"LOSE!"

One of the best bits of this game has to be when you lose a round, and your PlayStation tells you, in no uncertain terms, what it thinks of you.

"LOSE!" it screams.

Anyhow.

Rival Schools is a 3D beat'em-up. And, as we all know, there's a thousand 3D beat'em-ups, so they all need a gimmick. Well, Rival Schools is that it is four-player. Kind of. I'll come on to that later.

The deal is this (and I'm gonna have a quick check in the manual to make sure I get this right):

Recently (it says here), mysterious and unexplainable incidents have taken place that have rocked the country. In high schools all over, students have been mysteriously disappearing with no clue as to their whereabouts.  Furthermore, it appeared that these unspeakable acts were occurring in direct defiance of the school system (what?). Yadda yadda yadda, organised crime ring... Yadda yadda yadda, government agencies co-operated with each other... Yadda yadda yadda, group of students taking matters into their own hands... Yadda yadda yadda, the great fight begins.

See? It's all about schools. So, there we are, nice weak storyline. But the game doesn't seem to follow it. You just fight.

Fair enough, it's a fighting game, but a little bit of story would be good. In Street Fighter, for example, you know that Ryu is going to fight M.Bison, Ken is going to fight Ryu and Vega is going to fight Chun Li. In Rival Schools, if you play as Raizo (the strong-willed principal who dreams of controlling a vaster empire beyond that of Justice HS (It says here)), who is, basically, the huge bad guy, get to fight six and who are you up against? Batsu, the leader of the student fighters, surely?

Nope, you're up against Raizo (the strong-willed... Etc). Oh.

To be fair, you do get a bonus round after that, where you have to fight Hyo (who is the ultimate bad guy, and my favorite character). But playing against the same character as you gets on my tit's. In fact, in RS, you could have four of the same character playing at once.

Which brings us to the fighting bit.

The control system is lovely, easy to pick up, and, with a bit of practice, you'll get good at it, laying down four hit 'textbook' combo's. It has loads of great touches, such as 'Rival Launchers', where you boot your opponent into the air, the jump up after him and twat him about some more in mid-air, 'Tardy Counters', which, if you press towards and an attack button just after you block a move, you'll cross their attack (well, you don't really, but it looks like you do) and belt them. Some of the 'Burning Vigor Attacks' (read super-moves) are pretty cool too (and some, of course, suck hard). However, the super-moves are too easy to do. For instance, to do Hyo's 'Ankoku Genei-Shuu' (kick them in the air and then whap them with your sword) you can either press D,DA,A,D,DA,A,K or L2.

Yeah, L2.

A quick tap on either of the left shoulder buttons sends your dude into a devastating, multihit attack. Not good.

But the Team-Up Techniques, oh, the Team-Up Techniques. When you choose your fighter, you choose a main and a sub. You start the first round with your main fighter, then can change to your sub at the end of that round (not during the match, sadly) if you wish, or stick with your main character. But if you hit Punch and Kick at the same time you buddy will come on and help you.

The techniques are so varied it takes the piss. Each character has a unique move. Your mate may come on and give you a quick massage to boost your health, or tell you how cool you are to boost your attack bar (you know, must be at level one to do a super-move, goes up each time you hit them or they hit you). Also, they might come on and give the other guy a pounding, by using twin fireballs, twin dragon punches, power slams, or they might get you to hold the bad guy while they kick the shit out of him. It rocks, and is still cool after six hours of play.

'But what about the four player mode?' I hear you ask.

Well, it a huge let down, to say the least. All players three and four do is control when Team-Up Techniques happen. Two people fight as normal, while the other two people have to watch the play, and press punch and kick when they think they should lend a hand. Yawn.

The characters are varied, to say the least. You start off with a choice of twenty, and you can discover six more (I think). Some of them are very well drawn (like Tiffany ('a cheer-leader with a deadly purpose'... For fucks sake) and Batsu), but some of them look unfinished and hurried. Nice to see Ryu's little sister, Sakura, making an appearance as a main character, too. As an extra touch, call Sakura on to help you in a match and she performs her Shungoku-Satsu (her best move in Street Fighter), with the same finish animation and number of hits.

The characters are all school based, students, teachers, cheer-leaders (with deadly purposes, obviously), and a school nurse.

The thing that really got to me about this game is the fact that they haven't bothered to translate it. Sure, all the text has been done, but the characters still speak Japanese. It a huge shame, because they say a lot, shouts of encouragement from your team-mate if you do a good combo, sayings when they win or "LOSE!".

Shame.

Huge shame, really.

Rival Schools

+ Team Up Techniques

+ Loads Of Characters

+ Two CD's*

+ Good Control System

+ Bangin' choon on the Final Stage

+ Some entertaining sub-games

+ The noise made when Shoma twats someone with his baseball bat

+ "LOSE!"

- Four player mode sucks

- No translation

- No replays 

- Too easy to do super-moves

- Crap start and ending movies

- Dodgy Storyline

DJ Ess

This is a review