About the only franchise GameCube owners can cling to, in the face of final desertion by the Resident Evil series to the PlayStation 2, is Capcom's homage to super-deformed, overly cute, power-ranging types in too-tight lycra suits battling for supremacy across movie sets. If you're a fan of the anime series, understand the frenetic nature of the gameplay, and feel the need for an update that crams more of everything into your television screen, often at the expense of clarity, then you'll already be playing this. Those hoping for a mixture of Super Smash Bros. and PowerStone but with horribly confusing fight sequences should definitely give this a go. Everyone else? You might want to rent this first.

The game begins innocently enough, with broadcast-quality anime introducing a cast of old favorites and newcomers who look like the offspring of Virtua Fighter characters with encephalitis. After the rather basic storyline involving your chosen character auditioning for the lead role a film has been bombarded into you, you're free to leap, slap, special move, and slap again through dozens of movie sets. At least the story allows you to visit wildly different locales, ranging from frontier towns to undersea temples, and there's the obligatory areas perched high enough to cause vertigo, or involving enough moving platforms to cause high blood pressure as you yell at your character to leap correctly and not fall from the screen.


These are all part of a sequence of "scenes" you play out against a foe, each involving a special rule to follow -- such as exploding more enemies than your opponent, or collecting more crap. Coins are also scattered throughout the fighting areas, and on the personage of your foe, so there's main methods of finding more and more of them. Achieve a better result, and you're smothered in yet more coinage, and of course, we all know that those with the most money are the coolest. Just ask Bill Gates. Amid all this chaos, there's an extra layer of antics to attempt: the pummeling of foes, and the collection of items (small balls that allow the activation of special abilities).

Seeing Red Hot

Not that you'll know what the hell is going on for the first two hours. The action is literally madcap, and you'll spend most of this time squinting at your television, wishing you knew where your character was, and launching their special move, deciding it wasn't exciting enough, and restarting with another character. Initially, you'll feel an annoying sense of imbalance when you compare characters, as some are lumbering and weedy, while others appear to laugh in the face of gravity and inertia. This perceived character imbalance is true for the majority of gamers out there, but when you've spent weeks charting versus battles between tournament-level players, and getting incrementally better at the game, you'll probably be able to challenge anyone with any character you like. That's if you have the patience and eyesight for this task, which rules out most people looking for a fun fighting game experience.