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.
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.
9 Comments
I'd forgotten all about the time I took a picture of the dude from Good Charlotte to the barbers and thought I'd come out looking like this guy. Nostalgia so thick I can taste the clearer air of my youth. Goodness me
Playing The Bouncer is like reserving fond memories for your future self. When the shitty factory level fades from memory and only The Vibes remain, it shines so bright. I think there's a lot of room in my heart for games like this, games that excel not in the moment-to-moment playing, but in aging like the finest vintage in the wine cellar of our memories. I may not think too fondly of Planescape: Torment when I'm in the middle of another shit mandatory combat bit, but I'll never forget the opening of the Bronze Sphere, will I?
All of this to say, on my third playthrough, the game became just Very Fun. The Char's Counterattack of Square Enix's output.
Great review.
All of this to say, on my third playthrough, the game became just Very Fun. The Char's Counterattack of Square Enix's output.
Great review.
All I know of THE BOUNCER really is Erin's streams and review, this, and the title screen saying THE BOUNCER. I feel this is enough to like it. Great review.
Nuclear Counter-Take to Wood
The Bouncer's moment to moment combat is cool actually, it's cathartic after half a decade of playing Yakuza games. I love being able to throw the guy and donkey kick him.
The Bouncer's moment to moment combat is cool actually, it's cathartic after half a decade of playing Yakuza games. I love being able to throw the guy and donkey kick him.
Actually typing it out now it's mostly just that, it reminds me how much I hate very specific aspects of Yakuza combat.
@dwardman
If we're talking about what I feel like The Bouncer has over it
Even in games that aren't Yakuza 3, the defensive play of enemies can feel arbitrary much of the time, while in The Bouncer, if you land a throw on a guy, the guy gets thrown.
I also feel like I prefer that in The Bouncer's combat you rely on your command moves that have all behave mostly uniquely from each other, while in Yakuza, even while it does have such things in certain contexts, your go to is the basic string with a choice of finisher dependent on the part of the string it's pressed, it's pretty auto-piloty in that sense.
Those are the immediate things that come to mind.
If we're talking about what I feel like The Bouncer has over it
Even in games that aren't Yakuza 3, the defensive play of enemies can feel arbitrary much of the time, while in The Bouncer, if you land a throw on a guy, the guy gets thrown.
I also feel like I prefer that in The Bouncer's combat you rely on your command moves that have all behave mostly uniquely from each other, while in Yakuza, even while it does have such things in certain contexts, your go to is the basic string with a choice of finisher dependent on the part of the string it's pressed, it's pretty auto-piloty in that sense.
Those are the immediate things that come to mind.
Rereading this review, damn it's good
Pangburn
1 year ago