The bad news is that it’s a very poor attempt at it.įor starters, the game is quite stingy with providing offensive moves. The good news is that this section is patterned after beat-em-up, something people are comfortable with and is easy to get into. It’s the action part that things kick off, when Amber transforms into superhero with her Game Stealth and saves the day, Power Rangers-style. The adventure part feels rather tacked on overall, but they’re only a coating around the real meat. Coupled with the loading time between areas, this is far from graceful experience. However, said spots are not marked on the map, and you’re often never told any clue about where you should go next, in which case you’ll have to wander around until you eventually bump into something. The game is set in an overworld, requiring you to visit certain location around the city that triggers the proper event. The way it’s structured is also quite confusing. Granted, you’re able to speed them up, but they feel like an afterthought than a genuine feature the game makes it out to be. The worst offenders usually come from Amber herself, constantly whining about everything and taking any chance to take a shot at gaming culture, which is not witty one bit and gets very irritating very quickly. These seem to exist only for sake of being funny, but rarely they are. Sometimes it shows flashbacks indicated to be relevant to your quest, but they aren’t, and sometimes you rescue characters who promise to help you later, but they don’t. They’re nauseously overwritten, and other than telling you bad guys to fight, most of them serve little purpose in any sense. It takes no less than 40-minute long introduction to actually get started, and there’re a lot more in-between the levels. The game goes a bit overboard with the cutscenes, which are aplenty and unskippable. Probably the closest call to actual video games would be an amusement center nearby that hosts some arcade cabinets inside, although only one of them is playable, a rhythm minigame machine that doesn’t sync to the music at all.
In fact, you don’t actually get to play them, or even watch over someone playing them, which is rather a disappointment for a game like this.
The game does feature some goofy titles – the first one is ridiculously sounding Otaku Crisis, which is apparently a million seller – but they don’t seem to be based on any particular games. You can try talk to students around the college, but the best they can offer is a short gossip that video games are awesome, without going into what and why they are.
In case of Manic Game Girl, it also tries the same thing, but maybe the developers weren’t that knowledgeable about video games, because the reference is kinda superficial and limited. Games with such meta premise has tried catering to their target audience in some way – Segagaga, a similar game with official Sega’s backup, had gone over their duty to include tons of minigames or others that references their products, and some like Neptunia, without that kind of support behind, utilized a load of tongue-in-cheek memes. It’s a noble concept, but there’s a certain problem with their writing. Soon enough, the city is overrun by terrorists also obsessed with video games, and Amber is selected as a resistance fighter against evil corporation responsible for this turmoil, which plans to take over the world by their equally evil video games. Manic Game Girl is a half adventure, half beat-em-up hybrid game, where you assume a role of Amber, a college freshman who doesn’t know a thing about video games, but becomes quite good at them once she brings the brand new console, Game Stealth, to her room. His expertise on the architecture might also has to do with its odd choice of the platform, which was by then in the twilight years. One of the key people was the main programmer Lee Hanjong, who used to work for Square USA where he contributed some programming works (his name appears in the credits of Parasite Eve). It was a budget release, but nonetheless Joycast brought a good number of talents into the crew to kickstart this project. The game was a pet project of Joycast, a company founded to exclusively deal with console affairs in the country, tying to Sony’s grand launch of PlayStation 2 on Asia at that time. First and foremost, it’s the only game ever developed and published in South Korea for the original PlayStation.
Just Click the Play button and Install the Emulator Plugin to Play.