Imagine that SquareSoft tried to make a Yakuza game five years before Sega — a beat ‘em up with role-playing elements and tons of splashy cinematics. Imagine that project was helmed by some of the industry’s most impressive creative talent. Now imagine that the resulting game was far less than the sum of its parts. That game is The Bouncer, developed by DreamFactory and published by Square Electronic Arts in North America in March 2001, shortly after the launch of the PlayStation 2.
(Yes, Square and Electronic Arts had a brief strategic partnership in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. No, I don’t like thinking about it either. It’s like finding out your Mom used to date your boss.)
The Bouncer focuses on three guys who work at a bar — Sion, Kou, and Volt — who must rescue their friend Dominique after she’s kidnapped by the Mikado Corporation. It takes place in the city of Edge, which has a neon-spangled grittiness that brings to mind both Final Fantasy 7’s Wall Market and Attack of the Clones’s Coruscant underbelly.
The game had two directors, both of whom already had some very impressive credits on their resumes. Takashi Tokita directed Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4, Parasite Eve…and Square’s Tom Sawyer, the infamous Famicom RPG from 1989 that features wildly problematic caricatures of Black people. Co-director Seichii Ichii helped design Virtua Fighter and was game director for both Tekken and Tekken 2. So you’d think the combat would be pretty solid here.
Welp, it turns out that the fighting might just be the worst thing about The Bouncer. That’s largely due to a finicky input scheme and aggressive ragdoll physics that turn every felled foe into a wacky waving tube-man. Stranger still, each level of The Bouncer is extremely brief, often less than a minute long. Cutscenes comprised nearly two-thirds of the game’s roughly 2-hour runtime, which meant that skipping all of the cinematics would allow a player to complete the game in just 30 to 45 minutes.
“The Bouncer manages to look good,” wrote one pithy reviewer, “but don’t let that fool you into thinking that it’s very fun.”
Even if the action wasn’t especially satisfying, reviewers did agree that The Bouncer had an eye-catching aesthetic all its own. The cutscenes are a noticeable step up from the PlayStation 1 era, and Tetsuya Nomura of Final Fantasy 7 and Kingdom Hearts fame designed the characters, who sport some truly wild Y2K fashions. One of the playable characters, Kou, has massive tribal tattoos that cover his chest and forehead. There’s a lot of exposed male torso, duster coats, oversized boots, gothic font hoodies, and chunky chain necklaces among the ensemble cast, and the leather-clad villains wear onesies with a prominent whale tail on the rear. (Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song’ came out in 1999. While I can’t prove that it was an influence on The Bouncer, I also can’t prove that it wasn’t.)
Most eye-catching of all is Sion, the main character of the central trio, who bears a close resemblance to Kingdom Hearts hero Sora. Though Sion is noticeably older, the styling of the two characters is virtually identical: spiky and asymmetrical brown hair, a red, short-sleeved hoodie, voluminous shorts, and a wallet chain. The fine details differ, but their clothing shares a distinctive red and blue color palette with pops of yellow.
In a 2003 conversation with Yoji Shinkawa (the artist behind the Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding series), Nomura confirmed this resemblance was entirely intentional. “Since all the other characters are not Square characters but Disney, I wanted Sora’s design to be a kind of ‘grand compilation’ of all the characters I’d drawn up till then,” he said. “So I think he resembles a lot of characters: there’s a bit of Cloud, a bit of Tidus, some Sion too. I was very intent on that.”
The Bouncer may not have spawned a franchise all its own, but its legacy did live on…in an indirect way. Nearly 25 years later, Sora has become one of the most beloved video game characters ever, and the prospect of Kingdom Hearts 4 has fans hyped all over the world. And it all might have played out differently if it weren’t for Sion. Here’s hoping that KH4 brings back those unforgettable whale tails, whenever it finally launches.
