Vattroller X (球闘士バトローラーエックス, Battle Fighter: Battle Roller X) is a 2004 Action game released only in Japan by Bandai for the Game Boy Advance. It was made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the V-Jump magazine and had a companion manga story by Tenya Yabuno (who would later write the Inazuma Eleven manga) published there.
The story revolves around Battle Rolling, a ficticious human Billiards sport where owners of "Armulets" fight it out both with weapons and by using their battle auras to roll into each other. In the manga, the kid hero Jin Tsukahara faces the criminal Death Rollers who use their Armulets for killing.
The game features a Story mode about Jin and a RPG mode about a Tournament Arc where the player can customize their character.
This game features the following tropes:
- Artificial Stupidity: The CPU tends to sink itself whenever it uses certain super moves to enter ball mode.
- Battle Aura: The Armulets can surround their owner in an animal-themed power sphere.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: If your health meter limit gets chopped too much, you might want to sink yourself to restore it. You'll lose a point while denying your opponents one.
- Boss-Arena Idiocy: Played with. In the secret Story mode chapter, the battles are something of a Puzzle Boss because the corner holes start out blocked. The game gives you just enough time to break a single barrier and then score a point or two to win.
- Calling Your Attacks: When Zoro performs a super move, he calls out its name with text appearing over him.
- Character Customization: Upon starting RPG mode, you must choose an Armulet and a generic Heroic Mime character. The Armulet choice determines attribute growth and the protagonist's color palette. The generic NPC characters and the Armulets owned by certain plot-important folks can be unlocked by certain passwords.
- Double Unlock: Weapons and characters unlocked by passwords must be first purchased at certain shops, which makes the feature at least a little less overpowered than, say, a Number Trader.
- Face Fault: Losing players fall on their faces during the results screen.
- Guest Fighter: Zoro, Beet and Kogenta can be unlocked for the VRX free play mode.
- Guide Dang It!: Some content, including the last Story mode chapter, is locked behind passwords that were featured in the series' trading card game.
- Infinity +1 Element: You need to progress through RPG mode to be able to use each kind of weapon, but those owned by the guest characters have no element and can be used anytime. Equipment storage is shared between save files, so you can get characters very powerful as soon as the storage PC shows up in a new game.
- Japanese Ranguage: That "V" on the title is most likely meant to be a "B" for "Batt(le)", as in Japanese those two letters are interchangeable like "L" and "R".
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields can be handy not just to defend but also to push opponents in ball mode into pits.
- Multiple Endings: The RPG mode normally ends after the big tournament, but it is possible to trigger an alternate ending elsewhere after clearing certain tasks.
- Ring Out: After you reduce an opponent's HP to zero, they turn into a ball you must then knock into any hole to score a point. A KO'ed fighter can still move and attempt to avoid getting sunk until they can stand again, but the more they get knocked out, the more time spent on ball form and the more maximum HP is lost. Those penalties are reset once they do fall, so as previously mentioned, better to sink yourself than to get sunk.
- Rolling Attack: You can roll to attack, evade threats or try to sink the other fighters. Zoro is the one character who doesn't roll, as he instead runs around while spinning his swords.
- Time Stands Still: Super moves stop time. Can be very annoying when all three CPU opponents start spamming them...
