Muscle March (Wii)

Every now and then, you come across a game that absolutely revels in its unusualness, and unfortunately, when that game is made in Japan, it rarely gets the chance to go overseas and weird out the rest of us. Thankfully, Namco Bandai seems to recognize that these games can get an audience overseas if given a chance, with their biggest success story having to be the delightfully quirky Katamari Damacy series. When Muscle March was released on WiiWare, it pleased me to see Namco continuing the push to bring over more off-the-wall titles. It’s likely the moment you saw the image for Muscle March that you already decided whether or not you’d be willing to give the game a chance… I only wish I could tell those of you who are still interested that it delivered on its seemingly kooky setup.

 

Muscle March involves a group of bodybuilders having their protein powder stolen by a string of thieves, the muscly marchers giving chase in a procession after whatever unusual character is responsible in that level. The characters and the thieves are where much of the game’s creativity has been used up, the game giving you the choice of various flamboyant barely clad men as well as a beefed-up woman and a polar bear in a speedo. Each muscle on their bodies has had a lot of attention put into its modeling to further push the joke of these overly muscled characters parading around 90% naked. The characters you chase after are bit more varied and stray away from the burly beefcake design model (after all, why steal the protein powder if you’ve got a ripped bod already?), with some unusual characters like the bunny twins where one rides piggyback on the other and the sunglasses wearing alien who is zipping away on top of a UFO. These characters are all important to the central gameplay, needing well defined figures so they remain visible and easily identified as you march after them, but it seems all the attention was given to these characters in making the game world interesting.

The muscle march will take you through a few locations, you picking an area to start in what could be seen as segmenting the game into Easy, Normal, and Hard modes, but they aren’t actually that much different in difficulty. The gameplay is always keeping you focused on the conga line of bodybuilders and the thief they’re running down, so the people in charge of the environments turn in a subpar performance.  Sure, you will end up running through Japanese villages and a space station, but you can’t really look around too much and if you did take the time to try and find something silly or weird, you’ll mostly see poorly textured sprites of characters who just fit the current environment. There are some setpieces that do feel suitably insane to match the game’s intended tone, but they’re hard to appreciate at high speed and are usually not that out there either. The music at least is a delight, the songs having an energetic and oddball feel that would make them a perfect fit in Katamari Damacy and they certainly work here as well.

 

Usually, my focus in these reviews is on the gameplay first and presentation second, but if you start playing Muscle March, you’ll see the game’s intentionally crazy art direction is pretty much the only thing it has going for it, and even then, it comes up a little short. With almost all the appeal hinging on the muscly main crew and whatever creature or campy character they’re chasing this time, the game exhausts its visual appeal quickly, so much so that it feels like you could see all on offer by simply watching the trailer.

If you do decide to play it anyway, you’ll find Muscle March has very simple requirements of the player but does not have the controls to back it up. When you and the other bodybuilders are chasing down the protein powder thief, you trail behind them in a line, your character at the back. The thief at the front is dashing to get away, but to continue their escape they must break through barriers in their path, the thief posing in one of four arrangements that the marchers must match to safely pass through the hole the thief made. The other bodybuilders in the train seem to exist to ease you into the poses, giving you an extra visual reference and more time to strike the pose before you come to the hole in the wall. Gradually though, they begin dropping off, putting you closer and closer to the thief until you are right behind them and must match their movements with only a split second to strike the right pose. Luckily, you’ve got a stamina meter so you can hit a few walls without going down, but it mostly serves as a way of making the game possible since the controls for posing are surprisingly poor.

 

To get through a hole in the wall, you must move the Wii Remote and nunchuck to mimic the pose the thief struck. Motion controls generally don’t bother me in a game, mostly because the task asked of them is usually too simple to get hung up on or works within the capabilities of the controller, but Muscle March pushes things a little too far and drags its gameplay down because of it. If you try to strike the actual pose the thief made, your character may flail about as they try to adjust, sometimes hitting the wall before it finally registers what you’re trying to do. The screen they use to teach you the controls even seems to hint that posing like the thief isn’t as effective as rigidly moving your arms like you’re waving semaphore flags. Angling your arms up and down instead of trying to look like you’re flexing can lead to a more responsive pose from your character… or not. As the chase speeds up your time to pose shortens, and either trying to be accurate or trying to game the system can still have the same issues with your character failing to move in time. The motion controls aren’t quite there to respond so quickly and in this manner, and if the game asks you to move from a full downward flex to a full upward flex, you’re basically going to have to eat that loss and hope you run down the criminal before you hit a few more walls.

 

At least every chase ends with a fairly frantic flailing of the controls that is hard to mess up. In fact, after each level, I realized my arms were a little tight, and even the game seems to realize that Muscle March can be a slight workout despite that it sort of missed out on getting its basics down. There is an endless mode where you will never reach the frantic rundown at the end, instead going until you hit the walls too much, but considering the control issues, it doesn’t exactly provide the best experience. Succeeding in the normal levels comes down to hoping the controls play along well enough, and while you might have little trouble with the easier stages, things get too sloppy too quickly. You can win eventually with just a bit of persistence and the game’s forgiving restarts, but it makes it hard to commit to Muscle March as anything more than a passing curiosity.

THE VERDICT: It pains me to see the state of Muscle March. I love it when things embrace absurdity, revel in the player’s reaction, and go all out without needing to try and appeal to everyone. I would love to be able to recommend a game like this. After all, absolute giants in the gaming industry like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog both have concepts that are crazy on paper but worked perfectly when executed, to the point their premises almost seem mundane in the modern day.  The only problem is, once you’ve basked in the hilarious premise and crazy menu screens of Muscle March, you’re put into a game that is surprisingly shallow and difficult to control.

 

And so, I give Muscle March for the Wii…

A TERRIBLE rating. I would have loved to love this game, but while I’m not turned away by it’s crazy aesthetic, I am turned away from it not having anything else going on. Gameplay just involves striking four poses and it can’t even pull that off, the controls failing to read your motions properly even if you try to trick it with more readable controller positioning.  With a very basic gameplay side that demands you to pay attention to only a small portion of what’s going on, the game got lazy with the rest of the visual design and spent most of its energy in putting up a good front with hardly any follow through. I won’t say that there aren’t moments as you get deeper in the game that have that same appeal of quirky craziness, but it’s not enough to make the repeated runs with unresponsive controls worth it.

 

Muscle March is sadly a game best enjoyed from afar. Perhaps if it had embraced its absurdity even more then you could stomach the bland and broken gameplay for the sake of seeing what’s next, but to really make Muscle March a game that isn’t best enjoyed as a Youtube video, it would have needed to fix its control issues and add something actually interesting to do in the game. Other strange games like Katamari Damacy and Mister Mosquito were able to take unusual premises and marry them with interesting gameplay, but compared to its quirky counterparts, Muscle March just can’t keep up.