While Nene is busy breaking international treaties, the bank robbers strike again, acquiring a total of 5 billion yen. Shit, why not just tell rando homeless street hackers about your plans, as a police officer, to bypass NATO security? Nah that would be so impossibly reckless oh wait she does that too… Eventually Nene just says “fuck it” and HACKS INTO ONE OF NATO’S DATABASES… WITH A POLICE HQ OFFICE COMPUTER… THAT SHE LOGGED INTO WITH HER POLICE BADGE. This requires going back and forth to various computer vendors, sleazy hackers, and military factory workers for bits of information. Most of the game involves investigating broken pieces left behind by the unfamiliar robo-armor of the criminals that performed the robbery. Doing so doesn’t even find anything, except a vague sense of horror at a player/character contract the game allowed you to violate. Well, turns out you can *force* her to investigate them anyway. After a brief glance in their direction, Nene resolves that the nearby garbage bins aren’t worth searching and are gross anyway. Anyway, you find yourself investigating the bank and immediately the fourth wall between yourself as player and Nene finds itself broken. One of the things that is endlessly frustrating if you don’t have a walk-through handy is that there are separate commands for “Talk” and “Listen” (bottom left and middle left) and many interactions require you to alternate between them in a non-intuitive (read: seemingly random) manner to keep the conversation going.
#Bubblegum crisis rpg review series#
Like other digital comic adventures, you have a series of commands you can use on the right side of the screen. You’d be sassy too if you had a 10-inch… neck. Even though it doesn’t come up at all in the game, they even made sure that looking at him, you just know. Seriously, even for anime, having such an unapologetically gay male character in the mid-1980s that wasn’t, like, dying of AIDS or otherwise weighted with hubris was really badass. So anyway you go inside to talk to Leon McNichol and Daley Wong and let’s just stop there for a second because Daley Wong. Then again, for 1980s Japan, this *was* progressive. It’s worth noting that the entire Bubblegum Crisis franchise does a pretty tenuous sexual politics balancing act between showcasing four relatively self-actualized woman protagonists (a business owner, a rock star, an actress and… a traffic cop) that are kickass robo-suited vigilantes behind the scenes but also making them ditzy, irrational, and surprisingly helpless on occasion. You start out playing Nene Romanova, one of the vigilante Knight Sabers, who finds out about the robbery because her day job is boring. The game opens up with mysterious armored battle suits breaking into a bank. Which is good because the game includes plenty of that for itself. Playing through the whole thing, the translation is fantastic, with very little ambiguity or awkwardness. Thankfully, about a year ago a fan-translation ROM of the game surfaced. It was also the only reason I hung onto my “ Purple Barney” converter so long You know, because it’s a “digital comic” text adventure entirely in Japanese. The game was part of my massive vintage game collection (that I sold to pay for my move to Portland), and not only had I never beaten it but I never got particularly far on it either.
#Bubblegum crisis rpg review Pc#
A couple weekends ago I finally beat Bubblegum Crash for the PC Engine, and that was kind of a big deal for a few reasons.