Second 25:
51. Tron ni Kobun (PS1)
Otherwise known as The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. I know there are a lot of people who really like this game, and it's not my goal to tread on anyone's feelings, but that may be somewhat of an inevitability in this case. I don't dislike the game or the characters as a whole, though. In many ways it's a functional, and perfectly fine game, but it also somehow strayed very far away from my expectations. It's possible that I really shouldn't have had those expectations in the first place, because in playing the game, I realized that I've never really known much about it outside of the basic premise of an offshoot game starring Tron Bonne, from the Megaman Legends series. The sticking point for me is the focus placed on the Serve-bots (Kobun)--specifically the demi-Chao style rearing aspects--and how disjointed the gameplay tends to feel. I really like the Serve-bots as characters; They're terribly adorable, and the Japanese voice actress who voices them (Yokoyama Chisa) is exceptional. I also can't ignore them, so raising their stats, talking with them, and sending them out on reconnaissance missions, between the regular story missions, was a routine I couldn't keep from repeating. That's a pretty huge part of the game, even though it's certainly possible to go through the game without really paying any attention to any of the Serve-bots.
I ended up playing all of the missions, except for two of the loading dock puzzles, and I did not actually finish the repeatable Mission 4. Basically, I thought I was going to be forced to do another round of paying interest, and ended up moving on to the final missions without really realizing it. I was looking at an English FAQ for the game after the fact, and still don't know how I missed the Red Rock in the third spelunking mission, because I went back to the room it's supposedly in about three times before I just gave up and finished the mission. In looking at that FAQ, I found an interesting bit of censorship: While playing, I gave Kobun #40 a raunchy magazine, which, unsurprisingly, bestowed upon him the special ability of, "H" (prevert). When I went back to Tron's room, he was flopping around like a fish on Tron's bed, muttering about how good the bed smells--talking to the Serve-bot making the bed provided a good laugh. I guess in the Western release this magazine became a "design" magazine, and I have no idea how bouncing on her bed is an aspect of design, but I guess they made it work.
Visually, this is a bit of an interesting game. It doesn't look bad, but I still think Capcom really should have ported the PC version of Megaman Legends to the Dreamcast*, and then released Tron Bonne, and Legends 2 on it as well. Tron Bonne doesn't look bad, per se--"rough" at times, I suppose. Visually it just reminds me a lot of things on the Dreamcast, but with often poor texture quality, low poly count, extremely low visibility in certain areas, and dithering everywhere. The attempt at lens flare is the most galling thing to me, graphically. I was thinking about this, though, and if the analog stick were used for the Serve-bot targeting, the only thing that would potentially be missing a button would be lock on, which is kind of useless in these game anyway, since one should really always be circle strafing. Stopping to lock on is generally a death sentence, but in the PSP version of Legends, they made it so that hitting the R button while holding the L button (or maybe the reverse, I can't remember) would lock on to a target.
Anyway, pie-in-the-sky scenarios aside, Tron Bonne is a pretty good game, it's just that it's ultimately more of a curio to me, rather than a real winner. There are a number of aspects of the game that I don't particularly care for, but it's certainly not bad because of any of them. I like it, and I might just grab some of the stuff I didn't collect from Mission 4 and a couple of the Kobun, but I don't see myself really revisiting the game in the future. Fun enough for what it is, but feels a little amorphous to me.
*EDIT: I thought the PC version was released around the same time as the PS1 release, but it seems it was actually ported to PC around the same time as the N64 release (mid-2001). So, that really throws a wrench into that whole concocted scenario. I blame Inafune, anyway.
