This week's game is Buffers Evolution, a game in which buff bipedal animals run, jump, and drive for our amusement. Combining speedrunning with exploration sounds contradictory, but it ends up creating a flexible and unusual experience that has a lot to offer regardless of your typical platformer preferences:
The Wonderswan is definitely what I'd consider to be "full of surprises" and Buffers Evolution exists as evidence for my case. The premise feels truly bizarre to me for the device it's on: a platformer on a small (pre-color) handheld in 1999 that wants you to ultimately try and speedrun its levels for no reason beyond the satisfaction of doing so? It sounds like a tough hypothetical sales pitch to make, doesn't it? Well, I was definitely skeptical, but I gotta say, this one is really cool even if you're like me and don't have any interest at all in speedrunning. Even though that's the focus, the game finds a way to balance that with Sonic-esque multi-tiered level design and collectible hunting on your initial runs to create an experience that has a little something for everyone.
In each of the 18 levels, all you need to do is get to the end. You can technically take as long as you want and getting eliminated is actually difficult to do, so simply "finishing" the game (I couldn't get any kind of ending or credits to trigger) is an easy task. Where things get interesting, though, is when you factor in the collectibles. There are 10 healing pod things to activate and doing so in each level gets you a new transformation item to use. Your animal athlete can equip two of these in a level to greatly expand what they can do, ranging from airplanes to jet skis to a mermaid tail and even a giant shield or drill arms. Not all of these are equally useful, but every single one has some kind of niche that you can then apply to specific levels based on your experience. If the level is vertically oriented, use the rocket to fly up quickly; if the level has a lot of water, make sure to bring something that lets you navigate in it, and so on. It's a system that works really well with the game's objectives, encouraging you to replay the levels to chart new paths on different elevations, find more efficient ways to get around obstacles, and discover design flourishes that you hadn't appreciated before.
Even without a precise end goal, Buffers has some other neat tricks up its sleeve. Finding more obscure collectibles gets you a special speedy armor upgrade and there's an entire second mode that's about eliminating enemies as fast as possible, too. I found that Buffers Evolution had a very fun, toy-like quality to it overall, which feels fitting considering Koto Laboratory's involvement. If you want, you can just kinda mess around with it for a bit and get something out of it, but if you really use your imagination to take your understanding of how it works to the next level, you'll find that it continuously rewards you with dopamine hits and, for you developers out there, new and clever ways to design a platformer with modern sensibilities that resemble the roguelike genre. It's a neat game on a cool console with a lot of good games that many people probably haven't played (and it's entirely in English to boot), so definitely check it out as a gateway into the fun world of the Wonderswan!
