They call it The Bouncer because if you get punched even once you bounce around the screen like Earnest Evans in a tumble dryer.

The Bouncer is one of those "magazine games," in that I never got the chance to play it back in the day and my familiarity was limited only to what I was able to glean from blurry photos and the two or three sentences EGM's editors were willing to write about it. One thing that always stuck with me from preview coverage was The Bouncer's unique visual design, it is both aesthetically and narratively very 2000s Square-Core, but I'm not sure when it sank in that this game was considered a disappointment. It must've been soon after release, because reviews were pretty unkind right out of the gate. I'll get into why I agree with a lot of these criticisms in a bit, but before I do I have to make it clear that I can't hate The Bouncer, because despite its many faults it is also one of the funniest games I've played in a while.

A lot of the humor is owed to the ragdoll physics that apply both to enemies and player characters. A simple tap to the chin will send an enemy into the stratosphere, crashing down a pile of twisted limbs after spending several seconds off screen enjoying non-existence. Most fights play out in very confined spaces where you have to contend with multiple enemies on top of your two AI controlled partners. It is chaotic and often results in bodies flying around the room as if caught in a cyclone. It's hard to be mad at the game sending you all the way back to the title screen on a game over when your death was caused by your character model hitting a rail in just the right way to break the physics engine, causing them to bend into an ouroboros and spin so fast that they look like they're charging up a horizontal spindash, eventually belting across the screen to collide with a wall with enough force to liquify their skull. It's ridiculous. Not even Gang Beasts or Goat Simulator is capable of reaching this level of physical comedy-- in fact they feel comparatively restrained. Truly, this is the power of the Emotion Engine.

Even outside of combat, The Bouncer had me laughing my head off. Sion's run animation when not targeting an enemy looks close to that weird meme walk cosplayers used to do at conventions, just knocking his arms out to the side, legs all bowed. Why does he move like that! I'm pretty sure it was hand animated, so someone had to look at Sion and go "This is the way he moves." The story also operates on the level of absurdity you both want and expect from this era of Square. It's a bit slow in the first half, but really goes places once you reach Mikado's headquarters. Turns out your girlfriend is a robot designed after the antagonist, Dauragon's, dead sister. Your own "dead" sister is also here, and she's a panther now and she's aged ten years?? The game ends with you destroying a satellite that ostensibly would've provided clean energy to the masses, but you know, Dauragon also used it to Independence Day a children's hospital, so it had to go. Fucking what the fuck, man!

As I neared the end, the one thought going through my mind was "I wish I had friends so I could stream this to them." Getting punched at the same time I beat the final boss, causing me to crumble to the floor next to him like Peter Griffin and having that be the frame the whole adventure goes out on is something only I could witness, and it's such a shame I had no one to share that with. By all rights, this should be a 5/5. I loved it. It's such a stupid game. But it's also the video game equivalent of a "so bad it's good" movie. There's actually quite a bit about The Bouncer that's straight up bad.

Despite how comedic it can be, combat actually doesn't feel good. Sion and the other player characters move with all the grace and speed of a cargo ship, and the camera is incredibly uncooperative and has a tendency to zoom in too closely, resulting in a lot of unfair hits as you unwittingly walk into enemy attacks as they reel up off-screen. The rag-dolling also makes it very easy to get juggled, and it does not take a whole lot to chew through your health bar. The second half of the game can get quite punishing, unless you employ a little trick I discovered that trivializes the difficulty: special moves don't require meter and can be fired off by simply holding L1 and tapping the corresponding face button, so there's no penalty for picking a move you like and spamming it. In my case, I found Sion's Torpedo Kick (which causes him to place both hands on the ground and buck like a donkey right into someone's cranium) to be unstoppable as it deals high damage and has basically no refractory period between attacks. I spent probably 40% of the game just rapidly tapping L1+Square and shouting "I'm gonna give ya one of THESE, and one of THESE!" and watching bosses fold in half.

But that also means combat just... isn't engaging. I don't think Square was all that interested in making a game you could play anyway considering how heavy The Bouncer is on cutscenes. It is not hyperbole to say you'll spend more time watching this game than interacting with it, and that says a lot considering how short it is overall. My in-game clock topped out at an hour and fifteen minutes, and I'm pretty sure it continues to tick away while you're in menus (it does at least go up if you idle on the save screen.) If you paid to play at launch, I can see this being a real sore point, but realistically you're going to be playing The Bouncer through emulation in 2023 and so the length is kind of a non-issue. I just wouldn't go in expecting a beat-em-up in the traditional sense. There are no levels, just small preset arenas with gameplay coming in bursts. No destructible environments despite them appearing in pre-release footage, no weapons to pick up... Mechanically speaking, there isn't a whole lot to chew on. I think this makes sense for Square circa 2000, especially given the fact that this was their first game for the PlayStation 2. Playing up the power of the console to create something more akin to controlling a movie rather than a game perfectly tracks.

I mean, this game has honest to god LORE that can only be read on the loading screens, which go by so fast that there's no way to really digest any of it.

The Bouncer is probably a 2/5, but it's my most favorite 2/5. It's not good, but it is good, and considering how short it is, it's pretty easy to recommend. Like, how burned are you really going to be wasting an hour of your life on this?

One year after Racing Lagoon put Livejournal behind the wheel of a Subaru, Square performed another proverbial kick of the monkey through Topman with The Bouncer: a dependable PS1 genre concept basted in Square's signature century-turning style, applying firm-hold hair gel, Hot Topic chokers and tribal-fonted loading screens where they don’t necessarily belong but are nonetheless appreciated for how f#cking c00l and aw3some they are. Like The Matrix, this is 100% the sort of thing that has slingshotted itself round the wormhole of bad taste and come howling back into the 2020s with Evanescencent avengence, a lifer lesson kerranging in the past that sends a machine-head’s message to a future with faith no more. Does for Fighting Force what Racing Lagoon did for Ridge Racer, for better and very much for worse - mechanical function giving over to stylistic form.

Sadly, the buck stops with aesthetic appreciation. The Bouncer can’t muster up anything more interesting than a re-run of Midgar, making this perhaps the first of many times Square would return to FFVII’s well for waters of uninspiration, a cycle of Nomura-headed rebirthing, retreading and reheating of Sector 7 pizza that’s sustained us all the way to 2020’s VII: Remake; but are you all that bothered about playing through one of the best settings in all of sci-fi one more time? Think about how many times we’ve been to Middle Earth and Tatooine and Colony 7 and Deep Space 9 and maybe you can find it in your heart to accept that there should be more stuff set in Midgar, the cyberpunk setting where ponytailed CEOs wield meito-grade katanas… Tempting to live in this world, isn’t it? This push-and-pull between pish-and-pill is at the heart of the game - two wolves within with lip-piercings fighting over whether a dude with jorts and a Gerard Way haircut is cool enough to compensate for the fact you can barely walk him in a straight line without your controller registering a busted input.

Unfortunately for me, the Lawful Gamer within won out. As intimated earlier, New Millennium Square simply couldn’t cut it outside of their usual turn-based fare. Combat is clunky and stinky and sticky and lacking in anything of note to someone who’s played pretty much any other beat em up ever made - each enemy seems to have a weakness to one of your three face buttons, so fights simply devolve into basic 1-in-3 guesswork that leads to your guy headbutting a sentient load-lifter sixteen times in a row, the menacing model “dying” by simply becoming an unresponsive clutter of polygons in the way of you Square-Square-Squaring another Shinra goon.

Fights being sheared into two, three, four or even five different pieces by cutscenes that dole out your little brother (Tetsuya Nomura)’s Final Fantasy VII fanfic feels like an intentional design choice to cut down on the number of times in a row you’ll have to press the Triangle button, but was in truth probably an attempt to showcase how super-duper impressive the PlayStation 2 was in the year 2000. Despite being alive and fully cognisant of the console’s grandeur at the time of its release (I powerfully remember seething with jealousy when someone showed me SSX Tricky at a time when all I had was an N64), I can no longer perceive that element of the game’s appeal so many years after the fact, in much the same way we no longer lose our minds at the transgressive nature of old Seinfeld episodes or the fact our phones have a little camera built into them. Such is the fate of almost every launch window title for a games console…

Woodaba said that games (namely this one) do not have to be good to be great, which I think touches up against what I’d say about The Bouncer - it’s a “theoretical” game, one that exists more powerfully as a cool box art, a collection of short twitvids shared among friends, character names (Sion Barzahd, Dauragon) that can be ironically idolised from a distance but aren’t really all that funny when you’re hearing them in your sixteenth cutscene before fighting your five-hundredth cut-paste enemy soldier. A 2000s artefact to be placed in a glass case; a cautionary tale of Y2K design-hedonism for the youth to heed, lest they too think it’s acceptable to wear two crucifix chains on your jeans.

I got our old PS2 working again, so I decided to pick a couple titles up from a retro games store near me. The guy at the counter told me this was one of his favourite games and said he was excited to know what I thought of it. That’s probably going to be an awkward conversation.

The good first, it’s a damn incredible looking game for its time. It honestly looks better graphically than some early PS3 games, and it’s running at 60 frames a second? Damn the PS2 was a good ass system. The general feel of hitting things is good, and the ragdoll physics are pretty funny. Kicking dudes into groups of other dudes like bowling pins was always fun, and watching your character do a cartwheel and flop around when he dies always made me laugh and softened the blow a bit. Other than that though, this game isn’t very good. Movement is sluggish, made worse by an automatic lock-on that means you can never really control what you’re aiming at. The timings for attacks and combos are very weird and unreliable. You basically have to throw the whole combo before the first hit even lands, so you can’t cancel out of it if it doesn’t connect. But on top of that, this is one of only a handful of games to use the dualshock’s pressure sensitive buttons for some combos and attacks, and I’m not talking some complex Tekken-style inputs here, I mean basic attack combos. They’re hard to pull off correctly at such a fast pace, so fighting is really awkward with you just finnicking around, trying to get the correct inputs and throwing out wrong moves left and right. All of this I found led to a lot of cheap deaths where I’m finnicking around trying to get combos to connect properly, and I just get screwed over because of it. It was especially bad during the boss fights. In addition to that, the game has a leveling system where you get points to spend on your stats, except you only get points for enemies you land the final blow on, so you have cases of your AI partners stealing your kills on you and you not having enough points to keep up with the escalating difficulty curve. A particularly frustrating incident was when I was fighting the first boss Echidna (who, by the way, straight up uses Eddy Gordo animations), and after dying to her again and again and again, I get her health down, about to land the final hit and….Volt kills her. There goes my big bonus.

This isn’t a particularly good game, but if nothing else, between the hilarious ragdoll physics and that incomprehensible, out of left field Nomura writing, I was laughing for much of the time. And it’s short. Even with all the trial and error and frustration, I beat the campaign with Sion in like a night.

THE BOUNCER

so like the gameplay is probably a 5 or 6/10 but the style and presentation have this immaculate amount of charm and style that outclasses even other squaresoft games at the time (minus racing lagoon). i love the over-the-top action and the goddamn loading screens with their gradients and insane lore dumps viewable in at most 10 seconds. there’s a lot more depth here as shown by the fuckin entire ass art and lore book they made for the game. still waiting for that to get translated. even then this stuff isn’t what carries the whole game for me, the gameplay is pretty solid. yeah it’s bs when your teammate steals you kill and shit but i just have a good time with its ragdoll-juggling pressure-sensitive-button-pressing action. this is like THE squaresoft game for me with how it conveys its ideas through its artstyle, 2000s nomura ass characters, and bangin eguchi tunes. this is a squaresoft game to the end.

A hugely endearing jank-fest from the days when the biggest companies in the business could afford to put major weight behind strange, experimental curios. An awful factory level at the mid-point drags it down, but otherwise, this is a riot. At just two or three hours long, there's no reason not to just sit down and give this thing a go.

I genuinely think a sequel would be an incredible time if they worked around some of the more awkward bits of design here. Unfortunately, the absurd cost of AAA development means that throwing the equivalent weight behind a sequel is a practical impossibility, which is just yet more reason to dismantle the entire games industry and start over from scratch.

It's also one of the most aesthetically pleasing games ever made and I'm not even remotely kidding. Possibly my favourite menus...ever????

Games don't have to be good to be great.

Part of my 'unofficial Final Fantasy' canon. Like some kind of bastard love child between Tekken and FFX, The Bouncer is a techno-infused take on the beat 'em up genre through a distinctly Y2K era SquareSoft lens. Characters with spiky haircuts and nonsensical outfits fight their way through retro-futuristic locales, set to a backdrop of slick electric guitars and techno rock.

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for mistaking The Bouncer for a new entry in the Final Fantasy series, as they share so much aesthetic makeup with each other that they may as well be related, thanks in part due to Nomura's heavy involvement in both titles. It also feels similarly well produced with an attention to graphical fidelity and a gorgeous all round presentation.

In essence then, The Bouncer is basically a beautifully rendered, feature length Final Fantasy cutscene that's occasionally injected with short and sweet bursts of arcade beat 'em up action, which play out like a simple version of Streets of Rage in the Tekken engine. These sections are fun enough, thanks mostly to the hilarious ragdoll physics which lets you launch enemies into the air and send them hurtling in to one another, but all too brief and unfortunately don't offer much in the way of depth or variety. With a focus so clearly placed on its story and presentation above deep gameplay or mechanics, you often feel like you're spending more time watching than playing- but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary,The Bouncer takes some interesting creative risks to stand out from the crowd and in hindsight could be considered one of the first truly cinematic movie games.

Clocking in at around only 2 hours, the game is easily beatable in one sitting but offers some decent replay value, as it can be played from three different perspectives with unlockable characters and features branching paths, reframing certain events within the story.

Harshly judged at release for not living up to sky high expectations (being Squares first release on the new console), The Bouncer is more than the sum of its parts and well worth revisiting for those looking to indulge in some mindless fun and early PS2 aesthetic kino, if nothing else. And boy does it deliver on that.

The Bouncer.

An absolute oddity of the early-PS2 era. Perhaps one of the most obvious tech demos a company has ever released. Completely half-baked on all fronts in service of showcasing Square doing a real-time combat system where the character models no longer have fused fingers and you're meant to be excited by both of those prospects. A beat-'em-up from an alternate universe where combos don't exist. Vertically-stretched Sora from Kingdom Hearts is here to rescue his girlfriend, Robo-Kairi, from the evil clutches of blonde Sephiroth. Marketing boasting seven to eight hours of gameplay to complete, making this the greatest lie Square has ever told.

The Bouncer is fascinating. I don't think anything could be described as a fever dream more than this. It feels like something that dropped out of another reality where games are designed for people who have shit to do later. Barely two-minute combat vignettes with lengthy save prompts bookend barely two-minute cutscenes. You'll be let out of watching a video to beat up three guys who go down in about three hits each and then you get to save your game and level up. Sometimes the levels just start going and never fucking stop, with the sequence where you have to escort Dominique past a bunch of robots who never ragdoll taking an inordinate amount of time relative to every other encounter. It masterfully embodies the feeling of beating a game when you were staying home sick from school and trying to remember what happened after you started feeling better.

Now, sure, the game is shit. The combat mechanics are playing catch-up to 2D games that came out a decade before it, the story is insipid, the music is complete garbage (save for the English credits theme done by Shanice, my god), people on original hardware are going to be spending more time watching loading screens than cutscenes. But it's important to make the distinction that not every shitty game is a bad game, and not every bad game is a shitty game. The Bouncer is shitty, but it's so entertaining in its ridiculousness that it loops back around to being fun. Why is there a man made entirely out of tribal tattoos? Why does Volt have steel demon horns? Why does the science-fiction microwave energy satellite make the love interest robot girl overclock and beat the shit out of five cyborg-men with stretchy arms? Who gives a shit! This is The Bouncer, and The Bouncer just goes. Don't waste your time or its time asking questions. Just go.

I think if this tried going on for like five more minutes than it did, I would have started hating it, but the entire game is over and done with in the span of an hour and a half. Most movies are longer than this, and most of them aren't audacious enough to try soft-launching a new franchise that immediately falls on its face so hard that all of the Nomura designs present need to be harvested for other, more successful projects for the next decade after its release. The Bouncer is ephemera, like a poster, or an internet advert. It's as captivating as it was irrelevant on the day that it released.

Volt should have been the main character.

The Bouncer.

i wish tetsuya nomura still designed 'em like this. the bouncer is a goofy, boggling little oddity from square right before everything starting turning grey. its gameplay is at best flawed and amusing, at worst mind-numbingly repetitive. the story is absurd in such an entertaining way i almost recommend you play it for the ride alone. it accomplishes essentially nothing it set out to do while managing to be less enjoyable than the games it clearly owes itself to, namely ehrgeiz, but god dammit, the bouncer is stupid, corny fun. stranger of paradise is the closest another square game has gotten to feeling anything like this and i'm glad this game exists in the weird little pocket dimension it does.

This game is absolutely hilarious.

Whenever I think of ragdoll physics The Bouncer is always the first game that comes to my mind, because god is it stupid in this game. Bodies fly everwhere and constantly interrupt action elsewhere along with potentially colliding with other ragdolling hitboxes resulting in extended combos and massive damage. Then you got the dumb story mode with voice actors chewing the scenary constantly with Mugetsu and Dauragon taking the cake.

The Multiplayer is the high point though, along with the three player characters you normally take through the story mode you also get access to playing as the boss characters. That's right baby, FOUR DAURAGONS. And all of them are busted as shit with none of their moves nerfed from when the CPU used them. MP was always fun until everyone figured out how stupid the two coat Dauragons' backflip attack was and just spammed it in neutral, then the game was over.

The pressure-sensitive buttons used to do different attacks takes a lot of getting used to, it's not great and I hope your PS2 controller is in decent condition when playing this game.

This game's worst components are probably the scaling on the enemies/bosses for story mode. If you attempt to spread out your usage of the three main characters you'll quickly find the boss characters spiraling out of control with their stat gains without any of your characters being able to compete. It's an absolute must to just stick with one character through a playthrough(or not spend XP at all on moves/stats, but that's lame) to save yourself a massive headache later when you try to fight the three phase Dauragon that begins appearing at the third playthrough. I found that out the hard way.

The other bad one at least during a fresh playthrough is the escort mission where you need to lead your girl buddy to the end without her getting double axe handle smashed by a robot.

This game ain't amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but in terms of entertaining me the player it does a good job.