[I ♥ The PC Engine] Bikkuriman Daijikai

Bikkuriman Daijikai
(ビックリマン大事界)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 12/23/88
Price: 4980 yen
Media: CD-ROM² (46.26MB + 71 audio tracks)
Genre: Other
PC Engine FAN Score: n/a

There is very little I can say about this prehistoric CD title without having to further explain the entire Bikkuriman boom that struck Japan in the late ’80s. If this sounds like a boring wall of text to read through, you’re right. Skip if you like, but take these two facts home with you: This is the last PCE release of 1988, and it’s also Hiroi Ōji’s first game credit — he’s listed as associate director thanks to his involvement with the Bikkuriman anime.

The English Wikipedia entry for Bikkuriman is not particularly easy to understand, so here is my take on it instead: Bikkuriman is the name of a family of trading-card stickers packed in with chocolate candy and released by Lotte starting in 1977. 18 different Bikkuriman sets exist, the most recent being devoted to Japanese pro baseball players, but for the most part the term “Bikkuriman” is used to refer to Sets 10, 11 and 14, launched between 1985 and 1993. These sets, “Demons vs. Angels” (悪魔VS天使シール) and “Super Bikkuriman” (スーパービックリマン), triggered a massive boom in Japan, spurred on by anime and manga tie-ins that spawned both this game and PCE launch title Bikkuriman World.

Sets 10 and 11 featured stickers depicting otherworldly gods and monsters, most of them with names and character designs that formed terrible Japanese-language puns. They had a massive backstory behind them, based loosely off mythology and the Bible, and this story was told in paragraph-size snippets on the back of each sticker. You could also play a very simple game with the stickers, but for the most part kids sought them for the collection aspect.

In the “Demons vs. Angels” set, the demon stickers were generally far more common than the angels; for every 40-yen chocolate packet with an angel sticker inside, there’d usually be three with a demon packed in. Further complicating things were the “Heads,” boss-like characters that served as the leaders of both sides of this pretend heavenly war; these stickers had extra gimmicks like reflective backgrounds or holograms, and you’d usually find about two or three of them in a display box of 40 Bikkuriman packets, making them rare draws.

As everyone knows today, Japanese kids love nothing more than collecting ‘em all, and the resulting boom was pretty dizzying. At the set’s height in 1988, Lotte was selling 13 million 40-yen packets every month; the company later estimated it grossed the equivalent of a billion dollars off Demons vs. Angels’ thirty-one series before the fad finally subsided. Kids from rich families would frequently buy entire display boxes in one go for a chance at more Head stickers; this led to stores limiting sales and the coining of the slang term otona-gai (大人買い, “grown-up buying”), which was added to Kōjien in 2008. Rare stickers, from contest prizes to special editions given out at baseball games, go for hundreds and occasionally thousands of dollars today. It got to the point where Japan’s Fair Trade Commission brought up questions about Lotte’s short-packing the Heads and angels, accusing the candymaker of giving kids a way to gamble for a chance to get cards they could sell for real money; Lotte responded by making all the card types equally common starting with series 17.

Bikkuriman Daijikai, then, is a database CD-ROM that lets you browse through all the stickers released in these sets through the end of 1988, when they were up to series 13 and approximately 500 different creatures. There’s some art and basic backstory info for each entry, and that’s about it. The only real game here is the quiz questions you have to get right before you’re allowed to “unlock” the Head cards.

Japan pop culture lesson over. It’s pretty boring from this vantage point, of course, but if you’re interested in what it was like to be a Bikkuri-maniac 21 years ago, here’s a taste:

[I ♥ The PC Engine] Appare! Gateball

Appare! Gateball
(あっぱれ！ゲートボール)

Maker: Hudson
Release Date: 12/22/88
Price: 4900 yen
Media: HuCard (2 Mbit)
Genre: Sports
PC Engine FAN Score: 22.52 / 30.00

Invented by Hokkaido resident Kazunobu Suzuki in 1947 as a low-cost children’s sport, gateball — a team-based, more strategic take on the sport of croquet — quickly caught on among the elderly since it emphasizes teamwork and doesn’t require a lot of physical strength. All you need is the ability to hit a ball on the ground with a mallet, and you can join in any league you like. There was something very pastoral, tender in a way, about going to the park on weekends while I lived in Japan and seeing the grannies and grampsters playing gateball and laughing away the afternoon. I say “was” because now that I know the rules, I have realized that gateball is one of the most barbaric sports ever invented. Not exaggerating.

Here are the basic rules of gateball, as kindly explained in the game’s extensive tutorial (your average PCE owner would’ve needed it, believe me):

• Gateball is played between two teams of five players on a lawn with three numbered “gates,” or wickets. The object of each individual player is to hit their ball through these gates in the specified direction, then hit the “goal pole” in the middle of the field to finish off.
• The game ends when all the players on a team finish, or if the time limit expires.

Pretty simple and pastoral so far, yeah? I sort of figured out the basic idea watching the oldsters play in Japan because my family considered croquet a great lawn game and argument-starter at backyard barbecues and gateball is not that far removed. Well, it gets much nastier.

• If your ball hits another, whether from your team or the opponent, you can do a “croquet stroke” (the game calls it a “spark shot”) on the ball you hit, sending it anywhere you like with your shot. Then you get another turn.
• The field is enclosed by a boundary, and a ball is knocked out of bounds if it crosses that boundary, even if it was sent out of bounds by an opposing team’s croquet stroke.
• If your ball is knocked out of bounds, then you are only allowed to hit the ball back in with your next turn. Using this shot to score a gate or hit another ball is against the rules and makes you lose your turn.

This is where all the game’s strategy comes in. If you hit a friendly ball, you can hit it someplace that makes it easier for the ball’s owner to advance it ahead. If you hit an enemy ball, you can send it flying out of bounds — and if all the opposing team’s balls are concentrated in a single area, say the goal pole, you can hit one and then keep chaining hits together to knock every ball out of bounds in one turn.

This game’s suddenly sounding a lot more competitive, isn’t it? You had better get used to it, because the computer will use this strategy all the time. If you try to play like a sweet old spinster with an artificial hip, you will spend the entire match out of bounds. The only way to compete is to give the CPU a taste of its own medicine. Pastoral, my ass. This ain’t no sports game, it’s a fighting game. I’m amazed I didn’t see any old, bent-over Japanese men take their mallets to each other’s heads after someone went all guerrilla on their team’s balls one too many times.

Gateball allegedly has a player base of over six million people worldwide, but like shuffleboard, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who sees it as anything besides an oldster-sport. That said, this game is extremely helpful to newbies — one flip through the rule section, and you’ll have enough knowledge to hold your own against the easy level in no time. In fact, the game does such a good job simulating its sport and making it approachable for the average game-console owner that, uh, you can’t help but wonder why they’re doing all this for gateball, of all things.

There are only two gateball sims in existence on consoles — this game, and The Gateball, a 1999 PS1 budget game from D3 Publisher. This is undoubtedly the better of the two, in no small part because the Hudson Lounge Orchestra is back in action with the music here.

You can see a couple small samples of Appare! on YouTube, but instead I will link to a Nicovideo that features a full match against the toughest CPU team in the game, giving you a full idea of gateball’s barbaric levels of competitiveness.