In my ongoing quest to clear through the remaining WiiWare games I’ve got on my Japanese Wii while I’ve still got it hooked up, this was the next thing on the list. This is a game I firmly recall hearing from many places was easily one of the best games on the WiiWare store regardless of region, and although it’s one I recall putting like half an hour into many years back, I didn’t remember much of my time with it. On top of all that, it’s also interestingly one of Grezzo’s first games, the studio made by the guy responsible for the Mana series, so this seemed like a fitting thing to play this year after all of the Mana games I’ve played earlier in the year (regardless of how much I didn’t enjoy them XD). It took me around 4.5 hours to play through the game to the credits on real hardware.

Our story follows our main character, who can either be a Mii of your choosing or the default in-game model named “Yuu.” On a quest to prove your worth as a warrior, you come to a land that is explicitly stated to be a world “like feudal Japan, but also like the more distant past as well as the future”. This very silly and irreverent attitude carries on throughout the game, and it follows you all the way through your quest as you’re quickly wrapped up in helping Princess Tomoe to squash a rebellion in the country (by a character whose name is literally the word for rebellion X3). It’s a story that’s exactly as serious as it means to be, which is to say not at all, and it’s delightful. A very funny and silly story that sets the stage for our ridiculous action very well, and I had a very fun time reading through it all~.

That ridiculous action is stage-based and almost feels like a Wonderful 101 predecessor. You start with yourself and a buddy, that buddy lending you their weapon. You then go around the stage thwacking other baddies to get them into your increasingly long conga line of dudes, and any stronger ones with weapons can have their weapons borrowed just like you can from your main buddy. There are three weapon types, swords, hammers, and lances, and among the various types of them, they have different combos on top of each weapon type having its own line attack (which is activated by swinging the Wiimote). However, not all is so easy, as your enemies can thwack the guys following you and steal them right back! Thankfully for both you and them, though, the head of a line is only truly vulnerable when their line is completely destroyed, so you’ve gotta be getting thrashed to actually die.

The much easier way to game over is by failing your present mission, which will usually be the result of the buddy you gotta protect dying. There are 40 stages between you and the credits, with more generic randomized missions filling the spaces between the story missions you hit at every multiple of five. During those randomized missions, you can recruit procedurally generated extra buddies as well as get accessories to bring into battle to power up your stats and line attacks.

Your buddies even have personalities and will dislike some mission types and like others. Doing missions they like will get them bonus stats after battle, but doing too many ones they dislike can actually make them leave your group forever! Given that you can’t re-pick a buddy after you’ve done it, and you only see the mission types after you pick them, there may be times you need to pick a harder mission even to save the buddy you’ve got with you so you don’t risk losing them forever. On top of all of that, the procedurally generated non-story named bad guys you fight can even form rivalries with you, slowly getting stronger as you encounter them more and more. Eventually you can have “showdown” mission types appear, and if you win against them, that super powerful enemy will now be a buddy of yours!

There are some slight drawbacks here and there. Some mission types are much harder than others, and given that your buddy is also your weapon, an unwise choice of buddy can make your next mission much harder if it turns out their weapon type is a bad match for the map you’re dumped into. There also aren’t too many maps in the game, with the same handful of 4 or 5 story maps being reused over and over with some slight variations in environmental objects. That said, it’s hard to see the lack of variety as much of a problem given how quick and breezy the missions are. There’s even a high score table in the game that keeps track of your highest rank reached, as though there are save points every 5 stages in the main story, you can keep going in the post-game and play as many of those non-story missions in a row as you possibly can for the highest score you can muster! All in all, it’s a really cool gameplay loop, and it’s super cool to have what’s basically an action rogue-lite (though we wouldn’t’ve called it that back then) on the Wii for such a cheap price digitally.

The presentation of the game is very well done too. The music has some really fun and rockin’ tracks, with the boss themes being some of my particular favorites. The graphics are also simple but very clever in how well they get emotion out of the characters they’re using. Because Yuu, the main character, can also be a Mii, this means that basically everyone in the game is animating and emoting with Mii-like proportions, and it’s remarkable just how much variety they have in these despite the limited pieces they’re working with. The story characters are super fun and expressive, but the degree to which Grezzo makes the Mii-like characters emote makes it no surprise that Nintendo tapped them for projects like 3DS Streetpass games or the more recent Miitopia, as they’ve shown an incredible aptitude for it for quite some time.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it takes a bit of getting used to the controls and the best practices in how to play, this is a super fun game! It absolutely deserves its reputation as one of the best games on WiiWare, as its gameplay loop expertly captures the most of what was possible with the relatively small file sizes you were restricted to for that system. If you’re a fan of action-based rogue-lites, this will certainly be a major pain in the butt to track down (let alone play if you don’t know Japanese ^^;) these days, but if you’re willing to go through the effort, you’ve got a super fun time waiting here for you~.

An enjoyable oddity from Grezzo, the team that would shortly thereafter become Nintendo’s Zelda babies for the foreseeable future. Arcadey arena fighter where you build a chain of defeated enemies behind you that you can swing around and attack with using less-than-satisfying motion controls. Tons of charm and polish, and the game opens up quickly with new characters to join your party and new abilities along with them.

A surprising Nintendo published WiiWare gem with an English fan translation.