Collection essentials #376 &377: Rakugaki Showtime (PS1) and PlayStation Multitap (PS1)

Here’s a game from Treasure, a great company I’ve talked about before originally composed of people from Konami, which made games on my list such as Radiant Silvergun, Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy. This one is pretty different from anything else they made, and it’s a real gem.

“Rakugaki” in Japanese roughly translates to “doodle”. And you’ll notice that this game’s graphics have a sort of “colored pencil” theme to it, with the characters all looking like they were drawn with such utensils. It didn’t push the PlayStation hardware to its limits or anything, but it gives the game a certain style that helps its look age better than jagged 3D polygons.

A simple way I would describe this game is if you combined a fighting game with dodgeball, though it’s more complicated to explain than just those two concepts mashed together. I’m not going to fully explain it in detail. But basically, like in a fighting game, you find yourself facing up to three opponents, and your goal is to get their health to zero. You can move both up and down as opposed to just left and right like in the average fighting game. There are also eight “spots” on the edges of the stage that you can have your character jump towards at any time by doing a double jump in the air towards that direction. 

Like you’d expect in a fighting game, you have buttons for basic attacks, and certain inputs you can execute for special moves. But the biggest element of the gameplay is…throwing stuff!! There is a variety of throwable objects, and chucking them at the opponent is probably what you’re probably going to be doing most of the time, and aim is automatic so you don’t have to worry about being precise. There’s a parry button so that players can counter thrown objects so that it’s not simply a game of who gets to the objects first. And the most important throwable object is a round face that will slowly change color until it is fully charged. Once it starts flashing and you hear a clip of “HALLELUJIAH!” taken straight from Handel’s Messiah, you know it’s all charged up, and the next player to grab it will get to unleash a devastating super attack! Normally you’ll only see one or two of these faces in a match, but if you’re feeling crazy you can have a multiplayer match with a whole bunch of them!

There are a variety of playable fighters who must be unlocked, and you do this in the brief arcade-style single-player campaign. Interestingly, it has an adaptive difficulty level that changes based on how well you’re playing, and you’ll need to be able to reach different difficulties in order to unlock everything. The characters aren’t really balanced, as some are very obviously much stronger and weaker than others, but the game’s not really meant to be balanced so it’s kinda okay. There’s notable variety in how the characters play, and there’s even one who can’t throw stuff at all but has more special moves to compensate. 

But the real bread and butter of Rakugaki Showtime is the multiplayer. This is a game that you really want to play with three other people. Once you get going in a four-way match and throw everything but the kitchen sink all over the place, it becomes CHAOS!! But I mean in the absolute best possible chaos, the kind that makes everybody laugh and admire the spectacle and experience of a particular chaos only possible in a video game like this.

The PlayStation, despite its huge library, was not a big “party game” sort of console. You had to buy a multitap adapter to play with more than two players, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why. Rakugaki Showtime stands out as one of the very best four-player experiences the console has to offer, and it’s just a shame that it was relegated to a limited release only in Japan. But boy, was it worth seeking out. It’s another shining essential treasure from Treasure.