I'd recently finished a few RPGs and needed something new to play. I picked up The Bouncer, a Squaresoft RPG/Fighter, from the rental place. The game is pretty unique, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. I love Square and figured that The Bouncer would be a classic Squaresoft title, but I was disappointed. Although not really a bad game it doesn't feel much at all like an RPG, and fans of the genre may want to skip over this one...unless they're also a big fan of fighting games.

The story to the game is pretty weak, but as good as can be expected for a game that can be beat in an hour. Your main character is Sion Barzahd, a bouncer in a bar called Fate. Dominique, a co-worker and friend of his (and his love interest, but he won't admit it right away), is mysteriously kidnapped by special agents from Mikado, a super powerful corporation that can pretty much do whatever it wants (kinda like Umbrella from Resident Evil, but with less zombies and more robots). Sion and his bouncer friends rush off to rescue Dominique from Mikado and beat up everyone in their path until they rescue Dominique and unravel the mystery of her kidnapping. That's pretty much all there is to the storyline...at least all I can mention without spoiling the few interesting parts. There's actually some good twists in the plot and overall it actually has a pretty interesting story. But it's so short and underdeveloped that it doesn't really matter. There's some interesting character history you can read during the load screens, but it flashes away so fast that its often hard to read. The characters aren't really bad, it's just that they are even more underdeveloped than the story. They'd actually have to add a few more hours to the game if they wanted to put some real character development in, so you end up with very little. I did find the boss an interesting character, and I even felt kind of bad for him a few times. Other than him everyone was just filling their boring roles.

Battle consists of running around punching and kicking bad guys... that's it. It's fun beating the crap out of people for a while, but I lost interest pretty quick. I would have quit if it wasn't for the fact that the game was so short. Whenever you get the finishing blow in a battle your character gets battle points. These points can be used to learn new skills, or increase yours strength, defense and life. You've got three characters to choose from in battle, Sion, Kou and Volt. They're attack styles differ somewhat so they each have their uses. You also can see certain things from their perspective when playing as them, which adds a little to the replay value and does help strengthen the story a little bit. In many battles you are accompanied by your bouncer buddies, but sometimes you're forced to fight alone. Something that bothered me when playing the game is that when your character gets near an enemy he practically comes to a complete stop. So if you're trying to run by an enemy, or back away from an attack, you're pretty screwed. You'd think the character wouldn't come to a complete stop when he gets close to a giant robot that's trying to crush him. Maybe he's just taken a few too many blows to the head. As annoying as this all was, combat was actually pretty fun (at least until I realized how repetitive it was). I don't get to beat the crap out of robots often enough, and it's a hobby I wouldn't mind picking up.

The A.I. was pretty bad too and when you and your comrades were in battle they often sat there doing nothing. My teammates died quite often and I was forced to finish most of the battles myself. The more you use your other party members the more powerful they will become and the less likely they are to die, but they'll still be idiots when you're not using them. You don't want your buddies to do too much of the work anyway or you won't be able to get the final hit and strengthen your character. Somehow this group of bouncers manages to fist-fight their way into the headquarters of the largest corporation on the planet. You'd think the security would be a little better than that. I've seen malls that were better protected than this place. You never run into a security guard with a gun...the whole time everyone just goes toe to toe with you in hand to hand combat. Maybe they're just trying to be honorable and fight fair? Nah, they're trying to take over the world...what do they care about honor.

The graphics in The Bouncer were one of the high points. The characters were detailed and moved convincingly even when doing complex moves, and the cinematics were excellent. There were lots of these beautiful cinemas too, so you'll definitely get an eyefull. There's actually too many of them, and after nearly every battle you see some sort of cinema. Then at the end of the cinema you pop into another battle...this is all the game is really. It's just a bunch of pretty cool looking graphics that tie together a very underdeveloped story with some people getting beat up in-between. It gets pretty annoying waiting for the load times every couple of minutes, because the battles were usually REALLY short and then you'd have to wait for the upcoming cinema. The backgrounds looked nice, but there really wasn't much to them. There was practically no interaction at all with the environment, and there wasn't even that many times when you got control of the game outside of battle...everything was done in cinema. At least the cinemas were nice. Actually, some of the nicest I've ever seen.

The sound was decent, but nothing great. Each character had different grunts and groans they made in battle, a taunt, and different things they said to start out the battle and different sayings when they died (hopefully you won't hear the last one too much though...the game isn't very hard). The voice acting wasn't very good though, and most of the characters lacked any real emotion. That's probably just because the dialog was so bad because some of the voice overs were actually decent. The voices seemed to fit the characters, but they had stupid and predictable lines. Fortunately, the music was quite good. It seemed to do a good job of setting the mood and kind of made me want to start fighting.

The game's got some replay value to it fortunately. There's a multiplayer mode where you and your friends can sit around and beat each other up, and you can replay the game keeping all of your upgrades. The bad guys get harder on replay though, so don't expect to breeze through the game. You can also play through as a different character to see things from their perspectives. This is all assuming you found the game worth replaying. I probably wouldn't have bothered playing more than once, but since it's so short I figured I might as well go for it. I probably spent almost as much time writing this review as I did beating the game. Pretty sad for an RPG, but being a fighter you can't really expect much more.

I can't imagine anyone paying $50 to buy this game when it was new, and I'm glad I waited a while to play it. This is a game worth renting if you're into this sort of thing, and maybe even worth buying if you can find it used for cheap. Not very often do you come across a decent RPG/Fighting game, so if nothing else it gets a few bonus points for being unique. It then loses most of these bonus points for being too short, repetitive and underdeveloped. Although a disappointment as an RPG it really isn't a horrible game, and if you're an RPG fan who wants to take out some aggression on killer robots then you may like this game quite a bit.