Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
52. Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53. Mother (Famicom)
54. Famista 64 (N64)
55. Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58. Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
61. SimCity 2000 (N64)
62. Prototype (PS3)
63. Prototype 2 (PS3)
64. Final Fantasy X (PS2) *
65. Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
66. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2)
67. Crackdown (Xbox 360)
68. Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)
69. Alan Wake (Xbox 360) *
70. Dead to Rights (Xbox)
71. Medal of Honor (PS3)
72. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
73. Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) *
74. Mario Party 9 (Wii) *
75. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 (PS2)
76. Splashdown (PS2)
77. R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1)
78. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) *
79. Star Fox (SNES)
80. Kamen Rider: Battride War (PS3)
81. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GC) *
82. Final Fantasy VII: International Edition (PS1)
83. Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)
84. Final Fantasy IX (PS1) *
85. Pac-Man World (PS1)
86. Super Ghouls'n Ghosts (SFC)
87. Disney's Aladdin (SNES)
88. Mega Man: Wily Wars (MD)
89. The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse (SNES)
90. The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey & Minnie (SNES)
91. Mickey to Donald Magical Adventure 3 (SFC)
92. Disney's The Little Mermaid (NES)
93. Little Nemo: The Dream Master (NES)
94. Gunman's Proof (SFC)
95. Blaze & Blade: Busters (PS1)
96. Void Stranger (Steam)
97. Fortune Street (Wii)
98. Max Payne (PS2)
99. Momotaro Dentetsu V (PS1)
This is a series I’ve known about for a little while if for no other reason than a much older entry came packed in on the PC-Engine Mini. This particular entry, the 9th in the series (despite what the title would otherwise imply), is a game I only even have because it was packed in with my PS1 when I bought it a few years back. I enjoy economics board games like Fortune Street a lot, and after playing some of that recently, I was still in the mood enough for board games that I figured it was high time I finally give this a try. This game has no single-player mode, so it’s hard to say exactly what “beating” it really means, but I played a standard game against two of the easiest rank CPUs and won, and I’m pretty comfortable calling it there because playing more of it does not seem like it’ll change my opinion on things all that much XP. That game took me about 1.5 hours to go through, and the game length was five years.
Momotaro Dentetsu, meaning Momotaro Railway, is a spin-off of the old Hudson Soft-developed RPG Momotaro Densetsu (Legend of Momotaro), but given that this series has now outlived Hudson Soft itself by over 15 years (with a new one coming out very soon), it’s clear that what was once a mere spin-off became the master of the overall Momotaro series for them X3. While a game like Fortune Street can quite easily be compared to a board game like Monopoly, there isn’t really a (popular) good equivalent board game in English to compare Momotaro Dentetsu to (which from this point will be abbreviated MD). The main goal of the game is to have the most money out of all players at the end of the game, and you decide how many “years” a game will be when you’re setting it up with each year being 12 turns (as 1 turn is 1 month).
As the game’s name implies, this is all about Momotaro and railways, so the game board you’re playing on is one big map of Japan with its various railways and seaways (how else are you gonna get to places like Okinawa?) being the paths you can go across. There are different kinds of spaces on the board, with the big differences being the stations in each major city and then the other miscellaneous spaces. The miscellaneous spaces are generally divided (much like Mario Party would later do) into blue spaces that give you a random amount of money, red spaces that deduct a random amount of money, and yellow spaces that give you a random item card which can be used later. Station spaces, on the other hand, don’t give anything, but instead have various businesses to be invested in. Investing in businesses gives a big return at the end of the year, so even though it’s lowering your amount of cash on hand (and a bought investment can only be sold for half its purchase price should you fall into debt), you generally want as many of them as you can if you want to win.
At any given time, there’s always a target station to go towards that the game has randomly determined for all of you, and the first to reach that station gets a big cash prize. Cash is the name of the game here, so you really want to be the first one there. Not only that, but the person furthest from the target station upon it being reached will have the God of Poverty forced upon them, which is a heck of a penalty for (presumably) already struggling by rolling badly. The God of Poverty will pester you every turn by taking your money and destroying your investments, and he can only be made to go away upon another target station being reached and someone else being farther away from it than you that time. Alternatively, you can also force him on someone you’re passing by if you happen to land on the same space, so there’s plenty of doom and gloom to go around if you happen to roll well enough.
That’s really honestly it. There are some apocalypse mechanics that are introduced in this version as well as some side modes you can mess around with, but that doesn’t really change the fundamentals that the main board game is built upon even if they are silly fun to watch occur. MD is a Japanese sugoroku (board game) in the truest sense, as many classic Japanese board games operate by similar rules where the main meat of the game is just rolling a die to move around a board and have excitement from the randomness that enriches or devastates each player. MD is a game so shallow that it doesn’t really have a ton of strategy because *so* much of the game is simply decided by random chance. You never know what number you’re going to roll on a die, how much money you’ll gain or lose from a particular space, or what card you’ll get. Heck, most cards I saw even have significant random elements to them, so even items don’t have a very definite aspect to their mechanics.
That’s not to say there aren’t strategies you can employ *at all*, but, to use a poker metaphor, it’s more analogous to knowing “when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” Knowing what destinations are worth chasing and which are worth ignoring because you’re too far away is an important aspect of the game, but, and this is the most important part for how I play these games, it’s something that is a far more engaging aspect if you actually have friends to play with (just like poker). There are no mind games to play or strategies to try and read into when you’re just playing against the CPUs. The only thing that really differentiates harder from easier CPUs is “how often do they just sorta go away from the objective for unclear reasons” because there isn’t all that much “better” a more difficult CPU opponent can play (outside of just cheating because they’re the computer). If you’ve got buddies to mess around with, then I could see MD’s gameplay loop being rather fun, but there’s not much mechanical fulfillment to be had here by practicing against the CPU on its own.
The presentation of the game is thankfully very fun. It’s a real bummer that human players can only play as Momotaro in different colored trains, and the different CPU opponents are all locked to their respective difficulties (i.e. if you want to play against the easiest CPU difficulty, you’ll need to play against various Red Oni), because the designs for the different (non-)playable characters are very cool. The whole of the game’s singular map of Japan is really colorful and pretty looking, even if it’s hardly going to blow anyone away for what nice 2D games on the PS1 looked like in 1999. The music is fun and fits the hectic atmosphere really well, and my favorite graphical touch is when you arrive at a target destination. There’s a shot of the locals partying it up as your train enters town, and it’s a big, exaggerated display of an assortment of the things that city is most famous for.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I don’t have it in my heart to totally not recommend this game, because it’s competent enough for what it is even if only has one board and no real difference in playable characters beyond different colored trains. It’s no mystery why a game with such approachable mechanics, strong cultural aesthetic, and frantic gameplay has been so popular in this country for so many years (there’s basically never been a time that one of the Switch ones hasn’t been in the top 30 best selling digital games on Nintendo’s website, for example), although for my tastes, it’s pretty darn boring. If you roll with the kind of crowd that would find a super casual and luck-heavy game like this entertaining, then it’ll probably fit your bill pretty well, but if you’re someone who wants more of *some* kind of strategy in your video game board games (playing by yourself or otherwise), then you’re better off looking elsewhere.
