The company's latest, Vib Ripple, is as different from Mojib Ribbion as Mojib Ribbon was from Vib Ribbon (the PlayStation predecessor to all these strange games). First off, it's not a music game. We're not really sure how one should classify it. Has there ever been a trampoline game before?
In Vib Ripple, you play as Vibiri. We're not quite sure what Vibiri is exactly. He's got lines for arms and legs, triangles for feet and hands, bunny ears, a face shaped like Pac Man and diamond eyes. He seems to be the same character that starred in the original Vib Ribbon, only now he's, for some unclear reason (the instruction manual doesn't really explain the game's background story), out to collect little "Peta Characters" that are hidden in pictures.
What this means in terms of gameplay is lots and lots of jumping. In fact, that's pretty much all you do in Vib Ripple. Stages take place in square arenas, with a center "mat" that's textured with a picture. Your goal is to find all the Peta Characters hidden in the picture. When you think you've found a Peta Character, you start jumping. The mat is actually a trampoline, so it repels you higher and higher with each jump. Eventually, if you're jumping in the right spot, the Peta Character will emerge from the picture, and by jumping a few more times you'll manage to get it.
A Peta Character, by the way, is a pixelated 2D representation of a real life object. So far, our experiences jumping around with Vib Ripple have brought us into contact with Peta characters shaped like dogs, cats, trees, chicken drumsticks, ice cream cones, turnips and lots of other objects. At the end of a level (that is, once you've found all the Peta Characters that are required of you), Vibiri introduces your catch to you. A couple of times, presumably because we'd performed well in the level, we were rewarded with new Peta Characters like "Wrestler" and "Doctor." Although confused by this, we were happy to learn that all these collectables are stored in an album for future viewing.
Finding out where in the picture Peta Characters are located may seem like a tough task, but the game gives a few clues to help out. On the screen's left side are icons representing the Peta Characters you need to capture in the level. Each Peta Character's icon indicates some combination of its color, shape and size. To find a given Peta Character in the picture, it's best to search for a clump of color in the picture corresponding to the size and color indicated in the character's icon. When you end up walking or jumping over a Peta Character, the game makes a drumming sound and the controller vibrates, indicating you're in the correct area.
The game includes sixty pictures which form its stages. As you progress through the different pictures, the content becomes more and more complex. Earlier pictures feature simple backgrounds like pieces of chocolate cake and checkered boards. Later pictures include shots of real people and natural backgrounds, sometimes making it a tricky task to actually track down a Peta Character.
And should you make it through all sixty pictures, Vib Ripple allows you to make your own stages. By connecting a digital camera to your PlayStation 2, you can use personal pictures as the basis for new stages. The game automatically places Peta Characters appropriately about the picture. Those with network-ready PS2s can also send pictures from their cell phone (the quality should be pretty good, considering that most new Japanese cell phones have mega pixel cameras built in). Pictures are shrunk and cropped to 200x200 resolution, allowing an album of twelve shots to take about 1 meg of space on your memory card.
Uploading your own pictures and experimenting with different scene types is apparently the only way to collect get all the Peta Characters. Fans of collecting useless junk in games will want to have their digital camera's USB cable ready.
Outside of just finding the Peta Characters in your pictures, there are a couple of things making your life as a Peta Character hunter tough. First off, stages have a time limit. You have to finish the stage before time runs out, or you'll have to start over again. In addition to this, you have to deal with obstacles, called Boonchies (they aren't exactly enemies -- some of the Boonchie characters follow Vibiri around because they like him so much). Boonchies are set about the stage from the start, with additional reinforcements appearing as you pound the ground with your jumps. They range in size, with the larger ones blowing up if you jump around too hard. Mere contact with a Boonchie will do Vibiri damage.
To combat the Boonchies, Vibiri has a few tricks. First up is his maneuverability. It's easy to simply avoid Boonchies by jumping around and over them. The game clearly marks where you'll land after a jump, and the excellent control and tremendous air time Vibiri gets from his jumps makes this your best bet against the Boonchies.
It's also possible to disable a Boonchie when you've become Super Vibiri. That's right, like Mojib in Mojib Ribbon, Vibiri can evolve through various forms. His weakest form is the Mushi Vibiri (Insect Vibiri). Going up from that are Kero Vibiri (Frog Vibiri), plain old ordinary Vibiri and Super Vibiri. Super Vibiri can physically strike the Boonchies and freeze them for a while; he also has the ability to see where the Peta Characters are hidden in a picture.
Get hit in any of the forms and Vibiri de-evolves. A blow while in Mushi Vibiri form means the end of the game.
To advance up the Vibiri evolution chain, you have to collect as many Peta Characters as you can from the stage's picture. There are actually Peta Characters in the picture besides the ones required for completion of the level. Catch 'em all, but make sure you don't run out of time.
As with previous Nana On Sha games, changing forms changes the tempo of the music. Super Vibiri has fast-paced music in the background while Mushi Vibiri 's music is so slow that it's almost tough to jump properly.
On the whole, audio isn't as central to Vib Ripple's gameplay as it was to Mojib Ribbon and Vib Ribbon. For what audio is there, Vib Ripple takes a different approach than its predecessors. As Mojib Ribbon focused on rap, this game focuses on percussion, with Vibiri performing drum numbers between stages and having his symbols ready to go at every turn. Inside the stages, the game's soundtrack sounds twangy and beepy like a videogame -- a new approach for Nana On Sha. The synthesized voice from Mojib Ribbon is back, and it makes for a cool introduction theme.
The look of the game is also different from its predecessors. Mojib Ribbon looked like it was being drawn in real time with a fountain pen. Vib Ribbon made it look like the PlayStation was drawing a bunch of white lines across the screen. Vib Ripple is closer in style to Vib Ribbon, but expanded to the third dimension and with a mix of reality from the high-resolution pictures forming the trampoline. The effects on the trampoline, with its picture growing deformed and loosing bits of information as you repeatedly jump on it make for cool watching, as does Vibiri's exaggerated jumping animation.
As with Mojib Ribbon, the simple, fun gameplay of Vib Ripple make us want to continue playing through all its stages. The bonus for non-Japanese-types with this game is the added replay value of creating stages with pictures (rather than the similar option Mojib Ribbon presented with words). Add in the typical stylistic presentation and the likelihood that only a few thousand people will ever play it, and we could have another Nana On Sha classic here.
