Sega Ages Ichidant-R

Genre: Arcade / Minigame Collection

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Ichidant-R is a Minigame Collection originally released to Japanese arcades in 1994. This release marks the first time a console version of any game in this series has been made available outside of Japan, and it’s also the first time that any game in this series has been available to play in America.

The paper-thin premise that forms the motif of this series is that players play as a knight seeking to rescue a princess being held captive by enemy knights, and players do this by… playing minigames that have nothing to do with that. Yeah, the game’s theme just gets dropped as soon as you enter a minigame, which can range from a Wild West shooting gallery, a game of counting fish, or spotting the difference between a bunch of crackers.

The visuals for this game are decent enough given the game’s age, but the music is pretty terrible. The minigames themselves are fairly inconsistent in their styles, although one could argue that they’re eclectic in much the same way the Wario Ware minigames are.

Having said that… these games are not anywhere near as engaging as Wario Ware’s are. Firstly, there’s only 20 of them, meaning that you’re guaranteed to see repeats in a single play session. Secondly, a large portion of these games are variations on “remember the sequence” and “find the pattern”-style games. There are a few that require some quick reflexes, but for the most part you’ll be doing a lot of “spot the matching pair” and “repeat what you just saw”.

Developer M2 has done what they can to polish this release, bringing us their usual slew of extra features, like save states, leaderboards, numerous display options, local and online multiplayer play, Japanese and international versions of the arcade game, and even the version of the game released on Japanese Mega Drive (their version of the Genesis). Unfortunately, the Mega Drive game hasn’t been translated to English. Even more unfortunately, that’s the only version that supports 4 players – the other versions support only 2.

I’d by lying if I said that Ichidant-R didn’t have its own sort of charm, and it does make for an interesting piece of videogame history, but as an actual game, this is pretty terrible. Only 20 minigames, many of them simple memorization or pattern-identification games, and a lousy and inconsistent presentation make this a terrible game that’s ultimately only worthwhile for collectors.

tl;dr – Ichidant-R is a Minigame Collection originally released to Japanese arcades in 1994, with this release marking the game’s first time being sold in America. Unfortunately, with only 20 minigames, and many of those games variations on memorization and pattern-recognition games, there’s not much of interest here to anyone other than a diehard Sega collector.

Grade: D-

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