Ages and ages ago, when the SegaCD was Welcoming People to the Next Level and all that good stuff, a very peculiar game managed to slip by the “make it as American as possible!” localization people, and we got Keio Yuugekitai (Keio Flying Squadron, in the US).

I’m no good at shooters, mind you, but this game had enough weirdness about it to make up for me being dreadful. It featured a bunny-girl-outfit-wearing shrine maiden and her pet dragon fighting against a fearsome tanuki army. If you’re my kind of people, you really don’t need anything more than that to understand why it was a glorious thing.

But it was a shooter, and therefore I managed to see about 3 levels of it.

In 1996, the Japanese got a sequel of sorts : Keio Yuugekitai Katsugekihen, which kept the bunny-girl and the tanuki and mostly lost the shooter aspect. There are a few shooter stages, and a very odd roller coaster stage, but mostly it’s a platform game. I can sometimes beat platform games, so this was more my speed. Walk to the left and right, go up ladders, jump on things to defeat them… or get a giant pink mallet and smack them about more directly. Again, if you’re my kind of people, any game where you wield a giant pink mallet should have you a little misty in the eyes.

I didn’t get a copy when it was new, of course, mostly because it was never in stock at any of the import game stores in LA. It wasn’t until 2002 or so that I scored a copy off eBay, and it was pretty shortly after that that I abandoned it after never getting much past the first boss.

Just because I CAN sometimes beat platform games doesn’t mean I can do it if there’s any challenge.

I booted it up again today, with the benefit of a few more years of off-and-on Japanese learning, and took a peek in the Option screen.

The first thing I noticed was that I could set it to auto-save when I finished levels, so I could put it aside and continue later. This isn’t on by default.

The second thing I realized is that I could understand the difficulty settings now. It was set at “hito” (person)

The other options were “saru” and “tengu”, or “monkey” and “crow demon”

I decided I was a monkey.

Thus began a few happy hours of tanuki slaughter, culminating in one of the oddest boss fights I expect to ever experience, and me happily watching the ending cinematic having used up every continue and all but one extra life.

Call me a gimp if you must, but I am one happy monkey.