Review #224: Kenka Bancho - Badass Rumble

 How to Man 101.

 Are you a man? After playing Kenka Bancho - Badass Rumble, you will be. A Bancho is the manliest man you can ever become, and one can only reach this status by being a complete and total badass. And this is what this game is about, becoming the baddest of the bad.

 After naming your Bancho, which can only be a guy, you are thrust into the town of Kyouto, and you make it your one goal to become the Baddest Bancho around. Not an easy task, there's 46 other Bancho with the same goal as you, plus, this is a 7-day school trip, so you are always running against time. As expected, there's not a whole lot story to the game, not that it needs to. The supporting cast is made up of your few school mates, which get a bit of development if you don't ditch the school activities, and the other Bancho, all which have their own distinct looks, but only get a few lines of dialogue. For what it's worth, the dialogue is excellent, they made it both funny and badass, and just like the setting itself, it's very Japanese, with lines such as 'Blame your own weakness!'. It's awesome.

 The game is about managing time. Every morning you are given the option of following the schedule and spend the morning doing the school touring, or ditching the class and hunt some Banchos. The town is made up of about 10 different districts, but moving around town will take up time. Besides your own two feet, you can use Buses, the subway or cabs. Cabs can take you anywhere, are faster than your own feet, but cost a lot, subways are cheap and fast, but there's only about 5 stops, while buses have more stops than the subway, but are very slow. The town of Kyouto is decently sized, but there's not a whole lot to do besides pummeling dudes. Sure, you can occasionally find 'secret' events, but they are just cutscenes, that may or may not trigger a fight or a decision that will slightly alter the ending dialogue.

 As a respectful Bancho, there are rules to follow if you want to be truly respected. For instance, while punks may use weapons(all behave the same though!), you shouldn't pick'em up. And while you can just sucker punch an enemy, the proper etiquette is to engage them with the MENCHI BEAM. The MENCHI BEAM is done by holding R, and it will 'challenge' whoever is in front of you. Most NPCs will cower in fear and run away, but if you use the MENCHI BEAM on punks, they will either bow down to you, fall down in defeat or challenge your MENCHI BEAM with their own MENCHI BEAM. That initiates a Stare down, a phrase will pop up, and a button-pressing mini-game will start in which you must press the correct buttons to form that phrase. It's funny the first couple of times, but it grows old. Fast. That said, if you fail the mini-game, you'll take damage, and failure to engage fights with the MENCHI BEAM will result in a drop to your Bancho rank.

 So, you just successfully insulted your enemy and got the first hit in, then comes the fighting. It's rather simple, Square is for weak attacks, Triangle for strong attacks and circle to grab your enemies. There's a few other mechanics like blocking, charging energy and your Super Attack, but they do little to flesh the system. Fighting is fairly... loose. The camera isn't too bad, you can move it around with the digital pad, but there's no way to lock on to your enemy, so you might have to slightly direct your attacks with the analog nub. The thing is... there's not much to the combo system, you won't be pulling any fancy 10 hits combos or anything like that. Simple is not necessarily bad, but it goes a long way into making it get a tad repetitive. There's no nuance, nothing to keep the fights interesting. But hey, defeated Banchos join your ranks, so you can call them to aid you in battle!

 That said, you can customize quite a few aspects of your Bancho. In Kyouto there's a barber shop and a clothes store, so you can make yourself into a Badass of your liking. Keep in mind that what clothes you wear affect the number of pockets in which you can carry items! But more interestingly, leveling up grants you stat points that you can manually slot on your attributes, and new moves. While travelling on wheels, or at the hotel's room, you can actually edit every single move in your moveset. They have different speeds and attack power, but it's still not a system that lends itself to creativity, as far as combos go anyways.

 I think it's clear by now that the game's biggest flaw is how repetitive it gets. Every day boils down to the same routine, fight random punks, which all fight the same even if they wear different clothes, until they drop an itinerary, then use that itinerary to find a Bancho and defeat him. Sometimes a Bancho will only appear on certain days, so you might have to find another itinerary. Fights never really change, once you find a strategy that works, you will continue to use it all the way to the end, because there's no need to change it up! Another issue is with the Town itself, there's no real map to tell you how to go from place to place, even while entering the Bus, which opens up a pseudo-map, there's some locations that aren't shown in the map. Lastly, the game is rather short, I beat it in about 6 hours, but if you rush through it, you could probably do it even quicker.

 However, the game does have some replay value. You probably won't be able to see everything on your first way through. Either you hunt all the Banchos, and will probably miss some, go to every School Tour, or dip one feet in both. There's many ways to go about each day, and the events on each day are different, which leads to many decisions on what to do! There's New Game+ in the game, and you keep everything but the items you had on your inventory, but you can choose to beat the Banchos you already beat, not that you need to. There's also a 'Night Out' mode, which can be played offline with another player, and while you don't level up in this mode, you can find souls that can be used to increase your stats.

 While it's not a particularly good looking game, it gets the job done. Animations are a bit on the stiff side, but not terribly so, character models are simple, but are easy on the eyes. Kyouto is a fairly simple looking town, but for such a mundane setting, they really needn't go crazy on the backdrops. Plus, it's a PSP game with no frame rate issues and a decent loading times, that's badass. There's not a whole lot of different music tracks, and what few there are aren't particularly noteworthy, but I guess they do fit the game.

 Kenka Bancho - Badass Rumble is a good game. It's fun, and while it's a bit short, there's plenty of replay value. There's not a whole lot of depth to the game, but I'm pretty sure they weren't aiming for that. For a portable game, it gets the job done, it's like a... Yakuza Lite.
 7.0 out of 10.