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Like I said: When in doubt, make it an RPG. Doesn’t matter what you’re dealing with.
Slot car racing? RPG. Item shop management? RPG. Golf? Heck, make it an MMO. It’s a
dangerously broad brush. Heck, if you wanted to make a kid-friendly version of a pastime
widely seen as a vice, or at the very least a formidable social ill, just make a pachinko
RPG. Go ahead. Oh, you say you already have? Make another! Have weird anthropomorphic balls
cavorting everyOH GOD. I DIDN’T THINK YOU’D DO IT THIS QUWHAT THE HELL IS THAT WHY ARE
YOU DOING THIS TO MY EYES
Behold Pachio-kun. He’s a pachinko ball, and he’s out to collect lots more pachinko
balls in order to... well, to win. Greed for greed’s sake. The spirit of the gambler.
However, instead of doing the smart thing and bellying up to a craps game or the blackjack
table, he’s gonna break the bank playing Pachinko. Read: He’s going to fire balls
into a machine with little to no control and just hope. A little too passive for my taste,
but there is in fact some interaction here. You’ve got an overworld to wander around,
full of game centers with different games. For each, you’ve got a profit goal to “clear”
that game. Success in meeting this goal is largely a function of hitting the right things
at the right time, causing all sorts of bells and lights and spinning things. However, even
if you think you’ve found a sweet spot, your aim will begin to drift to one side or
the other if you don’t keep adjusting. You can’t even set it and forget it. You have
to pay attention to this monotony.
Sometimes I say there’s a certain amount of luck intrinsic to a game, but here, it’s
entirely luck. You might sit down at a loose machine, like you could in the game centers
of those early Pokemon games. Back when, y’know, you could gamble in them and not just play
that Voltorb what’s-its-face. You might get the super awesome jackpot, and just keep
hitting it and hitting it. I did see some success, and felt kinda excited when it happened.
But I don’t think I could get through the tedium of getting to that point over and over
again. If you like problem-solving and figuring machines out, you’ll probably have a pretty
good time, and repeated success can earn you points to buy running shoes or other RPG-ish
upgrades. But in the end, you’re just an anthropomorphic ball, playing a weird physics
simulator, and learning the hard way what a bell curve looks like. I’ll stick to Vegas
Stakes, thank you.