The bouncer game wiki

The game marks Squaresoft's first release on the PlayStation 2. The game was known for its production values, introducing a juggling physics engine and graphical techniques such as bloom lighting and depth-of-field effects. The Bouncer tells the story of an eventful night in the city of Edge, akin to an action martial arts movie.

Under the influence of the Mikado Group, a multinational conglomerate excelling in the fields of bionics, robotics, and energy resource technologies, Edge is the corporation's center of operations and headquarters, and under its newest CEO, Dauragon C. Mikado, the Mikado Group initiates its plans for its next generation revolutionary orbital satellite solar microwave energy collection system. While it would seem that the Group's presence would help Edge flourish, the city has long been a place considered a warren of desperation and corruption, with gangs said to roam about its streets and the Group said to have ties to underworld racketeering and crime, with all exacerbated with a current economic recession.

In its most dangerous area known as Dog Street exists the bar known as FATE, where its three bouncers, Sion, Kou, and Volt, work with their boss, and live life day to day with their close friend and fellow coworker Dominique. Though seeming to be just everyday martial artists and tough guys on call to keep patrons in line and keep their workplace peaceful, all three share lives negatively impacted by the Mikado Group.

Little do they know, their shift will come to tie destiny together with the Mikado Group's master plans While the game itself is not commonly remembered as a high point in the PS2's library, some of its features were popularized by more successful games and became widely-used. The game's presentation and production values were considered groundbreaking, particularly due to its introduction of innovative shading techniques, most notably what would later be called a light bloom effect, which critics at the time described as a "glowing" effect that created "a unique gloss that's never been used before with such success.

The Bouncer also introduced a depth-of-field DOF effect, blurring the background or foreground during cinematic cutscenes. Both the bloom and DOF effects are now widely used in modern action games, and more generally, The Bouncer was a precursor to modern shaders.

According to director Takashi Tokita in a interview: "No matter how many polygons you use or how realistic the textures are, without filters and lighting, CG pictures will be of a quality lower than that of a figurine. In order to create atmosphere, we spent much time on filters and lighting.

We adjusted each scene in detail with an editor that conducted parameter adjustments on the actual hardware. The Bouncer also introduced a new juggling type of ragdoll physics engine to third-person action games, allowing the player to launch enemies into the air with an attack and keep them suspended by striking them repeatedly.

Enemies can also be thrown or otherwise knocked into one another, causing all of them to take damage at once. This juggling type of ragdoll physics was later refined and popularized by the Devil May Cry series. It was also the most cinematic beat 'em up released up until then, with a heavy emphasis on storytelling through movie-like cutscenes. Although the game received a healthy amount of press before its actual release, it was met with mild sales and a mixed reception ranging from positive to mediocre.

Squarewiki Explore. Recent Changes. Recent blog posts Forum. Fate is then attacked by masked soldiers from Mikado who kidnap Dominique, and Sion pursues them with Kou and Volt in tow.

They pursue signs of Dominique across Edge, splitting up in a few places and confronting agents of Mikado. These include Echidna, a supervisor who knows Volt; Kaldea, a former friend of Sion's turned through experimentation into a shapeshifting agent of Dauragon; and Mugetsu, a skilled soldier driven insane by enhancement experiments. Each protagonist has their own routes which impact story sequences, and backstory elements during loading screens in their routes.

During their missions, they learn that Dominique is an android created in the image of Dauragon's late sister, and he is planning to destroy Edge and take over the world as an act of revenge, in hatred towards their abandonment and unforgiving lives on the streets, and as his sister died due to neglect by the city's social systems.

Echidna is defeated and eventually abandons Mikado. Kaldea's fate depends on who is selected to fight her. Mugetsu is killed by the group after Dominique is taken to a rocket heading for a new satellite designed by Dauragon to destroy Edge.

With help from Leann, the three reach the satellite in a shuttle. There they free Dominique and defeat Dauragon, escaping as the satellite is destroyed. Depending on the final character selected, the ending scene varies; Sion is shown happy with Dominique, Volt meets Echidna again, while Kou opts to remain assigned to Dominique. A series of post-credit stills shows Dominique, wearing Sion's necklace, visiting her friends' graves.

In Sion's route, a further scene shows when he and Dominuque first met. IGN reported "Square's "Seamless Action Battle System" means that players will roam from adventure sequence to fighting sequence without intermittent FMVs or cutscenes that look out of place; the adventure aspects blend seamlessly into massive street brawls involving as many ten characters. Designed to appear as though you're controlling characters in a movie, The Bouncer ' s camera movements and special effects truly appear as though they're straight out of a Hollywood creation.

At the Spring Tokyo Game Show in March , Square showed only a ten-second clip of the game, and revealed no new screenshots or information. They also had no release date, leading some journalists to speculate there may be problems behind the scenes. IGN was underwhelmed with the new material, feeling there appeared to be too many cutscenes in relation to actual gameplay.

They reported that Square expected the story mode to take players roughly seven to eight hours to complete thoroughly. The developers outlined the gameplay mechanics, the branching story, the versus and survival modes, the music, the character design, and the challenges of working on the PlayStation 2 for the first time. On November 13, Square announced a Japanese release date of December The Bouncer was the first PlayStation 2 game to feature Dolby 5. Because the game was being considered for a North American release early in production, the English voices were recorded first.

The Japanese voices were recorded and incorporated later to "provide more of a DVD quality to the game. The game contains several vocal themes, including the original Japanese ending theme song "Forevermore" "Owaranaimono" , performed by Reiko Noda, and the English-language theme song " Love Is the Gift ", performed by Shanice Wilson.

Takashi Tokita has commented that the lyrics of "Love Is the Gift", heard during the closing credits, signify the game's overall theme. Two separate soundtracks were released; one in Japan and one in North America. The Bouncer received "mixed or average reviews," and holds an aggregate score of 66 out of on Metacritic , based on twenty reviews.

With the consideration of its high-profile development team, as well as the fact that it was a front-runner PlayStation 2 release, The Bouncer was highly anticipated. However, the game was perceived as a disappointment by many, and was largely seen as mediocre.

Numerous aspects from the E3 trailer, such as destructible scenery, were removed in the final game, possibly in order to get the game out in time to be among the first batch of PlayStation 2 titles. Much of the criticism, however, fell on the gameplay. IGN found the controls average and the camera angles to become a major issue in the later portions of the game, where the player is confined to tight spaces.

GameCritics' Brad Galloway, for example, argued actual gameplay constitutes less than one third of the game's length. IGN's Douglass C. Perry reviewed an import version of the game prior to its release in North America, and was disappointed with the lack of depth, but impressed by other aspects.

He praised the graphics, character design and CGI cutscenes. He was also impressed with the " glowing " effect used throughout the game; "DreamFactory employs a Playboy -like filter that smoothes out every single bit on the screen.

The effect is consistent throughout the game, and rids the PS2 of aliasing or flickering , but also provides a unique gloss that's never been used before with such success. He concluded " The Bouncer is not the next messiah , it's not the next wave of fighting, and frankly, it's not the paradigm for anything really new, except perhaps incredible-looking graphics.

These things said, The Bouncer is a decent game. It's not horrible, it's not brilliant. It's pretty average. In his look at the import version, GameSpot's Miguel Lopez called the game "little more than a glorified and highly cinematic version of Final Fight using dated Tobal animations.

Of the graphics, he said "Everything, from the characters to the backgrounds, looks absolutely incredible. It looks and sounds incredible. However, the ease and extremely short length of the game, matched with other problems like horrific camera angles and lack of a multiplayer story mode, make The Bouncer fair, at best.

He wrote, "It's easy to tell what the developers focused on, because The Bouncer is obviously one of the best-looking games on a console to date. Near flawless animations and picture perfect visuals make it a great choice to show off the sleek Sony super machine to your friends.

Once the game begins, though, The Bouncer sheds it's [ sic ] pretty boy image and gets down and dirty. Like other critics, he also had problems with the camera and the ratio of cutscenes to gameplay. He concluded "Though many will undoubtedly be disappointed by The Bouncer ' s inability to live up to the hype, others will find a fancy beat 'em up to pass a few hours. Its flashy graphics are at least worth taking a look at, but its many problems just might keep it from a place in the collection.

GamePro were more impressed, scoring the game 4. Blake Fischer reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for Next Generation , rating it two stars out of five, and stated that " The Bouncer manages to look good, but don't let that fool you into thinking that it's very fun. The Bouncer was a commercial failure. In its debut week in Japan, it sold , units, debuting as the fifth highest selling game across all systems.

Copyright The image is from Wikipedia Commons. Wikipedia Page. The Bouncer North American cover art. Square DreamFactory.

Takashi Tokita Seiichi Ishii. Yuichi Ninagawa Hiroshi Takai. Noriko Matsueda Takahito Eguchi. Archived from the original on December 1, Retrieved October 22, Archived from the original on August 31, Retrieved September 16, Archived from the original on January 31, Archived from the original on October 29, The Bouncer Instruction Manual.

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