CB Chara Wars is an Action game, developed by Almanic Corp. and published by Banpresto, which was released in Japan in 1992.
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This is a game I actually learned of via a Twitter account I follow that posts old Japanese video game commercials. This is a licensed tie in for an OVA series from around the same time, CB Chara Go Nagai World (with the “CB” being read “chibi”), and the footage from that used in the commercial was eye catching to say the least. It looked like a fun enough game from the brief amount of footage I looked up of it, and while it wasn’t a super common game online, it was thankfully one that I was able to score for cheap, at least. It took me a bit over 5 hours to complete the game on original hardware with extensive use of a guide video to show me where to go next.
The story is original from the OVAs, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s a very silly super-crossover of Go Nagai franchises nonetheless. You (the heroes, Devilman and Mazinger Z) are informed that laughter has suddenly disappeared from the world, and everyone is going mad (quite literally) as a result! This can only be due to the sudden vanishing of the mysterious power known as “Gag”, and it’s your job to get it back and bring peace and laughter back to the world! It’s a story as unserious as it is silly, and that’s all it really needs to be. It’s a fine enough reason as any to get a bunch of Go Nagai created characters interacting and being weird with each other, and it does a perfectly fine job at that.
The mechanics, on the other hand, do something significantly less than a perfectly fine job of anything. They’re so borked, frankly, that it’s difficult to even pick a place to start talking about them, but I suppose starting with the overall gameplay design is a good a place as any. The game is an action/adventure game, and a sort of Mystical Ninja (Ganbare Goemon) clone of sorts, with beat’em up-style 3D-ish sections intermixed with more traditional 2D side-scrolling sections. There is virtually no signposting of any kind, which is unfortunate (especially in the increasingly massive and maze-like later half of the game), but not unheard of for the time. Sure, it was becoming much rarer on the Super Famicom to have a game like that compared to how common they were on the Famicom, but it’s hardly an inexcusable design decision for the time (despite how vexing that kind of thing can be either way).
The big thing that makes this so much worse of a problem than it already is, however, is that the game controls terribly. Movement is very stiff, and having an unused face button while nonetheless requiring a double-tap to run is something I’m quite famously not a fan of. On top of that, the delay on your inputs is very noticeable, particularly for your attacks. You have a punch button and a kick button (with the jump button being only adjacent to the punch button, making jump kicking very awkward), and the delay for the punch is bad, but the delay for the kick is nearly twice as long as that. This makes the at times quite tricky platforming very annoying and awkward, sure, but it also makes combat utterly miserable.
Enemies are very fast and are very tanky. They can also nuke your HP down VERY quickly, and you get staggered almost immediately from virtually all attacks, which means you’re usually taking three hits before you actually get any invincibility frames. The game has a real problem with luxury animations on your already terribly delayed punching, kicking, and ducking, but just how long the animations are for when you toddle around after taking damage make already frustrating and unsatisfying combat a really miserable slog.
All isn’t completely lost, however, as this game has vaguely River City Ransom-like stat upgrades you can acquire by using consumables you pick up throughout the game. Even if, in an interesting albeit somewhat annoying twist (given how awful combat feels even when you’re winning), bosses are actually immune to your attack upgrades and take just as many hits to kill no matter how much power you have, grinding up some stats can make normal enemies far less of a burden, at the very least.
However, of course, this can’t be anything simple or fun. You, the player character, actually can’t carry any money. Instead, the game has a minion system, where killing a certain special type of enemy will recruit them as one of your minions. You can then send them as a gofer to go buy you an upgrade or healing item, or you can send them on a part time job to go earn some money to buy yourself upgrades at shops. There are various types of minions, with different ones having different multipliers on how much money they earn as well as different amounts of starting cash, but not much of that matters given that their main mechanic is waiting for them to come back.
Your minions won’t stay bossed around by you forever, and unless you’re blowing a lot of cash on giving them food to keep them happy, they’ll buzz off after a job or two. You actually have no wallet yourself, so that’s their cash you’re blowing, and there isn’t really a great way to keep your minions both useful and happy, so the best strategy I found was just using them until they left, and then going to one of their spawn points to pick up more minions. Shops and minions get increasingly hard to find and access as the game goes on, though, and my winning strategy was just to grind up 20+ kick power (it’s the most common kind of attack upgrade vs. punch power ups which I found to be much rarer) and 24+ defense power (enough that even the final boss will only be doing 1 pip of damage at a time) and some 18-ish max HP right at the start of the game. However, as mentioned earlier, all you can do while they’re gone is just wait for them to get back. I reckon I spent some 2 hours doing almost nothing right in the start of the game simply getting strong enough to take on the rest of the game, and with how tough the challenges that followed actually turned out to be, I was happy I took the time to do it!
This brings me to frankly the most difficult to excuse part of the whole game’s design. While the game mercifully has infinite lives & continues, and dying just brings you back to the start of the room you’re currently at, this game isn’t particularly short. This is a game that has a ton of grinding for stats, a fair bit of difficult/annoying platforming, and a lot of wandering around totally lost looking for where to go next if you’re not using a guide (all while trudging through the dreadful controls and combat). Keep in mind that it took me over 5 hours to beat this game even WITH using a guide on where to go next at every given opportunity, and I’m far from a novice at action games or platformers. Despite all of this, this game lacks any way to actually continue your progress after turning the console off. There is no save system, no passwords, no nothing. You beat this game in one sitting, or you don’t beat it at all. Even with how bad everything else is, this is some incredible insult to injury, as it would’ve made playing this even back in the day an awful chore, and it deserves complaining about now just as it would’ve back then.
Aesthetically, at least, the game is up to the standards of what I’ve come to expect from licensed early SFC games. The graphics are very nice realizations of the chibi characters they’re meant to be. Even as someone only really familiar with the super robot connected side of Go Nagai’s work, it was still always fun seeing just how a new character would be portrayed. Sure, there aren’t many animation frames, and those which are here are sometimes unwanted (like the luxury frames as you wind up a punch or a kick), but the sprites and environments look very nice for the time, and they still hold up well now. The music is also fairly good. There’s nothing super special to write home about, granted, but it fits the action well and it was never annoying to listen to, even in my hours standing around the first area waiting for my gofers to get back.
Verdict: Not recommended. If you hadn’t predicted what the verdict of this review would be by the end of it here, I have done a very poor job of explaining just how awful it so often is to engage with this game’s systems ^^;. This is a game I only really beat out of a feeling of obligation given that I went through the trouble to buy it physically, but the only real fun came from managing to overcome the BS it so often throws at you. I’d struggle to recommend this to even the biggest Go Nagai fan, as even then, I’d say it’s much more worth your time to just watch a longplay on youtube rather than actually subject yourself to the game itself.
The story is original from the OVAs, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s a very silly super-crossover of Go Nagai franchises nonetheless. You (the heroes, Devilman and Mazinger Z) are informed that laughter has suddenly disappeared from the world, and everyone is going mad (quite literally) as a result! This can only be due to the sudden vanishing of the mysterious power known as “Gag”, and it’s your job to get it back and bring peace and laughter back to the world! It’s a story as unserious as it is silly, and that’s all it really needs to be. It’s a fine enough reason as any to get a bunch of Go Nagai created characters interacting and being weird with each other, and it does a perfectly fine job at that.
The mechanics, on the other hand, do something significantly less than a perfectly fine job of anything. They’re so borked, frankly, that it’s difficult to even pick a place to start talking about them, but I suppose starting with the overall gameplay design is a good a place as any. The game is an action/adventure game, and a sort of Mystical Ninja (Ganbare Goemon) clone of sorts, with beat’em up-style 3D-ish sections intermixed with more traditional 2D side-scrolling sections. There is virtually no signposting of any kind, which is unfortunate (especially in the increasingly massive and maze-like later half of the game), but not unheard of for the time. Sure, it was becoming much rarer on the Super Famicom to have a game like that compared to how common they were on the Famicom, but it’s hardly an inexcusable design decision for the time (despite how vexing that kind of thing can be either way).
The big thing that makes this so much worse of a problem than it already is, however, is that the game controls terribly. Movement is very stiff, and having an unused face button while nonetheless requiring a double-tap to run is something I’m quite famously not a fan of. On top of that, the delay on your inputs is very noticeable, particularly for your attacks. You have a punch button and a kick button (with the jump button being only adjacent to the punch button, making jump kicking very awkward), and the delay for the punch is bad, but the delay for the kick is nearly twice as long as that. This makes the at times quite tricky platforming very annoying and awkward, sure, but it also makes combat utterly miserable.
Enemies are very fast and are very tanky. They can also nuke your HP down VERY quickly, and you get staggered almost immediately from virtually all attacks, which means you’re usually taking three hits before you actually get any invincibility frames. The game has a real problem with luxury animations on your already terribly delayed punching, kicking, and ducking, but just how long the animations are for when you toddle around after taking damage make already frustrating and unsatisfying combat a really miserable slog.
All isn’t completely lost, however, as this game has vaguely River City Ransom-like stat upgrades you can acquire by using consumables you pick up throughout the game. Even if, in an interesting albeit somewhat annoying twist (given how awful combat feels even when you’re winning), bosses are actually immune to your attack upgrades and take just as many hits to kill no matter how much power you have, grinding up some stats can make normal enemies far less of a burden, at the very least.
However, of course, this can’t be anything simple or fun. You, the player character, actually can’t carry any money. Instead, the game has a minion system, where killing a certain special type of enemy will recruit them as one of your minions. You can then send them as a gofer to go buy you an upgrade or healing item, or you can send them on a part time job to go earn some money to buy yourself upgrades at shops. There are various types of minions, with different ones having different multipliers on how much money they earn as well as different amounts of starting cash, but not much of that matters given that their main mechanic is waiting for them to come back.
Your minions won’t stay bossed around by you forever, and unless you’re blowing a lot of cash on giving them food to keep them happy, they’ll buzz off after a job or two. You actually have no wallet yourself, so that’s their cash you’re blowing, and there isn’t really a great way to keep your minions both useful and happy, so the best strategy I found was just using them until they left, and then going to one of their spawn points to pick up more minions. Shops and minions get increasingly hard to find and access as the game goes on, though, and my winning strategy was just to grind up 20+ kick power (it’s the most common kind of attack upgrade vs. punch power ups which I found to be much rarer) and 24+ defense power (enough that even the final boss will only be doing 1 pip of damage at a time) and some 18-ish max HP right at the start of the game. However, as mentioned earlier, all you can do while they’re gone is just wait for them to get back. I reckon I spent some 2 hours doing almost nothing right in the start of the game simply getting strong enough to take on the rest of the game, and with how tough the challenges that followed actually turned out to be, I was happy I took the time to do it!
This brings me to frankly the most difficult to excuse part of the whole game’s design. While the game mercifully has infinite lives & continues, and dying just brings you back to the start of the room you’re currently at, this game isn’t particularly short. This is a game that has a ton of grinding for stats, a fair bit of difficult/annoying platforming, and a lot of wandering around totally lost looking for where to go next if you’re not using a guide (all while trudging through the dreadful controls and combat). Keep in mind that it took me over 5 hours to beat this game even WITH using a guide on where to go next at every given opportunity, and I’m far from a novice at action games or platformers. Despite all of this, this game lacks any way to actually continue your progress after turning the console off. There is no save system, no passwords, no nothing. You beat this game in one sitting, or you don’t beat it at all. Even with how bad everything else is, this is some incredible insult to injury, as it would’ve made playing this even back in the day an awful chore, and it deserves complaining about now just as it would’ve back then.
Aesthetically, at least, the game is up to the standards of what I’ve come to expect from licensed early SFC games. The graphics are very nice realizations of the chibi characters they’re meant to be. Even as someone only really familiar with the super robot connected side of Go Nagai’s work, it was still always fun seeing just how a new character would be portrayed. Sure, there aren’t many animation frames, and those which are here are sometimes unwanted (like the luxury frames as you wind up a punch or a kick), but the sprites and environments look very nice for the time, and they still hold up well now. The music is also fairly good. There’s nothing super special to write home about, granted, but it fits the action well and it was never annoying to listen to, even in my hours standing around the first area waiting for my gofers to get back.
Verdict: Not recommended. If you hadn’t predicted what the verdict of this review would be by the end of it here, I have done a very poor job of explaining just how awful it so often is to engage with this game’s systems ^^;. This is a game I only really beat out of a feeling of obligation given that I went through the trouble to buy it physically, but the only real fun came from managing to overcome the BS it so often throws at you. I’d struggle to recommend this to even the biggest Go Nagai fan, as even then, I’d say it’s much more worth your time to just watch a longplay on youtube rather than actually subject yourself to the game itself.