With Ichidant-R, M2 has rescued another Sega classic from international obscurity. As either a proto-WarioWare microgame collection or an academic dive into Japan's transitional arcade scene, Ichidant-R's ecstatic presence succeeds in delighting and illuminating its audience. It's another affirmation that M2's work on the Switch's SEGA AGES' line continues to be one of the most valuable projects in gaming.
Contrary to popular belief, orderly batches of frenzied minigames were available before Nintendo’s beloved (and now dormant) WarioWare initiative. Sega’s Panic!, Komani’s Bishi Bashi series, and the Nintendo 64DD’s Mario Artist: Polygon Studio created arguments for quantity and variety as sufficient substitutes for complexity and depth. It was like you were playing a succession of first levels from arcade games that never existed.
Ichidant-R, the second of three entries in Sega’s Puzzle & Action arcade series, is another member of this tiny class of games. Before now, Ichidant-R had only been available in Japanese arcades and through Japan-exclusive compilation releases on the Saturn and PlayStation 2. Offshoots appeared on the Mega Drive and Game Gear. This SEGA AGES release is actually the first time Ichidant-R has been made available in North America, which provides some relief for retro enthusiasts (hi) who had considered themselves well-versed in Sega’s arcade and console history and had no idea it existed until yesterday.
Original games are allowed a bland premise, granting Ichidant-R a pass for abducting a princess and charging a knight to rescue her. To do this, the knight must walk through four castle-themed stages to reach his goal. To move the knight, the player must topple four microgames for each section of each stage. Failure in these microgames comes at the cost of a game over, but, because we’re in the future playing a Switch and not in the past punching an arcade machine, you can give yourself as many credits as you like. Ichidant-R’s exacting challenges and demanding time limits are mitigated with infinite continues.
Besting Ichidant-R’s collection of 20 games requires a combination of memory, reflexes, and logic. They all use only one button and one directional pad. Different mixes of each game must be beaten three, four, or five times before the knight “wins” and can move on to the next game. This version of Ichidant-R, like many of M2’s SEGA AGES releases, comes equipped with a Helper option than can reduce the number of victories needed and provide the player with 30 lives right from the start. It’s a welcomed addition, as adjustments like this only increase accessibility without compromising the original product. Ichidant-R is still Ichidant-R if you want it to only be Ichidant-R.
The action-oriented games may feel the most familiar. One where you become a bird and must grab apples from trees while evading flying squirrels may have inspired Flappy Bird. Horizontally puncturing a series of bouncing balloons, from shortest to largest, requires a level of timing that was surely easier on a CRT display. Hitting the brakes on a fast car before it goes off a cliff is the modern equivalent of a QTE. Rotating an analog stick to sharpen a pencil reminds me of seeking gloves from Nintendo to pay for the sins of Mario Party. Elements of Ichidant-R’s action games, if you look close enough, are still present in modern game design.
Other games put a spotlight on the deterioration of my short-term memory. One tosses a bunch of spastic fish on the screen and asks the player to count them in just a few seconds. Another pops objects with a gun in an old western town, which the player must repeat in order like Lethal Enforcers but with Simon rules. Asking the player to pick from two motion portraits of dancing monkeys, picking out two like crackers from a series of flipping crackers, and selecting gold vases from behind a curtain all demand the player employ a photographic memory for just a few seconds. I struggled with these, as will anyone else whose attention span has been compromised by the reality of 2019.
The last set of games function closer to logic puzzles. A guy in a one-screen maze must plow through a series of two-alike doors in different rooms to reach a goal. A bunch of frogs on lily pads must be stacked from largest to smallest, but juggling them all is a vexing challenge. Switching train track pieces around to reach special coins in a square course feels like a variant of Pipe Dream. Matching coffins together from a vague series of questions seems like it was pulled from a standardized test. I failed a lot of these early on due to the intense time limits, but I got better once I had a bit of experience.
Every single game can be played locally or online with another player. If you’re trying this at home you might want to let your partner know that you have been playing Ichidant-R for three hours and not to be dismayed with your slight advantage only to have them demolish you anyway. It was humbling. I managed to find a few matches online (presumably with Japanese players) and while timing-focused events like the Car Cliff Jump could have felt better, it was fine overall. I wasn’t sweating wins and losses in a game like Ichidant-R.
Included in this release is the original Mega Drive version of Ichidant-R. It’s completely in Japanese, which is a barrier given its RPG-Lite reframing. Fortunately the digital manual included with Ichidant-R has a built-in strategy guide for telling the player where to go and what to do. It even has the kanji translations for cardinal directions, and a few basic recognizable phrases like “yes, “and “no.” At the end of the day you’re still playing many of the same minigames, but it’s cool that Ichidant-R’s Mega Drive iteration is part of this release. Its feels like more of a historical document for Sega enthusiasts than another port shoved in an emulator and thrown out to no one in particular.
Longevity may be an issue. After two hours I had decided I never wanted to play the frog game or the pencil sharpening game ever again and actively avoided those. I quit the game if the random select-ish mechanic locked one down. Like any minigame collection there isn’t a lot of depth once you’ve effectively solved what you need to do and how to do it in each event. Given Ichidant-R’s origin as a quarter-gobbling arcade game, all of this makes sense. It’s here to be appreciated as it was, not necessarily as a beacon of quick-game design at the end of 2019. Like last year’s release of Game Tengoku, Ichidant-R thrives on the knowledge and comfort of being able to play it whenever you want.
With Ichidant-R, M2 has rescued another Sega classic from international obscurity. As either a proto-WarioWare microgame collection or an academic dive into Japan’s transitional arcade scene, Ichidant-R’s ecstatic presence succeeds in delighting and illuminating its audience. It’s another affirmation that M2’s work on the Switch’s SEGA AGES’ line continues to be one of the most valuable projects in gaming.
