Rumble Roses
Sony PlayStation 2
Today, I wanted to take a look at a wrestling game that was released by Konami. Konami releasing a wrestling title is a rare thing, indeed. It's not unheard of for them to release a wrestling game, as evidenced by my review of Konami's Jikkyō Power Pro Wrestling '96: Max Voltage which is a pretty fun and pretty solid game but, their wrestling releases were few and far between. Let's see if Rumble Roses is anywhere near as good as Max Voltage is.
Yukes was the developer for this release and it uses the same game engine they used for Raw vs Smackdown! Here Comes The Pain. That's a good start considering how that particular game is one of the classics of that era. The main difference between the two games is Rumble Roses is sort of Konami's answer to Tecmo's Dead Or Alive series of fighting games. You know, it focuses on curvy women and "jiggle effects" more than anything else but, who knows? Under all of that, we might still find a solid wrestling game.
The plot for the story mode is a pretty simple one. A mad scientist dressed as a nurse (you gotta have a sexy nurse character in a game like this, right?) holds an international women's wrestling tournament. She then brainwashes and extracts DNA from the competitors to make some sort of super-soldiers. Pretty standard stuff. All joking aside, it is an interesting story to follow as opposed to most standard career modes in wrestling games. At least they're being different with it. There aren't any different modes or many different match types to play but there is an option to have a mud wrestling match. At least Konami owns what they're doing with this game and isn't trying to be coy and sugarcoat it like, "Yeah, if you're playing this, we know what you want". There's also an option to set up and COM vs COM match to watch two wrestlers compete if you want to just sit on the sidelines, watch, and be a pure cuck about it all.
The game controls like the aforementioned Raw vs Smackdown! Here Comes The Pain but with subtle tweaks to the gameplay. Aside from the constantly jiggling tits you don't see in Here Comes The Pain; submission moves are handled a little differently. When you get a submission on your opponent, a "health bar" for their arm or leg or whatever body part you're attacking pops up. This meter shows you exactly how many button presses you have to perform to pull off the submission. This takes simple button mashing to a new level because it takes the guessing game aspect out of it. You're always aware of exactly how much damage you need to inflict before your opponent taps.
There are 11 "lovely ladies" to choose to compete with but one awesome aspect of the game is all of them have a different face/heel persona. That brings up the total roster number to 22 wrestlers once you unlock all of the personas. Personas are unlocked using the "Vow System". The Vow System has various things to complete during matches. For example, if you're using a heel character then perhaps you can unlock the face version but not using any weapons in a match. If you're a face then performing a "Killer Move" may unlock your heel persona and so on. It adds another level of depth to the gameplay that you don't always get with other wrestling games.
I wasn't expecting much going into this game, to be honest. I had never played it before and never cared to give it a try because I figured it was mostly just about the T and A but I was wrong. Under the surface, this is a pretty fun game to play and has hidden depth to it. Worth a try if you've never experienced it.
Until next time... keep mashing those buttons!