Absolute piece of trash. I like the idea of a short action movie romp of a video game, but this just feels bad from start to finish. The combat, which is all the game has to offer outside of incomprehensible cutscenes is so sluggish and unresponsive, and every single encounter (outside of the bullshit final boss) can be beaten with a single move. If one of them doesn't work on a certain type of enemy, just cycle through all the available moves until you find the one that can stunlock that punk in a corner. I was initially charmed by its goofy character designs and awful dialogue, but as the two hours went by it all started feeling a little like I'd been playing it for two weeks. Even for an older game it has some baffling design decisions, and almost feels a little unfinished. I don't recommend this, even as a curiosity. It's bad... BAD-bad.

This is a game I just remembered existed and thought would make for a good stream. I watched a Let's Play of it aaaages ago, but I barely remembered any of it, and anyone I mentioned my consideration to stream this game to was really excited to see me play it. Thankfully, it's very easily acquired for the low low price of 100 yen around here, so it was pretty easy to acquire~. I beat it over the course of a little under two hours in one Twitch stream playing the game on the original hardware.

The Bouncer was toted as a sort of playable movie, and that's more or less how the story plays out. However, the story is something more akin to a cheaply produced action movie than some larger summer blockbuster. The titular bouncers of from a bar called Fate on Dog Street, and a girl they know named Dominique gets kidnapped by mysterious assassins who invade the bar one day. It ends up turning into a quest to save the girl and the world from the evil corporation, and it involves so many unimportant characters and weird twists of logic that it's certainly entertaining, albeit not exactly a great story XP. There are three playable characters, and depending on whom you play and when, the levels/scenes you play can change, but it doesn't exactly do anything to make the story more interesting. It more so just adds some replayability. The English script has been punched up a bit, but it's only really to the purpose of leaning into the campy, one-liner focused humor that the Japanese already has a fair amount of. The sillier English script definitely makes it more entertaining, but it's definitely not something I'd call a "must watch" by any means.

You'd also be much better off watching this game than playing it, because it plays BAD. This is a 3D brawler and Square's first game on the PS2, and it very much continues Square's trend of the PS1 era of more style than substance. The substance here is a very rough 3D brawler with RPG elements, and it can't even get that latter part right.

For starters, there is no way to control the camera or manually target enemies, so you're at the mercy of the arbitrary and bad auto-targeting system to try and attack enemies. Attacking enemies feels terrible because different attacks are mapped to different elements of the PS2's infamous pressure-sensitive buttons gimmick, where a light tap on O will give a different move than a firm press will. In practice, this makes fighting chaotic and confusing because it's actually REALLY hard to differentiate between what will be a firm press or a quick tap when you're in the heat of fighting bad guys. To add one last insult to injury, your fellow bouncers are often fighting alongside you, and while you'll get EXP if you get the last hit on an enemy, you get 0 EXP if one of your allies steals that last hit from you. It makes for a frustrating and not very fun fighting experience, and the only benefits it has are that the game isn't very long and it's also not terribly difficult.

The presentation is notable in that the characters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura (of Kingdom Hearts fame), but other than that it's nothing that special. None of the music is particularly memorable, and the character designs were mostly entertaining on the grounds that they look like a bunch of Kingdom Hearts rejects (which isn't the game's fault, as it came out significantly earlier than that did, but it is most certainly the fact of the matter in 2021 ^^;).


Verdict: Not Recommended. There's a weird multiplayer mode you can do as well if you feel like doing some Ehrgeiz (made by these same devs)-style bad 3D fighting with friends, but there really isn't anything this game offers that's worth putting your time or money into it. It's a much more entertaining game to watch the madness of than play yourself, and I would've felt pretty cheated paying much more than I did for it XP. It's memorable for being weird, sure, but that's damning with faint praise given how little else there is to praise in The Bouncer.