I’m 100% not an ‘anime guy’. I have nothing against the genre or the culture of it all, but vast swathes of it are just not for me, and trust me, having friends who are absolutely anime people has given me mountains of exposure to it even when I didn’t want any. It’s something about the usual storytelling and dialogue style of them that I’ve never been able to get myself into, that instantly identifiable Japanese stiffness, and that they often rely on cultural information and concepts more heavily than typical Western style stories do, and I of course have no idea about any of those things.
All this being said, there are a few choice animes that I absolutely **** with, stories that managed to break through the cultural barrier and my usual hang-ups enough for me to actually say I enjoy if not love. I really like Welcome To The NHK, even if it is really hard to watch for a multitude of reasons (maybe that’s even why I enjoy it so much), and I absolutely am down any day of the week for Trigun. I will admit that I even enjoyed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya enough to say I ‘like it’, but that’s mainly because of the meta aspects and the greater ideas of it more than the actual show itself. But there’s one specific anime that has transcended past being an anime for me and become one of my most favourite pieces of any media, a masterpiece of such profound essence and style that it 100% changed the way I viewed stories and writing afterwards, and I 100% mean that. A show of such caliber that I still think about it on a day-to-day basis, an incomparable iconoclast that defined its entire era, blending multiple genres and elements into one pure aspect of beauty.
I’m referring to the absolute legend, Lucky Star.
While I have actually watched the entirety of Lucky Star for reasons I don’t even understand myself other than I was unfathomably bored for an entire week once and am a masochist, I’m not talking about that.
But I got you there, didn’t I?
I mean of course mother****ing Cowboy Bebop, Shinichirō Watanabe’s masterclass of character writing and poeticism of such immaculate vibe that it’s astounding. I have carried that weight, and I regret absolutely nothing and would do it all over again at the slightest opportunity. I was not exaggerating when I said that it changed the way I looked at writing fictional characters, and perhaps in that way it’s ruined me; I’m constantly comparing things to Cowboy Bebop, which is not a fair comparison for the vast majority of things. It’s a story that blends a variety of different genres while following the exploits of the expanding crew of the titular Bebop ship, perpetually money-starved intergalactic bounty hunters (‘cowboys’ in the show) who hunt down targets across the solar system for the woolong-cash reward. Spike Spiegel, the lanky hand-to-hand combat expert and the usual chain smoking ‘action man’ of the group; Faye Valentine, the hustler queen who apparently only loses when she gambles and who has space’s strangest sense of fashion; Jet Black, the ex-cop with a wicked metal left hook and an even stronger gruff cynicism; Radical Ed, the Earthling hacker who’s talent at finding info is dwarfed only by her being the weirdest ****ing person in any room; and everyone’s favourite data dog, Ein the corgi. What’s a data dog? Don’t worry about it, just go with it.
The gathered weirdo’s.
Its episodic structure had the crew hunting down the bounty of the week, always barely ever making any financial net gains, broken up by some of the strongest characterizations you’ll ever witness in your life and glimpses into each of their pasts and lingering wounds. Watanabe has cited a big writing theme for the series as an exploration of how someone’s past can affect their future, how someone can become so entrenched in it that they’re unable to move on ‘as if they’re in a dream’; something that affects every character to some degree, trapped by a loneliness that’s holding them down. The soundtrack? A character unto itself, iconic, never makes me almost tear up ever; freeform jazz, punctuated by the most emotive saxophone solos, somber acoustic pieces and bittersweet folk rock and whatever form of majesty Blue is. It’s a show that will have one episode of goofiness, then another that can entirely ****ing crush you, and it pulls off both of those sides well. You could even say the series can be ‘vicious’ like that.
But enough about the show as this article is about the formerly untranslated Japanese-release only 2005 PlayStation 2 game, Tsuioku no Serenade (Serenade of Reminiscence). I’d heard about this game quite awhile ago, but was never interested in playing through it untranslated and so I figured I’d just never end up playing it.
Big credit here to translator ‘SonicMan69’ for this recent full English sub translation of course, which made this whole article even possible.
I will absolutely credit someone with that cute of a cat.
The History; Why Didn’t You Localize This, Bandai?
Serenade of Reminiscence is developed by Chime Corporation, a Japanese developer (obviously). Finding concrete information on them was pretty hard, as a lot of my usual sources often had non-matching or incomplete information; the best source was their entry in the Game Developer Research Institute wiki page. They’ve done a variety of odd jobs here and there seemingly as a backup co-developer primarily with Japanese staples like Apollosoft and Chunsoft, with the only solo developer jobs I’ve been able to narrow down being Cowboy Bebop and 2014’s Zero Time Dilemma, the third entry the Nonary Games puzzle/visual novel series (coincidentally, the only game I haven’t played in the series).To answer my question in the title header here, this was actually going to be given a Western localization back in the day, but the leading theory is that Namco’s acquisition of publisher Bandai into the aptly titled titanic juggernaut of BandaiNamco the same year the game came out had it lost in the shuffle and quietly cancelled, which is common in business acquisitions like this. According to an IGN article (which is so of it’s time that it has a Chuck Norris joke in the title header) and a GameSpot article, it was apparently shown off at 2004’s E3 conference on this side of the pond, so presumably some level of work was done on the localization before its cancellation. Unfortunately, it seems we’ll never know definitively why it was cancelled, but I’m guessing the common theory is probably correct. Interestingly enough, the only other Cowboy Bebop video game, being the directly named 1998 scrolling shooter Cowboy Bebop for the PlayStation 1, also never saw an official translation. Maybe Bandai’s translation department just hated the series?
Well, this is the shortest ‘boring history’ section of a review I’ve done yet; that’s all I’ve got on this game. With both of those two paragraphs out of the way, let’s finally dive into the game proper. Is it worthy of the anime’s prestigious legacy? Does the crew ever eat anything more than meatless fried bell peppers and beef? Will it reference that one episode where Spike left some Ganymede rock lobster for so long in the back of the Bebop’s fridge that it mutated into an energy vampire and stalked the crew?
The Game; An Acceptable Level of Jazz
Serenade of Reminiscence sees the Bebop crew set out to do the usual bounty head collecting, only to get involved in the hunt for a mythical thief’s treasure as well as an unreleased song by the famous space singer, Priscilla, and maybe they’re related? Full disclosure; I have no ****ing idea what happened in this game on a narrative level. I played it, I watched the cutscenes, I have no idea. It's a convoluted and often unexplained mess, with characters showing up as if you already know who they are, the secondary characters having very little in the way of established motivation or even any attempt at a backstory, it’s mentioned once that the military garbed goons you start seeing later are from a 'bureau’ but I have no idea what that means as it never elaborates, and I’m only like 5% sure of what was going on with the big villain who has the silliest name. I think he had a space station and was a cop?
Ooh, a tonfa. Real intimidating when your name is ****ing Ronald, dude.
It never gets into the real heavy stuff like the show does, and stays pretty lighthearted throughout. There’s a bit of characters saying the ol’ ‘my life is a dream, dream this or dream that’ that’s very frequent in the show and a single instance or two of some bittersweet melancholy, but don’t go in expecting something like the episodes Jupiter Jazz, or Speak Like A Child, or Ballad of Fallen Angels or Ganymede Elegy if you have profound taste; this plays more like one of the more fun ‘filler’ episodes, like a Mushroom Samba or a Honky Tonk Women or a Boogie-Woogie Feng Shui. It also avoids any mention of the show’s greater plot or character specifics, leaving it entirely free of continuity or spoilers; so don’t worry about any of that stuff. It takes place sometime after episode 9 considering every character is in the crew, and that’s all that’s important.
To be fair to the game, the show was never really about the actual plot of each episode with it only serving to build up the characters. There were some silly plots in the show, but at least I understood them. I’m not sure if maybe some of it was perhaps lost in the translation, but I don’t think that’s the case as SonicMan69’s translation work seems to be really good here on a line-to-line basis. The dialogue wasn’t hard to understand at all, and it didn't have that recognizable oddness that poorly translated writing tends to have where lines don’t feel like they’re even related to one another. I think it may have just been a mess of a story.
Jet’s absolutely the type to just dropkick somebody.
That being said, the actual writing of the crew here is pretty spot on. It’s not to the same caliber as the show of course, and I highly doubt Watanabe or any of the show writers were involved for this outside of maybe some general consulting, but it’s a fine enough imitation. They all act on brand and have their specific quirks baked in, like Spike’s blaise attitude about everything, Faye’s constant scheming for more woolong’s, Jet’s attempts at ‘fatherly wisdom’ that often makes little sense and feels like he just made it up on the spot.
It’s an entirely linear affair, seeing you jazz your way across levels. Each of the three bounty collecting crew is playable in this, switching around from Spike, Faye and Jet for certain chapters.
I did find great entertainment in Faye turning into Chun-li levels of combat expert for this game. I think she was in a fist fight once in the show.
Luckily, the actual gameplay itself carries its weight enough to make up for the mess of a narrative. The most important part of it is the brawlin’ side, so let’s start with that.
The game is like 80% a beat ‘em up, and it absolutely delivers. Dare I say I even greatly enjoyed its combat brawling. It’s a simple set-up that just feels good to use, which is exactly what a game like this should be. You have a punch and a kick button, and can in fact use them to combo enemies. There’s two 3-hit strings you can do, being either punch-kick-punch to knock enemies down so you can stomp on their crotches (I’m only half joking), or kick-punch-kick to blow enemies back to get some space or knock them off arenas at some points. There are longer combos with different combinations, which leads into what I think the game absolutely nailed with its combat; it’s all about timing.
In order to actually land these combos, you have to actually time your button presses instead of mashing them. Sorry, button mashers. The first three hits are pretty lenient timing wise, but from the fourth hit on it requires some precision. This timing flow is core to the whole brawling experience in Serenade of Reminiscence. Your finishers at the end of these chains inflict massive damage to enemies, and are even capable of hitting multiple opponents at once which is of course absolutely ****ing necessary; the enemies are monsters at crowding you in this game. So, you absolutely want to do these combo finishers. The timing of these strings isn’t overly hard after some basic practise, thankfully making the combat actually feel rewarding rather than punishing. Each character also has different timing and even the max amount of combo hits you can do before hitting a finisher; Jet is the slowest speed but the strongest hitting and only has 5 maximum combo hits, for example, while Faye is the fastest timing and has up to 8 and deals less damage per hit. They still fundamentally control the same, but it's a small change that does make each of them feel unique from one another which is great to see.
Timing is also essential to your only defensive option, other than a kind of awkward roll I never found much use for; the dodging system. By holding R1 down, your current Bebop weirdo will automatically spot-dodge 90% of the attacks flying at them, other than a few undodgeable attacks from certain enemies. There’s even a few different context-sensitive animations that play out based on the move you're dodging; you hop over leg sweeps, or flicker underneath punches, or do some cool Bruce Lee **** as Spike. This sounds overpowered, until you learn that it's tied to your ‘tension’ gauge underneath your health bar and you drain it by holding down the button. It’s also tempered by the fact that when you’re doing combo attacks hits, you can’t dodge attacks during the majority of the animation and therefore have to get a little smart with it.
Dodging obviously stops you from getting haymaker’d in the face, but it also leads into a really cool feeling counter system. After dodging, you can let go of R1 during the dodge animation and hit either punch or kick to do a big sweeping counter attack with a lot of invincibility, and that often knocks the various goons back. The animation of the dodge is fairly quick, so once again there is a strong sense of timing required to do these essential counter attacks. Not only is there a counter attack, but there's also parrying. If you hit R1 just as an attack hits you, you do an even stronger attack complete with cinematic zoom that often instantly knocks enemies out, often multiple if they're close enough. This is absolutely an essential technique to start using, especially as the game goes on and enemies become tough ****ing cookies.
The parries or ‘just counters’ or whatever you want to call them in action. Those mooks never stood a chance, dude.
There's also two different meters that fill up as you fight dudes, one being your blue ‘cool’ meter and the other being the red ‘hot’ meter. Your cool meter fills specifically from finishing a combo, giving you more the longer the attack combo. Your red hot meter fills as you take damage, draining your cool meter at the same time. When either is about 2/3rds full, you can hit triangle to do the usual fully invincible room clearing beat ‘em up special move, with the specific attack based on if your cool or hot meter is the one that's full enough. When your cool meter is fully filled, you can also hit punch plus kick to go into a super mode essentially until it runs out; this fully removes any timing precision on your combo attacks, and makes you automatically dodge and counter attack any unfortunate enemy swinging at you. It's a really cool little idea the way the cool and hot meter interact. Even if you're getting the snot kicked out of you, that's filling your hot meter so you can still use a slightly weaker special attack potentially, at the expense of never building cool meter to be able to do the overpowered super mode. There's a really cool give and take to them, something small but that is really smartly designed. The cool meter also makes you engage with the combo system, as you fill it exclusively through hitting the combo finishers; again, its really smart game design, feeding one part of the combat into another.
It's in the combat that the game truly shines, basically. Once you start throwing your lanky limbs around, watching your timing in case you have to dodge another enemy coming up beside you, flowing from one satisfying animation into your counter attack; this is what makes you really feel like you’re recreating the really well-done fight scenes from the anime. Perfect adaptation, perfect beat ‘em up combat; chefs kiss.
The game has some great variety, honestly. I never expected I’d suddenly go into a first person covering fire scenario.
I said the brawling is 80% of Serenade of Reminiscence because there are some other things thrown into there for variety to good effect. The most common of these bits is the gunfight sections when you pull out your piece and start blastin’. You can only pull out your guns during these bits which is maybe a little strange, but it’s also in fact a video game so it didn’t bother me that much. It would also be weird to design really great feeling fisticuffs only to have you able to pull out your .45 the whole time. These sections are fine, there’s nothing really special about them but they’re a decent little change of pace. You can take cover behind objects, enemies pour down the hallways and into the always ever present balconies, and that’s about it. The aiming controls maybe aren’t the most fluid, but there’s also some generous hitboxes at play so it doesn’t ultimately ruin it. Oh wait, there is one cool thing you can do here; by using your tension gauge you can turn the game into discount Stranglehold and do a wicked slow motion gundive.
Max Payne? Never heard of him.
There’s also the occasional simple puzzle solving, as per the usual style of this generation of action games. Occasionally you have to look at something in a first-person view to find a password for a door, or a key somewhere; there was only really one or two of these sections that had me thinking for about 30 seconds maybe, and the rest are not even worth mentioning. There is an extended section where you have to find bombs hidden around the Bebop that almost overstayed it's welcome, but it was still ultimately enjoyable.
Rounding the game out are some pretty quick first-person on-rails ship piloting bits where you have to rapidly dodge hazards and laser blasts. They’re also fine, they don’t really come up too often and last for maybe 30 seconds a piece; nothing really to bring up with them. There’s also plenty of gimmick sections thrown in as well, seeing you have to do the usual video game stuff like kick grenades back at enemies in the background, or run away from chasing vehicles, or the essential ‘dodging signs on top of a train’ stage that every beat ‘em up needs apparently. There’s even quick time events, something I’d rather it didn’t have but at least they’re few and far between.
The ship piloting sections aren’t bad, but luckily they are very short.
Sometimes you’ll even have help from some other AI controlled characters, and the only thing I want to bring up from these is this insanely brilliant QoL tidbit; they will actually pick-up the medkits scattered around levels if they’re lower health than you, entirely on their own initiative. Whoa. Did this just solve the greatest and most frustrating aspect of escort missions with one really tiny thing that not enough other games thought of? I was actually stunned the first time I saw one of them break off of the fight to run for a medkit.
Holy ****, look at that little twink go! He’s booking it for that pickup!
Graphically the game’s nothing special, but it has recreated the look of the show pretty well. It doesn’t look bad necessarily, just not really impressive. You may be noticing a trend in these last few points being that a lot is ‘nothing special’, and you’d be correct.
Outside of the game's stellar beat ‘em up brawlin’ and assaultin’, the game’s just fine. I have nothing to overly complain about other than the storyline, but nothing to also really point out and praise other than the punching. It’s not a bad game, it has an acceptable amount of fun which to me at least is perfectly acceptable; sometimes you just want a fun little beat ‘em up, you know? It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.
One big plus other than the exceptional Jeet Kun Do-ing is that the game has plenty of additional stuff to do after you beat it the first time. You unlock hard difficulty in case you want to go back through it, there’s a challenge map mode that lets you choose your character and do a bunch of shenanigan scenarios which is great to see, and a…quick joke mode where you play as Ein, or a shooting gallery where you play as Ed? **** yeah.
He’s just the cutest little data dog, dude. Don’t worry about what that means.
You can also get absolutely rocked by any of the crew in a blackjack game, so there’s also that.
Don’t let her innocence and the ‘I’m literally a child’ thing fool you. She’s an absolute ****ing shark, a monstrous killer.
Overall the game is a perfectly acceptable amount of jazz. It’s not exceptional or groundbreaking, but it’s still a good game in the end. The storyline may be utterly incomprehensible, but the game has plenty of variety and fun stuff in it that makes up for a lot of the more boilerplate elements. Luckily it’s also a relatively short jaunt; my playthrough clocked at the end screen as about 7 ½ hours and that’s with plenty of game overs and retries here and there. It’s not too challenging, or a cakewalk, and never felt frustrating. The smartly designed combat alone makes this worth playing for me as a beat ‘em up aficionado; it almost feels like a much, much simpler prototype of something like Sifu sometimes with how the dodging works and its fundamental focus on button timing. The big keyword there is much simpler. Honestly, the combat here entirely impressed me; I think I may actually rate it pretty high on my PlayStation 2 brawler list.
There could have been more to it for sure, but for its era I think it doesn't commit any grievous sins. Playing this has made me wish for something like a modern Yakuza game based on the series, carrying this games combat style into something a little more fleshed out. I think there's some potential there, at least.
I’d recommend trying out Serenade of Reminiscence, as long as you go in expecting a simple experience. It’s just simple fun, has a few bells and whistles in it and there’s nothing I can really complain about ultimately. Fans of the show may get more out of it as there’s a bit of fan service thrown in, such as finding the fridge that housed the unexplained Ganymede rock lobster alien or even the section where you get to walk around a fully 3D Bebop interior (which was sick, by the way). If this was officially localized back in the day, I’d have picked it up for a weekend or two and have been satisfied.
Business as usual.
See you, space cowboys. Someday, somewhere…
Pros
- + Exceptional brawling combat.
- + Great variety, mixing in a lot of different sections.
- + Carries the vibe of the show well.
Cons
- - Bewildering and confusing narrative.
- - Some half-baked ideas around the combat system.
7.5
out of 10
Overall
Serenade of Reminiscence is a perfectly fun little brawler that carries the weight of its source material to an acceptable level. It's not exceptional, but it's still a good time.
Last edited:
