Paragon Sentry

...THE BOUNCER

A bit of a meme of a video game due to it's strangely funny title screen and for it's infamous status as the PS2's first flop. But in my opinions, history treated this game too harshly, even if it's not perfect. Quick summary: It was developed by DreamFactory, the developers of Tobal and Ehrgeiz, the latter of which is one of my favorite PSX fighters. Character design were done by Tetsuya Nomura and the game itself was published by Square in 2000. It was originally a tech demo in 1999 to demonstrate the then upcoming PS2's capabilities. It was to be Square's first game on the console. All the hype around generated around the game due to it's developers history and companies involved is probably a reason why it flopped come to think of it.

First off the visuals. This game, looks stunning. The graphics are so good, I genuinely had difficulty differentiating between game engine cutscenes and FMV cutscenes. Even in gameplay, there is no sacrifice to the graphical quality whatsoever. Better still is that I never experienced any lag or framerate loss whatsoever throughout my playthroughs of the game.

Those cutscenes however... make up a large chunk of the game. Battles are rather short, and once you finish them, you will go straight in to a cutscene. I'd say a 3rd of my time playing this game was watching cutscenes. Very forward thinking for a sony title! 🥁 Again, great cutscenes, but for a beat 'em up, I don't want to spend so much time watching the game rather than playing.

So how's the gameplay? Well, while it definitely has a lot of Ehrgeiz DNA flowing through it, many moves and combos from that game make their way in to here, the game feels a lot different. It lacks a lot of it's predecessors speed and verticality. You instead have a slower paced, more methodical beat 'em up which has more focus on bigger hits and shorter combos, and much shorter battles overall too. I can definitely see why this turned many people off from the game, but in my opinion, the game is not ruined by this. While this word is thrown around a lot while describing old games, the game does not, at all, feel janky or clunky.

What I can compliment the game on is it's unique approach to combos. Rather than long strings of button presses, instead you have two ways to execute combos. Pressure sensitive combos, and the extra button combos. The four face buttons on the PS2 are all pressure sensitive, and depending on how hard you press them, you can execute a different move. So you can perform a softer press to start a combo, and then follow it with a hard press of that same button. I prefer this for beat 'em ups honestly, in a tense battle where you can get jumped from behind at any second, shorter easier combos are honestly what I'd rather use. The bumper button also allows you to perform special attacks when you unlock them, normally by pressing a face button in addition to another button. While not the most ideal system, ultimately, I don't think the gameplay is as offensively bad as some make it out to be.

Now, the story, because this game places a lot of importance on it. You play as one of three bouncers for a bar called "Fate" in a futuristic city. While protecting the bar, a customer named Dominique is captured by masked special forces agents for a corporation named Mikado. Now, the bouncers need to infiltrate the company and save her from its CEO Dauragon (pronounced as "Dragon"). The game has some pretty wild turns, such as revealing that Dominique is actually Duragon's dead sister revived as a robot, who is being used to power a Satelite that harnesses electric waves from the sun to shoot lasers down on Earth, along with a woman who can turn in to a Panther for some reason. It's nothing deep, but it's pretty cool for a Beat 'Em Up. Your choices of bouncers are;

• Sion Barzahd, a young man who looks very much like Sora from Kingdom Hearts and has a fairly balanced moveset.
• Volt Kruger, a former special forces agent for Mikado, has a slower, power based moveset and grapple attacks.
• Kou Leifoh, my personal favorite, the "2cool4u" guy of the group, uses a fast paced Tae-Kwon Do moveset.

All of these characters have backstories that are expanded upon in loading screens and in some cutscenes that play after certain fights that you select them for. Each battle allows you to select who you wish to play as for said fight, while the other 2 are allied NPCs. Now as cool as this feature is, I would not reccomend it for a first playthrough. This is due to the games 2nd major feature, it's RPG mechanics.

Due to Square's influence most likely, the game had RPG mechanics added to it. After each battle you get XP for the character you played as, mainly depending on how many enemies you took out in that battle. You can use these to learn new moves, or to increase your 3 stats (HP, Power and Defense). While this is a very cool feature in concept, and I've seen other Beat 'Em Ups such as Urban Reign do this, it suffers from the fact that you have to pick one character for your playthrough and stick with him to the end, rather than select freely for each battle. If you don't, you will end up using a very underpowered character who will not stand a chance in later levels. It's quite upsetting that this problem exists, as it hampers the games big feature of allowing you to choose a character for each battle. I imagine it could have easily been fixed by allowing the NPC allies to get XP from battles too, especially since often, they can steal your kills. Even if it was just half XP, I'd be fine with it.

Thankfully, this is somewhat remedied by the game being designed to be played through multiple times. I imagine a lot of people only played it once and drew conclusions based on that, probably another reason why the game got such a negative reception on launch. Play through the game with each character and you will have a much better experience, as well as some extra content like an extra phase to the final boss. This occurs on your 3rd playthrough, I've heard he has a 4th phase as well when you get every character to max rank, but I don't like this game THAT much.

A few other nice features I'd like to mention about this game are;

• The pause menu during cutscenes. Having one at all during cutscenes was relatively unheard of back then, but not only does it allow you to pause the cutscenes, the menu lets you skip them, check your XP, your abilities and allow you exit to the title screen if you'd like. After playing so many games from this time that don't let you skip cutscenes (especially annoying when you get stuck on a hard section), this honestly impressed me. More games should do this.
• The game allows you select between English or Japanese audio, and also allows you to select Japanese subtitles as well. As an objective standpoint, I'm glad this game had such a thing. From a subjective one, the English dub kinda sucks so I was happy to just use the Japanese one instead.

My last major complaint is how each time you die, you go back to the title screen. No continues, just straight to the title screen and having to load your file and skip the cutscenes ALL OVER AGAIN.

Played on Playstation 2 Hardware, Japanese Dub with English Subtitles.