Definitely an unorthodox game, but considering this games background that's to be expected. You run a blacksmithing weapon shop with your burly mentor figure, forging weapons that various people can use to complete their quests and solve their problems. Forging weapons is done through this strange rhythm minigame where you tap different parts of a molten slab to a rhythm in order to strengthen different stats, but the game really doesn't do a good job explaining how to consistently make weapons with good base stats so it felt like complete RNG as to whether or not the game said I made a dull piece of garbage or a god-slaying masterpiece. Hell, maybe it actually is RNG, who knows.

Rather than outright sell the weapons you make, the shop you run has a weird rental system. Weapons are rented out, and only once your clients clear their quest will they pay you for your services whereas if they fail they both don't give you shit AND lose the weapon you gave out to them. Since weapons level up and grow in stats the more times they are used and successfully return, you definitely want to make sure you assign the right weapons to the right clients or else you might accidentally lose something decent. The weapons are also equipped with the "Grindcast", which is a twitter-like media feed that broadcasts whatever it is that the renters are questing in real time, and it plays all throughout the game (even during the parts where you are focused on something else, which can and will lead to moments where you miss some story beats entirely due to your attention being elsewhere. Maybe if the grindcast was voiced instead of a text log it would have worked better as an in-game podcast but then the rhythm gameplay would be harder and yeah i don't think they really thought that one all the way through). Customers also come in and out of the store as they please, and it gives the game this very passive vibe. Like there's just a lot of downtime as you just kinda work on making and polishing weapons while waiting for the game to send someone in. Or sometimes the game will throw countless random unnamed NPCs at you to rent random shit while you are trying to actually make what you need to make before an actual named important client comes back looking for the weapon you promised them. The pacing is borderline nonexistent and the gameplay almost borders on idle-game territory at points.

The real point of the game though is in its writing. It's clear that the weird rental nature and Grindcast feed system are all in place as a way to keep the player involved with the world and characters despite being confined within the four walls of the weapon shop for the entire game. The game was written and directed by Yoshiyuki Hirai of the Japanese comedy group America Zarigani, so the emphasis is on the gags within the NPCs and the quirks that each of the characters have. That being said, I think that the localization team might have translated some of the gags a bit too literally because the writing felt really dry and the jokes usually tended to fall under a very particular singular sense of humor that I honestly can't even describe in words. A lot of the bits didn't really hit for me, and I honestly can't really tell if that's due to the brand of humor that Hirai has in the first place, the localization team being too direct with their translation, or some combination of both. Even the games ending is a bit that just fell flat on its face to me...

I definitely think the game runs a bit too long for its own good, especially given the downtimey gameplay and flat writing that make the game feel far longer than the roughly 10-hour runtime actually is. Unlike the other Guild games having been developed by established and esteemed developers that have intricate experience on how to make games, this game was made by an entire outsider to the industry and honestly I respect that. Since Hirai has done voicework for other Level5 games I wouldn't be surprised if he got onboard for the project by just pitching this idea for a weapon shop game he thought up some time ago (yet didn't fully think through in a gameplay mechanical sense). You don't really see experimental titles like that from complete outsiders get made very often, stuff like the Mother series, Takeshi's Challenge, Penn & Tellers Smoke and Mirrors, Otocky, etc. Just people that don't typically make games having an off-beat idea and a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Even if the end result might be something that's kinda eh to play and doesn't feel very properly thought-out, I can't hate the ambition and adore how absolutely unique games like this always turn out to be.

It's a twist on Breakout, though I'm not particularly sure if it twists things in a substantially better or worse way tbh. Instead of having one ball bounce between a paddle you have two clowns bouncing off of a see-saw, and you gotta position things right and account for physics n shit to get good hits. The bricks are balloons now and are now constantly moving, with the line going in a loop constantly. It's cool in the way that you can get a clown stuck at the top sandwiched between two balloons as they keep moving into his bounces, but idk doesn't feel as inherently satisfying as calculating a shot to get stuck in the ceiling in breakout. The physics with the see-saw seem a bit inconsistent to me as well, as most of the bounces I had didn't even really launch the clowns high enough to hit the balloons in the first place. The balloons also repopulate on a per-row basis instead of everything refilling at once when the board is clear, which I thought was weird at first but upon playing the game type that refreshes in the traditional breakout way and being stuck trying to hit that last moving balloon by hoping it just happens to move into my clown ass I realized why they made the default refresh how it is. There are also game types that add extra barriers that move in a row below all the balloons, which add another layer of unpredictability to the game. At the end of the day it's breakout but with a lot of extra moving parts, and those moving parts can make it both more interesting due to the seeming random chaos that can happen while that same chaos can make the game less satisfying and engaging as sometimes you can get a crazy point combo by complete accident. I can definitely respect the thought that went into trying to make breakout more complex, but I don't really think it substantially adds or detracts to the block-breaking genre, it's just different. Despite being a circus game, you wouldn't have to be a clown to enjoy what's on offer here.

jesus christ activision sure knows how to make tense games for the 2600. On average, this game is like 6-7 seconds long, which sounds pathetic on paper but dear lord getting that time down is an absolute struggle.

So here's why this game is kinda nuts: there's a tachometer at the bottom of your screen. If it goes past 3/4ths of your screen at any time, you blow up and die instantaneously. Pushing the button on the controller is your gas and your gas moves the meter up. Pushing down the left direction on the joystick puts you in a clutch state where the tachometer is so sensitive to gas that pretty much holding both the button and left at the same time at any point is a death sentence. Releasing left after pressing it down brings you up a gear, where you go faster with a slower tachometer. Basically you need to do as close to frame-perfect button presses and joystick inputs/releases as you feasibly can, and if you do it right, you get a good time, and if you do it even slightly wrong you either die in a horrific car explosion or get a shit time that brings great dishonor to your drag racing career. The manual's challenge of getting under 6 seconds to join the World Class Dragster Club is no simple task either. Considering the frame-perfect theoretical perfect time is 5.57, there's a shockingly small margin of error to join that prestigious, 40-years-defunct club (and if you say you've gotten a 5.51 before, you are a liar!). It took me dozens upon dozens of attempts to be able to just barely squeeze out a 5.94 that I swear to god felt like luck as I did the same thing I usually did for a good run, I just must have happened to have pressed the buttons at a more optimal time. Though I guess since the game is only 6 seconds long on a good run those dozens of attempts was still only like 20-30 minutes of grind. I felt like I spent more time waiting for the starting countdown to finish (or prematurely exploding by failing to properly feather the gas during the countdown as a way to get a good start) than actually racing, which is kinda eh but it is what it is.

It's certainly a deep and thought-out game that has a high skill ceiling to work up towards for sure. With how much frame-perfection is emphasized here, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a game to sew the seeds of speedrunning or just general high-level gamer tech to the still-blossoming Atari gamer crowd. But it does mean that this game is definitely geared towards that certain type of player, so if you aren't into personal time attack grinds there's pretty much less game time for you in this game than the time it took you to read this whole ramble in the first place. Fascinating!