The Problem With Licensed Games / Anime & Manga

Anime & Manga have been adapted into video games, which several adaptations fell into the common pitfalls of licensed games:

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• The classic anime motion picture AKIRA received a couple of games, neither of which were very good:
  • The one for the Amiga is considered one of the worst for the system. Why? It's a side-scrolling action game where you play as either Tetsuo or Kaneda, in at least four levels of extreme difficulty and unfairness. The idea of a difficulty curve is thrown out with the first level, a motorbike racing stage somewhat like the infamously difficult level 3 of Battletoads but with more random obstacle placement and the added challenge of constantly needing to pick up fuel cans; the publisher supposedly had to give out passwords for reviewers to clear it. The third level has keycards to collect, and while you don't need them all to reach the end of the level, if you don't get all of them anyway, you will be trapped and unable to complete the level. The fourth level can't be completed at all because of poor play testing; one of the platforms is placed too far away for you to jump on. It apparently even drove its developers, ICE Software of the United Kingdom, crazy.
  • The Famicom version isn't much better, as it's a Trial-and-Error Gameplay option-choosing game disguised as an adventure game, where you must reenact the movie step-by-exact-step.
• Anmitsu-Hime (re-skinned in America as Alex Kidd: High-Tech World) for the Sega Mark III (Sega Master System in western territories) was a video game based on the anime of the same name, which itself was based on the manga of the same name. While somewhat innovative for the time for featuring an in-game clock (that albeit only existed to impose an eight-hour time limit on the player), the game itself has mind-numbingly boring gameplay that basically amounts to an extended Fetch Quest, an ear-grating soundtrack, frustrating platforming segments where you die in one hit (and with the janky controls, you will die a lot), instant death traps during the Castle segment of the game that undo all of your progress if you fall for them,^note Turning on a computer will reveal that it was apparently broken and fatally shocks you, putting on armor renders you immobile and ends the game, and going down a broken set of stairs (the fact that they're broken isn't apparent at first) kills you, and those are only a few examples. and cryptic puzzles, the most egregious example being as follows: One puzzle has you figuring out how to obtain a pass to get through a checkpoint gate. There's a book that you can buy that teaches you how to print your own pass and a printing press that you can also buy, but those are actually useless if you missed the window of time to use them. In reality, you need to pray at the shrine 108 times (which, unless this is some sort of reference to the show, is never made readily apparent to the player at any point, and it certainly won't make any sense to Western players) until the shrine kannushi comes out and gives you a pass. But beware, as if you have either the "How to Print a Pass" book or a pistol (that you can just pick up off the ground in one of the houses) in your inventory, the guard arrests you. You can't drop either of them either, so you might as well reset the game if you pick them up by accident.
  
  When it was released in America as Alex Kidd: High Tech World in what was possibly a poorly thought-out attempt to compete with Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 2 released half-a-year earlier, which itself being a reskin of a game based on a Japanese license - in Mario's case, a bunch of Fuji TV mascots - it marked the beginning of the end for the franchise. Following two more games in the series (Shinobi World, which was well-received, and Enchanted Castle, a Genesis sequel to Miracle World, which... wasn't), Alex would be phased out and replaced with the much more universally beloved Sonic the Hedgehog as Sega's mascot only two years later.
• Bats and Terry by Use is a platformer based on an anime. Normally most licensed platformers would be too average to warrant a spot on the list, but the ridiculous amount of Idiot Programming make it something to be reckoned with. Like the fact that when an enemy dies the explosion moves along with the scroll or the fact that blocks that you have to jump on are easily confusable with elements for the background. It is no wonder that all of those reasons contributed to its #7 spot on chrontendo's top 10 worst NES/Famicom games, with him even showing a clip where he defeated a boss by touching it with his sprite.
• Beyblade:
  • There's two separate trading card games, one for Bakuten Shoot Beyblade and the other for Beyblade: Metal Fusion. Neither are particularly good for trading card games and one is left to wonder what fans of a high action franchise like Beyblade could see in a slow card game.
  • Bakuten Shoot Beyblade has fifteen video games to its name, which leaves it no surprise there are both good and bad games. The bad ones are the ones that try to digitally emulate the thrill of beyblading and nothing beyond that. They're essentially Fighting Games with at best barely any moves and a worst no control at all beyond the initial shot. There are no or no interesting unlockables, a minimal roster, and all the art present is stock art.
• Black Butler received a pretty terrible DS tie-in game that is just a collection of highly simple mini-games.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball: Shenron no Nazo, a 1986 video game based on the Dragon Ball anime and manga and adapted into Dragon Power in the United States, is for the most part downright agonizing. A health system that gradually decreases is the least of the game's problems. The game sometimes has some of the worst Guide Dang It! moments, such as trying to get Oolong to drop an Interchangeable Antimatter Key in Stage 2. You have to hit him enough times whilst he's flying around. If you take too long, he'll hide under a different house.
  • There was a Dragon Ball Z set in the Ani-Mayhem trading card game. Unfortunately, it's rather overpowered compared to other sets in the game, and may have contributed to its eventual failure.
  • Score Entertainment made a Dragon Ball Z game - and later a compatible Dragon Ball GT game, but it suffers from balance issues as it tries to reflect the story too closely — they faithfully replicated the source material's utterly out-of-control Power Creep. Characters were helplessly, hopelessly outgunned as soon as the next set came out.
  • After the end of the series, Score started over with a similar yet completely incompatible game, while immediately abandoning all support for the previous one. Critics reluctantly admitted it was a better game, but everybody was so burned by the company that the new game completely failed.
  • While Ultimate Battle 22 had a great soundtrack, it fell short on so many other areas; the graphics are terrible looking and lazily arranged, especially for the PS1, the gameplay's shoddy AI is noticeable, and the gameplay's just as shoddy. To make matters worse, the U.S version feels even more like a disaster; the loading screens feel longer, music loops feel unnatural, and the cutscenes for special moves were removed (except for the announcer during tournament mode... without being re-dubbed {or even subtitled} and with longer pauses in between his sentences, for some reason). To add further insult to injury, the inferior U.S. version was released eight years after the Japanese version, at a time when the Playstation 2 was three years into its lifespan, in a cheap effort to capitalize on DBZ's then-ongoing surge of popularity in the West.
  • Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout suffered from almost all the same problems from 22 (in a few cases it's even worse); while the graphics are (for the time) pretty good, the gameplay's very shoddy, what with the controller responding at the wrong time (assuming that it even responds at all), the camera's uncooperative, and the moves felt repetitive and lack variety. There's also the voice acting in the American version, which feels so unsalvageable; not even Steve Blum's portrayal of Goku feels tolerable.
  • Dragon Ball Z for Kinect was very poorly received due to repetitive gameplay, little content, no real story, no multiplayer, and of course the stigma of only being able to be played with Kinect controls. At least one reviewer considered the cardboard Super Saiyan hair hat bundled with the game to be more fun than the actual game.
  • The first Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku kicked off the GBA's trilogy of Zelda clones. The graphics are pretty good, but that's all it has going for it. The game suffers many repetitive fetch quests, horrible AI, terrible collision detection that often keeps you from landing an attack on an enemy no matter how close you are (on top of enemies having insane reaction times, very frequently hitting you the instant you get close enough to attack), and a broken combat system where Goku dies in three hits no matter how strong he gets, forcing you to use the Solar Flare ability to stun enemies, land a punch, run away, and do it all over again until they fall, which unsurprisingly isn't that exciting. Thankfully, Legacy of Goku II and Buu's Fury improve on its faults and fit more in the other trope.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu is a Street Fighter-style fighting game with terrible prerendered graphics, little variation between characters, a lack of any semblance of a plot, and shallow attempts to integrate the franchise's Pummel Duels and transformations,^note Characters default to their base forms and only transform during super attacks, which is especially baffling for Cell, who turns into his perfect form and goes back to his first form when he never reverts to his first form anywhere else, and Majin Buu's super attacks inexplicably replace him with Super Buu, who isn't playable as his own character despite appearing on the title screen and box art. built on an engine that can barely handle the gameplay without bugging. At the very least, the game's music is pleasant.
  • Dragon Ball Z Sagas attempted to recreate the gameplay of the Legacy of Goku games in full 3D. It failed thanks to low-quality graphics, exceedingly linear and bland levels, a wonky camera that makes it difficult to focus on the action, tedious and unexciting combat, and an extremely poor implementation of the Super Saiyan mechanic that's aggravated by the fact that certain bosses can only be damaged when you're in Super Saiyan mode.
  • The notoriously awful Dragonball Evolution received a tie-in video game for the PlayStation Portable. Despite being a clone of the popular Dragon Ball Z: Budokai series, it isn’t much better than the film it’s based on, suffering from shallow button-mashing gameplay, poor graphics and sound design, idiotic enemy A.I., and a story mode with cheaply-produced cutscenes that can be completed in less than two hours.

• Jujutsu Kaisen got a particularly notorious tie-in game in Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash. The game is considered to be very shoddy and poorly-made, with boring game modes and uninspired gameplay. It ended up hitting a record for most Steam refunds in 4 days, and many people consider it to be 2024's successor to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Even among Bandai Namco's usual forgettable anime tie-ins, Cursed Clash stands out as one of the absolute worst (and one of the most insulting, given that the Jujutsu Kaisen anime had been on an award-winning roll at the time).
• From the Gundam franchise:
  • Some of the non-Banpresto Mobile Suit Gundam games are pretty mediocre. Operation Troy did so poorly in its native Japan that it never left; Crossfire was poorly received by American reviewers for being slow-moving, ugly, and for not having online multiplayer; and there are some Gundam games that are plain unmentionable due to how bad they are.
  • Gundam 0079: The War for Earth is historically interesting (an FMV game made by a US-based developer with Western actors, with its original English dub making it obvious that this was before certain terms and pronunciations were solidified), but is something of a chore to actually play; there's also the issue of the acting in the English dub ranging from passable (mostly White Base) to dubious (Zeon), and Char's actor not being the best fit visually.
  • The franchise has also had two CCGs in its time. At the height of its popularity in the West, Bandai made Gundam MS War, which died quickly due to poorly thought-out mechanics and limited scope (only really covering the original series and Wing). A few years later they tried again, this time taking the pre-existing (not to mention better-designed and much more successful) Japanese game Gundam War and translating the cards into English. Unfortunately, by that point the franchise was on its last legs in the West and Bandai obviously didn't care anymore, releasing cards with terrible translations and Engrish, eventually pulling support after only two expansion sets despite the fact that the game had a cult following.
  • Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: Hot Scramble for the Nintendo Entertainment System is one of Bandai's first infamous licensed games, that alternates chaotic FPS stages and repetitive maze platforming levels. The sad thing is that it was developed by Masanobu Endoh of Xevious and The Tower of Druaga, who left Namco to develop it and fell into a heavy case of Executive Meddling.
  • While the other games based on the Cosmic Era range from legitimately enjoyable (Alliance VS ZAFT series, GBA's SEED Destiny, BATTLE DESTINY) to average, the first eponymous Gundam SEED game for PlayStation 2 is a true stinker, a side-scrolling game with fighting game command inputs that seems outdated for a PS2 game and doesn't even cover the whole show.
  • Likewise, Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Gundam Meisters reuses the engine from Encounters in Space and Never Ending Tomorrow, themselves decent games, and simplifies the engine to create an incredibly monotonous game where the player doesn't do much else than hack and slash trough incredibly easy enemies.
  • PlayStation 3's Mobile Suit Gundam Side Stories tried to gather every previous video game-exclusive story into a single game. Needless to say, the final result is little more than a rehash of Battle Operation with vague rehashes of the mentioned stories, done with the same generic gameplay that makes some of their Gameplay and Story Segregation stories to lose appeal.
  • While most Gundam Breaker games fall into the opposite side of the spectrum, New Gundam Breaker is one of the most disliked Gundam games period, with a litany of technical issues even after extensive patches, sluggish controls, tedious gameplay, and numerous Scrappy Mechanics that render New Gundam Breaker a major step-down from previous installments. To add insult to injury, it is also the only Breaker game to receive an official release in the West.
• While most Hamtaro games are known for being good to great adventure games, Tottoko Hamtaro: Tomodachi Daisakusen Dechu - the first game released for the series - is a rather undistinguished Virtual Pet with a few extra features, like a friend list, a "fortune teller" that tells you which Ham-Ham you're the most like and tries to predict your career path, and a love meter. There's little to hold the player's attention for more than 15 minutes or so, unless they're the kind of person who really likes to ship their friends together. Unsurprisingly, it was never released outside of Japan.
• Toei Animation once got themselves into the video game publishing business in Japan, but never published anything of note aside from a series of terrible Hokuto no Ken video games throughout most of the The '80s and The '90s. Despite their terrible reception, they somehow managed to churn out eight of them.
  • The first Hokuto no Ken game for the Famicom is a substandard single-plane Beat 'em Up with graphics that look like they came straight out of an Atari 5200 and an obtuse power-up system that involves picking up floating words from certain enemies after they explode. It's generally (but incorrectly) regarded to be Unwinnable by Design due to how the first level just loops itself in infinity if you continue walking left. That's because in order to actually proceed through the game, you must stand in front of certain doors and press Up+A+B at the same time (good luck figuring that out without looking it up). It made for such an agonizing experience that Chrontendo ended up giving it the #5 spot on his list of the top 10 worst NES/Famicom games from 1983 to 1987, right after Fist of the North Star. While the sequel, Hokuto no Ken 2, suffers from some of the same fundamental flaws (now you're required to press A+B+Right to enter doors), it was enough of a considerable improvement for Taxan to pick it over the first game for a US release.
  • After the two side-scrolling action games on the Famicom, Toei took a stab on the RPG genre with Hokuto no Ken 3. At first glance, the game seems like a bog-standard JRPG from the era, with the main gimmick being that it's first game that tries to adapt the whole manga all way up to the Kaioh saga. However the game simplifies the story to such a ridiculous extent, with key moments from the manga being changed or just downright omitted. The most egregious being the Souther arc. Instead of giving him a difficult dungeon to rule over or a dramatic pre-battle speech, he just appears wandering in front of his pyramid as an average NPC.
• Initial D: Mountain Vengeance has abysmal gameplay, graphics that make Nintendo 64 games look like PS4 exclusives, and there are only 2 songs in the whole game. "Running in the '90s" and the opening song from Tokyopop's dub, "Initialize." 99% of the time it will only play the latter, so expect "Initialiiiize. Initial drive. Custoooomize. Initial dream. Eneeergize. Initial drift. Initaliiiize. Initial D" to be burned into your mind by the end.
• Capcom's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's games were consistently good, but not most of the JoJo games by other developers. The SNES Stardust Crusaders adaptation is regarded as a So Bad, It's Good game in Japan, thanks to the even more nonsensical plot that totally ignores the original manga. The Phantom Blood adaptation on the PlayStation 2, however, is a partially-censored slavish adaptation with far more cutscenes than action and bad, repetitive gameplay with an unbalanced difficulty level (the bullies - the first enemies in the game, mind you - are stronger than the final boss Dio himself).
• Kakugo no Susume's PlayStation game has been ranked by Famitsu as the worst fighting game for the system,^note Technically, a 3-way tie with The Masters Fighter and Shura no Mon - the latter being another example of this trope. to the point that the manga's author derided it.
• Kinnikuman: Muscle Tag Match for the Famicom (also released as M.U.S.C.L.E. on the NES) was the first Famicom game published by Bandai, and it shows. It is a wrestling game with eight different playable characters, but all of them share the same small pool of basic moves. Thanks to a combination of the poor controls and the tiny character sprites, it's near impossible to do anything intentionally as you fight your opponent, making the game difficult to play properly.
• Majokko Daisakusen is a PlayStation crossover game featuring Toei's early Magical Girl shows (and Cutey Honey), but it's a Dolled-Up Installment port of The Unholy War. Not only does the game recycle a bunch of enemies of the original game with no context, but most of the featured franchises have no violent confrontations to begin with. Not to mention there’s little scaling between the seven girls featured- the only let’s play of the game has Sally Yumeno being used the entire time, and her flight abilities make her broken.
• The PC88 game based on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (screenshots and review here). The PC88's hardware was very hard to get a functional game running on in the first place, and the results speak for themselves — a very slow-paced, buggy adventure game with hideous graphics where all of the items you need to progress are randomly placed amid endless Cut and Paste Environments. Sometimes, instead of an item, you'll find a skull that will instantly kill Nausicaä and waste one of the only three chances you get to finish the game. Supposedly there's a glider sequence past these, but nobody has actually stuck with the game long enough to play it... at least, not without hacking. The same publisher's offerings for the PC-6001 and MSX were better, but still mediocre at best. No further video game adaptations of Studio Ghibli films were made, though this may be equally due to Hayao Miyazaki's admitted distaste for the medium.
• Osomatsu-kun Hachamecha Gekijou is one of the more notorious examples of this trope in Japan. Originally released as a Mega Drive launch title, it quickly gained an infamous negative reputation as one of the worst games available on the Mega Drive. Obnoxious sound, graphics that fail to highlight the Mega Drive's strengths, slippery controls, maze-like game design that is paradoxically both padded out and extremely short (as in it's possible to beat the game in only 10 minutes), etc. Not helping that technically it was half of the original game released, as SEGA planned to use a 4MB cartridge instead of the 2MB cartridge the final build used. The poor quality even sparked a rumor that the original manga author Fujio Akatsuka threw an ash tray at one of the developers because he was genuinely that repulsed at how terrible the finished product was. Oh, and just to throw salt on the wound, Osomatsu-Kun Hachamecha Gekijou is also one of the few games that doesn't even work on later models of the Mega Drive, as it fails to boot due to the TMSS chip preventing it from loading.
• Characters of Ranma ½ appear in half a dozen Street Fighter clones and one JRPG. The fighting games are So Okay, It's Average at best, but the RPG doesn't make it even that high. It offers absolutely nothing new to players who aren't fans of the anime or manga, just the same old railroading between Adventure Towns, Level Grinding and half of your team being The Load. Fans enjoy the few Shout Outs to the original, but much potential is wasted. There's only 2 puzzles that involve characters' transformation abilities. Their unique fighting styles (and potential for side quests to learn new techniques) are largely ignored in favour of standard "buying new armour and weapons in each new town". Those who expect a few good pictures for cutscenes will be disappointed too. But there's a lot of in-jokes only the programming team understands.
• Sailor Moon had two PC games in North America: "Colorforms Computer Fun Set," which, like the Colorforms toys, involved putting images of characters and props on backgrounds—naturally, this was more exciting as a standard toy—and "The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon", an activity center which had creepy character models with stiff animation, poor voice acting that seems to be done by the same person, and various inaccuracies. The simple act of playing dress-up with the Sailor Guardians is a chore due to how finicky the clothes are (the dolls will reset if you don't place articles in the right order), and the program as a whole is prone to crashing. 3D Adventures is regarded as a historical curiosity at best, with its most notable aspect being the hints that Michiru/Sailor Neptune was planned to be included when R hadn't even finished airing in the States, along with a Dummied Out unfinished image of Sailor Moon in her Eternal form.
• Speed Racer:
  • While most games based on Speed Racer veer close enough to this trope, the PlayStation game might be the laziest of them all. The Daytona USA-like gameplay is average at best (even ripping a track straight from Daytona) and the main vehicle keeps its gadgets (although most of them are useless), but the complete lack of Wacky Racing, cars or music from the anime, or any semblance to a story makes it a dull experience.
  • Speed Racer in My Most Dangerous Adventures for the Super Nintendo is a hybrid racing-platforming game. While somewhat ambitious for featuring irregular terrain (other contemporary racing games like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart have flat tracks), this comes at the cost of performance, as the racing segments barely run at a choppy 15 FPS (with frame drops) - ironic for a game based on a show about a super-powered car. However, the platforming segments are even worse, featuring unresponsive controls, terrible combat, poor collision detection, and questionable level design.

• YuYu Hakusho: Spirit Detective for the GBA is abysmally boring in addition to sporting graphics that make the characters only distinguishable by their hair and outfits. The other games, with the exception of the fantastic one made by Treasure, tend to be a little bit less horrible, though there are a few others on its level.
• The first two entries in the Eldoran Series, Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh and Genki Bakuhatsu Ganbaruger, got two Game Boy games with abysmal ratings.

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