THE BOUNCER
Original Release: Square, 2000, PlayStation 2
The title that would convince Square to stay away from fighting games for a good decade or so, The Bouncer took a gamble on some unusual concept pairings that just didn't quite work out
The Bouncer (PS2, Square, 2000)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
The Bouncer didn't end up having any real impact on or legacy in the world of gaming, but you wouldn't have guessed that if you were around for its debut. It was a project of developer Dream Factory, headed up by Virtua Fighter and Tekken vet Seiichi Ishii, which had previously helmed Square's weird PS1 dabbles with fighting games (Tobal and Ehrgeiz). But this one was special, being a near-launch title for the PS2 and Square's first release for the system. Consequently it was given a huge budget, and Final Fantasy character designer Tetsuya Nomura was brought in to handle the aesthetic elements and story. A bunch of that money was spent on a major ad blitz that kept the hype going in the game rags and on the internet forums of the time, helped by early footage that looked much cooler and more complex than the game turned out to be.
Maybe it would have actually been received better if it had just been another little weirdo side project out of nowhere, without all of these inflated expectations put on it. But it was widely panned as a dud for its limited and disappointing gameplay and its ratio of cutscene time to actual fighting.
I don't think time has proven anyone wrong on that. It was just a case of a lot of bad design decisions piling up: too much hype that wasn't delivered on, shoving two very different audiences together (beat-em-up fans and people willing to sit through endless PS1-era Final Fantasy cutscenes), and just a bunch of fundamental jank in the core gameplay. Nomura also seemed to be using it as a sandbox to either try out new designs ultimately headed for Kingdom Hearts (one of the playables is a dead ringer for a slightly older Sora) or to iterate on characters he'd already used in previous games. The whole project isn't without its likeable qualities, but it hinges on being willing to replay the game multiple times to get any type of meaningful playtime out of it and it just doesn't do enough to make that worthwhile.
The game takes place in a far-future cyberpunky setting that resembles FF7's Midgar with maybe a splash of Tekken's vaguely-established corporate-run cyber dystopia world. The "Bouncer" title comes from the fact that our heroes are three bouncers working at some little bar in the midst of the city, whose lives are turned upside down when Putty Ninjas kidnap a young girl they've taken in. As the story unfolds we learn the three Bouncers actually have a little more insight into this mysterious happening than they initially let on due to their rough and rowdy pasts.
The basic structure is, you watch a long cutscene, then you play a relatively short beat-em-up sequence that often takes place on just one small screen. One of the things that was hyped about the game was "RPG elements," as you earn points for beating foes that can then be applied to upgrading your stats or learning your character's special moves. Watch another cutscene, do another beat-em-up. Repeat for about two to three hours of total gameplay, watching of the cutscenes included.
So it's kind of a thin game really leaning on a few things to make it all work. One is willingness to replay the game to see alternate cutscenes and branches for each of the characters. But the story is just ... disjointed. Not a surprise for a Nomura project for anyone that's dabbled with Kingdom Hearts, but it puts aesthetics ahead of everything else and has a bunch of elements that really don't make much sense if you stop to think about them at all.
You certainly aren't sticking with it on the strength of the core gameplay. That does improve slightly as you get more moves, but to bring a leveled character back through on a "new game+" you'll have to complete the game. There are some fundamental problems that you're always stuck with, though. Unhelpful fixed camera angles seemingly borrowed from the PS1 Final Fantasy games (and that often completely obscure you from seeing the enemies you're fighting, including during tough boss battles) is perhaps the biggest one. The other top contender is the janky auto-targeting system; almost every battle in the game involves 3 to 6 enemies, but you can't manually switch focus or lock on to one, the game just kind of flops your attention from one to the other randomly based on general proximity.
The experience system is also frustrating. The character you're controlling has to strike the final blow on an enemy, or you get nothing. The two AI companions get no experience for killing foes, so it's a total waste for them to do so. What's not disclosed to you at any point is that the difficulty scales with the level of your characters, but it's an average of all three. So you make things harder if you keep switching between and leveling different characters, and easier if you just stick with one character the entire time (which also tends to unlock hidden scenes and unique endings).
The only other option for gameplay is a 100-enemy "Survival" mode, for which you can unlock certain enemy and NPC characters as playable by completing the game ... but it's still the same manky gameplay, so it isn't much of an addition.
The Bouncer isn't awful, but it definitely isn't what Square advertised it to be and isn't particularly good at either of the genres it tries to be. Beat-em-up fans will be put off by lengthy cutscenes with characters and developments that just aren't that interesting, and by a simplistic engine that's basically a 3D one-on-one fighter cobbled into a brawler format kind of clumsily. Square RPG fans might actually get more out of it, especially Kingdom Hearts/Nomura fans specifically, but will probably find the gameplay bits more of a tedious chore than anything else.
And a good deal of the selling point of the time was simply the then-new PS2 graphic and audio capabilities, which long ago ceased to be any sort of big deal (and the backdrops sometimes look a little Vaseline-y here despite tending to be graphically simple). The thing that has held up best is actually the sound work, it has a pretty good soundtrack that might have been an influence on Sega's Yakuza, and Spike Spiegel's voice actor from the English dub of Cowboy Bebop is paired with a guy that sounds an awful lot like Jet Black (but who actually played Laughing Bull) for turn-of-the-century nostalgia.
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