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?
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?
Reviewed on May 08, 2023
7 Comments
*overalls oopsie
Dauragon C. Mikado is a top three villain in gaming and I'm tired of everyone snubbing that man of his rightful claim.
@Hilda That's one of the (many) parts that had me in hysterics. Like, of all the things this jacked up pretty boy Square villain could've been wearing under his expensive trench coat, leather overalls is the funniest possible thing they could've gone with.
@Duragon His whole backstory is just so wild. Takes his dying sister to a hospital and they're like "ew, no" and then she just dies at the next one anyway, so he's like "well I'm going to make a ROBOT SISTER" who he also has zero affection for and just uses to power his space laser. Peak villainy.
@Duragon His whole backstory is just so wild. Takes his dying sister to a hospital and they're like "ew, no" and then she just dies at the next one anyway, so he's like "well I'm going to make a ROBOT SISTER" who he also has zero affection for and just uses to power his space laser. Peak villainy.
I bought this at launch. At. Launch. At the time I was convinced everything Square released was gold. My world came crashing down here. That said I genuinely don't hat it. As you say, it's bad but it's kinda good. Like a B movie.
The Bouncer is Sharknado of video games.
The Bouncer is Sharknado of video games.
@FallenGrace Didn't you guys generally pay more per game back then relative to the Japanese and American markets? At 50 bucks USD, I'd feel really burned by this.
More consoles then games pricing wise. I think The Bouncer was £39.99 which compared with the £70 prices now is a heavenly price.
hilda
11 months ago