• he/him

real official verified page of Bekoha (real) at cohost dot org


Thew
@Thew

my whole impression of it was based on half-remembered blog posts from 20 years ago, when everyone was treating it like some haha cRaZy JaPaN ecchi game. But it's just... not that?

It's an EXTREMELY tightly scoped arcade volleyball game, with almost nothing else going on. Also it's a very fun arcade volleyball game!

There's zero writing, the "campaign" is about three hours of increasingly-difficult volleyball matches, and then the island explodes and you start over with all your stuff from the previous run lol (I thought it was a multiple-endings thing, but no, the end of the game is just "the island explodes" lmao. The anime girls escape unharmed)

The core loop is just play volleyball -> win money -> use money to buy gifts -> give gifts to your teammate to make her better at winning volleyball -> use leftover money to buy cute outfits

This rules? It's a perfect allocation of dev resources for what was clearly a very limited budget. Polish a core gameplay loop, on a scale of like five minutes, and then make several hundred swimsuits to buy as your long-term retention system. No upgrade trees, no branching narrative, no hidden collectibles, just Play Volleyball -> Buy Costumes

Getting to Wear Cute Outfits is like 70% of the reason anyone plays videogames in the first place. It's perfect

also it's like... not even particularly horny? I mean yeah there's girls in swimsuits but like, that happens in real life. There's some boob physics, sometimes, when the physics code happens to work. It's not like a totally NON horny game obviously, but it's nowhere close to even basic ecchi stuff. like it's tamer than xenoblade lmao


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

iirc the whole reason the game even exists is because some programmer on Itagaki's team spent all their free time screwing around with water physics, and Itagaki himself was majorly into gambling/information theory and wanted an excuse to make a casino game, so they worked backwards to come up with a project that'd let them fixate on their hobbies for x months


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Thew's post:

My recollection of its reception at the time was people being pleasantly surprised at it being an actually good volleyball game. Later games in the series failed to iterate on the volleyball at all though, instead focusing on the titillation.

in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

lol that definitely tracks. Usually when games do casino-themed minigames they're tilted in the player's favor to make them actually fun. I don't know anything about blackjack or roulette but as near as I can tell from messing with them: the DOAX versions are basically just simulations lol. Like it's nearly impossible to actually make money because the odds AREN'T artificially tuned

I had the exact same experience. I needed money in Xenosaga 1 so I found a tutorial that explained how to exploit the poker mini game with a complete break down of how it worked.