Today's massive disappointment: Gaogaigar Picross is awful

The full name of this game is Oekaki Puzzle Battle: King of Braves Gaogaigar. It's by Sunrise Interactive, which should have you worried right off the bat. Sunrise has made real videogames-- the Sunrise Eiyu-tan SRPG series comes to mind-- but typically when you see an animation studio's name on the box, that means they've decided to cut out the middleman and deliver you the subpar licensed goods themselves. Anyway, I found a used copy for cheap this past weekend (along with Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 and a Galaxy Express 999 book that helpfully lists for me every time Maetel has ever been in trouble), and I figured it wouldn't be a great game, but what could be the harm in buying it?

Oh, there was harm. I should have left it where it was. I should have bought that G Gundam book instead. I should have forgotten the damn thing ever existed right there when I saw it. But I couldn't. God help me, I couldn't.

This is neither a good Picross game nor a good Gaogaigar game. If you're not familiar with the former, it's a simple logic puzzle where you use number clues to draw a picture. Picross DS is $15 and a fine implementation of the game that will last you many months. This game came out before Picross DS did, but the interface isn't even as good as Nintendo's old Japan-only offerings on the Super Fami/NES. The D-pad and buttons aren't used at all, for one thing, and for another, you can't X out a square when you are completely sure that it shouldn't be filled in. Not having this simple, invaluable visual aid makes the puzzles significantly more frustrating. And it's not that any of them are hard puzzles: even the "hard" and "super hard" puzzles are just composed of multiple connected 10x10 squares. If you're at all familiar with Picross, you know that 10x10 is pretty cake. The fact that there's a 2-player-only card battle game gives away that this is really targeted at younger kids, which seems counterproductive because GGG is such an ubernerd license. Didn't it bomb with kids when it ran on TV?

And then there's the Gaogaigar stuff. My god, what license abuse. This is apparently one of a series, and Sunrise can pretty much swap any cartoon of theirs they want into the next game: the next one was supposed to be Raijin-Oh, but thankfully I don't think it ever happened. The puzzles haven't got anything to do with GGG, and the only indications ingame that this has anything to do with the show are some truly ugly pixel renditions of the robot standing on the top screen. When you clear a puzzle, you get to the game's sole bright spot: a bit of stock animation from the TV show where Gaogaigar will do a cool move and Nobuyuki Hiyama yells. You can get that particular bit of joy in your life whenever you want, so this game really has nothing going for it. Even if you're a fan, avoid.