Grape Garden

Intro

I’ll admit it. When it comes to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, to say I’m a fan would be a bit of an understatement. From October to December, this movie gets played the most out of all of my DVD’s, and I go to the 3-D screenings as much as I can. I’ve memorized the majority of the lines from the movie, as well as the songs from both the movie and both versions of the Haunted Mansion Holiday soundtrack (in which the Disney Theme Parks change the Haunted Mansion layout to feature Nightmare themes). I have most of the first edition figures in mint condition sitting somewhere in my closet. Now just to get this out of the way, I don’t have some inner angst that I feel matches Jack’s conflict like the majority of Nightmare fans claim. Rather, I feel that Nightmare pulls off the difficult task of appealing to both kids and adult; It’s like a fairy tale that never gets too kiddy, and takes on a different meaning every time you see it.

Now I bring this up because I’ve recently picked up a video game that was barely commercialized, called, The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King. A Gameboy Advance game, it’s supposedly a prequel to the movie. Seeing as it’s both Nightmare and a prequel (I do love my backstories), I picked it up right away to see how it was.

Oscar-Winning Plot

There is slightly some more depth in the plot (which is all related to Jack, Oogie, and Sally not knowing who the hell each other are), but that’s about it.

PREDICTABO

The game is actually a pretty predictable platformer. You have a health bar that you can expand by collecting shrunken heads (think Zelda Heart Containers). There’s a lot of ladder-climbing, ledge grabbing, boss fights that require (limted) strategy, questing, and collecting items (in this case, Halloweentown citizens’ belongings). That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but Jack walks as if he’s on ice. Seriously, the friction on Jack is horrendous, as it takes an unusual amount of time for him to reach his top speed, as well as to slow down. It doesn’t help matters that Jack cannot climb stuff for shit, as it takes forever for him to climb a ladder or pull himself up from a ledge. Even if you’re playing it on VisualBoyAdvance and you’re holding down the spacebar to speed up the process, it still feels slow. Every now and then, the action is broken up with Zero segments where you have to dodge stuff, but it’s pretty boring. You know what, let’s forget this part, let’s go to the weapons!

Nothing’s more suspicious than Frog’s Breath!

You start the game off with the basic Frog’s Breath Gun. It never runs out of ammo and is close-range. Now I remember Sally saying that “Frog’s Breath will overpower any odor,” but I must’ve forgotten the scene where she said “You can use it to make bugs blow up.” I guess that must be Frog’s Breath laced with Deadly Night Shade.

This weapon is called the “Bat Boomerang.” No, it’s nothing like Batman’s Batarangs. These things don’t return and you can spam this thing like most shitty Mugen characters’ fireballs. The damage it deals sucks, so basically you only use this if you don’t want to stand right next to your opponent and nail him with the Frog’s Breath Gun OF DOOM, or if you need to open up some doors.

Hey, remember in the first Kingdom Hearts when you could throw the Pumpkins like bombs in Halloweentown? Same basic principle, except no lock on, and the physics are ass. What makes it worse is that this is one of the only two weapons that requires ammo. Finding the ammo usually requires you to blow up crates, and how do you do that? With Pumpkin Bombs! And if you don’t have enough Pumpkin Bombs to get more Pumpkin Bombs, you have to kill enemies repeatedly until an enemy just so happens to drop one. What fun!

Near the end of the game, after a particularly annoying quest that puts you on a time limit, you get the “Pumpkin King” power up, which lets you burn through blocks that have fire symbols on them and pretty much anything else that moves. Now if at this point you’re thinking “OH COOL,” allow me to disappoint you by telling you that it isn’t. You cannot move at all unless you tap the gun button. Worse still, the amount of time you spend in this form is about five seconds total (unless you’ve dashed into the air during which you’ll revert when you land), so if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily waste an ability that’s extremely hard to find ammo for. Think Pumpkin Bombs except much worse.

The other abilities you get include other “upgrades” such as sticky shoes to help you walk up muddy walls, Acid pools that turn you into a puddle to go under small holes (pictured above), and ghost buttons that let you pull a Monkey D. Luffy and stretch your legs to reach high up platforms. These abilities aren’t particularly exciting, and can’t be used for any other purpose than to get to required areas of the game.

A bow? But why?! How ugly!

I know I usually started my Mugen reviews with aesthetics and then moved on to gameplay, but in this case, I believe the opposite should be stressed. After all, the original movie, which I admit has a pretty darn simplistic plot, was known for its heavy aesthetic appeal, combining stop-motion animation with computer animation (the fires/ghosts, anything that looked “animated”) and a camera system that was groundbreaking for its time (it was the first stop-motion movie to have a camera that could “move” on a track), so obviously the looks and sounds of this game should take precedence over it playing good.

Unfortunately it fails in this department, and fails hard. If you looked at the screenshots above, I have to say that what you are looking at are the better moments of the game. The rest of the stages are horribly put together, and are usually just mazes of random chunks of ground thrown together. And while a lot of the movie’s characters are in it and are, for the most part, faithful to their appearances, all enemies that aren’t from the source movie look nothing like Tim Burton’s art style. Rather, they look like they kidnapped a character designer from Jim Henson’s studio and forced him to draw the bugs, and the end result is just horrid and inconsistent.

The soundtrack, I admit, is a somewhat admirable attempt at porting Nightmare’s music over to the GBA. However, the song selection is really, really weird. The graveyard levels play the intro of “Jack’s Lament,” and loops it over and over again in a very unnatural fashion. Every time you use the Pumpkin King power up, you hear “What’s This?” although the effect usually doesn’t last long enough to even finish the second “what’s this” in the song. I will give props to the Zero segments. As much as I hated them, the music, taken from when Jack is giving out his satanic toys to all the unsuspecting kids on Christmas Eve plays, is quite fitting for the segments. The boss fights though, aside from being tedious and stupid, however, really suffer more due to the song choice. It’s just the Oogie Boogie fight music from the movie, which even incorporates the segments when Oogie dies during that fight. WARNING: If you didn’t see Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, unread that sentence.

The sound effects though are just flat out misplaced. When you switch guns, you hear a door creak because creaking doors coming out of GBA speakers when you push L is scarier than anything the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre could offer. Any time you get a healing item, ammo, or a shrunken head, you hear a… well, I guess it could be an owl hooting, I really don’t know what it is. My point is, is that most of the sounds just really suck.

Conclusion

As a Nightmare fan, I’m kinda pissed at how the game got treated. Not at the same level Haruhi fans feel when a person with an IQ greater than 75 tells them how much their favorite anime sucks, but I feel let down over it. At the end of the day, this game is equivalent to all of the Nightmare merchandise you can buy at Hot Topic: devoid of anything that made the original movie great.

Graphics: 5/10
Sound: 4/10
Gameplay: 4/10
Overall: 4.3/10 (I’m too lazy to calculate the actual percentage today)

Closing Thoughts

I imagine this is what the game developers thought when they were making the game:

Uh oh! Burnin’ Leo’s out and there’s gonna be some hell to pay. Note this version is still incomplete (1 more super, and other tweaking is forthcoming), but I guess it’s ready for public consumption.

Download
Readme

So I was ripping sounds from various PSOne games when I realized that I forgot to reupload the Open Source section from my old site! Anyway, since Robert’s voice rips are now hosted on TrinityMugen, his stuff won’t be back up, but everything else that was there should be back. Also ripped some voices from some shitty Sailor Moon PSOne game, so check those out! If an author isn’t specified, I ripped them.

Bible Fight Sprites (all ripped by kronos)

Eve
God
Jesus
Mary
Moses
Satan
Misc. Effects

Bible Fight Sounds

Sound FX (ripped by kronos)

Super Street Fighter II Turbo Sprites

Ryu (ripped by felineki)

Sailor Moon PSX game sounds

Sailor Moon
Sailor Mercury
Sailor Mars
Sailor Jupiter
Sailor Venus

Intro

Kamek kind of reminds me of Slugworth from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you are one of the five people who didn’t read the book or watch one of the two movie adaptations, Slugworth was a candymaker who infiltrated Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory to learn how to make candy like Wonka, and then would make it himself and make a huge profit, initially forcing Willy Wonka to shut down his factory until he figured out how to stop people from stealing his recipies. Now I’m not accusing Kamek of code thievery or making people quit Mugen, but the idea is the same: most of his stuff is just taking what people like and putting it into a character, and the average person loves it. In Reiko Hikari’s case, you take Tetsu Yatogi’s playing style and system, stir in some Warusaki3-style groove select, and finally add in a bunch of references to flash cartoons and other Mugen characters so that you have a mass of Kakuge Yaro template character that tries to do too much and comes out significantly less fun than any of the components used.

History Lesson

Before I begin the review, I think it’s important to discuss why anyone gives a rat’s ass about Kakuge Yaro today, and for that, I believe it’s because of XCB’s Tetsu Yatogi. For better or for worse, Tetsu Yatogi can be seen as one of the icons of Mugen gaming. With a movelist based on the popular Shoto playing style seen in Ryu/Ken/Akuma, its unorthodox game of origin, and heavy, heavy aesthetic appeal, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Tetsu Yatogi is one of the most frequently used character in Mugen (Randomselect Admin Kung_Fu_Man even pointed out that the majority of the bandwidth consumed by Randomselect comes from Tetsu downloads).

Now, just as a little background, the game Kakuge Yaro, where Tetsu originated from, is a Japanese 2D customizable fighter that looks like this:

Looks pretty shitty, huh? The gameplay isn’t much better, either. However, where it thrives is its ability to customize all characters in the game, right down to the palettes. Traditionally, this game has been pretty hard to find, passed around only between friends. Then suddenly, in what seemed to almost happen simultaneously, everything changed. A popular emulation site released an ISO of the game for public distribution, and a translation patch was soon to follow. Eventually some members of the community would make and distribute a Kakuge Yaro Artmoney table that made ripping from the game much easier. And suddenly, there was what can be described as a “boom” in Kakuge Yaro characters. Kung_Fu_Man’s gimmicky Hashimoto Yamazaki (you can call his not-jumping “out of the box,” I call it a gimmick), Rikard’s KOF/MvC Hybrid Nanashi Kimura, Kamek’s Reiko Hikari, and kamekaze’s Trusdale Brothers all came out in a short time following the release. Aside from kamekaze’s characters (and to a lesser extent, Hashimoto), all of them used the same fighting system seen in Tetsu, as well as his accompanying system graphics. But none of them borrowed as much from Tetsu as Reiko Hikari.

NOW FOR THE ACTUAL REIKO REVIEW

Firing up Reiko, you don’t sense anything wrong in the first place. Some of the sprites look a little iffy (the game’s fault, although it might’ve been nice if Kamek straightened these up a little), and listening to the voice is comparable to sewing your ear to the carpet (If Reiko is an EXTREMELY JAPANESE person, why does she speak English? With voices from Disgaea no less???), but there’s nothing totally wrong here. Yet. However, all one has to do is play with Reiko for a bit to realize blantant clashing sprite styles, the result of them being from totally different sources. For example, compare the Strong version of “What’s That?” to the EX version!

The one on the left came from Kakuge Yaro, while the other is of Kamek’s invention. Whatever happened to uniformity?! Now let’s look at all the “jokes” Kamek has tried to implement into this character. These next three shots all come from her Hyper Incoming super.

Ripped from Homestar Runner, “YOUR HEAD ASPLODE.” Remember Homestar Runner? Yeah, that cartoon was funny… like 3 years ago.

A 1-Up mushroom! Get it?! Yeah me neither.

This was funny when Most_Mysterious had this pic for his Alex’s Super KO a few years ago, with said creator singing “I Feel Good” A capella. Today, with that same pic, and that same voice clip, it feels little more than an attempt at getting people to laugh.

HERE’S A TANK LORRY! WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY GAMMA CRUSH etc etc. Also nice white edges on the UFO. This is one of Reiko’s ultimates, btw.

The mark of my dignity shall scar thy DNA. Oh geez.

If you haven’t come to the same conclusion I have so far, there is little sprite consistency anywhere, all covered up by really old attempts at humor. The end result just looks and feels really weird.

Gameplay

I apologize for the amount of graphics in the first part, so all other shots will be in links from now on.

First of all, let’s talk about the groove select. Kamek decided it was a cool idea to give Reiko selectable grooves. Five grooves, to be exact. However, careful playthrough reveals that pretty much the only noteworthy grooves here are C-Groove (the original format), and K-Groove (which makes it play in pseudo MvC style, like Kamek’s Sailor Jupiter, which I thought was decent). Both A-Groove and D-Groove are basically C-Groove in spirit, but A-Groove simply adds attack power as far as I can tell, and D removes parry and replaces it with more defensive maneuvers. X-Groove is pretty much useless, as it’s exactly like C-Groove (apparently, there were plans for it, but I’m not going to discuss this information here). While many people will say “It worked with Wausaki3, it works here,” this is probably because they haven’t played the other grooves and noticed how similar they all are, with only simple changes to attack parameters.

But with that out of the way, let’s move on to how Tetsu… errr, Reiko plays. Well actually, that’s a good point right there. Reiko has a fireball, a whirlwind kick, and a SHORYUKEN. Now I’ll be fair, the fireball doesn’t behave like Tetsu’s (it bounces on the ground)… until you play in the Sakura palette, which makes Reiko play exactly like Tetsu in terms of all three of those attacks, right down to the fireball sprites!

As far as the non-shoto inspired attacks go… damn, this character is really projectile heavy. Whether they sprout up from the ground like “What’s This,” or fall from the sky like “Incoming,” you have lots of distance projectile attacks. The only attack that’s not a projectile or based on Tetsu (I consider Dive Bomber to be like Tetsu’s diving kick special, or possibly like an attack seen in the unleaked version of Blaque) is Baserunner slide, which is actually pretty much the only instance of fresh, original idea in this character

Regarding supers, aside from the damage they deal, what really irks me is the commands. For two of the attacks, you have the directional command F, D, F, D. What the hell? There’s all sorts of good super commands that exist that are not being used here (HCB, F+Attack comes to mind), so what’s with this weird one?

Well I have really nothing else to say about gameplay. It’s just that it tries really hard to be Tetsu and then attempts to branch off into other ideas, but ultimately falters in presentation. If you want me to comment on the system, (and I know I’m going to get a lot of fire from Eli friends and fanboys here, but that’s okay because Eli partially agrees with me) it basically boils down to a lightshow with really stupid chainability. In the end, the strategy aspect goes right out the window, unless the strategy you’re focusing on is to get as many hits as you can. It’s not as free-styled as Melty Blood, but it can get out of hand.

OH WAIT I DO HAVE MORE. If you downloaded the Dark Reiko patch, which comes with two alternate Reiko’s, well, you get to see even more crappy attempts at humor. Dark Reiko has Proton Cannons and Shun Goku Satsu (wow what original jokes), and Really Dark Reiko is basically an answer to PotS’ Rare Akuma, made to be really cheap and nigh unbeatable. Honestly…

Conclusion

What’s a good way to end this review? Reiko is basically Kamek’s attempt at ripping people off in an attempt to make other people like his characters. It would be nice if Kamek actually played some more fighting games, learned about their styles, and ultimately tried to branch out on his own and make a unique character, but that doesn’t look like something he’s going to do.

Tally

Aesthetics: 7/10
Controls: 4/10
Gameplay: 6/10

Final Score: 5.6666666…/10

Final Thoughts

SUGOI

Uh oh, I just jumped on the Kakuge Yaro bandwagon… kinda. For no reason at all, I ripped the Announcer’s voice and brought it over to Mugen. Give it a shot, y’all. I’ll probably end up doing common fight sounds later, so keep your eyes peeled.

Download