Last week, we looked at a game that had tons of prerelease hype, which managed to meet or even surpass its high expectation. This week, we will turn our focus to a game that...didn't.
It's hard to convey what a big deal The Bouncer was when it was announced for the then-new PS2. The developers had big ideas in mind, promising a gritty, movie-like story with revolutionary game physics, interactable environments and customizable characters. A lot of small developers get themselves in trouble making promises like this. But this was no pet project of a small up and coming developer. This was coming from Squaresoft (along with DreamFactory), the company behind Final Fantasy, a series you might have heard of. It's not that Square never made bad games, but they were few and far between. So when they made the promises they did, we all expected them to pay them off. They had Final Fantasy stalwarts Shinji Hashimoto and Tetsuya Nomura working on the game, how could they not. The first screenshots and early footage pushed already sky high expectations into the stratosphere. The Bouncer was everywhere, on the cover of every gaming magazine, on the lips of every gaming commentator, in the thoughts and minds of gamers everywhere.
First, let's start with the story. The game takes place in the city of Edge, at a bar on Dog Street called Fate. Our main characters are Sion, Volt an Koh, bouncers at the aforementioned bar. For a game called "the Bouncer," you would think their occupation would be an important part of the game, but it's mentioned here and never discussed again. More important to the plot is Dominique, a 15-year old girl who has taken a liking to Sion. Side rant, this is just a bit creepy. I don't think the game ever tells you how old Sion is, but either way, there's a problem here because he's either: A)Too young to be working at a bar -or- B)Too old to be dating Dominique. Anyway, the game starts with Dominique visiting Sion at work. She hands him a new chain and flirts with him for all of three seconds when suddenly, a squad of body suit wearing commandos busts through the windows, starts a fight with your crew and kidnaps Dominique. As you might expect, it's up to you to go rescue her.
That in and of itself is not an unreasonable plot for a video game. It's not anything revolutionary, but its passible. The problem is that all of this goes off the rails very quickly. (Spoilers ahead, which you should read so you don't have to play the game). It turns out Dominique has been abducted by the megalomaniacal Duragon C. Mikado, President of the Mikado Group. Along the way to rescue her, you slowly unlock the backstory of each of your characters. You learn about Sion's regret over the death of his best friend...who apparently has come back from the dead and can now turn into a panther. You learn that Koh is actually a secret agent. You learn that Volt used to work for Mikado, but was fired for some reason. At the end of the day, it turns out that Dominique is some sort of robot that's supposed to be a clone of Duragon's dead sister, there's something about a satellite, yada yada, none of this makes sense. For a game that relies on its story, it really was a poor effort. It's all over the place, the twists all have little impact and it all just feels like its trying too hard. Because of the structure of the game, you are forced experience each character's individual story piece by piece.
As previously mentioned, the game is built around its cutscenes. You will watch a (long) cutscene before being prompted to choose one of the three main characters. You will control that character for the next fight and will get a little more character development for them before continuing on with the cutscenes. There will occasionally be a "correct" character to pick for the best impact on the story, but for the most part its up to you. Basically, this means you have to play through the game at least three times to get the full story. It's not like its a long game, it can be beaten in just over an hour, but its still frustrating to have to play the same game over and over again just for some small story differences. The system also has an impact on gameplay, as you need to level all of your characters up separately. The AI will control the other characters during battle, but only the player gains experience points. Even worse, you only get experience for landing the final blow on an enemy. If one of your AI companions vultures your kill, you lose out on the experience. There are times where your party will be split up, so you do need to put some time into all the characters. But the system favors using one throughout each playthrough, both from a leveling and story perspective.
It's taken a while to get to gameplay, but that feels appropriate here as it feels like there's little more than 20 minutes of actual gameplay throughout the entire single player mode. The Bouncer is a 3D beat em' up with a control scheme allegedly similar to the fighting game Tobal, which I've never played. The scheme itself is okay, you have low, medium and high attacks, a special button and a block. You can learn special moves with your experience points and activating them is easy enough. The problem with combat comes from the animations and game engine. You never quite know when your attacks are going to hit, the distance as to when your attacks should hit feels completely random. The same is true for your enemies, you will think you are out of their range, only to get hit for tons of damage. Even worse, it's impossible to cancel an attack once the animation starts. If you fire off an attack, especially a special attack, at the wrong time, you are definitely going to get hit. When you do get hit, it takes forever to get up and you can continue to be hit on the ground, which really sucks. This leads to a slow, frustrating experience in combat. In fact, everything about the combat is slow. The character attacks are smooth, but all of them come out without any urgency. Because the engine is somewhat based on a fighting game, your character has to be facing an enemy. When you are locked on an enemy, your character moves like they are in molasses. The game really needed a forward dash or something, it's damn near impossible to close distance.
I've never been a huge fan of the whole "new game plus" deal, I always feel like its a way for developers to artificially extend playtime. There are some places where it works, games like Borderlands 2 or Chrono Trigger use the option to great effect. But in those games, you are offered new content on subsequent playthroughs and those subsequent playthroughs come after finishing 20 to 30 hour stories. The Bouncer asks you to play the same, mediocre one hour story over and over again to fully powerup your characters, with no reward other than the satisfaction of having done so. There is a versus mode, which is probably the most fun part of the game. Up to four players can choose a variety of characters, including the three mains, Dominique, Duragon, boss characters like Echidna and Mugetsu and others. Sure, the combat still isn't great, but its a lot more fun just being able to jump straight into the fighting with a variety of characters than have to sit through hours of cutscenes. It almost feels like that's what they should have done, a 3D fighter similar to the previous DreamFactory/Square collaboration Ehrgeiz or Dreamcast standout Power Stone. Push the story to the background, add some unlockables and you would have had a good, or at least interesting, product.
My last complaint is going to be with the character design. Every single one of these people look completely ridiculous, even for a Square video game. I mean, we're talking about a fantasy world here, it's not like I expect the characters to wear jeans and a polo shirt. But these people make even the most ridiculous Final Fantasy universe characters look tame by comparison. Sion is something of a predecessor to Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series, he looks just like him. But he wears a dog collar? With a bunch of random chains hanging from every article of clothing? Kou is like a proto-Post Malone, he has tribal tattoos all over his face and body, the game explains this as part of him being undercover, but it still looks ridiculous. And in a world where everyone is bundled up from head to toe, he rocks a vest with no shirt? Volt kind of looks like he should be a roadie for Coal Chamber or something, he's got a studded leather jacket and his entire face is covered with piercings. He even has devil horns. Have to give him some credit for the jacket though, as a longtime Final Fantasy fan I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't get the "no escape" reference. I thought he just really hated Cactuars. Also, what the hell is Dog Street supposed to be? The game tells you it's the name of the street the bar is on, but it's also all over everyone's clothes. It's all just weird, though the side characters are a little better designed (except Dominique, what's the deal with the trench coat and no pants?).
I know I've done nothing but complain, so I will say that there are far worse games out there than The Bouncer. It's playable, it's not like its a buggy and broken mess. The graphics and sound really are phenomenal, it's one of the best looking PS2 games and it came out not even six months after launch. Once you did get the combat down, there was some fun to be had, especially in the versus mode against other human players. At the end of the day, it's probably a below average to okay. But Square promised us a hell of a lot more than just okay. The promised excellence and delivered mediocrity, and gamers rightly dragged them for it. This would mark the end of their partnership with DreamFactory, which is unfortunate because I believe the two companies could have created something special together if they kept at it. I'll put it this way, The Bouncer is the gaming equivalent of an NFL draft bust. It's not the worst of all time, we're not talking Ryan Leaf or JaMarcus Russell levels of bust-ness. But it's certainly on the level of a Trent Richardson. Like some of the more competent NFL franchises, Square was able to quickly recover from the body blows to their reputation and bottom line. But The Bouncer will still go down as one of the biggest, most overhyped flops in gaming history. For me personally, it might be the most disappointing game of all time.
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