The Bouncer is a beat ‘em up by Square Enix. Yes, the very same company that brought to the masses Final Fantasy after Final Fantasy brought an arcade style game to the PS2. In fairness, they also did make one of the best racing games on the NES, Rad Racer.
The story is roughly such: you’re one of three bouncers working at a bar called ‘Fate’. The Mikado corporation kidnaps a woman working at a bar, who turns out to be the arch villan’s sister. You fight to get her back, and the story unfolds. As an interesting twist, the two bouncers you don’t choose are controlled by the CPU, so you’re almost always fighting in a group.
I’ve been struggling how to review this game, and in the end came up with:
“This is the best “worst game” I’ve ever played.”
There are a lot of issues with the game. First, the interface is horrendous. When you want to load a game, you have to go to load game, pick your game – “are you sure you want to load this game? All progress will be lost”, bearing in mind you haven’t started playing yet, and load. Then you go to the first cutscene after your save point.
Cutscenes are broken up with more cutscenes and loading screens in between; you can’t just hit X or O or something to skip them – you have hit start, choose skip, and then hit X. Since there is almost always more than one cutscene, you have to do this multiple times. And when you get to play, there’s an interminable loading screen.
If you lose a fight, you’re dumped back to the title screen. Doesn’t ask if you want to go back to your last save point, if you want to continue, nothing.
Fights are fairly lousy. The AI of your teammates is hit or miss – they’ll sometimes attack, sometimes will simply circle the opponent. There are group attacks, but they do no damage – they are there just for show. If you have one go-to move, you simply hit the enemy, hide behind your partners, and circle around them. This goes for boss fights too.
To add insult to injury, you get bouncer points for defeating an enemy – enough points and you can upgrade your fighter, ala experience points in Final Fantasy. If your fellow cpu controlled bouncer finishes off an enemy, no one gets bouncer points. Go figure.
There are certain parts of the game where you’re just running through generic warehouse buildings, where nothing happens. You fight no one, you’re just simply running. That kind of silliness is best left to a cutscene; given the genre, it severely kills the mood of the game.
Finally, the game is ridiculously short. If you watch all the cutscenes, the game spans a couple of hours. If you skip all of them, there’s probably 20-30 minutes of action.
All that being said, I still liked it. The character designs are outside of typical Square fare. The audio was done well, even though the script was either translated poorly or just a hack job. The visuals are absolutely astounding – everyone is super detailed, it feels like you’re playing a CGI movie. There were some memorable fights in the game, in particular the first few. The story, while a bit strange and disjointed, has a couple of concepts that are interesting to follow.
The problem is that Square decided to make an interactive movie instead of a brawler. They want to tell this grand story that they couldn’t stretch to the requisite number of hours in the Final Fantasy universe, so they pared it down to a genre where they clearly have very little experience.
Every character has at least two endings, and there are multiple unlockable characters for the multiplayer mode. If you’re a 100% completion kind of person, you’ll need to play each character through the game at least 4 times each to get everyone at 100% stats and all the moves.
There’s a certain infectiousness to the game, despite all of its shortcomings. The fact that it is so ridiculously short does help its case; Soul Calibur Legends was fun for the first eight (!) hours, but the last four were extremely tough. Here, the glaring deficiencies are easy to overlook.
I will likely play it through a couple more times; after watching all the cutscenes and losing a few battles (before I wised up), I still finished it in two sittings. I’d like to unlock everyone’s stories and play it through with all the characters. If I take a day off (I’m thinking sometime next week), you’ll know what I’m doing.
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