skills have improved and it’s revealed more nuances I didn’t appreciate the first time around. Even with the recent surge of entries into the genre, Fight n Rage still represents a definitive entry in the genre for me, one that’s unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.
A retro throwback so authentic that it runs on actual Neo Geo hardware, Vengeance Hunters manages to not only imitate the games of the era, but stand beside them, albeit with notable limitations. The expressive art and animation brings to mind games like Ninja Baseball Bat Man and Mutation Nation, with an era appropriate comic book style.
Vengeance Hunters aims for a typical spread of speed, power and all rounder, but with several deviations from genre conventions. Each character requires different approaches and combo routes, though notably it comes at the cost of splitting universal options between characters, with moves like throws or dodging restricted to certain characters. Even your basic combo string is atypical, playing out in full if you mash, making it less safe than the typical jab that only completes the combo on enemy contact.
The spread of options gives each character a drastically different rhythm. Candy’s high speed and cartwheel dodge allows her to reposition to any part of the screen, with numerous routes into launchers, air strings and divekick allowing her to extend juggles indefinitely. Golem controls the space with a variety of grapples, able to toss, suplex and piledrive enemies, and extending damage with wall bounches and air grabs. Simple, but satisfying.
Loony is by far the least compelling character design sporting an archetypical 90s protagonist look, with generic animations outside of his rocket arm. Unfortunate, since he’s easily the best character in the game, with his rocket arm giving him the only projectile in the cast, one that causes respectable hitstun, can be angled at both the ground and air, wallbounces, extends juggles from anywhere on the screen, and can relaunch grounded enemies, an option the other two characters don’t have. By comparison, the other characters are almost incomplete, trading in the full set of options for better character design and a gimmick. It’s hard not to feel you’re restricting yourself when picking anyone but Loony. It’s a shame since the game is full of appealing designs, even for the fodder enemies, and Loony is probably one of the few I don’t like.
The opening stages might fool you into thinking there’s a lot less variety in those designs, however. Maybe due to memory constraints, but the opening stages hold back on introducing a lot of the later enemy types, sticking to just a few variants. It gives the impression that you might be fighting the same enemies with the same patterns the whole game, and thankfully that’s not true. The early enemies still show up late into the game, but they’re paired with new threats that change the calculations of how you approach them.
The problem is exacerbated by a common problem of neo-retro games, where it forces you into an arcade style format, where progress isn’t saved and runs must begin from the start each time. That means replaying the opening stages--and the boring speeder bike interlude--each time you start the game, drawing attention to the initial lack of variety and making me wish I could skip to later parts of the game.
It’s another limitation of the format it was designed for. Despite originally being made for the Neo Geo, the console and PC ports are not emulated, and don’t feature common features you’d see like save states. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s clear this is partially out of justified concerns of ROM piracy and bootlegging, but not having the basic ability to continue a run made me pine for the ability to emulate it.
At the very least Vengeance Hunters has cheat codes that will allow you to skip to particular levels, add infinite lives and more, but it’s an anachronism I’d happily leave behind for a standard menu option.
Despite these annoyances, Vengeance Hunters still manages to stand among the few excellent entries in both the retro homebrew and beat em up revivals. It's generally smart with its limitations, using them to build interesting differences among its characters, and creating something that feels at home with other titles on the hardware, rather than feeling held back by it.
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A cheesecake tribute to the beat-em-up genre, Maiden Cops is full of variety in both combat mechanics and fetishes pandered to. With plenty of jiggle and juggle combos, it’s clearly got its sights aimed on a very particular niche. The horny character designs make the most immediate impact, with a parade of anime stereotypes, furry characters, and provocative costumes, but a few minutes with the game makes it clear that the real attention was put towards the elaborate combat system. But while the combat remains more interesting, the split focus means details all around are a little off, making it successful and provoking a proper reaction on either front.
Talking tit before tat, looking at the rest of Pippin Games’ catalog, it’s pretty clear that cheesecake anime girl designs make up a key part of their attempts at appeal. Their previous games both prominently feature horny character designs as a selling point, banking on the easy attention it can grab you. And I can’t say it hasn’t worked, as the premises have got me to play all of their titles, not knowing they were all by the same developer.
And that’s exactly where Maiden Cops’ attempts at sexy fall apart. All the sexual elements are perfunctory, pandering in the truest sense of the word, without any real sense of investment.
It takes a certain amount of courage, and I’d even say vulnerability, to put all your peculiarities and fetishes on display for real perverse work. There’s a certain vibe an artist gives off in their art, even in relatively tame illustrations. None of that is here, with what should be very specific fetish work drawn with workmanlike precision.
Maiden Cops presents everything with irony, trotting out decades old jokes about anime tropes and having you collect items like panties for score bonuses. None of the situations or characters present interesting dynamics or tension either, making everything come off rather safe.
Thankfully, this is also Pippin Games’ most full bodied game, with a good variety of combat mechanics and movesets to carry it through its run time. Each of the three characters has a large movelist, and while they fall into the usual categories of the fast, strong and all rounder, they all have interesting tools.
Each character has a special attack meter, with three specials to spend it on, with Megia, the power character, getting the additional ability to carry and attack with enemies and large objects. Specials generally chain into each other, and the juggle system is generous, often allowing you to carry enemies from one side of the screen to the other. Specials are especially important since they’re the only moves that can’t be consistently interrupted.
Throws and combos enders often fail to finish due to lack of invincibility frames, giving combat a janky feeling, and making stronger attacks less valuable due to their tendency to take damage mid animation. Enemies are aggressive, too, happy to gang up on you and leave little breathing room.
These issues naturally pushed me towards constantly playing as Nina, the speed character, since her movement and specials quickly reposition her, making it easier to avoid damage. Meiga presents a viable alternative, but mostly due to how her large health bar allows her to tank more stray hits, and her high damage knocks enemies out fast, though with the caveat that you engage with the combo system less as a result.
The combat manages to stay fun throughout the whole runtime--an accomplishment not every modern brawler can claim--but attempting to play well reveals how much the system can’t support it. It makes those interesting tools redundant, ending up with an unpleasant tension between trying to explore the variety of moves available, and their ineffectiveness when applied.
Your combos are often not interrupted due to your bad decisions, but because of the jank in how your attacks interact with enemies. It’s just off enough to stay satisfying when things are going well, but feel it wasn’t your fault when you fail.
Maiden Cops is easily the most ambitious of Pippin Games’ catalog, and is largely successful, but just misses in so many places it never entirely satisfies.
