Video Game / Rakugakids

Rakugakids, a 2.5D fighting game for the Nintendo 64, was created by Konami and released in Japan on July 23, 1998 (and strangely enough, December 4 on the same year for Europe, translated into English). That's right, only one international release!

The game's plot is simple: a group of 6 kids - Andy, Nola, Clione, Roy, Jerry and D.D.J. - travel for the summer holidays. When they visit a cave they end up getting interested seeing a crayon box, a rather intriguing find... until Jerry's brother, Val, decides to steal it. Eventually, he draws a character on a wall — revealing that whoever's drawn with those specific crayons will come to life.

As said drawing later causes trouble for the town, the kids then pretty much try to combat against Val and his doodle with their own characters. Eventually they also encounter George, who gets a hold of the crayons as well and serves as the game's final boss. That's how simple it is once you play the story mode.

Despite the small character roster and amount of locations, there may be a big reason behind all of this; because of the fact the drawn characters are traditionally animated, all of them have a wide arrange of sprites, that even then with such a console like the N64, it's still quite a bundle of frame-by-frame content.

This game has drawn the following tropes:

• Aerith and Bob: Clione and D.D.J.'s names noticeably stick out of the other four. Meanwhile, the playable roster just really didn't care about a consistent naming convention, so we have names like Marsa, Astronots, and Beartank.
• Amusing Injuries: Darkness' Magic abilities.
  • One is where he builds a giant bone and uses it to summon a herd of ghost dogs, hoping to catch the opponent in the herd and trample them.
  • Another is where he literally blends up an opponent, with several other inedible ingredients.
  • And another is where smacks the opponent with a large frying pan, serves them in a giant sandwich, eats them and farts them out the other end across the screen... yeah.
• Animal Motifs: Technically downplayed(?) — Marsa is a little witch who wears a chicken for a hat. She's also the only character who has her tease animation being her combing her own hair, uses regular household items for her attacks, and does relatively normal things for her Magic.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Darkness, the dog.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While Val and George (and by extent, Mamezo and Darkness) are both antagonists, they don't really interact much with each other unless you choose to play with either one of their creations.
• Breakout Character: Of all the characters present in the game, only the Bear Tank has any significance outside of this game of origin, making appearances in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Konami Krazy Racers, and Popn Music!
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Special attacks are referred to as Magic attacks.
• Captain Space, Defender of Earth!: Astronots is an astronaut clearly based on Buck Rogers and uses a Ray Gun.
• Cowboy: Cools. Roy is themed as such.
• Expy: Captain.Cat.Kit is an obvious Parappa The Rapper reference.
• Ironic Name: Darkness is a ghost-dog creature who is pure white in color and doesn't have any moves related to darkness. He gets a line of bright pastel alternate colors with only one fitting his name: a charcoal black alt only accessible if two Darkness try to pick the same palette.
• Interface Spoiler: The game's two secret characters can still be drawn from the random character select option even before they become directly selectable.
• Jerkass: Val is described as a bully when he gets introduced in the story mode's intro. His drawing, Mamezo, ain't spared from being mean either, and they sure are having fun with it!
• Magic Skirt: Averted, as Marsa holds her dress down when descending from a jump.
• Medium Blending: The very core of this game's style is that it places 2D characters in 3D environments, a la Paper Mario.
• Odd Name Out: Out of the group of children, D.D.J. is the only one whose name seems to be an acronym. On the other end, we have Darkness — the only fighter in the cast whose name is a word!
• Palette Swap:
  • Every fighter gets seven additional color palettes along with their base palette. Each palette corresponds to the six main attacking buttons, the Start button, and a mirror palette if two players attempt to pick the same color on the same character. The "Drawing" visual style uses its own pool of palette swaps.
  • For full characters, we have Inuzo. He's essentially Mamezo but with gray skin, a blue cape and different idle and walking animations, alongside different A.I when out into the hands of the computer. He also gets his own set of color palettes that are much darker than Mamezo's. To drive the point home, they even share the same slot on the CSS.
• Portmantitle: The title is a portmanteau of the Japanese word "rakugaki" (meaning doodle) and the English word "kids".
• Secret Character:
  • Inuzo, a Palette Swap of Mamezo controlled by Val's dog Mudgas, is unlocked after two hours of playing the game, then holding L while selecting Mamezo.
  • Darkness, the game's Final Boss, is unlocked after playing the game for five hours total.
• Sequel Hook: Following the staff roll, an unnamed boy moves into town alongside a pair of twins. What follows is animated drawings of a skateboarder and an alien riding a four-legged UFO in the same style of the playable fighters creating and erasing To Be Continued from the screen respectively.
• Sleepyhead: Beartank's idle animation is him just sitting there and dozing off. One of his win poses even has him pull out a fancy pink bed to take a victory nap in!
• The Smurfette Principle: Although there are two girls in the group of kids, Marsa's the only playable female character.
• Token Minority: D.D.J. is the only character of the cast of artistic kids who is black.
• True Final Boss: Win the game without losing a single round and Inuzo will appear to challenge your fighter after Darkness.