I’ll start!
I’ve never understood brawlers. I grew up with the NES version of Double Dragon on the Wii Virtual Console – and sure, I played it, because when you’re little, you play the games that you have… but I can’t say I was ever particularly excited to. I’ve always just found brawlers mindless, samey, and unremarkable, and only thought it a crying shame that they took over the arcades in the late ’80s to early ’90s… until yesterday.
Yesterday, I played Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari. (The Japanese version, and not River City Ransom, because I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam, and the “tough juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold” archetype is a guilty pleasure.)
What struck me about this game was the rich interactions. Technos went in asking “alright, we have a punch, a kick, and a jump – what can we do with that?” They then proceeded to come up with as many answers to that as they could. In the manual, there’s a section called Hen na Asobikata (lit. “How to Play Like a Weirdo”), which is possibly the best section header I’ve ever seen in a manual, and which details some of these unexpected responses.
Rock Baseball & Trashcan Football: You can dream up all sorts of games using items! Sports are the essence of youth! Get out there and sweat!!!
- If someone’s holding a bulky object, you can jump on top of it and make a human tower.
- You can kick trashcans to roll ’em at people, and play football with ’em if you’re two players.
- If someone throws a rock at you, you can hit it with a wooden sword and baseball it.
- You can hop on top of benches and railings, making you feel like a pugilistic Tony Hawk…
- …and if you run eight steps or more, you can jump unreasonably high, meaning that you can do a running Rider Kick off a fence and whomp a dude from five meters in the air!
And that’s just half of it. Moving around in this world just feels like so much fun (especially with the Mother 3-style “running keeps going after you let go of the button”, which I always love), and that translates to feeling like a dancer, or like a nimble jester, when righteously beating up on barfing bozos.
Mochizuki: “You’re as strong as they say… Urk… You bet I’m lookin’ forward to our next face-off.”
Of course, that’s not all that this game has going for it. It’s charming, has entertaining dialogue, it’s open-world, and has RPG elements (and the latter two of these can really tide me over with just about any genre) – and these aren’t necessarily true for all (or even most) brawlers. But the fact that I had fun with the mechanics gives me hope that, hey, maybe there are more brawlers out there for me to enjoy? I’m excited to find out.
