Wednesday, 1 December 2010

Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou - Super Famicom 1995 (Winds/Virgin Interactive)

This is an odd turn on the conventional beat em up . In the futuristic year of......the 21st century , after World War III , a city , named (a bit optimisticaly) Zeus Heaven Magic City is under attack of the villanous organisation Bath.......whose goal is to.........well.......do stuff .


BAD STUFF !!!






So the wise elders of Zeus devise a plan : create a trio of human robot (cyborg anyone ?) abominations , send them out alone while being ridiculously outnumbered , and hope for the best .






The three characters you fight for is Madame , Tres Bien and the default beat em up character , Bonjour ,a Haggar-esque oaf . They don't seem to vary in strength all that much , aside from one crucial little aspect that we'll talk about later .


The game right away puts you up against an array of bizzare enemies . Floating robot heads , a living pocketknife punk who dies by attacking you ,some random thug guy , scantily clad ladies with metalic claws , a small guy with a box for a head and a light bulb that you'll be sorry you killed , walking landmimes , and then there's....Oh Damn .


No , that realy is his name . A walking mentaly handicaped person who makes curent Ariel Sharon seem like Raffael Nadal in comparison , he has no attacks , walks around so slowly that he has no actual character animation and.....drools . The only thing he can do to you is exploding when he dies . Oh and he also yells "Die" every time you hit them .


Now the bosses are a fairly bizzare lot , stemming from a woman's face in a giant jar on mechanic legs , to a flying man wasp that injects you with it's.....thingy and the apropriately named Gun Jerk , the top hat wearing , shirt not wearing magician who has a tie that can punch you and who can turn you into one of the enemies for a short while . Which is not so bad.....unless you become Oh Damn . Damn .


During this battle you might have thought it was kind of sad for how short a period you actualy get to stay transformed . Well guess what , there is a cheat which allows you to play through the game as one of these enemies all the time . However they have one major limitation : they cannot pick up ingredients .


This is that one major difference between this game and most (read : ALL) beat em ups . Your health does not get replendished after each level . Normaly this would be the cause of rage of many a gaming nerd out there , and surely justified . But when you defeat an enemy , they drop an ingredient . Picking it up will add it to your inventory and after the end of each stage you get to face



a character who looks like he wandered off from Toriko .

Anyways chose two incredients and the cheff will mix then up into a full fledged meal in a matter of seconds (read : two) . You then proceed to eat your designed dish (made harder to fine tune without being able to read Japanese) . The resulted HP bonus can range from + 50 to - 999 .

Yeah......

The one major setback of this game is the final boss .


This little fucker has the annoying tendency to turn into a blue robot that can suck you into him , turn into a singing bird cage and proceed to do a pile on with you as the one who is being piled , with him as the one who is on .

There is a special move to avoid getting sucked in , but I usualy just go to as far away from his as possible then jump into his head . That doesn't hurt you and knocks you back , temporarily avoiding his suction . Simply repeat the process until he stops .

The other major setback of this boss is the form where he becomes a mini rolling ball of fire that's too low to actualy kick before it fires up while speeding towards you . I had to literaly let myself get killed and switch to Madame , given her jump kick actual reaches much lower .

Stil I at least got to see her spin around and expose her almost naked ass in the end credits.....an act she can do even regularly in the game , as part of a series of poses that each main character does . These literaly have no use other then just looking pretty (well in Madame's case anyway) .

In conclusion , the game is hard , yet is certainly inovative and fresh and it's stock of weirdness is enough to ensure you will not get bored halfway through , like in other beat em ups .

As such I rate this game with 4 out of 5 French Greetings .

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