Well, it's come to this. I figured I ought to cover Cho Aniki eventually, what with the TurboGrafx-CD being the very system where this whole sorry affair of beefcake shoot 'em ups originated. For the uninitiated, Cho Aniki ("Super Big Brother") is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up that borrows a page from Parodius' book in bewildering the player with its visuals as a means to trip them up and cause them to prematurely game over. Prematurely do something, anyway. I talked about how random stuff appearing out of nowhere would occasionally be your downfall in Lords of Thunder, and Cho Aniki is that concept multipled by infinity. It's the game Shadow Kanji Tatsumi would make, if he had his druthers.
Then again, I hear it's the PS1/Saturn game where this series really starts to go off the rails. In comparison, the first Cho Aniki is practically a somber documentary on the perils of obsessive bodybuilding and steampunk gone awry. At any rate, I wasn't about to pass up something as historically significant as the first Cho Aniki game. For a system that didn't seem to get too far in the US, it sure was the origin point for a lot of interesting franchises.
This Octurbo is Rated PG-13 for Posing Pouches
This seems a lot more serious than I was expecting. That guy is very big.Oh, never mind. I was worried for a moment that I put the wrong CD in.Welcome to Cho Aniki! I'm playing on Normal. I suspect I might not live to regret it.Your playable characters are Cecil Harvey and Terra Branford, meeting years before the Dissidia crossover. Actually, it's Idaten and Benten. I don't know who they're supposed to be.The game immediately begins with these flying cages. You start between those two upper left ones and will die within seconds unless you move out of the way, which feels super cheap. Welcome to Cho Aniki! Again!Enemies start showing up fairly soon, and it's a mix of birdmen and Metal Slug mechs so far. The first boss (or mid-boss, I suppose) is this creepy thing. All those creepy weird bald guys. Is this where Cargo: the Quest for Gravity got it from?Though it doesn't seem like you're doing any damage, persist shooting the front and it'll crack to reveal the boss's weak point. Already I'm having trouble dodging these bullets, and they don't give you a lot of room to move around in.After the boss is this fast descent with... you know what, we'll gloss over the green fellow and talk about Samson, the little orange guy in the speedo. Samson and Adon are essentially Options in this game, but they would go on to become the mascots for the Cho Aniki series (as well as starring in the next game, Ai Cho Aniki).I eventually bump into... what I guess is a Tengu wearing a fedora. Riding a mechanized tree branch.Midway through the fight, he loses his log and his, uh, face. I'm not sure who Mr. Topknot is.It's not apparent from the screenshots, but this game has a very schizophrenic pace, dropping you in and out of boss fights without a second's notice. The music follows suit. Oh man, the music in this game... I'll save that for later.Next boss is- You know what, screw it. Your guess is as good as mine. A spider tank run by two balding guys, let's go with that.This giant mechanical samurai is fairly unremarkable in comparison, but at least it looks cool. It's apparently powered by liquefied muscle energy.Once you blow the head off, Topknot shows up again. Him and his two hands are spectral, so they flash a lot. Made grabbing a screenshot a handful.I didn't cap the last one, but these overview screens give you some idea of what you'll be facing next. There's no hints about how to destroy them, but I've found that shooting at bosses a whole lot seems to work so far.Look at this beautiful knight sky. Oh shut up. How are you supposed to caption giant rampaging chess pieces shooting smaller chess pieces at you without chess puns? You can't, last time I checked.The way this guy plays the harp with his stubby little arms is disquieting. This whole game is disquieting.Nice looking background this time, though it doesn't make enemy bullets any more visible.Next guy is this half-sun, half-mechanical floating island powered by a bodybuilder. A Cho Aniki boss, in other words.The veneer peels away to reveal a whole bunch of guns. It switches from drills to lasers to machine guns, though they're all easy enough to avoid if you don't float directly in front of them.Next this is this disturbing angelfish. I had legit trouble with this one, because it fires a lot of bubbles at you. These bubbles move fast but are destructible, which means your best bet is to stay somewhat parallel with the fish's mouth and zap them once they appear. All these giant blue bolts don't make it easy though. What's most jarring is how the background comes back completely different after each mid-boss. Now it's some kind of medieval aqueduct?I... fuck, I give up. I gotta hand it to this game, it comes up with some weird-ass bosses. And there's that muscleman canister again.I believe I've had all I can take of Cho Aniki. I'll stop it here before I'm forced to gun down Buff Thomas the Tank Engine.
That's Cho Aniki. I think. I'm still confused, but I suppose the vaguely "H.G. Wells by way of John-Paul Gaultier" visual stylings of this game start to seem normal after a while. Like I said earlier, the weirdness of the PS1 sequel easily supersedes this one. As a pure shoot 'em up it's not too bad, though very limited at the same time. Especially in comparison with its peers, given that the TurboGrafx was rife with superlative examples of the genre (like Blazing Lazers). The player can only upgrade their one weapon (I assume the other playable character, Idaten, has his own upgrade path) and Samson and Adon only seem to help out every now and again. They're mostly just there as bullet buffers.
For a game made famous by its idiosyncrasies, it's still a fairly solid if unremarkable shoot 'em up underneath. There's certainly nothing wrong with grounding the gameplay with some rudimentary fundamentals and then layering on the insanity with the visuals and presentation. I think making both sides of the equation as equally chaotic (say, with a byzantine power-up system) would just lead to a lot of confusion and annoyance. I may just be talking out of the hole on the top of my head, but I think Cho Aniki's appeal is that the game is easy enough to pick up and play, and you can enjoy the campy weirdness without worrying too much about what you're meant to be doing. Protip: Shoot everything.
Cho Aniki full soundtrack (listening to each track one after the other with all the weird tonal shifts gives you a pretty decent sense of what it's like when actually playing the game)
