Game cover
Ichigeki Sacchuu!! HoiHoi-San for the Playstation 2 was released on November 11 2003, published by Konami, and developed by Ivy-Arts.
The game underwent development at the same time as the original run was being serialized in Dengeki Daioh, with a chapter even alluding at the idea of a joyconremote-controlled HoiHoi-San. Wow. Wouldn’t that be so cool?
Or maybe not.
In fact, the game’s release and the first appearence of HoiHoi-San on print happened just 3 months apart from each other. Leading one to believe the game was actually planned way ahead of the manga release, unless the development crew underwent the worst crunch-time ever. Both claims that will remain unverifiable for the foreseeable future.
On the hunt
Strange speculation aside, what is this game? I’d call it a pretty straight-forward action game. You drop into a level and have a number of insects to kill, you must traverse the level and try not to break everything valuable with your deadly weapons as you hunt them down. Obviously, there’s variation to the missions, like defending a cake from continuous waves of ants, or traversing a maze to kill a carpenter ant queen, but they all follow this same formula.
Interspersed between missions are small cutscenes of various characters talking to you directly, god knows what about since I don’t speak Japanese, and short animated cutscenes of various manga plot-beats happening. Some of these cutscenes unlock new items on the shop, or give them directly to you. Usually, they trigger based on mission completion or when getting an A rank.
A lot of the value of this game lies on the customization system and the shop. While you can pretty much defeat a level flawlessly with just a katana and a fair bit of practice, you also can blow everything up with an RPG and call it a day. Or you can make one of your weapon slots unusable by equipping a weapon that does literally nothing and call it a challenge run.
Try me now
That’s another big part of this game’s design: buying useless stuff because it looks cute.
You can customize HoiHoi-San’s look through various outfits and accesories. With each outfit (except for the HoiHoi Color line) having two unique animations on the main-menu screen for each trigger button. There’s also the voice module accesories that give HoiHoi-San different voice lines with different personalities, some voiced by pretty well known VAs, and head accesories for extra customization.
There’s a total of 17 different outfits to unlock through the shop and by completing missions, plus 10 accesories including voice modules and 3 special weapons to match their respective outfits.
All these items, except for the weapons, are purely cosmetic, mind you. They have no effect on gameplay and exist for the sake of looking at them. Actual weapons amount to 20, with guns all having their own type of ammo that is bought separately and which deplete through use on each mission (completed or not, if you shoot and quit, it keeps track of that :-) ). Not to mention, 3 permanent upgrades and 2 equipable head accessories with special features.
If you haven’t noticed, there is a LOT of buying in this game, if you are interested in trying out all your options of course. Which means you will be grinding for money replaying levels over and over just to get to the next cool weapon or outfit or whatever. You could stick to the same combo of meele weapons forver and never set foot in the shop again, if you really feel like it. But if you care for A ranks you will be grinding anyways.
Add to this the clumsy camera controls, language barrier, and a few frustrating levels here and there, and you got what you might call a game thats a bit of an “acquired taste” for modern gamer sensibilities. But, once you get past the several initial hurdles and get a good weapon combo, killing bugs becomes pretty fun!
All worth it for this.
Check this guide on GameFAQS if you want to play, its the only one around and its pretty thorough all things considered. Shout-outs, and thanks BakaOrochi. o7