Original Release: Konami, 2004, PlayStation 2 / Xbox
Konami licenses the familiar Yukes wrestling engine (Smackdown series) for a graphically impressive cheesecake-fest with decent gameplay.
Rumble Roses (PlayStation 2 / Konami / 2004)
Where to Buy: ebay
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Back when Konami was a real game company, they would sometimes take these interesting little experimental forays into genres that had passed them by. These games weren’t always particularly good, but they were almost always interesting because some amount of the company’s rich array of talent was contributing to them. They generally spent some decent money on them and took the time to polish them too. I’m thinking of things like the Vandal Hearts games (SRPG), Battle Tryst (3D fighter), even going back to their oddball collection of sports games that appeared on ’80s consoles and in arcades.
Anyway, Rumble Roses was Konami’s experiment with a wrestling game slathered in DOA-style cheesecake. It’s not strictly an “adult” game as there’s no simu-sex or nudity, but it’s about as sexiful as you can get before you’re crossing over into the softcore porn world.
Konami was clearly more interested in delivering the T&A than building their own unique wrestling engine. They simply licensed the Yukes engine put to use in so many of the WWE Smackdown games of the era, and anyone who has played pretty much any of those will find the gameplay here instantly familiar.
On top of that fairly simple and straightforward gameplay engine is a roster of nubile young ladies who are scantily-clad and rasslin’ for sometimes rather questionable reasons. The story centers on Reiko Hinomoto, pure yet firmly packed Japanese wrestling prodigy seeking to follow in the footsteps of her wrestler mother and find out what happened to her missing sister. She’s come to this weird and unnamed wrestling federation to try to take the title from mysterious gimp-suited champion Racer X, and there’s also this odd nurse hanging about making cryptic comments. With enough suplexes and knee drops we will get to the bottom of all this mystery.
Though it’s not an outstanding wrestling game, it’s also not nearly as bad as you might think for a cheesecake game. The Yukes engine is solid (if a little simple and repetitive) and is implemented well here, with some surprisingly vicious move sets for the sexy ladies. It’s actually oddly progressive in that sense, delivering the more modern “serious” female wrestling action of today back in the era when “bra and panties” matches were more the norm.
That’s not to misconstrue it as secretly some sort of feminist Fight Club game; there are mud matches, there are unlockable bikinis, and there are special “humiliation” moves that usually involve holding the opponent in some sort of compromising position before delivering the slam. And let’s not forget the long, gratuitous stripper-riffic dances that pose as ring entrances. But it’s definitely a real, honest-to-goodness, big-impact wrestling game and each character has a pretty satisfying roster of moves.
The story is also in that Troma-esque so-bad-it’s-good territory. I particularly enjoyed the Metal Gear Solid boss-esque backstory speeches that would appear before some matches. Whoever wrote this definitely knew it was stupid and embraced it. It’s helped along by the emphasis on the quality of the character models; Konami definitely tried to give you your money’s worth in eye candy if nothing else. Between the seemingly intentional embrace of the “backwoods Broadway” aspect of wrestling, and the roster made up of the sorts of moves that you still see in Japan and on the indies but that tend to be banned by the WWE for being too risky, I’m pretty sure honest-to-god wrestling marks were at the helm of this production.
So all of that isn’t so bad, but you eventually run up against the issue of there simply being a lack of gameplay modes and content. Each character is given a fleshed-out story mode to play through, which is maybe an hour of matches for each; completing it unlocks either their face or heel doppleganger, who is often a quite different character model but tends to have the same moves and also only gets an intro and ending vignette instead of a full story. Other than this, exhibition matches are pretty much the only other option.
Though the gameplay tends to be pretty good, there are some irksome design oversights. For one, there is no in-game save option for the story mode; you have to beat each in one sitting, which can take a little over an hour in some cases. There are also no in-game move lists whatsoever, which is particularly annoying when you run up against a match that requires you win with a “humiliation finisher” and you have no idea which moves build up the meter for that.
The game definitely has some of the nicest and highest-poly-count character models on the PS2, however, and offers up some solid rasslin’ action with some big nasty moves to boot. Thus perhaps worth a look for coomers and wrestling fans.
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