Anime goes to the games
Knight Sabers...Go! With those words, four women in
personal power armor set out to engage and
neutralize, by any means necessary, whatever
adversary they faced. Whether targeting the head of a
multi-national corporation, or taking down rogue
combat robots (called Boomers), Priss, Linna, Sylia
and Nene struggled to remain one step ahead of the
police who were desperate to put a stop to their
vigilante antics.
The PC Engine got
this enjoyable, if
simplistic,
digital
comic back in 1991.
English-speaking
fans had to wait
fifteen years for an
unofficial translation
patch, but for fans of
adventure games and anime, grabbing this one is a nobrainer. Graphics are quite
stylized, with both the
statics and animations looking like they could have
been pulled straight from the original cels. But while
the music is nice and pulled from the anime itself, it
suffers from being on a
HuCard. A licensed property like BGC really could have benefited from a CD
release, if for no other reason than the richer soundtrack options you get from Redbook specs.
The game plays very similarly to other point-and-click
adventure games like Maniac Mansion or
Shadowgate, where you pick from a limited number
of actions, then click on the screen where you want to
perform
that
action
('Talk'
to
a
character,
'Look'
at a
BUBBLEGUM CRASH 2040
TURBO GRAFX-16/PC-ENGINE
computer screen,
etc...). Most of the
game is spent Classic sci-fi Anime in game form
Words: Michael Crisman
controlling Nene
Romanova, who
works for the A.D.
Police as a
dispatcher. The last part of the game
makes a rather stark transition to an RPG-lite style,
with 3D maze navigation and active time battles involving all four Knight Sabers, though you only get to
control one of them at a time. This is odd, since
they're trained to fight as a team instead of
taking
on enemies one-on-one. It might have made some
sense if Priss was the main character as she's the loner
of the group. But Nene's the 'support character' of the
group, the one with the least amount of combat skill,
so it seems odd to make her the face of
Bubblegum Crash when there's eventually going to be a
big boss fight at the end of the game.
Critiques aside, Bubblegum Crash is an entertaining
bit of retro gaming goodness for those who enjoy
classic adventure games like Snatcher, which are more
dialog-driven than action-heavy. It's a fun story that
entertains for a few hours and then goes home. Fans
of the Bubblegum Crisis series doubtlessly know
about this
game's existence already, but
newer
anime fans
will enjoy
this
look
back
at
what
the
80s
and
early 90s
were like.
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