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Somewhere within a village, there is conflict between animals: koalas, cats, pandas, and the like. WAR. It's... not as menacing as it sounds. The village has organized a tournament called DOJIBALL, where animals face each other in brackets, one against one, until the last two standing players take each other on to decide the champion. With a name like DOJIBALL, you might come to the swift conclusion that this is essentially a video game about dodge ball; you'd be partially right.
Taking place in a third-person viewpoint, you control the only penguin in the tourney. At the beginning of every set, you and the opponent have five balls, with each side being able to pick up and throw them across a long table at one another. The best way to describe gameplay is that it's a cross between dodge ball and air hockey... with ten balls being tossed back and forth. In order to win a set, out of a best-of-three, you must make sure your opponent has more balls on their side than yours before the timer runs out. Another alternative method is to get all ten balls on their side at once, concluding the set as a "perfect game."
So how would one go about winning a set if both contestants are constantly throwing balls toward each side? There are several aspects that come into play that disrupt this balance. The most common one is that balls can and will collide with one another, changing its route and speed; now imagine this happening with multiple balls and that, occasionally, a moving obstacle randomly appears in the middle to further complicate matters. This situation alone already makes for quite the hectic scene, but what makes this even more frantic is the fact that both animals can actually get hit by the balls. This in turn will knock down either you or the opponent for a few seconds, unable to retaliate while the other is free to toss balls with no repercussions.
This frenzied tone is Penguin-Kun Wars' main catch; but if you remove those intentionally-conflicting features, what you're left with is something generic hiding beneath the cutesy animal presentation. Even then the tournament itself is surprisingly short, as you're only fighting against four opponents, though this is "circumvented" by looping those four battles over and over as the difficulty rises. But if you're wondering how long it takes to fight all four, you can ideally defeat them in under 20 minutes. "Ideally." With this originally being a 1980s arcade game, two specific restrictions have been placed in a bid to plunk more coins in the machine. The first is the ability to continue, or the lack of: lose two sets in a row and it's back to the title screen. This was ordinary for an arcade title of the era, so that doesn't come as a shock.
However, the second restriction is what makes this frustrating to play when things get heavy: being knocked down by a ball. It's not the action itself, but what can be exploited while you're down. The problem here is that the game acts like you're still standing, so if you get hit again, the stun animation resets. Worse, there are no invincibility frames. Worse than that, the AI is programmed to know this. As the difficulty rises over time, this becomes increasingly infuriating... If the opponent manages to stun you, they will stand there with a ball in hand and literally wait until a second before your stun wears off to stun you again. It's torture. You pretty much have to avoid every ball in later matches just to stand a winning chance.
Granted, with this being an Arcade Archives version, you can use Hamster's save feature to hassle your way around this annoyance. But you literally have to exit to the PlayStation home menu, turn off the game, and turn it back on for the function to work, plus it only lasts for as long as you have the console on. So... hassling your way around the hassle is still a hassle itself. But say the exploit was modified and iframes were included, would the overall product be a guaranteed buy? It would make the experience more tolerable, but there isn't that much here to warrant a purchase over more fun titles in the AA catalog. The concept itself is interesting, but there's so much room for improvement in terms of variety; it's a shame that the bonus rounds, one of which is literally air hockey, wasn't incorporated into the actual matches.
If Penguin-Kun Wars still sounds intriguing, wait for a price drop and play the game with someone in its local two-player competitive mode. At least this way you can cuss out the other player in person when they stunlock you.
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Community review by dementedhut (July 24, 2023)
Now if only I had the foresight to submit this OutRun review a day earlier... |
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