The Bouncer (PlayStation 2) review on HonestGamers

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Review by Zack Little
October 13, 2005

I like Square. I don’t cosplay as Tidus, I don’t fantasize about Tifa, and I damn sure didn’t cry about anybody getting a sword ran through their heart…but I like Square. For all their androgynous protagonists, for all their sappy love-plots, they can tell a good story. And I do love a good story.

But even if I was a rabid (and yes, I mean ‘rabid’, not ‘avid’) Square fan, I’d still have to agree on one thing: A company that makes games like Square makes has no business making a beat-em-up. Ever.

Could you imagine a pantywaist pansy like Tidus in a brawler? Or Squall? Or any other of the female-looking males they put in their RPG’s starring roles? Even if you can picture it, you probably don’t like what you see. Brawlers are manly games; testosterone-fueled, rage-induced bash fests. Broken bones and broken noses, busted lips and twisted necks. If you take everything Square’s games aren’t, you’ve got a decent brawler on your hands.

Common sense didn’t stop them from making the Bouncer.

The Bouncer is a traditional brawler at the core, the standard fighting fare I’ve grown to love…and sometimes hate…from the genre. You and two computer-controlled characters punch and kick and throw your way through infinite enemies, each one too stupid to bring a gun. You can level up a bit; boost the offense, boost the defense, boost the attacks. Punch, punch, punch, kick, kick, kick, fight, fight, fight.

And all that punching and kicking and fighting looks damn good, too; the Bouncer is gorgeous all over. A PS2 launch title, true, but you’d never know it from a glance. Each cutscene gets the full Square treatment; they give it just as much effort as they would for any RPG. Perfectly-modeled models. Detailed effects; everything moves in a realistic way. Well-designed and streamlined, this is the kind of thing you’d expect to see from your Final Fantasy X’s and your Kingdom Hearts. Square doesn’t make ugly games.

But they do make sissy heroes with stupid names, and Sion Barzahd is one of them. See, the trouble starts when Square starts acting like Square.

Sion (who looks remarkably like an older version of Sora from Kingdom Hearts) is a bouncer, something you’d never guess from looking. Skinny-bodied, whiney-mouthed and spikey-haired, he doesn’t look like he could protect a ham sandwich, much less a seedy bar like Fate.

Oh, yeah. The bar these guys bounce at is called Fate. It gets dumber.

In an effort to counter Sion’s wussiness, we also have Volt. Big dude, tough dude; the last guy you’d want bashing you in the face. Volt’s scary, yeah, but it’s not just his physique: Leather jacket, chest sticking out for all the world to see, tight jeans that don’t leave nearly enough to the imagination…Village People reject. Definitely.

And if that’s true, than Volt’s ‘special friend’ would have to be Kou, Fate’s third bouncer and a tattoo fetishist. He looks every bit as frail as Sion, the only difference being that, instead of hiding his wimpiness behind an oversized Ronald McDonald coat, he goes around open-chested, just like his big buddy Volt.

In an RPG, these three stooges might have actually fit. They could develop in an RPG, break out of their trite shells, actually become characters I could care about. But here, in this thirty-minute thumping, they start out cliché and stay that way.

And it doesn’t help that they’re cliché characters in a cliché plot, either. The story’s one of those high-rolling deals, with long-lost loves found again, tons of teenage angst, battles that challenge both morals and body. So it’s the exact opposite kind of plot you’d ever want in a brawler.

The fun starts when a group of ninjas, led by a guy I would have sworn was a girl until he started speaking, literally drops into Sion’s bar and kidnaps his kinda/sorta girlfriend, Dominique. Sion and Co. go off in hot pursuit, like any trite trio of chumps would, and what results is the most overblown crop of crap the genre has ever seen.

The driving force behind this melodramatic drama is a rich-bitch called Duragon C. Mikado, whose name is probably what I like most about this entire game. Duragon figures that, since a couple of rich guys snubbed him off when he was trying to get help for his sick sister, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD MUST PAY. At least, I think that’s the deal. His history gets told through these cryptic flashbacks that keep switching to him in the present, showing him as he glares at random objects and does his brooding thing. No matter how many times I play this game, I always lose interest and just skip over that part.

How does Sion’s obligatory love interest factor into the maniac’s machinations? Well, it’s extremely lame, but on the odd chance that the five people who’d actually care about it happen to read this review, I have to keep it hush.

Oh, what the hell.

WARNING: LAME PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!

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Dominique? She’s Duragon’s sister. Except Duragon’s sister actually died a while back, so she’s not really his sister, but a robot clone of his sister. And she also happens to be the crucial key in his weapon of mass destruction, a satellite laser.

So he made a key for his ultimate weapon that looks and acts like his dead sister, apparently in some half-assed attempt to be ironic. And then he lost the damn thing. Wrong on so many levels.

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SPOILERS OVER. WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BASH REVIEW.

It’s the kind of plot that’s supposed to make you break out the Kleenex. And you can tell from all the melodrama and all the speeches and all the predictable plot twists what Square was trying to do: Put the two most different genres in all of videogaming together.

But it just doesn’t work.

They took the same cookie-cutter moves from your average beat-em-up, the same concepts and the same styles. They threw in a plot that thinks it’s an RPG, and a crappy RPG at that. They added some wide-eye-worthy graphics, and the resulting Frankenstein was the Bouncer, the unmanliest manly game ever.

Rating
3	This is what happens when you mess with the universe's natural order.
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Game Profile & Content

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Staff Score (Avg): N/A User Score (Avg): 4.0 Press Score (Avg): 7.0
Reviews: 1 Guides: 2 Cheats: 1 Ratings: 1	High Scores: 0 Screenshots: 6 Videos: 0

Title: The Bouncer
Genre: Fighting Action (Brawler)
Publisher: Square-Enix
Developer: DreamFactory
Release Date: March 6, 2001
ESRB: T
Save: 70KB

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