0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Bakuretsu Hunter Mahjong Special

       

Based on the Manga series Bakuretsu Hunter written by Satoru Akahori which is based on a previous Manga series Sorcerer Hunters, the game is a first person Mahjong puzzle game using characters from the series, the game has anime sequences before each Mahjong game.

Developed by Alpha-Unit and published by Banpresto the game released exclusively in Japan on the 26^th of October 1996, like Sorcerer Hunters the Bakuretsu Hunter manga was adapted into a short Anime tv series that ran from 1995 to 1996.

Using characters from the Manga and Anime which are voiced by the anime voice actors the game is a first person Mahjong game, between the games of Mahjong a voice sequence of dialogue takes place to progress the story (no idea what they are saying as I don’t speak Japanese), once the dialogue has been concluded to Mahjong game begins.

 

Mahjong is made up for five different tile variations you have Bamboos, Characters, Dots, Dragons and Winds the main goal of the game is to get four sets and a pair the first person to reach this is the winner of the hand.

The aim of the player is get a four sets and a pair this can be done in four ways a pung, a chow and a kong are the three most common ways, a pung is a set of three identical tiles, while a chow is three times of the same suit in consecutive numbers, for example a 1,2 and 3 in the bamboo tiles, and a 4, 5 and 6 in character tiles,  Dragons and winds can't be used in a chow. A chow cannot loop from 9 back to 1, while a kong is a set of four identical tiles.

 

During the course of the game the player discards tiles which are placed in the centre of the playing area and a new tile is drawn, the discarded tile can be claimed by another player if nobody claims the tile the game continues with most of your time being spent discarding and drawing tiles.

Based on the Bakuretsu Hunter manga series set on the Spooner continent where the population is divided into two the ordinary people who are called Parsoners and the magic wealding and generally evil sorcerers who use their power to dominate, torment, murder and enslave the Parsoners of the Spooner continent.

The Bakuretsu Hunters are a group of warriors who protected the Parsoners from the evil sorcerers, under the command of a holy woman named Big Mama who is head of the popular Stella Church who have set out to protect the Parsoners from the gifted sorcereses who have chosen to abuse their powers.

The main story of the game revolves around a small family group of Bakuretsu Hunters again using characters from the manga and anime these include the Glace brothers, Carrot and his younger brother, their childhood friends the Misu Sisters Tira and Chocolate as well as Gateau Mocha.

This being an early Playstation release and a Japanese only release critic reviews for this game are none existent so we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings. With the game currently sitting at an average user rating of 3.83/5 from a total of 3 users.

With the game rating at average of higher from users with the lowest user rating coming in a 2.5/5, the remaining two user ratings are very good with a 4.5/5 from one user, while the second user rated this game at an impressive 5/5.

Moving next on to the games difficulty, where again we find just 3 users rating this category with a 2 to 1 split in favour of the game having just the right difficulty level, the remaining user found the game to be on the tough side, averaging out the game comes in at just right to tough. Lastly we have the games lifespan, with just 2 users rating this category with both spending the same amount of time with the game, with both clocking in 12 hours with it.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese exclusive same goes for Retrogames.co.uk, eStarland.com and Amazon.com, the latter while having software related to this series but not the Playstation 1 game. I also checked the co.uk and co.jp versions of Amazon as well and it was the same story as the dot com version of the site.

As a last hope we head over to Ebay.com where we finally strike lucky with just one copy of the game is available, the copy is a used one which comes complete with Case, cover, manual and spine card is priced up at $20.00 with a $6 shipping fee so $26 overall.

  

Written by

P J Gibbon