Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Wrestle Angels - Long-Ass Wrapup

So, what happens after you've finished playing card games and watching girls pound the snot out of each other as a direct result? Well, that depends on your results. For the first three chapters, while you're competing in team matches, losing best two of three results in you being shown a graphic of the last member of your team who got to fight being humiliated by being forced to expose herself to the crowd.

Poor Toshimi...

After this, you're shown a screen listing all five members of your team and their current stats. Here, you're given two experience points, which you can then spend levelling up stats exactly twice (Example: levelling up Toshimi's default level 6 in joint moves to level 8). The maximum level for any stat is 10, represented by the letter "A" due to space restrictions. After levelling up, you're shown another exchange of dialogue against the boss you failed to defeat and sent back to the roster menu to try again.

Should you win, then you're shown a graphic of the enemy team's captain being humilated (whether or not you actually fought her in the tiebreaker), and then taken to a screen which allows you to copy a move from the enemy captain and give it to one of your members for use. The number next to a move's name is the level in its stat category required to learn it (In the picture example, Yukiko's "3" rating in Power will only allow her to learn a body slam from Beauty's extensive power repitoire, but since she already knows it, it's a moot point). Then you're shown the EXP screen, only now you're allocated five experience points to use on your girls. Once you're done, you're sent off to the next challenge.

The third match of the first three chapters is against the local champion, Panther Risako in Japan, mysterious masked luchadora Em Sande in Mexico, and hard-hat wearing powerhouse (and Reggie Bennet expy) Remy Dadarne in America. Defeating their teams simply earns you the five experience points. In order to gain access to copy their moves and view their humiliation CGs, you must send a single member of your squad to face them in a title bout. Losing a title bout gives you a single experience point and sends you back to the roster screen to try again. Winning gets the above mentioned rewards, and yields two experience points as well as allowing you to move on to the next chapter.

On the subject of the roster screen, there's a reason you're asked to select five girls to form a squad instead of just three. See, damage sustained in one match carries over to the next, so it's not a good idea to simply send the same three girls in repeatedly, lest you start racking up losses, which can be kind of embarassing when you're shown the win/loss record after clearing the game. HP lost in one match are partially restored for the next, but allowing a girl to sit a match out will restore them completely. This places a great importance on building up your entire team as well as knowing the makeup of the CPUs, so that you can play the enemy's weaknesses to your advantage (No CPU-controlled character will ever have more than a single stat at max).

However, after the third chapter, everything changes. At the end of the third chapter, Beauty reveals to your team that while they were out touring Mexico and the US, she captured the world championship from Risako, and in order to flaunt her superiority is organizing a tag-team tournament. This tournament takes up the entirety of the fourth chapter, and you're only allowed to select two fighters to participate for its entirety. The fourth of the four buttons at the bottom of the combat screen (Data, Situation, (Pin)Fall, and our subject, the humorously misspelled "Tuoch" ("Touch", in other words tagging in/out) finally comes into play, as enabling it before initiating an attack allows you to switch characters should that attack be successful. It's an interesting feature, but one that isn't very important here as you'll usually have at least one character leveled up enough to take on two CPU opponents all by herself (the feature gets refined in the later sequels).

During the fourth and fifth/final chapters, each match itself is treated as a title bout, with humiliation CGs and all (actually, it's the only way to see the CGs of the lesser non-Japanese girls). The final chapter is, instead of an elimiation-style tournament, a round robin-style tournament in which each participant fights every other contestant, and the one with the highest number of wins takes home the gold. Winning the whole thing sends you off to the final title bout, and througout the entire chapter, you're only allowed to use one of your roster. This effectively means that the game layout was designed to get you used to the 3v3 system in the early chapters, ween you off of it in the fourth, and have you use your most upgraded fighter in the last.

Final Thoughts:

At the end of the day, the original Wrestle Angels is a fun little title to play. It has limited character buildup and only moderate replay value (You can finish the whole game in under three hours if you know what you're doing), which will either be spent trying to get a better win/loss record for the challenge gamers, or trying to see all of the humiliation CGs for those who like that sort of thing. However, what it does with what little resources it has to do them with is pretty damned impressive. The card game takes some getting used to, and easy to exploit once you start maxing out stats, but is very addictive once you get going.

The only thing that I find didn't need to be here was the humiliation CGs (and it would seem that fans at the time agreed as they were completely phased out of the series following the third installment), but then again, that's one of the things about Japanese 18+ games. It seems to be that the best ones are those where the gameplay or story is so good that the naughty stuff feels tacked on.

On the whole, WA1 is an interesting take on the fantasy sports genre, combining team management (something that would eventually become greatly expanded upon and would become the secondary purpose of the series, after watching cute girls beat each other up) with a combat system that rewards not just stat progression, but (some) critical thinking as well.
Hmm... How to end this long-ass rant that most people would only take a single post to write about... I know! Boobies! Everybody likes boobies, right?

Funny, it's almost like she wanted to show her "selves" off...

The luchadora tag team "Pink Pirates" give you the same CG no matter which of them you beat at the tournament.

The American wrestler Bunny Bomber, who was unceremoniously dropped after this game and didn't show up again until last year's Wrestle Angels Survivor 2.

- Azure out

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