Quirky Work / Video Games

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North America

Canada

• A Super Mario Thing, a wicket made in the form of the raocow-centric Super Mario World ROM Hack. This was a collaborative effort by the members of the TalkHaus community (being said French-Canadian LPer's forum), and managed to totally baffle a Japanese Lets Player, Ryuu.
• Jazzpunk takes place in a 1950s pop-art reimagining of Cyberpunk where all the human characters are shaped like restroom sign icons and it just gets weirder from there. It's a comedy game, in the sense that the comedy is the main attraction; there's very little gameplay beyond walking around and interacting with things to make silly (and often quite surreal) stuff happen.
• Maize has the player attempting to solve puzzles on an abandoned research facility surrounded by idiotic sentient corn, the result of a misinterpreted research request by the U.S Government, with the begrudging help of a Russian animate teddy bear. And by no means does the weirdness end there.

USA

• Some of Atari Corp.'s games (particularly under Jack Tramiel's leadership) definitely qualify as WATs (Weird Atari Things?). Two of the most notable are Ninja Golf for the Atari 7800, which combines golf with a side-scrolling fighting game, and Kung Food for the Atari Lynx, where the player is a miniaturized scientist who must battle mutant vegetables in his refrigerator.
• Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is an exaggerated take on unconventional basketball-themed things from the 90s (such as NBA Jam, Shaq Fu and most importantly, Space Jam, with one of the creators summing up with "It’s just sort of like we said, “Well, what if all these things are serious?”) while blending in increasingly more absurd elements (JRPG cliches, fantasy tabletop gaming, otaku culture, internet forum discourse) in an experience that can be summed up as an acid trip on a basketball court.
• Crash Bandicoot: A mutated marsupial regularly battles a Mad Scientist with help from a floating wooden mask and collects peaches called Wumpa Fruit. Said marsupial also invites said scientist to kart racing tournaments and has a Child Prodigy sister and a friend who is an Expy of Mr. T!
• The flash game Death Dice Overdose as a bizarre and trippy western video game.
• Earthworm Jim is another fine example of a WHAT (Weird Humorous American Thing). It's about an earthworm wearing Powered Armor who battles against lethal foes such as Psy-Crow (a galactic bounty hunter crow), Evil the Cat, Professor Monkey-For-A-Head and his close associate Monkey Professor-For-A-Head, and of course the Evil Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed Slug-For-A-Butt.
• Flower definitely belongs here since it's a game about opening flowers and the inability to lose.
• Insaniquarium, where you raise fish in your own fish tank! Fish that... poop money? Which are also preyed upon by random aliens that occasionally warp inside your tank. Which you fight off using a laser gun. Yep, Insaniquarium is a WHAT alright.
• I Love You, Colonel Sanders!: A visual novel with romance elements and set in an anime high school scenario with all the expected archetypes, that is officially licensed by KFC. It doesn't get any quirkier than this.
• LucasArts had many WHAT (emphasis on "humorous") cases, including Day of the Tentacle, the Monkey Island series, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Afterlife (1996) - the lead designer for the last said his idea only flew because Lucasarts was "a rather experimental studio at the time", explaining so many quirky games.
• Nazi Zombies: Four crazed soldiers fight against zombies in Germany, Japan, USSR, the Arctic, Shangri la, the moon, and post apocalyptic Earth.
• Plants vs. Zombies has you defending your house from a zombie invasion headed by a zombie Mad Scientist in a mech. Your allies are a bunch of sapient plants that spit Edible Ammunition and a crazy man with a pan on his head. The sequel makes things even weirder by introducing Time Travel to the mix.
• Though the Saints Row series started out as a standard GTA clone, it slowly worked its way to WHAT territory with each subsequent game. By the fourth game you're firing a gun that shoots dubstep at people in The '50s while preparing to kill an evil alien overlord who blew up the Earth. And that's not even 1/4th of it.
• Parodied in The Simpsons Game. Big Super Happy Fun Fun Game is a stage built entirely from references to Ōkami, Pokémon, and Katamari Damacy, while also using series gags like Mr. Sparkle. Furthered when every character explicitly notes it as being in Japan, much to Homer's frustration.
  "Okay, so we're in Japan. But I'm not eating any sushi, unless it's covered in chocolate and there's no sushi in it!"
• The Sims: Creator Will Wright deliberately went for this approach. Instead of tying it down to a specific Eagleland setting, he went for a Retro Universe inspired by American domestic sitcoms from The '50s through The '90s, as that was a portrayal of America that would be immediately recognizable as such to Americans while still remaining universal enough that it wouldn't seem utterly foreign to players in other countries. In practice, this means a setting that resembles Stepford Suburbia to the point where a number of critics felt that Wright must have had some satirical intent with the game. Add on the cartoonish, stylized look of the Sims, the gibberish language they speak (again designed to be as universal as possible), a recurring preset family being named the Goths and having a creepy atmosphere to them to match, and the addition of things like aliens, vampires, and witches in the expansions, and you've got yourself a WHAT.
  • In The Sims 4, your Sims can react to a WHAT. The City Living expansion added, among other things, a public access station (listed on the main page under Live-Action TV) to the television lineup, which can cause your Sims to get a Playful moodlet called "Public Access Weirdness" upon watching the strange content that is broadcast from that station.
  "Was that a guy in a bear suit giving a speech about the benefits of pescetarianism?"
• Squirrel Stapler is a Horror Comedy game where you need to hunt squirrels and staple them to your "wife" (actually a dismembered corpse) to make her beautiful again. If you kill too many squirrels you get to meet God, who is a giant squirrel head with bizarre appendages and an exposed brain.
• The Stanley Parable initially appears to have a coherent narrative about a man named Stanley investigating the mysterious disappearance of his co-workers. However, the story only continues in this way if you follow the Narrator's attempts to Railroad you into a specific path, and any attempt to disobey will cause the story to go completely Off the Rails. Possible endings include things like Stanley becoming a famous author after writing a book about going up and down in an elevator too many times; or Stanley being transported to another dimension where there are nothing but buttons to press; or Stanley spending his entire life watching footage of silly birds with a bucket that may or may not be an evil entity in disguise.
• Toe Jam And Earl, proving quirky music-based games (in this case, about funky aliens who crash-land on Earth and try to pick their instruments while facing all sorts of weird adversaries, including Santa Claus!) are not exclusive to the Japanese.
• Toss the Turtle. Get a turtle, a cannon, your Gun Of Choice, and add several crazy things like smoking French phoenix-like birds, bananas who can shoryuken the shit out of you, and angry ground creatures with a tenuous hold on their sanity, all for the purpose of getting cash, and you got something that is a grade-A WHAT.
• Tyrian stars at a rather serious tone, as in having the protagonists' family killed as retaliation for betraying a terraforming MegaCorp, and slowly turns the silliness switch to about just enough to reveal the Man Behind the Man as a cult of free-range fruit and ale worshippers. Sentient ones, at that. And its god, who is also made of such stuff. Not even the main character has the patience to deal with this kind of WHAT.
• Vegetable Game. As far as we can tell, it's about a crudely-drawn bear hugging escalatingly bad people, from "Jaywalker" up to "Adolf Hitler". No vegetables involved at all. Also, the game repeatedly tells you not to play it.
• Undertale definitely counts as a WHAT on the lighter routes. The first NPC you meet is a malicious, sentient flower. From there, notable NPCs include a pair of Abbott and Costello-esque human skeletons, a fish-woman who acts like a living shonen anime stereotype, and a Tin-Can Robot who hosts game shows, cooking shows, and even does opera. And that's without getting into the background cast, whose designs lean even more abstract (there's one family composed of sentient piles of snow). When the spider girl who grinds her non-sentient brethren into "spider cider" to use in her cooking is one of the most normal characters you meet—one of the nicer ones, even—you know you're in for a ride.
  • The Else Worlds spin-off Deltarune is a bit more serious than Undertale, but every bit as weird. In your quest, you meet such strange characters as a hot-heated delinquent lizard-girl who eats chalk and frequently comments on the weirder aspects of your adventure, an evil King's goofy, incompetent, Affably Evil son who rides around on a bicycle with burning matches strapped to it because he's too young to ride a motorcycle, a chef who spins around while speaking in a terrible Italian accent, and a computer who manifests as a sassy, eccentric evil queen of Cyber Space. You also get tasked with designing "A Machine to Thrash Your Own Ass", and have the opportunity to make it look like a duck (which becomes a moot point when the bad guys blow it up because "your machine sucked").
• zOMG! is a game that has you fight, among other things, gift boxes, lawn gnomes, jackets that behave like wolves, and cyborg alien rodents. Your weapons are rings, which have effects such as launching beehives, wrapping the monsters in duct tape, and covering yourself or an ally in cooking spray. Pop-culture references abound. And the game takes place on a World of Weirdness as it is.

South America

Chile

• Zeno Clash is a Wichet (as in, Weird Chilean Thing). Anything else from ACE Team, like the Rock of Ages series, The Deadly Tower of Monsters and The Eternal Cylinder also qualify (okay, except for Batman Doom). They're to Chile as cactus is to Sweden.

Asia

Japan

• Ace Attorney owes its success to lots of curious people wondering what the hell the Japanese were thinking making a game based entirely around wacky, over-the-top lawyers. The excellent localization helped, too. In Japan it's not seen as so odd because it's pretty true to the Japanese Court system.
• AkaSeka is an Otome Game that requires players to have solid knowledge of a wide span of Japanese history, reaching as early as Yayoi-Asuka period and as recent as Meiji-Shōwa period, to fully enjoy. Other than that, the game also makes frequent use of poetry and wordplay, which makes it even more difficult for people whose first language is not Japanese. It's not as popular as its Spiritual Predecessor 100 Sleeping Princes and the Kingdom of Dreams not without a reason.
• Arm Joe (Link here), a freeware 2D fighting game based on Les Misérables. It has, in addition to the standard cast of characters; PonPon, a Mini-Cooper driving rabbit from another dimension; Robo-Jean, a robotic duplicate of Jean Valjean, who shoots lasers out of his chest, fires rocket punches, and attacks with lightning bolts; and the Anthropomorphic Personification of the concept of Judgment.
• Arcana Heart, one of the few cute-schoolgirl fighters that plays well as a game, and the only one ever that made it to American consoles.
• While the Bangai-O series itself qualifies, its first installment is the best example. The giant robot action may not be nonsensical, but the plot, characters and dialogue certainly are.
• Baroque is an exercise in "What The Hell?", it's a bizarre and disturbing Sci-fantasy horror game where you're encouraged to keep dying as you enter a terrifying tower in a post-apocalypse world.
• The Battle Cats could definitely be considered one of these, as it stars a group of adorable yet evil mutant cats trying to take over the world... and you're going to lead them to victory. The various enemies, stage names, and plot developments are no less weird.
• Bein Panzer (aka Kouashi Kikou Shidan: Bein Panzer) is an odd (especially for its time) alternate history Real-Time Strategy Playstation 1 game with economic/military development - where in World War 2, humanity has a space elevator between Earth and Mars as well as factions that are analogues to real-life countries. The war will be fought using tanks with legs among other Diesel Punk oddities.
• Bishi Bashi Special is one of those surreal, Super-Deformed cutesy variety games that'd in the '90s would be odd in any place other than Japan.
• The entire Bomberman franchise. To recap: An absurdly cute robot with more than enough explosives to make even the MythBusters squeal with joy saving the world (or the universe) on a regular basis. Enemies include: homicidal balloons, giant coins that can phase through walls, your evil twin, Wario, a different evil twin, a furry BDSM mistress with a giant robot that shoots eye lasers, entire teams made up of evil twins, a bodybuilder with Cool Shades, and what some may argue is you in the future. This isn't even touching Multiplayer, by the way.
• Bunny Must Die, a game where you play a Playboy Bunny cursed with cat ears who can manipulate time, who fights such enemies as a photorealistic picture of a cat and an expy of Dracula that spouts Zero Wing quotes and inflicts instant death by flashing you. Those are just some of the named characters, never mind some of the mooks.
• Cave is notorious for bizarre and creative fantasy settings:
  • Death Smiles casts you as one of four Elegant Gothic Lolita girls pitted against such bosses as a giant that apparently was Buried Alive except for his face, a living tree that flings smiling apples at you, a giant cow... more mundane enemies include bipedal sheep with pitchforks and at one point what appears to be ballroom dancers.
  • Mushihime-sama (literally "Bug Princess") has you play as a princess riding a giant beetle, fighting hordes of various giant (literal) bugs, trying to reach and talk to the bug god. And plants are trying to kill you too for some reason.
• Chibi-Robo!. Gi FT Pi A. Let's face it. ALL of skip Ltd.'s games fall under this trope. It's most telling when they use the popular idea of a Crossover video game to make Captain Rainbow, about the title character and his Secret Identity Nick helping second-rate Nintendo characters get their wishes granted.
• Cho Aniki is a Shoot 'Em Up game famous for its comically exaggerated homoerotic overtones. Incidentally, there's also a Japanese meme centered around muscular gay porn star Billy Herrington, a.k.a. Aniki. Viral videos derived from this meme commonly use footage of overtly homoerotic wrestling, such as in this one.
• Cho Chabudai Gaeshi by Taito. It's a table-flipping game. Yes, you read that right. The game gives you several scenarios that allow you to unleash your rage through the therapeutic nature of table-flipping. At least, it's therapeutic if you're Japanese. Everyone else is just confused at the premise and gameplay. And it got a sequel...
• Chulip. One Let's Play thread author even prefaces his introduction to the game as "Violently Japanese". The object of the game? To work up the nerve to confess to your crush by kissing as many things as possible.
• An oft-overlooked WJT (and WAT) is Sega's Crazy Taxi, where you control one of four cab drivers, driving as recklessly and crazily as possible to deliver people to their destinations to rack up cash. No rules whatsoever, so you can jump off ramps, go underwater and do all sorts of weird shit, hopefully delivering the passenger before the timer runs out. And the "Crazy Box" mode has you doing things like popping balloons and knocking over giant bowling pins with your cab.
• Crimsoness, a short, weird, angry, Japanese indie game...because it's OMGWTFOTL IN MS PAINT!
• Cross Edge definitely qualifies, as it's a Massive Multiplayer Crossover featuring the likes of a few of the other quirky games listed here.
• Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban is a Widget (WJT, Weird Japanese Thing) top-down action game in which a Japanese Upper-Class Twit inexplicably teams up with a French Upper-Class Twit can be possessed by their powerful Bara Genre fathers to indulge in Macho Camp and take on Tokugawa Ieyasu and Oda Nobunaga, or rather YEAHyasu and NObunaga, with the latter turned into a cyborg and relocated to Mars. This is only the start of the insanity.
• Dokuro is a Fractured Fairy Tale platform puzzle game where a little skeleton pities the princess kidnapped by the resident Dark Lord, so he goes to lead her out of captivity (hindered by the fact that he's invisible to her as a skeleton and only appears when he takes a potion that makes him into a prince).
• DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu's console-exclusive Arrange B mode is this for scoring system buffs. Enemies that change bullet patterns and point values as the player plays more, lots of Smart Bombing (even moreso than most 8ing/Raizing games), enough bomb recharging to make the announcer ask "Are you ready?" over and over, among other things that break many established shmup conventions.
• Doshin the Giant probably qualifies, especially the sequel, where you must save Doshin by pissing on things, and running around the show floor of a business convention pissing floaty pink hearts at the booth babes.
• Dynamite Dux has two Funny Animals setting off to rescue their owner from a weird-looking wizard named "Achacha" through a variety of strange and colorful landscapes, battling other animals along the way.
• Dynamite Headdy, a platform game framed as some sort of stage play starring a puppet who hurls his head at enemies, is definitely a widget, although some of the more aggressively widgety elements were excised in the North American and European localizations.
• Earth Defense Force is a series of budget games about defending the Earth (mostly in Japan) from an army of alien invaders. Big Creepy-Crawlies, Humongous Mecha, Kaiju, and explosions leveling city blocks ensue.
• Endless Ocean, which embraces the player doing things at his own leisure and does little to nothing to penalize him. It even got mocked by professional reviewers for not including such expected things as a life gauge, weapons, or a point. Comments directed at trailers for the franchise's third installment, Endless Ocean: Luminous, show that the series still hasn't escaped this, with frequent questions of what players do in the game.
  • The PS1 game Aquanaut's Holiday is something of a Spiritual Prequel to it, since it has you do pretty much the same thing, save that there's even less of a discernible plot (or point) beyond being told in the manual that you're an ocean researcher/explorer who just saved the world's oceans, now you're on an ocean exploring holiday.
• The trailer for "English of the Dead" pounds the fact that it's a WJT even further into our skulls. "Come on, friend! Write or I'll bite!"
  • Its predecessor, the Typing Of The Dead series, are just as WJT despite being in English in the first place. It's hard to pinpoint who the target demographics are- the game has the gore of the House of the Dead series and pretty much uses the same storyline, but instead of gunning down zombies, it's a keyboarding trainer that lets you kill zombies by the sheer power of typing words into a keyboard. Additionally, the game isn't afraid to to throw cuss words in the player's general direction, and in the first game, the characters look ridiculous with a giant Sega Dreamcast strapped to their back and a keyboard strapped to their front.
• The EXA_PICO series (which includes Ar Tonelico) has weirdness from the "Installation" Innocent Innuendo that started in the first game to the crafting systems of the second game (you can make a bomb inspired by the tsundere trope) to the combat system of the third game (Reyvateils Battle Strip to power up their songs; no, it is no Clothing Damage). If it's any consolation, even the Japanese think Ar Tonelico went a bit too far. Especially in this scene.
• Gadget: Past as Future, by Haruhiko Shono. It resembles Myst, but without any real puzzles; you play a brainwashed secret agent in a nation resembling that from Nineteen Eighty-Four and have to help a group of scientists gather a bunch of gizmos to build a spaceship to escape earth before a comet hits and its ending redefines the meaning of not providing any fucking explanation for anything.
• Gal*Gun is a series of Rail Shooter games where you have to fight off hordes of love potion-addled school-girls with a "Pheremone Gun" while trying to find true love.
• The Ganbare Goemon (aka Mystical Ninja) games started out as semi-serious Jidaigeki adventure-comedies, but got considerably weirder in the 1990s. One of the plots is preventing Japan from being Westernized by Admiral Perry who looks exactly like Hulk Hogan and all of his mooks are in bunny costumes. The two localized N64 games provide a good sample of its craziness.
• Gitaroo Man is another... interesting video game example. An ordinary boy named U-1 turns out to be The Chosen One, and fights a series of enemies in order to save a distant planet from the Big Bad... except he engages in musical battles armed with a high-tech "Gitaroo", and he faces a Quirky Miniboss Squad that includes a baby demon in a diaper, a parapara dancing UFO, and a jazz trumpeter in a bee costume.
• Gourmet Warriors is a Beat 'em Up... made by the creators of Cho Aniki. It's one of the most surreal entries in the genre - The plot revolves around the heroes trying to save humanity from a food shortage after a criminal organization stole the entire world's supply of protein, and your enemies range from tofu-headed mutants to robotic moai heads and tiny liliputians who will cling on you to stomp on your skull. It's mostly an Affectionate Parody of the various Beat 'em Up games populating arcades at the time.
• Gun Nac, Compile's parody of their own past shooters. Its stages are based on the Japanese days of a week, with appropriate enemies. So the first stage, being the Moon stage, has you fighting robotic Moon Rabbits that fire carrots at you. The second stage, being the Fire stage, puts you against giant match boxes and cigarette lighters. The third stage, being the Water stage, pits your ship against umbrellas and a giant mermaid. And so on...
• Harmful Park is a Cute 'em Up (heck that entire genre is Widget!!) where you're flying a ship inside an Amusement Park of Doom and shooting weaponized food products at things such as a flying blue whale.
• Hatoful Boyfriend is about a human hunter-gatherer girl who goes to a high school for pigeons (and some assorted other birds), and discovers romance along the way. With the birds. And then some disturbing endings start to show that things aren't as delightfully wacky as they seem, and the game begins to get very, very dark...
• Hellsinker is this with a healthy heaping of Mind Screw. To further drive the point home, one of the main characters is a frail blind girl who uses a naked crystal fairy as a sword, while another is an artificial Hermaphrodite half god. Also in one of the final battle's you fight a kitten together with the spirits of four dead children inside a computer system of some sort. And when it comes to the game mechanics the game pulls no punches, for example if you want a good score you have to utilize tactics that would be downright suicidal in other games.
• Hong Kong '97 is on a class all of its own: its creator intended to create the worst game ever as a mockery to the game industry. Thus he combined unfun gameplay (a repetitive and simple shoot 'em up starring a One-Hit-Point Wonder) with a presentation both terrible (all sound is a ten second loop of a Chinese song, the graphics are lousy and full of gratuitous stock imagery) and tasteless (the story concerns a man intent on killing the entire population of China, the game's only boss is a disembodied\decapitated flying head of the Chinese president with exposed entrails and blood dripping, the stock images include actual corpses from The Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide), in a full embodiment of Japanese weirdness.
• Imagination Reality Paradise (Link here) is an amazingly random puzzle game with a lot of Interface Screw and perhaps some horror thrown in. Most definitely a WJT.
• I'm Sorry, a 1985 arcade Maze Game that is as weird as it is obscure. The game's title turns out to be a bilingual pun at the expense of Japan's former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, and enemies are Super-Deformed celebrities, like Michael Jackson and Madonna.
• Incredible Crisis is about a family that has the worst day ever trying to get home early for Grandma's birthday. You live through each family member's day (The father Taneo, mother Etsuko, son Tsuyoshi, and the daughter Ririka) and guide them through ridiculous scenarios by playing minigames, including, but not limited to, Taneo chased through office hallways by a giant globe, Etsuko fighting a twenty-story tall stuffed bear in a jet fighter, Tsuyoshi shrunk to the size of an insect and escaping a gigantic mantis, and Ririka riding a bicycle to escape from a giant wrecking ball.
• iNiS DS Rhythm Games:
  • Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and its sequel, a series of rhythm games where Hot-Blooded Japanese cheerleaders cheer on people doing tasks that range from ordinary (like a ronin student trying to get into a good college) to not-so-ordinary (like an ex-wrestler trying to show her mother-in-law she's got what it takes to run a traditional Japanese inn) to downright weird (like a salaryman growing to enormous size and saving his daughter from a giant mouse monster).
  • Even the Americanized version of Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents, still thrives on quite a bit of WJT-ness, going from stages where a teenage girl's date with her football-loving boyfriend is interrupted by an emergency babysitting job, to one where a meek taxi driver who literally goes crazy behind the wheel drives a woman in labor to the hospital, to one where a washed-up baseball player fights a giant lava monster at an amusement park.
• Irisu Syndrome! is a Widget Game of the "OH GOD WHY" variety, a seemingly-innocent puzzle game with a dark side.
• The Japan World Cup series. Non-interactive horse races. Only most of the contestants aren't horses. Mounts include an elephant, a seal, a panda, a two-person horse costume and so on. Jockeys employ various techniques to boost their mount or hamper enemies, from dancing naked to rocket jumping. Each game is stranger than the last, and each one only gets weirder the longer you watch. The upright sideways running horse is probably the second most normal thing you'll see:
  • Japan World Cup
  • Japan World Cup 2
  • Japan World Cup 3
• Katamari Damacy is a big blatant WJT, with its genre-busting gameplay (rolling around a ball to collect random items and make it as big as possible) and odd assortment of characters (such as the hammy and self-important King of All Cosmos). Namco is aware enough of this trope that the later games intentionally play up the weirdness.
  • NOBY NOBY BOY, by the same designer, involves a weird snake-like creature known as "BOY" trying to stretch himself as far as possible in bizarre, randomly-generated landscapes.
  • Wattam is another game from the designer of Katamari Damacy, featuring various anthropomorphic objects interacting with each other.
  • And Muscle March, from the same company. Best described as Follow the Leader on drugs.
  • Namco churns out games like these every now and then. Look up Taiko No Tatsujin and Panic Park.
• Keio Flying Squadron, a Cute 'em Up set in 19th-century Japan with zany anachronisms. Amazingly, both games in the series were translated into English.
• Kirby. The game about a constantly hungry pink puffball living in a dream land full of happy people, sentient trees, insane walruses, chef potatoes, and... horrifying world-destroying monstrosities?
• Kuukiyomi is a WarioWare-like mobile phone and Nintendo DSI game by G-Mode, where the player character is put into certain situations and they must decide how they will act both in private and in public. Since there's nothing right or wrong in this game (only score system, judging how considerate you are in situations), players can do anything from something mundane to hilariously bizarre. Most of the situations are realistic, while others aren't. There are a lot of Japanese cultural references, shout-outs (such as the recurring orphans who look like Seita and Setsuko, The Matrix, etc.) and humor in the series, though some people may not understand them and don't know whether their in-game actions are correct. Fortunately, the developers manage to downplay this by adding a subtitle in some situations (such as adding "In Tokyo" and "In Osaka" for those who don't understand Japanese culture, etc.) and adding a Cultural Translation such as remodeling the ghost in the English version. And yes, this game has 3 remakes for Nintendo Switch, which all of three are often streamed by famous Virtual Youtubers and made it overseas.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has the small town of Termina, which is a weird place to be in because of what happens there between the citizens of the town. A few random examples of what happens in the game include:
  • Blowing a bubble at the imp who stole your Ocarina to make him drop it, which then turns into a set of tubas because your forcefully transformed form is too small to play the Ocarina.
  • Learning the other half of a lullaby from a baby so that you can get a giant invisible stone man to go to sleep and roll out of the way and stop breathing an icy wind.
  • Using different magical masks to become an entire musical quartet, and thus make someone cry, who is Drunk on Milk.
  • Racing a creepy beaver with Kaleidoscope eyes so he'll give you his most prized possession: an empty bottle.
• While each plot of the Like a Dragon games is a dark action-packed crime drama, the side missions that take place outside the main story (known as substories) put our protagonists in some outrageous and embarrassing roles, such as a film director, a model, a music video star or Santa, and constantly get dragged into a fight with men with rather unusual tastes (yakuza roleplaying as babies?). They can learn moves from witnessing a panty thief or a traffic accident, and many brutal moves and weapons, such as a Magical Girl toy wand are pure slapstick. And they also can stand their own against tigers and bears.
• Linda Cube is the result of when a company got sick of making generic titles inspired by Dragon Quest and decided to do whatever they wanted. It features three separate story scenarios with the same setup and mostly the same cast of characters, but in each scenario the characters' personalities and roles can change drastically. You can expect to see a violently Tsundere co-protagonist, an Evil Twin who works for a pharmaceutical company that makes its employees wear Santa outfits, a Mad Scientist who very strongly resembles Adolf Hitler, a clone girl who can shapeshift into a laser-shooting bug-like creature, a man who has his wife fused into his chest, and much more.
• LSD: Dream Emulator has become a cult-classic in the west for its what the fuckery. The game is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A first-person game where you explore a nightmarish brightly colored Acid-Trip Dimension. There is no objective, no quests, no enemies. You just wander around and enjoy the randomly generated scenery that steadily gets weirder until you quit the game, or your brain quits on you. If you regardless keep soldiering on, eventually the game quits on itself. Actually, this is a result of the game (intentionally) causing the textures to become increasingly corrupted as the it goes on to the point where it can't handle it anymore. This isn't the only game by the creator, but we'd be here all day. Go to Osamu Sato for those.
  • His other games are no better. Try Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou and its sequel Chu-Teng. Like Namu Amida Butsu Uetna below, this is due to the game containing references to Japanese religions like Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism, combined with a heaping dose of Osamu Sato trademark acid-inspired graphics.
• maimai from 2012 is notable for having an arcade cabinet that looks like a washing machine, even as Rhythm Games that don't simulate any sort of non-game musical activity have been around since the late 90's and 2000's. Not only do you have to hit buttons placed around the circular screen, you also have to slide your hands across the screen for some notes. The game as a whole feels less like "just another hands-based music game" and more like doing dancing/choreography with your hands; cabinets in some regions feature mounted cameras too, just to further encourage players to look cool when they play.
• In a somewhat retroactive way, Capcom's Japanese branch believes that the Mega Man franchise is one of these and doesn't appeal as much to international audiences, as it was meant to be geared towards children in the first place. Naturally, the international fandom isn't amused.
• Metal Wolf Chaos. A game where you play as the President of the United States of America, behind the cockpit of a Humongous Mecha, as he launches a one-man counteroffensive to take back America, city by city, from his Vice President Richard Hawk, confident that he can win because he is The President of the GREAT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!! He does by destroying everything in sight with BURNING AMERICAN FREEDOM!!! And America didn't get this game for years, since Sega claimed it impossible to export until 2018 (thanks to Devolver Digital).
• Mister Mosquito is weird in the sense that you play a mosquito. And you must suck the blood of the family whose home you just invaded. As you progress in the game, things get more surreal. Has to be played to be believed. And like Cho Chabudai Gaeshi above, it too got a sequel...
• Monster Party features the most bizarre assortment of Everything Trying to Kill You, including enemies such as disembodied pairs of legs, Living Clothes, and a Sequential Boss that starts as a shrimp and turns into an onion ring and then a kebab. Some of the strange enemies were originally going to be references to movie monsters which got replaced at the last minute, and at least one was an obscure cultural reference, but many straight-up lack an explanation no matter how much you try to find one. Bandai never released the game in Japan; it sold poorly in America, probably on account of its awful gameplay mechanics. To quote JonTron: "Excuse me sir, but is that a well with eggplant moons shooting plates at me? Liek..."]]
• The Mother series is an odd case - the West interprets it quite clearly as a WJT series, yet it was originally designed to be viewed as an American-style series from a Japanese perspective. The first game's weirdness isn't particularly Japanese, but then the sequels became Denser and Wackier.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Being a game about Japanese Buddhism, it's two widget-isms for the price of one: culture and religion. The game even features Buddhist figures obscure to even Japanese people who don't have extensive background or research in Buddhism, for instance the Eight Offerings in the Diamond Realm.
• Neptunia is an Eastern RPG series in which moe girls are various video game consoles^note the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, and the scrapped Sega Neptune fighting the Console Wars, as envisioned by Sega, Idea Factory and Compile Heart. They get stronger the more market share they earn for the console they represent. The antagonists are based on concepts and internet social phenomena, including software piracy.
• The premise of the "Neo-Atlas" games has you exploring Earth by sailing and removing the Fog of War surrounding much of the world. But if you don't like the layout of the world that turn, you can reject it and re-explore the area to see if the geography has changed! You can also accept rumours and make them true, such as there being men with faces in their bellies in what approximates to Africa (or is actually Africa depending on what you accept). Also some of the sidequests are...interesting. Such as a rescue of people from India who were kidnapped by bloody-mouthed oni, turns out the oni were just taking the humans for a vacation and introducing strawberries to humanity (the "blood" on the oni's mouth turned out to be strawberry jam).
• Nezumi Man is gameplay-wise a Mega Man (Classic) clone, but includes a sentient fridge, a kangaroo, and a dragon cosplayer among its bosses. Oh, and nearly everyone is a Super-Deformed rat.
• NiGHTS into Dreams…: Some of the weirdness comes from the fact it's about dreams, of course, but you can bet if it had been made in the West they wouldn't have gone half as weird, no matter what the subject matter demanded. Plus, the western-marketed sequel is considerably more generic.
• Ninja Baseball Bat Man is, oddly enough, both a WJT and a WHAT. It's an Irem arcade game, but the very premise is from an American. As for what the game's actually about? If the awesomely absurd title doesn't make it clear enough, The Angry Video Game Nerd sums it up nicely.
• No One Can Stop Mr. Domino involves an anthropomorphic suicidal domino as he races across an oddball mix of obstacle courses while laying down dominoes.
• Ōkami is arguably a strong example of this, given it is heavily reliant on Japanese Mythology, with an incredible number of references to its source material backing the claim up. Despite the very real threat constantly present in the plot, it is not afraid of, and in fact gladly, embraces every single chance of humor it can afford, which are aplenty. This game is just as humorous as it is epic; it was actually quite-well received by Westerners due to its extremely appealing visuals, Awesome Music and compelling characters, story and system—it was in fact quite a lot LESS well-received in its home country, largely in part due to the fact that the Japanese didn't find their own mythos so interesting.
• One Piece Mansion was a quirky puzzle game where you managed an apartment full of cartoony tenants who were either extremely annoying or heartwarming, so you would shift their rooms to keep morale up while dealing with the local mob.
• Panzer Front bis's story mode, if the bizarre cutscenes, and that one level where you fight a demon Tiger tank, are any indications.
• Parappa The Rapper and its spinoff Um Jammer Lammy are Widget games. Everyone in the game is literally 2-dimensional, as in flat like paper. Compared to the plot of the games, that's the least weird part:
  • In the first game, the eponymous rapping dog tries to impress his crush, an anthropomorphic flower-girl, by learning karate, getting his driver's license, taking a part-time job in a flea market, and learning how to bake a cake... all done through the medium of rap battles. Then in the sequel, Parappa uses rap battles to save his town from a super-villain that wants to turn all food into noodles.
  • In Um Jammer Lammy, a guitar-playing goat-girl tries to put together a show for her band, but keeps getting sidetracked by various strange events, like having to put out a fire, being Mistaken for Pregnant after stuffing her face with pizza, and having to fight her way out of Hell while having a near-death experience (which was bowdlerised in the US version into getting stranded on a deserted island). Lammy also uses music to deal with her problems, in her case by playing rock guitar on everything from a fire hose to napping babies.
• The Parodius series, which plays like the Gradius games, except nowhere in the Gradius series can you play as a torpedo-riding Playboy Bunny who blasts a fifty-foot tall Vegas showgirl while dodging incoming fire from giant penguins.
• Part Time UFO is about a sentient UFO crashing to Earth and using its giant, verastile claw for... working mundane part time jobs to get home. Jobs it can take up include replacing a broken statue at a museum, building the world's biggest pancake stack, working on a fishing boat, and even helping a group of cheerleaders form the perfect pyramid. The better and more efficient it gets, the more galactic currency it gets paid to spend on cool costumes.
• Patapon is about a tribe of eyeballs-on-stickleg warriors who essentially believe the player is their god on account of the player possessing a drum. They wish for the player to guide them to Earthend so they may gaze upon "IT" and know eternal contentment, but they don't even know what IT is. Everyone not a Patapon is convinced that gazing upon IT will bring the world to an end.
• Pokémon Conquest in a nutshell. Take Nobunaga's Ambition, a game about one of the most violent, tumultuous periods in Japan's history, then put Pokémon in it.
• Pole no Daibouken is probably one of the weirdest Mario-style games ever. It stars a cowboy with shades as he battles evil deer-men, lions that can go Super Saiyan, volcanoes that launch random debris, giant snakes, squids, penguins, aliens, numerous messed up gags and eventually some unholy mashup of a lion, a snake, a squid, a giant bear and a frigging chihuahua. All the while, a baffled narrator points out the various strange events that happen to Pole, many of which subvert traditional video game tropes.
• pop'n music would lose half its charm without its silly cast of characters, including but not limited to: the rabbit- and cat-like mascots, a Cute Witch who can turn her broom into a guitar, a girl who continuously runs left really fast as if hopped up on sugar, an angel disguised as a Hot Librarian, and a DJ who occasionally communicates with some sort of devilish spirit. And on top of that, the multicolored notes all have eyes and are called "Pop-kuns."
• The Power Instinct series has, in addition to a retinue of Serious Business martial artists typical for the Fighting Game genre, not one, not two, but three little old ladies, a perverted old man, a hulking amazon (well, Reality Is Unrealistic; fighting game women tend to look like slender beauties, not wrestlers), a Magical Girl, her Stripperific roller-blading alter-ego, a man in a dog suit (really!), a fat kid wearing nothing but a giant bib and has his... objects show when knocked into the air... well, rest assured that's not all. A usual fighting game might have one such character just for laughs. But these weirdoes are what Power Instinct is really about.
• Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is an Adventure Game where a cucumber hero and his kid persimmon sidekick Save the Princess of a kingdom of Anthropomorphic Food and battle with farmers in games of Rock–Paper–Scissors.
• Project Rub (aka Feel the Magic: XY/XX) is absolutely mindboggling. At one point you have to get some goldfish out of a man's stomach, at another you follow a helicopter on a unicycle, and at another you dance with a girl at a campsite (incorporating the fire into your moves), and at yet another you have to bowl a man rolled into a ball at some people waiting for a bus. As you can probably guess, those who do buy the game are in for a real treat.
  • Also see The Rub Rabbits, the sequel/prequel, in which you meet your true love, win her over, defend her from other suitors (who dance, or parachute from the sky), and fend off the advances of a perky schoolgirl. You do this by running up the down escalator while dodging sumo wrestlers, paddling a log across a giant-crocodile-infested sea, eating delicious cakes (and avoiding the bad ones) while tied to a chair, closing the rapid-fire pop-ups on her computer, doing aromatherapy to help her do yoga, and fighting a mecha-bear.
• Pu·Li·Ru·La, a totally bizarre arcade Beat 'em Up by Taito. The characters are kids with magic sticks who turn the weird-looking enemies into animals, with things getting weirder in level 3.
• Puyo Puyo: You fight such characters as a dancing fish man, an effeminate skeleton, a half-demon boy who has an obsession with bugs, and Satan himself by eliminating cute little blobs on a puzzle screen. That isn't even getting into many moments within the games that aren't even explainable by context (for example, Schezo having a wedding cake all for himself in a cave in a cutscene in 20th Anniversary when Lemres notices the cake. Why Schezo is in a cave with a cake and why it's a wedding cake are never explained). Very Japanese games indeed.
• Rakugaki Show Time is a whimsical dodgeball Fighting Game hybrid where a young child has created a world out of their scribbling artwork.
• Rewrite isn't as extreme as some examples but it is definitely quite surreal. You play a young man who goes on various strange quests as part of your school's occult research club.
• Ribbit King is a game in which a rabbit-like alien named Scooter has to save his planet from certain doom by competing in a Frolf tournament. Frolf is a sport not unlike golf, only instead of using a ball and a club, you use a frog and a catapult. The objective is to get your frog into the hole while using "gimmicks" around the courses such as rain clouds, snakes, spider webs, and bubbles to increase your score. Your opponents include a rock monster, a wind-up penguin robot, a woozy princess with a fish on her head, and a group of small plant people. Also, your teacher is a talking picnic basket.
• Rose & Camellia and its sequel, two Flash games about noblewomen bitch-slapping each other. One Internet commentator described it as "Jane Austen's Punch-Out!!"
• Rhythm Heaven, otherwise known as Rhythm Tengoku, which is a minigame collection like WarioWare, except weirder, more musical and more Japanese. In fact, Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare are both made by the same studio, and it shows. And there's a factory that makes literal widgets.
• The localization of Samurai Zombie Nation changed the player character, tasked with defending the United States from an Eldritch Abomination, from a floating tengu mask into a floating samurai head, disguising its WJT-ness not one bit.
• Enix's Segare Ijiri is a sentence-constructing platformer game full of Surreal Humor. It's about an arrow-headed boy named Segare, who lives in a strange world, falls in love with and wants to meet the arrow-headed girl from another planet. Segare has to find various objects and construct many words and sentences so his giraffe-headed mother's neck becomes taller and she'll give you some useful companions to reach certain places that cannot be accessed alone. The outcome animations of constructed words and sentences are all hilarious and some of them cross with Japanese puns, dirty joke subtexts, and Toilet Humour. This game hasn't been released overseas due to its Japanese-exclusive puns.
• Silhouette Mirage is an action-platformer full of oddness as your character Shyna uses parasites and dual aspects that depend on which direction she faces, in order to affect enemies that are either "silhouette" or "mirage".
• Sin and Punishment: Successor To The Earth for the N64. Since it arrived here, albeit seven years late, it should qualify. Its sequel (which did make the jump to American shores), somewhat less so.
• Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill is a 1994 Japanese game where you play as President Clinton's cat. Enemies include giant, bipedal rats in green trench coats, the democratic donkey, the republican elephant, and caricatures of republicans.
• Sonic the Hedgehog, a game series where you play as a hardcore blue hedgehog with Super-Speed, who must foil the evil plans of an egg-shaped mad scientist resembling the late Teddy Roosevelt (who tends to trap small animals inside his robot soldiers). All while frequently running through loop-de-loops. Some of the said hedgehog's friends include a two-tailed fox and a red echidna that can glide. As Sonic was intentionally modeled after cartoon characters from The Golden Age of Animation to endear him to a Western audience, this essentially qualifies the series as being either an American-styled WJT or a WAT by Japanese developers. Of course, much like its rival franchise, its popularity (outside of Japanese borders) has helped people get used to it to this day.
• Space Harrier. You play as some guy with sunglasses and a red jacket with a two-in-one energy blaster and rocket engine, flying down endless plains of checkerboard environments with environmental obstacles like trees, mushrooms, and polyhedrons in your way, while all manners of ships, stone faces, cyclops mammoths, and the like try to kill you. For the bonus stages, you hop on your companion dragon and try to ram into trees for bonus points.
• Splatoon is an arena-based Third-Person Shooter game where teenage anthropomorphic cephalopods capable of Voluntary Shapeshifting join up after school with their Family-Friendly Firearms to fight in ink-soaked battles at the local mall or scrapyard and work part-time jobs at a cannery to shoot Proud Warrior Race salmon who use kitchenware as weapons. You in particular also assist in protecting the surface world as part of a secret militia partially-run by popular celebrities, fighting against sentient octopus tentacles with Dalek-like weapons and millennia-old AI created by the precursors. The precursors are humans by the way, since this is all taking place long After the End.
• Suda51 is rather famous for directing many games that could fit into this category.
  • No More Heroes features an upside down boss battle and a boss battle using gimps as baseballs among other things. The game centers around a guy who bought a lightsaber on eBay. Other examples include and old granny with a shopping-cart-slash-Wave-Motion Gun, a Combat Pragmatist mailman-slash-superhero-dressed-faux-Nice Guy who attacks via Calling Your Attacks, including frickin' laser beams from his crotch, a korean punk-rock scientist using an earthquake-generating-machine-with-a-BRAIN-for-a-CPU, a Jerk Jock with his 24 identical-looking cheerleaders and their Humongous Mecha... The list goes just goes on, and these are only the bosses; there's enough dysfunction in the main characters themselves and the series' weird and quirky humor to make it qualify for this trope.
  • Killer7. Full of Mind Screw moments, having even a very unorthodox gameplay, surreal graphics and sound, and being gratuitously violent and depraved. These aspects have made the game very niche, though not without a Cult Classic status.
  • Killer is Dead had a hit-man with a gun for his arm and doubles as a giggolo to beautiful women, while fighting monsters along with occasional odd-ball encounters such as finding Juliet from the game below being trapped inside a barrel.
  • Lollipop Chainsaw seems to be a serious WJT contender. Considering how you kill zombies with a chainsaw-toting cheerleader and have rainbows coming out of them...
• Super Galdelic Hour seems to be a recreation of some kind of game show, but it's hard to be sure when one of the events is Butt Sumo, and all the contestants are voluptuous women in skimpy animal costumes. It really has to be seen to be believed.
• Super Mario Bros.: This is a game series in which you play as an Italian plumber and have to repeatedly rescue a princess from an evil turtle-dragon, while fighting off his armies of walking mushrooms, talking bombs, and bumper-car-like turtles. To help in your quests, you get such things as leaves that turn into raccoon-suits which give you flight, flowers that shoot fire balls, mushrooms that make you grow, and an Extreme Omnivore dinosaur that you can ride. You could put just about anything in a Mario game and it wouldn't seem out of place. The reason such weirdness doesn't really get addressed by fans all that often is because 1) At the time the original was made, video games rarely made sense to begin with, and 2) Although the former is no longer the case today its long-standing popularity has gotten people used to it.
  • Mario vs. Donkey Kong was developed by the Redmond, Washington-based Nintendo Software Technology Corporation, making it an example of a WHAT sub-series to the above. The games involve Mario facing Donkey Kong after the latter wants some of the Mini-Mario toys the former produced.
  • Mario Kart 7 was partially developed by Nintendo EAD in Japan and partially by the Austin, Texas-based Retro Studios, making it both a WJT and a WHAT.
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder is already being called Super Mario Acid Trip, and it's not hard to see why, given that the Wonder Flower the game is centered around distorts reality even more than the usual Mario game, to the point where Elephant Mario looks normal in comparison. Basically, think Mario meets Alice in Wonderland with all the quirkiness added up and multiplied by three.
    Talking Flower: That [sleeping] Goomba looks so serene. (Elephant Mario sends Goomba flying) ...Well then.
• Tail of the Sun - You lead a tribe of cavemen in building a tower out of mammoth tusks tall enough to reach the sun.
• While reviewing Taito Legends, The Angry Video Game Nerd made sure to highlight games that were "Taito as fuck":
  • Space Invaders '95: Attack of the Lunar Loonies is a version of the company's best known arcade with the weirdest graphics it can place, including characters resembling living poop (named "Toilet", no less).
  • Plump Plop is Arkanoid, only the characters are a couple "shooting" their child at aliens.
  • The NewZealand Story, following a kiwi bird trying to rescue his family from a sea lion, in the most bizarre levels possible - including a boss fight against a frozen whale that is fought from within its stomach, and a Bonus Level of Heaven from which the kiwi must escape following certain death conditions.
  • The Ninja Kids, which as the AVGN summed up, is "The TMNT arcade, but starring Sesame Street puppets who cut people in half and fight motherfucking Satan - sorry, "The Satan"".
  • Growl, which along with supposedly being in the early 20th century while featuring modern weaponry, illustrates our Giant Space Flea Out Of Nowhere page because after the whole game being about fighting poachers, the final boss turns into an alien millipede!
  • Violence Fight, which is a slightly traditional fighting game aside from moments such as fighting a tiger, and the fact very Japanese Written Sound Effects emerge after hits. But the weirdness doubles considering the over-the-top character biographies and the "Blind Idiot" Translation ("Lick Joe", "Sammy You", "Score a Point Over").
• Tengai Makyou: Far East of Eden, a series of comedic role-playing games that spoofed the everloving hell out of Western misconceptions of Japanese culture (and vice-versa, in the fourth game).
• Tenkomori Shooting (1998, Namco) is all about "shooting", but is a minigame compilation and WJT. Little easy on the 'weird', but hey, it's about monkeys doing minigames to rescue their friends; that's as weird as it needs to be!
• Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, an entry in the Final Fantasy series contained within the Dissidia Final Fantasy universe, has been described as Final Fantasy meets Elite Beat Agents. To restate for candidacy, it's a Japanese Role-Playing Game anthology fused with a Rhythm Game (similar to that of DanceDanceRevolution or Guitar Hero, with wildly varying graphics (from Kingdom Hearts coded-style chibis, to eight- and sixteen-bit graphics - Nintendo Entertainment System/Game Boy/Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Game Boy Color-era - to fully rendered CGI (same quality as the PS1/PS3 or the Xbox 360), and it's in the same series as a FIGHTING GAME. Oh, and it's on the Nintendo 3DS, so it's all in stereoscopic 3D.
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE, in sharp contrast to the Heroic Fantasy Strategy RPG of Fire Emblem and Post-Apocalyptic Science Fantasy Crapsack World of Shin Megami Tensei, is unrelentingly silly and lighthearted, featuring a group of Totally 18 Teen Idols gifted with the power to fight demons from the Fire Emblem franchise harnessing the power of creative talent, singing and dancing to save the day from the creatures — and yes, you defeat the final boss with a sing-along. Tiki is also a vocaloid here, too. This was apparently because of the fact that Atlus and Intelligent Systems — due to their games likely being on different ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism — couldn't agree on what direction the game was supposed to take, so compromised by taking an unrelentingly silly approach to both games while acting as a love letter to both series.
• Time Gal has you play as a 16-year-old girl named Reika Kirishima, who goes through time battling (among other things) dinosaurs, cavemen, pirates, and rogue motorcyclists. Quoth Slowbeef in this MST:
  Slowbeef: Wow, this could not be any more Japanese.
• Touken Ranbu – Bad guys with no clearly defined identity, goal or operation time-travel to the past to change historical events for no reason so you turn a bunch of real swords owned by historical figures into an army of dashing men to fight them off.
• Trio the Punch is a bizarre Beat 'em Up where, among other weird things, the continue screen shows a statue that suddenly acquires a clown mask, a defenseless turtle turns into a human boss, you and your weapons turn into pink sheep after defeating a pink sheep, Colonel Sanders turns into a purple bird, and "WEEBLES FALL DOWN!"
• Umihara Kawase is a game where you control a schoolgirl using a lure on rubber line to maneuver through Bizarrchitecture stages with multiple pathways, and avoiding various species of aquatic life, including fish with legs.
• Under The Skin, from Capcom has an Alien Invasion is happening where prankster aliens are trying to drive people, including Jill Valentine and Nemesis, bonkers in a competition of who can be the best prankster.
• Vib-Ribbon - You control a rabbit wandering across a mobius strip dodging random obstacles that appear in time with the music. Oh, and despite being made in the late 90's, everything is using vector graphics like it's the early 80's. And you can make your own levels by putting in your own CDs. It's proof positive that WJTs and minimalism are quite happy together.
• Violent Storm is a pastiche of Post-Apoc locales with post-apoc punks and all kinds of weirdness culminating in a boss battle with a pre-fetus Tetsuo expy. And his bodyguard gives KEFKA a run for his money on the ridiculous-looking bishie clown angle, looking like an effeminate Blanka. There's also a Shout-Out to Cho Aniki with Julius the bodybuilder, possibly the funniest 'stampeding fat guy' enemy type ever created, the lollypops (yes that's their name. Like Andore, they come in regular and Jr. varieties), a Ninja Turtle expy in Sledge, a train conductor with a gigantic ticket puncher, and cameos by a few of the programmers who can be beaten up and knocked off the stage. And on said train stage, there's a momma pig with little baby pigs walking around. The baby pigs can be picked up, and when thrown become FOOTBALLS. (the American kind)
  • Battle Circuit is a lesser widget entry than the above, focusing more on anime/game references than the weirdness, though the final boss and Dr.Saturn more than make up for it. And one of the characters is a little girl riding a pink ostrich wearing an eyepatch. The ostrich, not the girl. And the ostrich is MALE. Also for no apparent reason one of the bosses is an Elvis impersonator.
• Vivarium, Inc. developed two different widget games, both based around voice technology:
  • The first was Seaman on the Sega Dreamcast, a virtual pet starring a man-headed fish/frog creature who posed intellectual questions to the player.
  • The other was Odama on the Nintendo GameCube, a combination of military warfare and pinball.
• Namco's Wagyan Land, a Platform Game where you fight with projectile katakana and bosses try to defeat you with shiritori.
• WarioWare: This is probably Nintendo's weirdest series, and that is saying a lot. Wario decides to make money off video games, but since he's too lazy to program a full-size game he just makes a bunch of minigames and sticks them together. He also invites his friends and neighbors to help, which include a moped-riding Go-Getter Girl with way too many part-time jobs, a Mad Scientist and his Child Prodigy Idol Singer granddaughter, a karaoke-singing robot, a talking dog and cat who run a taxi service that sometimes takes them into outer space, and a Deadpan Snarker Cute Witch who lives alone in a haunted house with her imp sidekick. Not to mention the games themselves are very weird, ranging from solving puzzles to playing mini-versions of old Nintendo games to doing mundane stuff like applying eyedrops.
• Work Time Fun puts the W in WJT, being a collection of mini-games representing bizarre low-paying part-time jobs you have to take on, including counting eggs in a factory and completing a Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony while drunk. Note also what the game itself becomes as an acronym.
• Yume Nikki, an indie game about journeying through the surreal nightmares of a Hikikomori, is one great big horror-fueled widget.
• Zunzunkyou No Yabou have you playing as a sentient Jizo statue who battles Disco dans, dancing Indian ladies who turns into animated skeletons, andromorphic pandas, businessmen in suits, a Chinese chef who attacks you with flung dumplings and an obese Captain America-lookalike before you fight a gigantic Floating Eye... to spread the words of enlightenment from Buddha to the world. It...Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.

Korea

• Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, as seen here. Shoving your finger up someone's ass? Someone in South Korea made an arcade game out of it. The fact that they stole the theme song of The Addams Family to use in the game's level select screen and that it dispensed gold-plated plastic feces-shaped key chains as prizes only added to the weirdness factor.
• The DJMAX series has a Weird Korean Thing in the NB Ranger series of music videos, which consist of Power Ranger lookalikes opposing love by beating up couples on dates.
• Pump It Up is a pretty straightforward, if cruel, dance game, except for the frequently bizarre background videos accompanying most songs.

Oceania

Australia

• Golf Story is an Action RPG about golf, and contains weirdness like crocodiles, angry geese, and a Frisbee golf gang.
• Rabbit Rush (Link here) is a rather upbeat STANZA game about breeding a massive army of rabbits to conquer far-off lands. It plays like a mouse-controlled Shmup. ...At least, it does until the game sends you a fake Steam message, telling you to investigate a certain cheat code. Doing so "crashes" the game, revealing that it's really a Show Within a Show of a much more complicated story.

Europe

Belgium

• OFF is a WTF freeware game about a baseball player who wants to exorcise Bedsheet Ghosts from Wackyland. Up until the halfway mark of Zone 3 where it takes a very dark turn.

Denmark

• A Hat in Time follows the adventures of a time-travelling alien who lands on a planet and has to get back home. Said planet is divided into: an island town full of identical, possibly immortal Mafia who can't cook; a pair of competing birds, one a DJ penguin from the moon and one a... strange orange "bird" that keeps making films centered around trains; a creepy forest with death-seeking fire spirits and a yandere who thinks being a queen instead of a princess makes her less beautiful; and a gigantic mountain range with an oversized birdhouse, a lava structure that resembles a cake, and an interdimensional bell. It is partly a throwback to old collectathons of the Nintendo 64 era, which may explain some of the weirdness.

Finland

• My Summer Car is supposed to be a car-building simulation, but the creator's insistence on Hideo Kojima-esque realism, Creator Provincialism, and strange sense of humour led to the game being most well-known for its depiction of ordinary life in 90s-era rural Finland, which comes off as pretty hilarious for both Finns and non-Finns, for completely different reasons.

France

• The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, a French point'n'click with bizarre humor.
  • Ditto the Gobliiins series, its Spiritual Predecessor.
  • Also Inca by the same developer, Coktel Vision, involving Incas and Conquistadors battling each other in space.
• The French role-playing game Bound by Flame isn't especially bizarre but it is also a strong contender for the darkest western RPG ever to see commercial release, quite a step outside the norm in overseas markets.
• Dogolrax is a side-scrolling action-adventure game inspired by Another World, where we play as some guy stranded on a remote planet. He will be involved in a random and confusing plot about alien priestesses and monks creating an army of mutants to invade Earth (or something like that), that boils down to lots of minigames and the graphic style changing every few screens, with areas (apparently dreams of some sort) looking like shadow theater or 8-bit games; there's lots of disgusting creatures (sentient or not), a vagina-shaped elevator, the hero at one point dies and is reborn for no apparent reason, and there's a bunch of animesque girls that clash greatly with everything else. It's not terribly good, but it's the thought that counts. And apparently it is the successor of the devs' earlier adventure game Temple of Dogolrak (with a "K"), still full of random anime girls.
• Right off the bat, the title hero of Ubisoft's Rayman is a guy with no arms, legs or neck who throws his fists at enemies and uses his hair to fly. How surreal the world around him gets depends on the game. It can range from dark yet whimsical to a flat-out Saturday Morning cartoon.

Germany

• The Edna & Harvey franchise are a rare example of a PEGS, since both games are point-and-click adventure games in which you play insane female protagonists.

Hungary

• Three Dirty Dwarves is a weird Hungarian thing. You control three dwarves who use sport gears as weapons and armors. Enemies include naked ninjas, an entire gym which attack by throwing can of steroids, and a blue troll covered by junkyard dogs biting his body. The backgrounds and the animated intro also have a distinct Eastern European Animation style.

Poland

• Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator is technically a weird Polish thing who're trying to appeal to those who're into the weird British thing that's Monty Python. Got a sequel called Oh, Sir! Hollywood Roast

Sweden

• Dubbelmoral! for Macintosh, a freeware game from 1990, has you play a Lund University student who sneaks out of his study to binge-drink and flirt with girls at the quadrennial Lundkarnevalen (Lund Carnival), and must return home before his mom finds him missing and attacks him with a Frying Pan of Doom and cement meatballs. Along the way, he must also dodge the University police, falling tree branches that increase in speed and frequency with the player's score, fellow drunkards throwing bottles, and the Rector Magnificus, along with periodically relieving himself at the Urinoar(urinal).
• Garden Gnome Carnage. The premise: You're a garden gnome tied to a building on wheels, and you're trying to hold off elves from dropping Christmas presents into the chimney (because gnomes hate holidays) by swinging into them and dropping bricks on them, in addition to the occasional air strike. Oh, and this game was made by Daniel Remar (of Iji and Hero Core fame).
• Magicka starts off tame enough, you play as generic wizards in a generic fantasy settings helping a generic kingdom. Of course, then are things such as a your mentor; a vampire pretending not to be a vampire, the wooden horses, multiple references, parodies of game mechanics like sidequests, and the first expansion removes you from the generic setting and places the wizards and monster into Vietnam.

Switzerland

• Plug & Play (Link here). Here's Markiplier's playthrough of the game. It certainly begs the question of what did I just play again?. Eventually received a sequel called Kids, which while is still weird, has a clearer narrative about bullying, peer pressure and... childbirth?

United Kingdom

• Alfred Chicken works his way through really weird levels, meets giant talking flowers, and saves his eggnapped friends from the evil Meka-Chickens.
• Lemmings combines colourful graphics, mind-bending puzzles, and grisly, relentless death of cutesy creatures if the player doesn't do things right.
• LittleBigPlanet is definitely a Wabbit. Ignoring the fact that the levels take place on a world made from people's dreams, the characters include a cardboard Leonardo da Vinci wearing 3D glasses, a sexy nurse with an apple for a head and a depressed, cowardly calendar ... whose facial expressions are drawn in ink but can change.
• Manic Miner is a straight enough platformer, albeit with some rather bizarre enemies. The sequel Jet Set Willy takes it up to eleven with some outright trippy level designs, obstacles and enemies.
• Putty is a British game that shows that Japan has no monopoly on Platform Games with colorful, cheerfully outlandish environments. This is the kind of game where punching enemies turns them into babies that have to be absorbed before they explode and a cat laughs at you.
• Rare has its fair share of Wabbits (Weird British Things), such as Blast Corps (a game about destroying all sorts of buildings with one ludicrous Excuse Plot about a runaway nuclear missile carrier) and Conker's Bad Fur Day (a cutesy Collect-a-Thon Platformer twisted into something both stranger and very family-unfriendly). One of their earliest "games", Taboo: The Sixth Sense, is a digital tarot deck for the NES.
• Rock Star Ate My Hamster is an example of a Wabbit. It's a British Rockstar management simulator, with all the insanity that implies.
• Skool Daze and its sequel Back To Skool aren't exactly weird, at least in the goal you have to accomplish (steal your bad report card in the first game, replace it with a forgery in the second), but the route there certainly is. The games, being steeped in the atmosphere of The Good Old British Comp, certainly give them a distinctively British flavour.
• Worms is War Has Never Been So Much Fun taken to ridiculous extremes: the combatants are homicidal annelids, and the weaponry often goes to unexpected things such as Sheep and Banana Bombs.
• Llamasoft have had this as their M.O. since the early 1980s. Titles like Attack of the Mutant Camels, Sheep In Space, Llamatron: 2112, Space Giraffe and Moose Life (all of which are psychedelic shoot-em-ups, of all things) should give you an idea of what you're getting into.

Unsorted

The origin countries of these games are unknown. If you do know, do move them to the relevant folder, thanks.

Unsorted

• Carrots and Cream: A game that tries to tell an abstract story about some guy being obsessed with carrots and cream, and a worm eating through the carrots and eventually meeting a grisly death? Those who've played it are baffled by it.

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