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.

The Bouncer was obviously more of a technical demonstration of the PS2's power than a game to tease the level of quality the console's library would have though despite all that it's still actually kind of awesome. It's for an roughly 2 Hour hardware demonstration incredibly soulful and though it's as a brawler not that refined it's still really fun and once you get enough upgrades with the characters it's a true blast. It's a shame that The Bouncer never was meant for anything more it seems. There would be more than enough room for a sequel espicially with the amount of story each character has (Volt in particular). The Bouncer maybe short, unrefined and ultimately just a tech demo but it's still cool nonetheless and I recommend people espicially those who like games like Final Fight to actually give it a shot.
7/10

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?