Stumbling through Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou or something like that

[davidn]

ravenworks reminded me about this series a couple of nights ago, and having put Amnesia aside for a while due to its rather dull translation to a playthrough video, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the SNES era. Having apparently felt that my life hadn't quite been weird enough recently, he came up with this suggestion, a specimen from Japan. Sorry about the stripe down the right hand side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCjl3H7V7Ss
I had no idea what it was about when I started, but I was quickly to find out that it was a side-scrolling beat-em-up. It has an alleged storyline, but just by looking at it I can't really make any connection with what goes on in the game - it appears to be about beating robots up and stealing their ingredients so that your Robochef 4000 can bang two of them together until they form a meal. I suppose that's where the "Gourmet" bit of the title comes from - I hadn't realized that until now.

Anyway, just look at it - it defies description, and I didn't even get very far. It did lead me to notice, however, that I have a tendency to vocalize pain felt by my player character - and I hadn't realized that during moments of stress my voice could get anywhere near that high.

I should make it clear - if you can't tell - that during my complete incoherence on the first boss, I was looking at her bizarrely muscular robo-legs. Goodness gracious me.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure which I find stranger: this game, or the fact that, after all the recent bird exposure, there's still things in the world that can make me go "...wtf?"

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Surely there's some reason for this pose button", he said. Ahhh, if only. ;)

That was fantastic :) I knew it would be a good fit :D Glad you had fun :)

And, bah, trepidation's just another word for excitement ;D (Depending on who you're talking to. :P)

[kjorteo]

Now I kind of want to know what an alternate-universe (without me having already streamed so much of it) "DavidN stumbles through: Hatoful Boyfriend" would have been like.

[davidn]

The voices would have been quite something, because I can only do two impressions and one of them's Sean Connery. (Fortunately I have somehow avoided games that involve a lot of narration...) Otherwise, do you remember the second episode where you stopped to make sure I was all right? It would have been a bit like that, captured in audio, after piling on several layers of disbelief.

It's also rather difficult to remember what I might have thought of this game in what I will no doubt forever refer to as the pre-Hatoful stage of my life... the robot-woman's huge green muscular bottom gave me significant pause (and I really did jump when she did that screaming laser attack) but otherwise it was a sort of acceptance (note: not an understanding) that this is how this game works.

[davidn]

Japan seems absolutely unconstrained by any boundaries of creativity or indeed sanity, and there are so many flavours of madness that it seems impossible to get used to all of them. That said, the sheer breadth of the ones that Hatoful covers is impressive in itself.

[davidn]

Yes - as much as I say that I didn't think I was all that surprised with this game in comparison to some others we've seen recently, I couldn't imagine that there was a 'pose' feature without some sort of purpose, like tapping out three different poses in a row to activate... some sort of powerup, I don't know. I'm glad that you enjoy the perpetual confusion of my life!

Excitement...! In some ways, you're absolutely right :)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Jesus H. Christ.
... actually, I think pigeons have ruined me, and left me able to manage only dull surprise. I did giggle a few times, though!

I wanted to go through this and comment on things individually like I did with some of the others, but the whole thing was just equally incomprehensible.

But I do kind of want to play it two-player, just to have posing contests.

[kjorteo]

Here's how to tell immediately and decisively which side of the console war we were each on growing up: as you played this and as I watched the video, you said "oh, it's Streets of Rage" at literally the exact moment I thought "oh, it's Final Fight."

[davidn]

Had I been thinking along the same console lineage, I would probably have said Double Dragon, as I remember playing that a lot on a friend's NES... though Streets of Rage is definitely the one that I remember.

[davidn]

I, too, was... surprised at how unsurprised I was by this game ;) I couldn't ask for a greater inoculation against insanity than Hatoful Boyfriend... after a while, you seem to just learn to accept that any other game is a bit weird, but those pigeons have such breadth and depth to their madness that it continues to surprise to this day.

[premchaia_pre4]

By the way, I just came back to this for no particular reason, and I had been recently futzing about with a translation dictionary and had at least a few kana in the front of my linguistic memory.

As a result, I now know that the three characters have names that are transliterations of “Bonjour”, “Mademoiselle”, and “Trés Bien”, and you had nine vegetables, three mushrooms, and one set of fermented soybeans. Unfortunately, it seems that you decided to cook the mushrooms and stringy soybeans together, which restores zero points of life at the end of the stage. In some ways this is quite appropriate.