One of the most amazing Fall Tokyo Game Show titles was Squaresoft's unofficial sequel to Ehrgeiz, The Bouncer: Seamless Action Battle System. An experiential game combining a unique four-person fighting system with adventure aspects that weaves in Square's knack for storytelling, The Bouncer demonstrated a new take on gameplay paradigms that Tekken Tag Tournament and Gran Turismo 2000 didn't.
First of all, the game shines with a luminosity that other game's lacked. Sure GT 2000 and TTT are brilliant looking, but they follow already established game formulas. They're going for realism. The Bouncer's design focuses on bizarre, animal-like characters and their abilities to move fluidly from unlike environments. The character design actually highlights a glowing characteristic, too, so they all seem oddly angelic and luminescent. Part of this glow effect is used no doubt to set the mood that this apocalyptic gang-style fighter, in which Final Fantasy-lookalike characters and marauding gangs run through streets, subways, and bash
through restaurant store fronts clashing in all-out brawls.
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Second, the graphics showed off spectacular water, fire, and lighting effects in large, interactive environments with a chilling purpose: to emphasize the chaotic nature of the world in which you're placed. On particular event shows a train bashing through a subway wall, knocking down slabs of concrete, destroying staircases, and puncturing a water valve that splashes into the subway. All this, after the star characters jump and roll off the train through a stream of fire issuing off its side. Previous demos (shown at
the Siggraph show) feature characters leap-frogging chairs, deftly picking up tables and other objects and hurling them at
opponents a la Capcom's PowerStone. In at least two scenarios, fast and early attackers were slowed down by the camera so that you could get a picture-perfect snap shot of the damage being done. This game is set in beautiful urban settings outside (an industrial wasteland along a ridge overlooking a city, for example) and inside (Chinese restaurants and bars). The Bouncer's visual appeal and dynamic use of environments is top-notch stuff, needless to say.
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