Chip-Chan Kick!

There is a particular sub-genre of games that I cannot get enough. I don't know if there's a common term for it; "platformer" isn't really good enough for it. Single-screen, eliminate all enemies, platform-based game with mild puzzle elements. A Bubble Bobble-like. A Snow Brothers-like. Whatever that's called, I love those kind of games. Love them enough that I even made one a couple years ago. I should probably make another some day. Cheap plug aside, I randomly ran across one a little while ago on a system that I don't have a whole lot of experience with: Chip-Chan Kick! on the PC-FX.

What is the PC-FX, you may be asking? It was the follow up to God's Favorite Gaming Console, the PC-Engine. The fact that I have to introduce the system shows that it didn't do very well. It had the misfortune of coming out after the Saturn and Playstation, didn't have any 3D capabilities, and didn't do 2D as well as the Saturn. The one thing it did do well was display full-motion video at a resolution and frame rate better than both the PSX and Saturn, but that was about it. So while the system wasn't setting the world ("the world" being "Japan only") on fire, it had a few good games in its small library, with Chip-Chan being among them.

Chip-Chan Kick! is a game allegedly developed by a company called MetroVG, and it was allegedly based on a property that was going to be an anime, but was downgraded to a three-part audio drama. I'm emphasizing allegedly because there is quite a bit of misinformation surrounding this game, which I'll be getting to later.

In any case, this is a cutesty little game with brightly colored anime girls in brightly colored environments fighting against brightly colored mutant animals and inanimate objects given life. It's pretty standard fare. You play as one of two characters: Chip and Chap. I bring this up only because the latter is voiced by the same actor (Satomi Korogi) who would go on to play May in the Guilty Gear series. You're armed with little blobs that you throw at enemies, stunning them, then you can kick them while they are stunned, where they become a fast moving projectile that can take out other enemies. It doesn't get any more complex than that. It is like Bubble Bobble, but it is also very much not like Bubble Bobble, this is not a game that requires you to master your character's movement and abilities to get through otherwise impassible or unreachable parts of a level. Chip-Chan Kick! is basic, you slap enemies with slime, kick them, then fight a boss every ten stages. There's no secret movement tech or any advanced scoring systems at play here. But it doesn't really matter if it's basic, because the game itself is pretty damn fun to play.

While I'm not going to consider its simplicity to be a negative, I will say that this game's difficulty can be. After a point, enemies just seem to always be in the right spot to kill you. Bosses can be brutal, even when you've got the pattern down. Losing a life causes you to lose all of your power ups, so you can be stuck in a situation where enemies and projectiles straight up move faster than you. But on the plus side, lives and continues are pretty generous, and the game isn't so long that you can't memorize enemy patterns and get better, but it'll be a pain in the process.

I admit that I've been struggling a little bit in writing about Chip-Chan Kick! Not writing about the game itself: this cute, slightly rough thing on a system that could have used more games like this. Rather, games like this leave me with a feeling that is very hard to describe. As a young, weird child, I played games on my Mega Drive like Valis, El Viento, and thanks to the Sega Channel, Pulseman. When I became a sophomore in high school, the internet had built a bridge to connect American and Japanese cultures. I had always had a bit of an Otaku attitude growing up, but this period of time was like my Imperfect Cell phase of loving Japan. This was when I got introduced to Visual Kei, anime that wasn't aired on Cartoon Network, manga that wasn't sold at Borders, and lots and lots of ROMs. Valis and Pulseman would be joined by the Sailor Moon Mega Drive game, Rondo of Blood, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Princess Maker 2, and Vampire. I guess it's just because these games are Anime as hell (complimentary), they directly appeal to some part of my weird brain that I struggle to articulate. These Otaku-centric games that you can play while listening to Malice Mizer on WinAmp, taking a break to some high school or college student's Final Fantasy VIII fanfic. Anyways, Chip-Chan Kick! has a similar appeal to me. Hopefully someone understands what I'm trying to say here. It really did a lot of heavy lifting for me to think of Chip-Chan Kick! as more than a decent game that worth a playthrough.

Let me get to the real juicy stuff now. So you may have seen me talk about this game's alleged development history. This is all bull shit, complete misinformation. Chip-Chan Kick! was actually developed by a company named Custom, which only ever developed three games. The soundtrack was done by a couple of guys named Hitoshi Sakamoto and Masaharu Iwata. Yes, as in the two men who would later go on to do the music for games like Baroque, Opoona, and a little something called Final Fantasy Tactics. I bring this up because, for whatever reason, there is a guy who is filing false copyright claims for retro gaming music on YouTube, and has chosen Chip-Chan Kick! as a hill to die on, to the point of threatening a lawsuit due to a vinyl re-release of the game's soundtrack. I'm sorry for linking to the war crime apologists at Time Extention, but they have a pretty good article covering all this. If you try looking up any information about this game, you will get a fan wiki maintained by this guy, filled with all of his false claims. Just a little something to add at the end of all this.