Overview
Chibi Maruko-chan: Quiz de Piihyara ("Piihyara" is onomatopoeia for a flute sound, heard frequently in the Chibi Maruko-chan theme song) is a quiz game for the PC Engine featuring the Chibi Maruko-chan license. Maruko's best friend Tama-chan gets kidnapped by odd robotic aliens, who taunt Maruko through her television set. Maruko decides to head into town to face them and rescue her friend.
The game poses various tests to the player via multiple choice questions with four possible answers. To answer these questions, the player has to defeat robots in a side-scrolling action segment whose colors correspond to the letter that signifies the right answer. So if the answer is D, which is white-colored, the player has to seek out a white-colored robot and defeat it. Other enemies, like cats, will provide random answer bubbles too. Maruko then has to duck down and collect the colored orbs to answer the question. If she gets enough right answers, dependent on the difficulty, she moves onto the next stage. Three wrong answers will cause her to lose a life and restart the current stage. While Maruko can get hurt by enemies, there is no health bar and it simply stuns her for a few seconds.
The questions concern various general knowledge categories and then-current topical news and popular culture. The game is intended for a younger audience, as is the TV show it is based on, and so the questions are easier than in most quiz games. However, they are all in Japanese, and so the player needs to be fluent in the language as well as also somewhat cognizant of Japanese pop culture and current affairs of the early 90s to get anywhere.
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