Hailing from the futuristic year 2000 on PS2, The Bouncer falls a little outside this blog’s usual range, but it was designed by Seichi Ishii, who also designed or directed on Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Tobal, and Ehrgeiz, so I”m making an exception as it ties into *both* the Sega Arcade and Square Fighter episodes of Retronauts.

Unfortunately it didn’t fare quite as well as some of those other titles. A very early PS2 title, it feels kind of like playing a shiny tech demo, with lots of bells and whistles (high-end rendered video for the time, Dobly surround sound, multi-language voice acting, analog button support, and so on) but kind of mediocre game-play. The “cinematic experience” also translates to some awkward camera angles. And to top it off, you have to play through the plot multiple times to reveal everything, with enemies getting harder each time, and an RPG-light progression system where it’s all too possible to screw up your builds with poor point-distribution choices.

Supplemental link - Square’s 90s fighters

Since tumblr’s search doesn’t always play nice for posts with external links, here’s a separate one with a handy link for the Retronauts podcast episode that goes with Bushido Blade:

https://retronauts.com/article/735/retronauts-micro-78-explores-squares-fightin-history

Hey, sorry for the long break (holidays + pneumonia, whee), but we’re back with a Retronauts tie-in: Bushido Blade! Jeremy and I just spent a while talking about Square’s 1990s fighting games, and this is a big one, known for its unique mechanics.

Developed by LightWeight under director Tetsuo Mizuno and released on PlayStation in 1997, Bushido Blade is a stripped-down weapons-based fighting game based on precise maneuvers and realistic damage. With no life bars, meters, or any interface to speak of, players go for one-hit kills or disabling an opponents limbs with clean hits.

I included a few shots of the manual highlighting the unique mechanics - controls change if you lose use of a leg or an arm, stances play an important roll, and you can also fight dirty by trying to blind an opponent with dirt. Most combos are tied to weapons, and you can mix and match as you please, but each character has a few special moves with weapons they favor.

In story mode, each character escapes through a castle fighting their former fellow assassins and then up to five bosses in a row. One of two final secret bosses is seen only if you make it through with zero damage, which is quite a feat. The stage layout is also really cool, featuring connected regions of one large location, and because battle is free-roaming the terrain comes into play with hills, water, and trees getting in your way.

All in all, a really addictive and intriguing variation on the fighting genre - and one we’d love to see an update of today.

(Sadly I don’t have an Ehrgeiz or Tobal artifacts to share, as I only played other people’s copies of those games, but I do have one more bit of Square fighting history which I’ll put up soon...)

Here’s something different; a 1997 corporate profile for Square USA. Full of all the finest corporate marketing-speak. I have to wonder how many of these fine people in LA and Honolulu lost their jobs after the Spirits Within debacle a few years later... guess I dodged a bullet there by going to grad school instead.

A few better things from the 1994 software catalog I’ve been mining... It was a good time to be Square, with FFIII, Secret of Mana, and Breath of Fire hitting in rapid succession. And Nintendo was steadily extending the life of the good ol’ Game Boy with the Super Game Boy that let you play on your TV with added color via a SNES adapter, and some surprisingly slick releases like Donkey Kong ‘94.

Found another Squaresoft newsletter, this one from 1994 featuring... a Capcom game. Apparently Capcom wasn’t too sure about this whole JRPGs in the US thing yet, but hot off the success of FF2(FFIV), Square took the plunge to localize and release Breath of Fire, albeit with painfully Westernized box art.

Other snippets from this issue: Final Fantasy III, finally settled as being a localization of FFVI, was about to roll out and already accumulating superlative-laden reviews. Square’s new US studio, which would go on to produce Secret of Evermore, had just been founded and still thought they were going to get to localize FFV (as FF Extreme) and Seiken Densetsu 3 (as Secret of Mana 2) - neither of which actually happened of course. And Square promises more direct connection with its fans on AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy! Yup kids, that was the public-facing internet in 1994, though the web was just about to gear up properly...

The Ogopogo Examiner from Sqaure, 1992-93. You got these if you filled out the consumer info card in a Square game in the early 90s. The later ones (at top) are mostly just ad fliers... though the Mystic Quest one contains a couple nice pieces of Katsuya Terada art. The first one’s a real newsletter, though! Has a ton of tips for FFII/IV (also FF Adventure, Legend 1 and 2 on the back) and one uncommon but game-breaking bug being passed off as a mysterious curse.

Also seen here are the dangers of spreading early info... with assurances that FFV will eventually be published in the US as FFIII, and exciting info about Nintendo’s upcoming CD-based system that Square will be developing for, among other things that didn’t quite work out as planned.

Remember back before everything was on GameFaqs when we actually bought guidebooks sometimes?