Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble

A hidden gem of the PSP library, Kenka Bancho delivers a unique gameplay experience with interesting though flawed narrative parameters.

"Unique gameplay" is a stretch as the comparison everyone loves to make is that this game is effectively Yakuza. To call this merely a Yakuza rip-off is ignorant, not only does the original game in this franchise pre-date Yakuza by nearly half a year but ultimately this game's interesting premise and mission structure sets it far apart from the Yakuza franchise. You play as a delinquent student on a school trip to what is essentially the mecca of delinquents. Every school in the country decides to visit this one city at the same time every year so consequentially every student wants to prove themselves as the most powerful. Each of the 43 prefectures are represented by a student, over their week long school trip the player must track down and defeat all 43 in order to beat the game.

The first flaw in this design is how they are tracked. Around every corner there are common delinquent grunts that the player can disperse for a bit of pocket money. Occasionally these grunts drop their school's itinerary which will tell the player where their school's leader is. Time is a big factor in the game as well so while fighting grunts to get itinerary's is important this takes up a lot of time in a game with a rather unforgivingly early curfew. Thankfully their are a few high level prefecture leaders who rule over other prefectures which functionally means the player doesn't have to individually defeat all 43 leaders, which of the leaders are high level leaders isn't made clear to the player outside of the colour of their icon on the world map, a fact that isn't taught to the player whatsoever. Also, while it's perhaps this game's most interesting feature, this mission structure doesn't lend itself to a good escalation to action nearer the end or a good difficulty curve. To an extent the game is quite monotonous, besides the grinding of grunts who MIGHT drop an itinerary, the confrontations are not too different from grunt fights besides a brief interaction via a silent cutscene before the fight. It feels very underwhelming to grind all in-game day to get an itinerary, rush to a leader before time is up only for their fight to feel exactly the same as fighting grunts. In fact the most difficult part of the game's combat is crowd management due to a rather restrictive camera and the player character's tendency to get hitstun between multiple enemies, so the 1-on-1 leader fighters are typically much easier than grunt fights that may feature up to 5 students against the player. This monotony and underwhelming confrontations continue until the game just ends, not much fanfare and no real narrative significance. The game has the option to go down romantic paths with female characters and I imagine those are given conclusions at the end but because of how time consuming the combat is and how boring the dialogue-heavy relationship parts are I never bothered with that aspect of the game. This is probably the part of the game that distinguishes most from the Yakuza franchise, while each of those games hook you throughout their compelling stories and keep you wishing for a new instalment, Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble feels like much more of a "game" in that there is a defined simplistic goal and once you reach it the experience is over with little feeling evoked.

Which is a shame because the levelling of the character, the customisation of every move, the "good and bad" paths in fighting style wherein you can fight dirty or honourably and that reflects on how grunts treat you, the open-ended mission structure, the new game plus which is a necessity for completionists, everything about this game screams replayability but underneath all its well polished mechanics Kenka Bancho doesn't offer a reason to play past one's first play-through. Certainly still a standout title on the PSP but overly ambitious and consequentially not as focused as it could have been on narrative or a satisfying feeling of progression.