Pu-Li-Ru-La

Released: 1991
Published by: Taito
Genre: Beat-'em-up
Platforms: Arcade, ported to FM Towns Marty, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PS2

[Note: Sorry for the late update. It was a holiday weekend up here in the frozen tundras.] Well, looks like it's the second week in a row of Taito-developed games! But they do deserve to be in the spotlight, as this week's game Pu-Li-Ru-La is a short but sweet classic weird game. What starts out as a seemingly saccharine fairy tale story turns into a surreal mess (though still admittedly saccharine) in which the two heroes Zac and Mel fight robots, clowns, and angry bamboo shoots to save their homeland of Radishland.

The basic premise behind the game is that each town in Radishland has a key that controls the flow of time, and these keys have been stolen by an evil mastermind, subsequently stopping time. For some reason all sorts of bizarre baddies are roaming around in the frozen towns, and when you kill them they turn into ADORABLE little fuzzy animals that you can, uh, run into to collect points. The combat is pretty simple, Zac and Mel have only one attack (club dudes over the head with a Magic Stick) and can use up to three magic spells per life, which are randomly selected and usually pretty awesome—at one point Mel used a spell that one-hit KO'ed the stage boss and moved us right along to the next level.

If I could have only posted one screenshot to sum up the magic of Pu-Li-Ru-La, this would be it.

While it might sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill sidescrolling beat-'em-up so far, the fun of the game starts in around level three when the world takes a sharp twist for the strange and surreal. Levels are littered with photos of real people blocking the screen or interacting with the characters (for example, a room in which a sideways face on the wall licks your heroes with a giant cartoon tongue). Demonic mosaics replace the storybook towns of the beginning of the game. The game explains in broken English that Radishland is being twisted by a megalomaniac's dreams, and while it's allegedly referring to the final boss, we can probably safely assume it applies to the game designers themselves. It's amazingly fun wondering what sort of monstrosity the next level will hold.

Wait, wait, wait... I don't think this is quite what I signed up for when I started playing this game.

Pu-Li-Ru-La's certainly a bit of an anomaly in the gaming world. It seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been targeted at a pretty young audience, judging from the pastel colours, cutesy characters, and difficulty level—it only takes a handful of credits to beat. And yet, there's something so off about it. It was obviously a pretty successful venture for Taito, as it was ported to four different consoles (!) between 1991 and 1997. It's extremely short, taking probably less than fifteen minutes to beat, but there's just so much to take in that you'll probably find yourself coming back to it. It's a shining example of the really weird arcade games that were coming out in the '90s, perhaps because it's something pretty much anyone with a taste for the offbeat can pick up and enjoy.

Pu-Li-Ru-La gets 4.5/5 nightmare fantasy worlds on the GTPU weird-o-meter. Give it a try, I promise you won't be disappointed. Now if only Taito would get around to making a sequel...

Zunzunkyou no Yabou

Released: 1994
Published by: SEGA
Genre: Shooter
Platforms: Arcade

How many times have you mused to yourself, "Boy, I wish there was a game out there where I could play as a Buddha on a religious crusade throughout the world--no, the universe"? Well, thanks to this bizarre mid-90s SEGA release, your wish has come true! Zunzunkyou no Yabou can be summed up in that one sentence, for better or worse.

The selection screen starts you off with four choices--Japan, Asia, Europe, and America. Each region is full of a goofy cast of ridiculously Japanese stereotypes: the Chinese are a fleet of acrobats and costumed pandas, the French are a bunch of effeminate, prancing ballet dancers, and the Americans are represented by a gaudily-costumed, steroid-fueled Captain America clone who regularly spams attacks in the form of the word "JUSTICE". Your mission as a happy little Buddha (or possibly a statue of one, it's never made quite clear) is to systematically destroy the inhabitants of every country you visit by shooting glowing manji at them. Are you committing genocide? Are you leading sinners to some sort of Nirvana or salvation? You aren't ever told why. There doesn't need to be a reason. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, which doesn't change the fact that the basic premise of the game is utterly insane.

Think of India as the birthplace of Buddhism and a rich cultural history? Sorry, Zunzunkyou no Yabou is here to show us it's actually just a big desert full of buxom naked ladies and dancing skeletons.

Each stage consists of three levels where you have to wipe out 40 -50 innocent people, and an appropriately-themed boss level. It's important to note that while most top-down shooters are pretty tough for the average gamer, Zunzunkyou is made harder by the fact that all the enemy sprites are gigantic and love firing fast-moving crap at you at all times. Furthermore, any attempts at a high score are pretty much moot since it resets to zero at every game over. You might notice from the screenshots that P1's score is pretty much solidly between 0 and 100 at all times, which is partly because I suck at shooters and partly because Zunzunkyou was explicitly designed to suck as many quarters from the arcade-going public as humanly possible. Really, it makes the entire Metal Slug series look like a cakewalk. Insult is added to injury by the time you reach the American stage and realise the game designers think of Harlem as a place for flamboyantly gay 80s sci-fi punk rockers to hang out on a basketball court.

Ah, France. Home to circus animals, Egyptian tilework, and of course, Pierrot the Clown. Where else could you find all these things in one place?

Once you've pretty much annihilated everyone on Earth (except of course people in Africa, South America, and Australasia, I guess), you may think you've beaten the game--but no! Our manji-throwing buddy's journey is much grander than that. Your journey next takes you to space, where you're given the chance to spread your pacifist philosophies through alien discotheques and bizarro-Earths full of clones of your own character. The final boss is Earth itself, which has sprouted a gigantic eyeball and decides to fight you by throwing little miniature Earths at you. Why Buddha wants to blow up the planet is kind of a mystery, but really, no moreso than anything else in this game. By the time I got to this point, I'd probably used up at least 50 credits, so you can bet I was hoping for an awesome ending animation, or at least a credit roll. Zunzunkyou being Zunzunkyou, all I was treated to for the wanton destruction of the Earth was a short message followed by the initial selection screen again.

Despite all this, Zunzunkyou has found a permanent home with me, and for some unknown reason I find myself coming back to it now and then. It gets 3.5/5 racist stereotypes on the GTPU weird-o-meter, mostly because if nothing else it'll make you smile, and you can beat it in about fifteen minutes.