I, unapologetically, like this game.

Its story is laughable, its combat is a tad nebulous, its ragdoll physics are hysterical and kind of awful, its difficulty can get a bit frustrating, it REEKS of early 2000's punk edge...

But, I like this game. I like Sion, Volt, and Kou, their dumb shinannigans, and their quest to save a kidnapped girl. I like the cheesy, corny writing that's trying WAY too hard to be a relatively serious action movie filled with cliches. I like how enemies get tossed around like wet towels or slide down the stairs in the funniest ways. I like how the game can be relatively difficult as the game goes along.

I also like that the game has multiple different paths and endings, depending on what character you played as at what time, not necessarily changing the main beats, but definitely re-writing certain scenes or certain details, or including extra lore tied to the character being played. I like that story completion unlocks characters in Vs./Survival mode. I like that upgrading your character through the story will raise the characters rank, which will also affect difficulty of the game as well as upgrade Vs./Survival versions of the characters in the game.

I played and beat this game so much I've seen every cutscene and varient and I've also unlocked almost every character, including the True Final Boss with the devestaing 10 hit special attack that obliterated anyone caught in it. Survival mode is the mode I haven't beaten yet, which has the last "character" to unlock.

If you're looking for a really good beat-em-up, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a good RPG, look elsewhere. If you want to check out an interesting experiment of an experience done by Squaresoft, you could do worse. Even if you don't like it, I'm sure watching Sion slide down the stairs after being sent flying with an uppercut would give you more than enough entertainment for an afternoon or two. Best played with a like minded friend, either through couch Vs. or taking turns in the story.

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.

This game is kinda rubbish. It feels like someone trying to recall Final Fantasy VII while drunk, and also while never having played Final Fantasy VII.

That said it's a triumph of maximalist late 90s/early 00s style. It's basically the last great psx game, and it's not even on the psx. It's as if someone had made a game out of the tribal-tattoo-design gba, but with more FMV.

Also, the combat is less bad than people say. Like it's STILL fairly bad, but I've played worse.

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.

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.

Honestly, I enjoyed this. More than I thought I would. Not that I had thought of anything bad before playing it, I don't do that.
Astonishing graphics for a PS2 game, character models, environment, and lightning, it's all great and polished. But the thing is, it's not optimal enough to get a good look at, mostly with the level structure being composed of like two 3-4 enemies to beat up in a very enclosed area. Except for two levels I think, where you have more freedom and thus are allowed to actually pay attention to the environment. Oh and also, very bad fixed camera angles, I remember in that one level where you have to quickly escape from something, it was horrendous because the sudden change of angle can screw you pretty badly into finding your way. I saw people complaining about this in the BTA phases, well I think it's not too bad if you know what you're doing. Overall, the battle system is alright, and as for the BTA definition... yeah that's not it, because everything is so goddamn slow. I accidentally discovered this game has a chain system. What's the point of adding that if the only occurrence you going to trigger it, is when you simultaneously beat two enemies who had as if by chance the same amount of low HP. Also, the way robots work is pretty stupid. These enemies don't work the same way humans or organic beings work. When you hit humans and co., they ragdoll, and they get i-frames while being in this state, meaning you cannot chain them. This isn't the case for robots. Every time you hit them, they just get stunlocked, allowing you to chain them. I'm nitpicking, of course, I don't mind this, this is just funny to me how you can cheese them.
One thing I didn't like is how the game doesn't give any incentive to rotate between the three characters. Why would I pick this guy when I can grind my current character, and experience his full moveset. When you're in midgame, there is no point in picking another character than the one you've been constantly picking, because that character will be the most fun to play. Because yeah, this game has a BP system, you beat up someone, you get BP, and you enhance a character. This is also tied to another gripe I have with the game. YOU have to beat your enemies to get the BP, YOU and YOU alone, not your CPU-controlled comrades, the player has to deal the finishing blow to get the BP.

Good tracks, if only they were just not on loop. I loved the ending song.
Good voice acting for both English and Japanese, but not so groundbreaking, as some lines delivery was really bad.

Regarding the story... that was ass. Have you played Kingdom Hearts Chain Of Memories ? No, because I think that in its structure, this is a worse iteration of KHCoM's storyline, really. Think about KHCoM's story, being mixed up with the level of stupidity of Stranger of Paradise FF Origins's narration. (Don't make me say what I didn't say, SOPFFO, the story is very good, it's only a disservice by its very poor narration.)

We got Sion Bazhard, supposedly the main character, (No he does NOT look like Sora in the slightest. Stop with that nonsense...) working in a bar with his friends, Volt Krueger, Kou Leifoh (Him however, nearly got the same face as Zell from FFVIII...) and Dominique Cross. Dominique gets kidnapped, and it's up to our Bouncers to rescue her. They quickly understand that the kidnapping of Dominique fuels the dark designs of the main antagonist, Dauragon C. Mikado, leader of the Mikado group. This is how I would summarize this game's pitch. Like I said, the story is a convoluted hot mess. Spoilers ahead.
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Dauragon was mad at that one hospital that couldn't lodge her sick sister, Dominique. She died. He brought her back to life. He then built a satellite to destroy the hospital that rejected her sister. For some reason, even though Dauragon was using Dominique to satisfy his desires, he also ceased to treat her like a human. That was the backstory of the main villain! Great...
So then back to our party, we beat up echidna who's uh... yeah. Then some irrelevant stuff happens, and our sensei dies but who cares, we find Dominique and we try to escape. One thing: The main reason Sion is so stubborn to save Dominique is because he already lost someone in the past, a girl named Kaldea. He doesn't want to lose someone else. Classic but neat plot point... or not. Sion and co. come across Kaldea, turns out she didn't die, and she willfully stayed by Dauragon's side because he felt lonely. And oh my god, the real KINO, the real peak fiction is still to come. Dauragon kills Kaldea, like, seconds after her revelation, Sion gets mad, and he literally KILLS Dauragon. Oh my god, he's so bouncy. I thought he would like to try to show empathy towards Dauragon, because he knows what it means to be alone, and I think this is why Dauragon no longer considers Dominique as a human, he's been too much alone. No fuck that shit about character interaction right, Sion kills the bad guy, gets the bitches, and that's the end. No wait, I almost forgot the best dialog ever uttered in all of Square Enix's history. (Don't remember what they said exactly, but that would be something along those lines)
Dominique: "I had a really bad dream, where I killed all these people. SIon, was it real"
(I'm assuming she is talking about the moment when Dauragon blew up that hospital, else I don't know what crack this girl's been smoking)
Sion : "It was not real, and you'll never have any bad dreams again, I promise."

Wow. Speechless. I don't know if the party actually knows Dauragon killed like, thousands of innocent, probably disabled people, and if they do know this, especially Sion, then what the fuck are you doing man. And it just keeps getting funnier, because they [Sion and Domi] say these lines of dialog AGAIN. With Sion iterating the same thing as before. Not sure what the writers were onto about that. Injured and disabled people are the source of all catastrophes in the world...?
Moreover, the hospital explosion scene was an FMV, and it was, in my opinion the best in the game. Yeah. So we get this in FMV, but not Kaldea's death or something? Absolute cinema if you ask me. No notes.

I also thought Sion would forget about Kaldea, but not exactly because until the very end of the game, he slips a little line: "Rest in peace, Kaldea" and that's it. My man already mourned. Now do you see why I say that this is a bad iteration of KHCoM story? Sion and Dominique are Sora and Namine. (No their chara design does not look alike either...) Their whole relationship was something made up, as Dominique already died some time ago, and Namine made all this up through Sora's memories. The thing is Sora actually goes through a journey of growth, he learns what it is to lose someone, to be alone, and even when he learns that all of this was made up, he still understands Namine, and he forgives her. (Namine is also portraying Dauragon's character here, on top of Dominique.) He then forgets about Namine, a bit like Sion did for Kaldea, but in Sora's case, it is set up like so because the plot allows it. Not in The Bouncer, that's just frustrating and expeditive. This game is two hours long, and yeah, I don't think you can cook something with such a short amount of time. But I also don't think the game would benefit from a much higher length. It was just made with a particular mindset I think.
I know I keep coming back to what I say, but this time this is it. You know when I realized this game was an all-timer? When I finished the game and I was still unable to figure out what the fuck a Bouncer is. I mean, not the real job, but why choose the bouncer profession for this?

So yeah. Good game. I'm honestly quite surprised by how much I have written for a game that, I feel, will not stick very long with me. But you should play it, it's just two-ish hours.