Ashley Brookshier’s Favorite Game of All Time: Gitaroo Man

By: Ashley Brookshier

The first system I ever bought for myself using my own, hard-won and long-saved allowance as a young teen was a Playstation 2. I had leeched off of my older brother’s systems until then, sneaking into his room to snag an hour or two of playtime on the Playstation here and there, borrowing his SNES and guiltily playing the games that weren’t mine on a system I hadn’t bought while he spent his time on newer systems. With the new PS2, I felt liberation of the likes I never had before. Finally, it was mine! Mine to keep in my room, play whenever I felt like it, mine to buy whichever games I chose for it. It’s pretty easy to see that this system, therefore, holds a lot of my fond memories and even more of my favorite games. This brings me to my Favorite Game of All Time: the very first game I bought for it.

Gitaroo Man.

My reasons for buying it at the time weren’t very noble. It was only $30 while the rest of the games were $50, the cover looked colorful and quirky, and, well, it was only $30 rather than $50. Without a steady income back then, price always won out; it had only received a 7 out of 10 in one of the gamer magazines I subscribed to at the time, but it was cheap! Eagerly, but without expecting too much, I set up the system and popped the game in as soon as I got home with my treasures.

As soon as the brightly colored, cartoonish title screen popped up, with a breathy, Japanese-accented woman moaning the words, “Ooohhh, Gitarooman! Oh, yeah.“, I knew I had a diamond in the rough.

For those who haven’t played it (which are probably many – though it received fairly strong reviews in the US, it failed to sell well and therefore only had a limited run, though it was re-released years later for the PSP as Gitarooman Lives!), it is a bottle of insane on top of a mountain of crazy. The quirkily Japanese story revolves around a young, shy and awkard boy named U-1, whose girl of his dreams is continually taken from his grasp by his rival, Kazuya. That is, until U-1′s dog Puma teaches him how to play a guitar, which magically turns him into a tall, handsome superhero named Gitarooman. He embarks on a comically dramatic quest to save a distant enslaved world, fighting different Gitaroo masters along the way to take their Gitaroos and add to his collection.

This is also a rhythm game. No, there’s no guitar controller or DJ spinners – back in my day, we had to imagine we were playing a guitar using the regular controller, you whippersnappers! This game uses two distinct modes – attack and guard. During attack mode, you use the d-pad to follow a twisting path while hitting the X button to correspond to notes that U-1 plays. These notes make up the music and tear down the enemy’s health. Missing a note hurts you too, so you’d better watch out. During guard mode, notes corresponding to the buttons fly into the middle of the screen, and you must hit then in correct rhythm to dodge the enemy’s jams. The battles go on in this fashion until you defeat the enemy in a blaze of musical glory and steal his gitaroo from his twitching, dying fingers.

These bosses really steal the show. They are all original and downright odd, ranging from a deranged man of questionable orientation shrieking in operatic tones about his beauty, to a shark chasing U-1 and Puma through space. I mean, come on, people. A space shark. Genius. (He later morphs into a transformer-style upright robot shark, where he battles with U-1 on top of a spaceship to a reggae tune. Huh?)

That’s really about it. There are ten stages, all held together by short cutscenes. These are hilarious. They are horribly dubbed, horribly voice-acted, and meant to be silly. How could they not be amazing? The gameplay is fun and challenging to the point of madness, and deceptively so. Beating the game on Normal mode is difficult enough, but once you unlock Master’s Mode, prepare to be humbled. The difficulty just skyrockets, to the point where the first song is several orders of magnitude more difficult than the last song of Normal Mode. I still haven’t beaten Master’s Mode fully, to this day, and I’ve played the shit out of this game throughout the years. Though there are only ten stages total, each one hearkens to a specific genre of music. These range from Rock, J-Pop techno (in which you battle spaceships who have zapped the townsfolk with Dance Until Death rays), or even Mariachi (in which you battle three skeleton brothers armed with shakers and pelvises shaped like PS2 controllers). The stages are quirky and colorful. It’s one of those games where little things are always happening in the background, if you ever get enough of a breather from the challenging gameplay to take a look. Oh, and the music is fantastic. Seriously. Youtube some of the songs and see for yourself.

I can understand how this game slipped under the American radar. It’s odd, quirky, hard to pronounce, and only for a certain audience. (Somehow, I get the feeling that the FPS crowd isn’t going to enjoy seeing the whiny main character dragged offstage by his dog after being rejected yet again by his life’s love, then fighting a bee singing the blues in a swamp during the next stage.) However, I can’t tell you how many hours I spent and how much fun I had attempting to train my fingers to only be a little bit faster so I could just beat that space shark. It’s addictive and a hell of a lot of fun. If you like rhythm games, or Japanese games, or even just want a challenge, pick this one up, either for the PSP or PS2. It’s well worth the $40 or so that Amazon is charging for it, and it’ll cause you to throw the controller down in fury, only to pick it up again to jump right back in to the fray.

So, why is this game my favorite of all time? Well, I’ve tried to just spell it out for you – catchy tunes, frustratingly fun gameplay, hilarious story. It’s also my favorite because it signified the beginning of a new era for me. Once I owned a system of my own, I suddenly had a lot more freedom when it came to gaming, and I used and abused that freedom with Gitaroo Man. I played it whenever I wanted, as often as I wanted, and I even let my brother borrow it from me for a change! This game also demonstrated to me two very important things: that I like Japanese games, and that I like rhythm games. If it hadn’t been that measly $30 price tag that this game had on the shelf that fateful day I bought my PS2, I never may have discovered the passion that I now feel for those genres.

Someday I’ll beat you in Master’s Mode, Sanbone Trio…someday! And until that day, I’m going to keep popping Gitaroo Man in my old PS2, every so often, just to remember that joy I felt as a teen again.