Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 78: Square's PS1 fighting games

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

Ah, yes, Squaresoft… the company that only made RPGs. Right? Well. During the PlayStation era, the company's output was all over the place — and that includes the FIVE fighting games it published. All good, all unique! Just in time for their newest fighter, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, Jeremy Parish & Ben Elgin look back at them all.

Thermometer swollen calls for watermelon. Thirst quenching watermelon smoothies are bursting for another fun-filled summer at booster juice. The watermelon wave and watermelon explosion are back at booster juice all summer long. Download the booster rewards app today. This week in Retronauts, God bless the ring. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another at Retronauts Micro. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is a tiny episode of Retronauts. That's why it's called Micro.

Hopefully we won't go more than an hour this time for once. We'll try. With me this week is... Ben Elgin. And it's just the two of us, because no one else knows about this topic or cares about it. which is the fighting games of Squaresoft. Yeah, not what you usually think when you think about Squarespace. No, but there's a whole set.

Back in the 90s, back when the PlayStation launched, Square was all over the place. They weren't just doing RPGs. They were doing shooters, action games, and then fighting games. And so you had stuff like Einhander and Internal Section or Layer Section, Internal Section. Yeah, that's what it was called, which never came to the U.S. There was like So Kaigi, which was like a 3D action game that didn't come to the U.S. They were doing kind of weird stuff. But we're going to talk specifically about their 3D fighting games for PlayStation 1.

No, we're not talking about the bouncer. Sorry, Ben. No, we're not talking about the bouncer. Sorry. Well. We're just talking about PS1 stuff. But that's okay because that's four games. All of which are, oh, wait, no, five games.

Five at least. All of which are pretty interesting. Three of them, there's like three. different series or franchises or IPs, I guess. There's two sequels in there, but the sequels change things up a lot. So it's five pretty distinct games, fighting games that didn't quite fall in line with any others that anyone else was doing. Yeah, they all had their quirks.

That's what makes it interesting. So, yeah, to talk briefly about SquareSoft, we've, you know, we've covered a lot of the Final Fantasy games up through Final Fantasy. I think by the time this comes out, Final Fantasy 5, Final Fantasy 6 episode is in the can, but hasn't been released yet. So this is kind of keeping in continuity with that. We've talked about Final Fantasy Legend, and it seems like there was something else we did. But I guess we're just going to cover the entire gamut of Square by the time this is over. There will be a Kings Night episode one of these days, just you wait. But yeah, the fighting output that the company produced in the 90s is really interesting

because, for one thing, they didn't produce any of these games themselves. They published them, but they were not the developers on any of these games. Yeah. And so we also have continuity with another episode that came out recently with our retro Nazis talking about Sega arcade games. And one of the things we recently covered was Virtual Fighter, which was their breakout 3D fighting game. And one of the people that worked on that was a guy named Sayichi Ishi. He worked on actually started on virtual racing and then went on to Virtual Fighter and evidently found out that he had a predilection for fighting games. So he was the guy I mentioned. in that episode that really liked putting real-world martial arts moves into his fighters. And he had a pretty distinctive style. And after he did virtual fighting, he liked that so much. He actually went over to Namco and helped them out with Tekken 1 and 2. And you can see a lot of the through line through between Virtual Fighter and Tekken in terms of the movesets and characters.

And then after that, he went on and established his own company named Dream Factory. And that was one of the places that Square outsourced for these fighting games. So this is behind both the Toll Ball Games and Air Guides is him. And then there was another guy named Mizuno who was, he was also with Sega. And he left, wasn't he? He was with Sega, right? I forget Mizuno's. I want to say he was with Sega.

Maybe he was with someone else. But he left whatever company he was with. Oh, no, actually, he was with Square. He was a Squarespace executive. Yeah, he was like an executive and for whatever reason decided. you know what? I'm going to go make my own company and then even though he like branched out of Square, they publish his games. I think they might have actually invested in this company. It might have been, it might have been part of sort of like, I don't know, like some sort of

tax dodge or just an attempt to diversify. So I don't think he left Square because of bad blood. I think it was more like a, you know, Square was was kind of looking to diversify. A lot of companies in this period kind of spun off studios into, their own enemy. I think he probably left with their blessing, is my guess. And that would certainly seem to be the case because they did publish several of his games. And so his was lightweight studio. It was his. So which one should we talk about first? Should we talk about Dream Factory's games or lightweights? Oh, I think Tobol hit first, didn't it? Yeah, I guess so, because Bushido Blade hit around the time of Final Fantasy 7. And Tobol hit early that year,

1997, and had the Final Fantasy 7 demo in it. So, yeah, I guess the smartest place to start is with Dream Factory and Tobol number one. Yeah, so this, unfortunately, I have less experience with these two than with the others in this podcast, but it was very, so, yeah, Toeball originally gained Prometas partly because it came with the Final Fantasy 7 demo, which I didn't, I didn't actually experience, because I didn't buy my plane station until Final Fantasy. Fantasy 7 actually was out later. So I sort of missed the boat on this. Was this one you played? Yeah, I picked up Tobol number one, partly because it seemed interesting, and I still thought I might have a chance to be decent at fighting games back then.

I was wrong. But also because I was interested in Final Fantasy 7, so it was a two-fer right there. It was a cool-looking fighting game and a demo of Final Fantasy 7. So the Final Fantasy 7 demo, if you've played it, it's kind of. of weird to compare against the final game because you have, I want to say, I think there's two versions. I think there's one where you have Ereth in your party and one where you have Tifa, but neither of those, I can't remember.

Like, you have, like, a character who's not normally in your party, and she doesn't talk the entire demo, and she has, like, high-level summonses. Like, you can summon Leviathan who you don't normally get until late in the game. It was this weird remix of the opening mission where it was showing off. off late game stuff at the same time, yeah. But it was, you know, the point was like, hey, check it out. It's Final Fantasy, but in 3D, wow, check out that opening crawl. It's crazy.

So that definitely caught my attention. But I did spend more time with Toeball number one than with Final Fantasy 7's demo because, I don't know, like, there are that many demos you can play infinitely. Maybe the Metal Gear Solid 2 one was one that people played over and over again. Yeah, the, like, pre-release, like, demos on disk was sort of just becoming a thing around that time. Right. So yeah, so Tobol number one stands out for a few reasons. One, we talked about this in the Sega episode, but it was really uncommon to see 3D games that ran at 60 frames

per second back then. And that was something Tobol number one did. Did it on PlayStation, which you rarely saw. PlayStation, PlayStation 1, you look back and there's some pretty cool looking games, but 60 FPS is not something you see a lot of. I think when RidgeRacer 4 came out, there was actually a bonus disc that was the original Ridge Racer that just ran at 60 frames per second. It was like, hey, we got, we figured out how to do 60 FPS. So here's the original Ridge Racer running the way it should be as in arcades. So this was one of the rare games that actually managed to maintain that sort of fluidity. And it really made a difference. Like there was no other game that I played on PlayStation at this time that had that sort of smoothness

that fluidity of motion. And, you know, it made up for, like, it sacrificed a few things to make this possible. One of them was texturing. There was no detail on the characters. They were all gourd-shaded, which is, do you want to explain to what gore-roud-shaded is? Yeah, sure. So if you got a, you got a model made up of polygons. And again, in modern times, all these polygons would be textures.

So they can be whatever color you want. Without textures, you basically just have a color and lighting. So the most primitive way to do it is just, each polygon is a single color. That looks really primitive now. You have these kind of flashing facets. Right. And that's like Virtual Fighter 1. Virtual Fighter 1. And then the next step beyond that is garage chain where instead of applying the light to each polygon, you apply it to each of the vertices and you interpolate in between them. So you have this shading from one edge of the polygon to another. So you get a much

smoother shading across the model. You still get artifacts from this. So if you see like kind of little stars of brightness or darkness as you're rotating as something's rotating through the camera, that's probably because your garage shading, and that's like a particular vertex being picked up by the light or whatever. So it's got this kind of distinctive look, but it's definitely you get, you get a lot nicer shading than just flat textured polygons, but it still, it still, you know, looks pretty primitive compared to actually having everything textured. Right. So even though the resolution was lower than that of Virtual Fighter 1 in the arcades, This was, I would say, arguably, the first game that managed to look as smooth and as fluid as VF1 on a home console.

Saturn hadn't pulled it off with its virtual fighter conversions. There was no consistent 60 FPS, and it was all flat-shaded, and, you know, Tekken didn't look this good. Battle arena, To Shinden definitely did not look this good. So, you know, just on a technological level, Tobol number one, should have been a big hit, but it wasn't. And I think that's because it was so friggin weird. Well, so the other standout thing about it was they got Akira Toriyama to do the character designs. And he was no stranger to the Squarespace world. He had designed the characters for Chrono Trigger. And of course, he had done all the monster designs and

everything for Dragon Quest, which later would come part of the same corporate structure as Final fantasy in Square Inix, or SquareSoft, when it became Square Inix. Not yet at the time, they were still bitterest rivals. Yes. So. Yeah. So a Keratoryama, kind of by this point, I think his career had sort of fallen into the Dragon Ball Z rut, where it was basically like, hey, you know, the publisher, Shonen Jump,

coming to him and saying, look, so what the kids really like from your Dragon Ball is steroid dudes punching each other and being very violent. So please do a lot of that. Forever. So, yeah. So the whimsy and the fun and the goofiness of the early Dragon Ball manga had really been sort of pressed out of Toriyama's work at this point. So I kind of feel like Tobal number one was a rare opportunity for him where someone came to him and said, you know, Akira, just be yourself. And so he sure was himself. Like the character. Characters in Tobell number one are really interesting. I mean, you have sort of like the sort of standard generic dude.

There's a couple of standard generic dudes. But even then they wear kind of like one of the guys is wearing like basically like Link's outfit, sort of a green tunic and a floppy hat. And then then you get really strange. You have like a girl who's wearing, you know, basically like a leotard. But then you have a huge Russian wrestler woman. She's like this strapping massive, just slab of bulk, whose backstory is that no one, like she's, she's kind of struggling to find work because she's so good at wrestling. No one wants to compete with her. So she can't.

It looks like crown her triggers Ayla and steroids. Yeah, it's like she's the massive version of Ayla. Then you have an old dude who is like the one guy who ever beat the final boss. but like 30 or 40 years prior. This is the 99th Tobol tournament, and he won against the Emperor Udahn or whatever his name is in like the 66th tournament or something like that.

Then there's like this giant blue chicken guy. He's a kintakujin, which in Japanese means Kentuckian. Yeah, that's as in Kentucky Fried Chicken because you have to understand that Kentucky Fried Chicken occupies this bizarrely huge footprint in the Japanese collective mind

that I don't get it, but Japan loves KFC and the colonel and just like the idea of Kentucky is eternally tied to the word chicken there. So, so you have a character who is basically KFC. That is, that is his name, pretty much in race. He's got this, this, like, red crest and kind of white outfit. But the weird thing is, like, because of his blue skin, he's got this bizarre synchronicity where now he looks like the guy in Guardians of the Galaxy. What's his same with the head crest weapon. Oh, um, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Jandu.

He actually kind of looks a lot like Yandu, but... Kind of does, yeah. By complete coincidence. Then there's like an inventor, and then there's the robot who wants to, like, break free from him or something like that. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Toriyama kind of archetypes flowing through here. Yeah, well, the robot is not like a typical android. It doesn't look humanoid.

It's, it's very robot. Like, even way more so. then Robo from Chrono Trigger. Yeah. And then finally, the final boss, the Emperor Udahn, or whatever his name is, or Udan, is your typical Toriyama, like he's really tiny and therefore he can destroy everyone guy. Kind of like this little wrinkly blue alien or green alien. Yeah.

Looks very unassuming and therefore he's the worst ever. So, yeah. So it's like super weird characters. And then in terms of the actual fighting mechanics, it's not a fighting game in the street fighter sense, where everyone has like crazy special moves, it feels much more like what dead or alive would be. It's very

grappling-based. It's almost like wrestling. So it takes a more realistic, like despite the fact that it has crazy outlandish characters and like these wild backgrounds set in cosmic realms, you know, cosmic realms. It has very sort of grounded,

realistic, like actual wrestling moves, not so much like WWE, but more like grappling. Yeah, like Olympic wrestling. And I think, I think, I suspect that's the director issue's interest coming through because he really is into mirroring real world fighting styles,

you know, even when, even when the rest of the setting going on around them is kind of out there. So I don't know, maybe all of those things account for why Tobol number one was not a huge success. It did okay. It got a sequel. But I feel like it just didn't really have much traction. And people mostly checked it out because they were like, Final Fantasy 7? I want to play that.

So... Yeah, it was kind of this weird. intersection of things that didn't really intersect a lot in America between, you know, the fighting game scene and people who like Torayama. Yeah, Dragon Ball wasn't a thing back then. Yeah. Like, Dragon Ball wouldn't catch on for a couple more years. Hadn't been on Tsunami yet.

I don't think Tsunami existed yet. Nope. It didn't. Like, Dragon Ball, you could rent it on VHS, but I don't think it had broadcast at that point. And certainly not Dragon Ball Z, which would be like the big breakout. Maybe this game had come another year later, people would have been like, oh, my God, it's the Dragon Ball dude. but instead it was just like, oh, what is this game?

That's weird. Yeah, it's kind of weird looking. And I don't know, maybe people didn't care about the 60 FPS and the go-roud shading and they just wanted more detailed characters. And, you know, like a lady who would, you know, have very detailed texturing and would crack your skull between her thighs like a walnut. I don't know. I mean, it could be the... This came out at the same time as Golden Eyes.

So that seemed to be a thing back then. there was, um, what's her face? The Toshindan lady, Sophia. Yeah. Like, I don't know. There was, there was this, like, it didn't have that edgy 90s vibe that was kind of everywhere It was too pure. It was too clean.

There was nothing like, you know, twisted or kinky about. It was just kind of goofy, which was not, not the aesthetic that the fighting game community was really into that point. Yeah. Like the backgrounds were, you know, these bizarre extraterrestrial landscapes like pink trees and the kind of thing torile. and crystalline planets, and it was just a beautiful game, but totally alien and bizarre in maybe a way that Americans found off-putting or just, not even off-putting, but just like,

oh, I can't relate to this like I can, you know, a dude in a tiger mask or a dominatrix. Didn't one of them have, I forget out if it was one or two, one of them had an unlockable choke-a-bow in it, didn't it? I think that was two. I think that was two. I think that was two. Yeah, that's right. I remember.

But yeah, we can talk about the unlocks in two in a minute. but they're tied to an element that showed up in the first game, which was, of course, this was a Squarespaceoft fighting game, and therefore you can't have a Squersoft game without some role-playing in it. So in addition to the standard fighting mode, which was, you know, like a tournament fighter, okay, great, you also had the dungeon mode, which was crazy because it was basically like a fighting game

where the presentation was changed, so it became more like a roaming brawler a la final fight, but you still fought with individual enemies one-on-one with your standard fighting moves. And it took place in the form of basically a roguelike. It's like so crazy. I can't believe this thing existed. I mean, I guess, you know, console roguelikes were kind of a thing back then

with Sharon the Wanderer, and, you know, eventually there would be Chocobo's dungeon. But, like, for Americans at the time, this was just like, what is this? Yeah, it was much bigger in Japan. back then especially. Yeah, I did not get that the first time I played it. I was like, oh, neat. There's like an RPG. Whoa. I just died and that's it. What the hell? Yeah. Yeah. This was sort of a thread that carried through most of Squares published fighters is that they all had roaming modes that were that were not just constricted to an arena where you're going around doing stuff. This one definitely feels like the most square softish. Yeah. I mean, it is.

Well, the one in Air Guides is pretty ridiculous too. That's true. But it's an evolution of this one. Yeah. Yeah. So like this is just, yeah. it is a rogue like that is also a fighting game. It's great. I really need to go back and play this and really invest some time into this. I feel like if I could master the fighting system, which always kind of alluded me because it's not Street Fighter and therefore I'm like, I feel like I would really enjoy the dungeon mode in this game. Although you also see, you also see Tekken doing this in some of its iterations. Not the roguelike, but the roaming brawler where you're one-on-one fighting a whole bunch of mooks and then bosses, which may also be. issues, influence, I'm not sure. But, yeah, Tekken did that several times also. So it's worth talking about the fact that Tobol number one had a sequel that was called, wait for it, Tobol 2. They dropped the number, but it's Tobol 2. And this game never came to the U.S. And it's really a shame because the first Tobol looked nice, but Tobol 2 had some of the most impressive graphics ever to appear on PS2. It also had much deeper gameplay. It had more

characters, the quest mode was greatly expanded. Not only that, but by defeating enemies in quest mode, like, you know, any enemy, standard mooks, anything, you know, cannon fodder, you would unlock them to play as a fighter in the full fighting game. So, yeah, you could beat like a little goblin or something or a chokobo in the dungeon, and then you would be able to enter the tournament as that character. And they usually had limited movesets, but it was so crazy. Like, It sounds really cool. Like, who wouldn't want that? Like, 200 plus characters to play as.

You see, like, a goblin fighting a rat monster or whatever in your turn of a fighter. And, yeah. It's so good. I feel like I really need to check that out and try to play it somehow. Yeah, but, yeah, disappointingly. Never came over here. That game never came over here. And there's been a lot of speculation.

But at the time, Square said it was memory constraints. And people took that to mean, like, there wasn't enough space on CD, which everyone said. Well, that's stupid. There's plenty of space on the CD. But what they actually meant was that the game, I think, wouldn't fit into RAM if it had been localized. I really, I'm willing to believe that because this game really, I feel, like, pushed the limits of the PS1 for its time and was probably utilizing every last kilobite of RAM. It's not like a PS1 had a ton of RAM anyway. but they said the text wouldn't fit into the boxes.

So what I think that means is that English is less efficient when written out than Japanese. So because of that, like a localized version just wouldn't have been able to fit. And you know, you saw with Final Fantasy 6 when it came to the U.S., they had to cut like half the script to make it fit into the cartridge. And you also saw with Chrono Trigger, When that came to PlayStation, the original Japanese version was fine. It was emulated, but it ran okay. But then when they added the English localization, there was like a patch that was applied in real time for the English version. And it took up more memory and kind of pushed it over a critical threshold.

So all of a sudden, like when you went into battle and stuff, the load times expanded greatly. So it became this miserable slog to play. So I feel like that was the same issue that Tobon 2 was facing. I would love to see this game revived somehow Square has just expressed interest in bringing some of their old franchises to Switch.

Like this game, I think, would hold up really, really well on Switch. If they would localize this game, like it still looks nice. Yeah, it's like a sort of primitive graphical style, but it has so much, it has so much style to it that it seems deliberate.

It doesn't seem like, oh, this is a really old game. It's more like, oh, this is a really old game. It's more like, oh, this is, is kind of a retro game. Yeah, it's bright and colorful. Yeah, it has, it has, like, it has enough personality to stand on its own. I would, I would love to see them bring this back. They won't, but man, I feel like this is just a gym that needs to be dug up for the U.S. I'd buy it.

So anyway, that was the last we saw of Tobal, because I guess it didn't sell that well, and it didn't come to the U.S. to boost its sales, so it languished and died. So instead, Dream Factory moved on to, I would say, fan bait. They came out with a game called Airguites. And that was co-developed with Namco. So you have Ishi, who used to work at Sega, then went on to Namco, then went on to Dream Factory to work in Square, suddenly collaborating again with Namco. So it's like an old homecoming. This game is not that much like Tekken, though. It is...

Well, it isn't. I mean, the setup is very different, but like the movesets and things, you'll find things. that are familiar. I remember when I first picked it up, so I had played some like Tekken 2, and I started messing around with it. I'm like, you know, there's moves like the hunting hawk, which is jump in the air and kick three times,

and it's literally called the same move. And it's in, you know, Vincent has it in Air Guides. So there's definitely, and I think, again, this is, you know, this is, she's influence, he has the things he likes and he brought through those styles and those movesets to the game. So that's where the similarities. is. But then beyond that, yeah, it's not just, it's not just this set facing each other

brawler. It's this more kind of arena-based thing where you can roam around and you have these big 3D, 3D arenas with a lot of structure to them that you're fighting on. So it is very different that way. Yeah. So this game started out as an arcade title. Yeah. And my understanding is that Namco wanted to collaborate with Square on a game after, this is something I read back at the time. After playing Final Fantasy 7 and seeing all the mini games, like the submarine and that sort of thing, they were like, these are really cool. We should get together with Square and make some games. I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting. And you can definitely see the Final Fantasy 7 heritage in this game.

There were a couple of Final Fantasy 7 characters unlockable as sort of hidden fighters in the arcade version. But when it came to PlayStation, they were just like, we are going all in, just everyone, just Final Fantasy characters. out the butt. So let's put him on the cover. The arcade had, it was mostly its own original set of characters, but it had Cloud and Tifa in it that you could play as. And then when it came to PS1, you got Ufi, Vincent, Sepharoth, and Zach, of all people. Okay, no, no, no. I thought you could play as Reese also, like the guy who controls Ketch She? Reeve, no. I think Reeve, no, no, no. I think you're thinking of Vincent has an alternate outfit that's his old Turks outfit. Oh, okay, okay. That makes more sense. Okay. That's an alternate outfit for Vincent.

And also the reason people remember being able to play as Red 13 is because one of the bosses of the game dating from the arcade is this sort of monstrous cat character. And there's a recolor of him to look like Red also in the home version. Interesting. So yeah, they were really pandering to the Final Fantasy 7 fan base. This was maybe the first time they did that. Like, sure, there was a cute little Aerith cameo and you could unlock Cloud and find Final Fantasy tactics, but here was a game that was like, you love Final Fantasy 7? Well, here's the dudes from Final Fantasy 7 punching each other. And, yeah, kind of weird that a few of the characters got left out.

Like, I guess Sid, I can see leaving out. But what about Barrett? Yeah, no Barrett. Maybe he was just overpowered in an arena fighter because he's a ranged fighter. Yeah, but then again, you got Vincent. I don't think he really used his gun much in the game. He was mostly. Well, you can't take away Barrett's gun.

It's part of his body. Yeah, that was probably. the problem. That's not cool. Yeah, and they even had things like they had special attacks that were patterned after their limit breaks. So, you know, Cloud had one where you could summon meteors and all that good stuff. So, yeah, it was very much like, this was a point at which everyone knew Final Fantasy 7 had hit it big and we're going to, we're going to tap into that and bring that in. So, yeah, it seems like you have a lot to say about Airguise. I didn't really play it that much. I didn't think it was as interesting as Tobol, but. I thought, yeah, well, I, you know, I played it

Some. Yeah, it was pretty fun, just sort of arena fighter. And again, obviously, the final, you know, I had liked Final Fantasy 7, too, so it was fun to be able to play as those guys. Although it also had some fun original characters. Although original, I kind of put in quotes sometimes, because there are actually several that are pretty blatant riffs on Tekken characters. There's the Chinese police guy. There's one of the girls, I think, is pretty much a Tekin character. Although there's also, they drew from other things, too. There's a girl. that fights with a yo-yo, which no one in the U.S. would have known who she was, but there's a series of movies Sukiband Deca in Japan who's about this international police girl who uses a yo-yo as her weapon. And she's basically just straight up in this game, you know, not licensed, just the character archetype. They just ripped her off. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, but you have a lot of notes about the quest mode, which sounds crazy. It had a ridiculous quest mode. So similar to how Tobol had, it had a ridiculous question. mode where, again, it was kind of rogue-like. You had randomly generated maps and randomly generated drops, but it also had, like, a hunger system, like, like a rogue-like. And you could eat different kinds of things, and they would raise different stats.

And it had, like, recipe books that you could make stuff from to raise your stacks. And evidently, I had even forgotten this until I looked it up, but you could, like, get things like wine in the dungeon and trade them in a fluctuating market. Like, why were these things in this game? I don't know. It was completely ridiculous things.

They really went all in. Yeah, yeah. It's this ridiculously detailed thing that was really about 10 times more detailed than it needed to be probably for an extra mode in a fighting game. And yeah, there was all kinds of other weird little mini games. There was like a foot race where you're just trying to get from A to B, but you could like punch the other guy on the way to try to slow them down. And there was, I didn't remember this one either.

I don't think I played it much, but there's like a game of a Versailles using the fighting characters. I don't know why. It's just there. Man, I don't remember any of this stuff. I guess I just picked up Air Guys and was like, this isn't quite what I want from a fighting game and never really bothered to dig into anything besides the main fighting mode. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's not, it's definitely not the world's best fighting game. You know, it's a little clunky. It's serviceable. But, you know, it's not going to, it wasn't going to unseat Tekken or anything. But as an arena fighter, it was okay. It was amusing. You know,

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All right. So, those are the All right. So those are the Dream Factory games, but now we should talk about the two games by lightweight, which are basically part of the same series and therefore can be kind of lumped together, although they are pretty different games in a lot of ways. Similar concept, but they changed a lot between one and two, and that is Bushido Blade. And this is definitely the game that I played the most of, the first Bushido Blade, of all of these. Yeah, I played that game just got its hooks into me, and I thought it was really, really fascinating.

And there's never been another fighting game like it. Even Bushido Blade 2 is not quite the same thing. Yeah, no one's really run with the concept, which is to try to make a weapons fighter actually realistic. And the consequences of that sentence are pretty severe. Because you've got swords and you're hitting people. You stab someone with a sword, they die. And that actually happens in this game. Yeah, like you saw fighting games try to be more quote unquote realistic.

And it ended up doing things like building a grappling system. a toe ball into it, whereas they really sat down and just said, like, how far can we take this? And instead of being a flashy wild fighter, there's like nothing, especially about the first one, there's nothing like dramatic about it. It is, I mean, it is, it is a drama. It is very much like a samurai drama complete with, you know, ritual suicides and things like that is the good endings for some characters. Yeah. But, but it's not over the top. It's not like, The physics are not crazy and unrealistic. You have very real-world weapons, and they're wielded in a realistic way.

So, like, you have a character who wields a sledgehammer, and he moves that thing slowly. But if it hits you, if it connects, it pretty much destroys, you know, whoever it makes contact with. And, yeah, so you get into this body damage system where each limb has its own health. And you can do instant kills. but, you know, on the same, by the same token, you can have a match that lasts 10 seconds or you can have a match that lasts 10 minutes. Yeah, and these both definitely happened in your own place. So you have, you have, to go over the system, you have no health bars for anything, I believe.

That's correct. Yeah, it's just, it's, there's no, there's almost no UI to it. And in trying to make this lifelike duel with bladed weapons, basically it's all about whether you connect or don't. And if you connect, you're taking something out. So if you hit someone's arm, then they can't use that arm anymore. If you hit someone's leg, they can't use that leg and they have to stumble around sort of half in a half crouch. You get a good, you get a clean hit on the head or chest, and that's it. You win. So yeah, it's these very, this very tense series of duels. And it's all about, you know, trying to read the other person, trying to fake each other

out. And it's basically, you know, one or two chances per match to get something right or wrong. And you either, you know, you cripple someone or you win. And so, yeah, it can go very fast. You know, the match can be over on the first hit. Or you can sit there trading, trading blows and not quite getting the opening for a long time. And it's really intriguing system. Yeah, and there's a block system. Like, you wield weapons, like, high or low.

Yeah. And there's a parry system. And so it does become, like, you know, a swordsman duel. And like we've been saying, like, it is possible for both opponents to wound each other without landing a fatal blow. And so you can have these just agonizing battles where the two of you are crawling around like trying to get the edge on each other.

But because you're both like, you know, basically crippled because of your wound. Yeah, you're down to like one leg and one arm each or something. Yeah, you can't, like you can't really go in for the kill. So it becomes like this incredibly grueling and incredibly tense situation. It's really interesting. It's such a unique fighting game.

Yeah. And like every match can go, even between the same people, the same setup can go very differently. So it's like almost more than any other fighting game I played, it has that one more match hook. It's like, let's do this one more time and something can go differently. And also it goes, you know, it can go super fast when things are going well. And so, you know, I remember playing Seth's disease where I'd play the same person with the same characters just like literally a hundred times in a row, which is something I, you know,

almost never do with any other fighting. Yeah. Yeah, and one of the things that makes the game so interesting is that you're taking these matches take place, not in a fighting arena, but in like a real world setting. The idea is that you are escaping from your clan's castle. Or infiltrating, depending on what character, but. Yeah, but basically you're working through like castle grounds, so there's like a bamboo grove, and then there's an area with a bridge, and then the game ultimately leads you to a parking garage. So it's like you're fighting, you know, as samurai, but in a modern day context. So you have some elements of modernity.

And the final showdown is kind of the best example of this because it takes place in a parking garage and you're fighting against a mercenary who wields a gun. I thought that was the second to last boss. You're right. That is the second to last. But the mercenary. Yeah. But here's the thing. like you're a person with a sword or a sledgehammer or you know like a knife and this is a guy with a handgun he's got a gun so which is fascinating and it's got the same mechanics if he gets a clean hit on you you die but i mean you can actually with perfect timing you can deflect a bullet um but also i mean the main strategy on is you want to close in and get him before he can before he can get a good shot right you have to well you know he has to reload yeah he can fire at you so many times then it has to reload so the the challenges to make use of the environment

which is difficult because it's in a pretty open area but make use of the environment to keep yourself safe from his attacks and then close in when you have the opportunity. So it's a completely different kind of combat and it seems kind of unfair because he's a guy with a gun and you've just got like, you know,

you brought a knife to a gunfight like literally. So, yeah, so that becomes the challenge. But then, you know, each character can wield any kind of weapon, but each character specializes in a specific weapon and has access to more moves with their specialization. So you have, you know, like, there's a, I think a girl who uses a Naginata. And so it's like huge and unwieldy and slow, but she's really fast with it more so than another character.

Yeah. So, you know, it's kind of good to know which character is best at what, but you don't have to limit yourself to that. You also have secondary weapons. And they expand on this a lot more in the second game, but you can have like, you know, you could have a Kodachi, like a small sword. or you can have throwing daggers or any number of other things. Yeah, and you can switch it up.

And there's actually so, I think, like, something like 75% of the moves are actually tied to the weapon. So anyone who is using that weapon can use those moves. But then the characters have special moves, mostly with their preferred weapon. So you can kind of switch it up and do unexpected things. Right. But making use of the scenery is also important based on the weapons you have. Because if you have a huge, bulky, bludgeoning weapon, you don't. want to get in close into bamboo grove because you're not going to be able to get a clean

swing at your opponent. You're going to hit the trees and have your swing blocked. But, you know, if you have daggers or something, then, or like a Kodachi or a Tonto or something, then you're going to want to get into the bamboo grove and getting close to them while they're trying to fumble around with their gigantic, you know, two-handed sword or whatever. So, yeah, so it's like the environment in this is really almost its own character. And you, touched on before, how it's all kind of something I haven't seen a lot of other games do, where it's even though if you play through this in quest mode, it's stage-based kind of in that you're fighting a character in a particular place, but they're all connected. There's one huge

environment consisting of various areas around this castle. And as you go through in quest mode, you know, you'll fight someone somewhere and then you literally just walk over to like the next place where the next person is. And you also have some limited ability to roam around once you've engaged someone. So it really gives you this. sense of place where you've got this one continuous environment that you're going through. Yeah. I mean, the biggest drawback to this game is that its presentation, like the sort of niceties, the interstitial stuff, it's basically zero.

Like, you go from one fight and it just kind of ends and then all of a sudden you're in the next fight. And it's like, it's really rough and feels very jarring. And the environments themselves are very stark. The character models are also pretty stark. I would love to see this game remade with contemporary graphics. They don't even have to be

like top of the line, but just like make the thing look nicer and you know, play up the environments make them prettier. There's like snow falling and things like that in the game and it's very, but it's very like, you know, first-gen PlayStation. So it's super clunky and has that

that like wobbly lack of perspective correction. And it needs you know, a little bit more I guess smoothness to the transitions. But if you could do that, this would be a game that I think people would still want to play today. We didn't even talk about the craziest thing, which is the first person mode. This is one of the few games to make use of the PlayStation's link cable, which allowed you to connect two systems directly and each play on a different television.

But you could go into first person mode and you could have like a duel against another character, another player, like from your character's viewpoint. I never would. I never would able to do that. No, I never had two PlayStation's in the same place. That's just crazy. But I love that that idea existed. And that would work so well nowadays on, like, Nintendo Switch, hello? Yeah.

Like, you know, like I said, Square wants to remake some of their old IPs on Switch. Well, hey, here's a game that has crazy elements that would work perfectly on Switch, built right in. Please, please, for the love of God, dig up the rights to this, figure out who owns Bushido, now and bring it back. Yep, I'd be all for it. That would be fantastic. Oh, and then there's also, finally, I think the last thing to say about this game is the Chambara mode, which I did not know what that was at the time, but basically this is the equivalent of the continuous quest mode where you fight through like a castle,

a medieval castle against a hundred ninja or a hundred samurai. And you fight them like ten at a time, but they come out and you fight them in waves. And so this is, you know, just based on, you know, Chambara movies, which are just, you know, the meat grinder. Yeah, yeah. Like, you're just slicing your way through enemies. But, you know, the damage that they inflict on you is persistent. So the longer you fight, the harder it becomes. Yeah.

I can't say I spend a lot of time on that mode. No, it was really hard. I never made it even to the end of the first wave. Although, speaking of damage, the other thing about the single player mode on this is, right, so you're going through this castle fighting all these enemies. an interesting thing is that if you so it's not so punishing that you keep your wounds forever

so like if you get wounded in a fight that gets patched up before the next one but it's actually reflected in the model you actually get a bandage like on that section of your body so you can end up with a bandage limbs or head or whatever

there was so much love put into this game yeah but the other thing about it is there's a extra real final boss guess how you unlock him by playing perfectly zero damage yeah you have to get all the way

through the thing never getting hit by anything. I think I did that with a couple of characters. Wow. Man, it's not easy. All right, and finally the last of these games we want to talk about the final lightweight production for SquareSoft was Bushido Blade 2, the direct sequel to Bushido Blade, which changed up things a lot.

And I picked it up very excitedly when it came out and found that I didn't really enjoy it that much. They changed up things in, I don't know, whatever intangible, magic it was about the first game that I loved so much, just wasn't there for this one. Yeah, it just didn't quite come together as well. You know, it had new characters and new weapons. And honestly, actually, I think a little bit more emphasis on switching up weapons between characters and trying different combinations, which is interesting in theory. But yeah, it just didn't, didn't mesh as well for some reason. Yeah, they simplified the controls a lot. The original Bushido Blade had a block button. And for this, they took that out. And you

basically have two attack modes, like high and low, and basically if you attack when someone is attacking you and you're at the right height, then you'll parry. So they took out blocking and just added parrying. But I don't know, like, that didn't work for me as much. And it's really hard for me to put my finger on what it is about Bichita Blade 2 that didn't click for me. But whatever it was, it just didn't, it wasn't there. Yeah, if they remake it, they need to go back to the first one. I will say that there are some. pretty cool things in this game. They added a lot of characters to the mix.

It is a direct sequel story-wise to the first game, which I guess means that it's not canonically, like, who was it, Black Lotus who committed suicide at the end of the first game? He's still around, so I guess it wasn't his story the first time. Yeah, that wasn't the real idea. Yeah, but like, the naive youth that was kind of

the protagonist of the first game kind of becomes this embittered edge lord kid. It was the 90s. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and there are a lot more weapons and a lot more sub-weapons, including one of them is like a frog, and you can throw the frog at people, and it will freak them out and distract them. And you're not actually doing damage with the frog, but you're like causing them to, like, drop their defenses. So you get a quick, quick opportunity for a strike. I've forgotten about that one.

You can also unlock the gun character, Katsi. And also there's like a female equivalent to him, I think. Yeah, that sounds right. And you can play as her. I think you have to unlock a lot of these characters, but there are many, many more ways to play. And I found that Katsi is not nearly as fun to play as as you would think. Like, he can't really do much because he's just a guy with a gun. Yeah, honestly. So if you don't take out someone at a distance, well, that's about it.

Bye. Try to parry them, parry their sword with their gun, but it's not always going to go so well. Yeah, not so great. Yeah. So, yeah, so there was a lot that this game tried to do, but I don't know that it really succeeded, but it did look really nice. It had much nicer graphics and much nicer presentation. I wish, like, this game's aesthetics could be ported back into the first game, because that would have been, that would have been a hell of a game. Yeah, if we could just, like, amalgamate the two and do some updates, come up with something really special.

Yeah, but it seems like lightweight continued to kind of hoe this row for as long as they were around, but every iteration felt further and further away from the magic of Paschito Blade. The next game they published was an early PS2 game I think published by Rockstar called Kengo. And I was really excited about that one because I really thought like this is going to be the game to bring back the Bushito Blade vibe and do it with, you know, cutting edge to PS2 graphics. Like no games will ever look better than PS2.

and it just, it was a total miss. It didn't have, it was much more of like a standard fighting game. Yeah, I never played that. It did not have any of the stuff about it that I liked about Pichito Blade, even though it was ostensibly pretty much the same concept. So kind of a disappointing end to that story. But, you know, at the very least, Bushido Blade exists and it sold really well, it's not, yeah, it's not an expensive game, it's easy to find. So, like, if you have access to PS1, there's no reason not to play it. It would be nice if Sony would release it, or Square Nix would release it on PlayStation Network.

But, you know, the game costs like $10. So, yeah. It's worth playing. Toball number one, I think, also costs about the same. Like, these games have not appreciated it greatly in value. And if we want more disappointing, N's Dream Factory went on to do the bouncer, but I guess we're not talking about that. Let's not. Oh, well.

On the other hand, what's his face? Mizuno from lightweight, went on to create Alpha Dream, like you mentioned, and they make the Mario and Luigi games. Yeah. Totally different games. Yeah. But mostly good. There have been a couple of duds,

but the most recent one was good. Yep. So, yeah, that pretty much wraps it up for this weird little corner of video game history. The time the RPG developer made really unique fighting games. And it was a pretty good little diversion. Now Square, they still make a fighting game, but it's called Dysidia. And it's not really a fighting game. I don't even, like, I don't.

It's a whole different kettle of chocobos. Yes. All those chocobos. Yeah. So anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, Ben, for sharing your wisdom about Square games that are not Final Fantasy. Such as it is. Yeah, so this is another Retronauts micro, which you can find at Retronauts.com on iTunes

and the Podcast One Network or Podcast One app. Also, you can get it directly a week in advance for, future episodes, if you're hearing this, by going to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. $3 a month allows you to listen to each episode a week before it goes public and also without ads, which I

think is a pretty good offer. That's like 50 cents a podcast since we do six a month. So kind of hard to top that. You can find Retronauts at, like I said, retronauts.com on Twitter as Retronauts on Facebook. And I, Jeremy Parrish, am on Twitter

as GameSpite. I also write at retronauts.com because that's what I do. So check it out. Old video games all the time. And what about yourself? And you can find me on Twitter as Kieran with two ends, K-I-R-I-N. I also have a retro blog at Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com. Only one N in that, Kieran.

And if I get the time of right, I'll try to post up some Bushido blade materials that I have around the time this episode goes up. And I guess next time we'll talk about squares, shoot. them ups. I don't know. Maybe not. In any case, we'll talk more about more video games this coming Monday in a full episode and two weeks from now in another biweekly micro. So look forward to it. Thanks. And now an ad from dad All right, save money on car insurance when you bundle, home, and auto with progressive. Can I take these off? All right.

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The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out. of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James

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