Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass (PC)
52.
Blasphemous 2 (PC)
53.
Max Payne 3 (PS3)
54.
Lemmings (SFC)
55.
Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu 3 (SFC)
56.
Crash Twinsanity (PS2)
57.
Coded Arms (PSP)
58.
Poy Poy (PS1)
59.
Tobal No.1 (PS1)
60.
Game Center CX: Arino no Chousenjou 2 (Switch)
61. Game Center CX: Sanchoume no Arino (3DS)
I’ve been a fan of Retro Game Challenge 1 longer than I’ve even known about Game Center CX itself. As a result, this is actually a game I’ve owned for a very long time, but I’ve just never gotten around to playing. Having just finished the second GCCX: Arino no Chousenjou game on my Switch, I wasn’t super sure on what I’d play next, so it seemed as good a time as any to finally use this momentum to knock out this longtime member of my backlog. I’d heard for a long time that this game was the worst of the three GCCX games, but I didn’t want to just live off of that assumption before I’d at least played it myself. Unfortunately for me, I was soon to discover that this game’s reputation is actually incredibly well deserved, and I can verify right now that it’s easily the weakest of the three GCCX games by a very significant margin XD. Not doing any post-game stuff (or really much of anything more than was necessary to see the credits), it took me about 14.5 hours to beat every challenge in the main story and beat the game playing on my Japanese 2DS XL (so I couldn't test any 3D stuff, of what seemingly little there is).
The first two Arino no Chousenjou games (which I’ll be referring to hereafter to their English monikers, Retro Game Challenge or RGC for simplicity’s sake) were made by IndiesZero, but they were busy when it came time to make this third game, so this was made by G.rev instead. G.rev have taken a fairly different approach to the RGC formula than IndiesZero did, and that applies to the story as well. Rather than you, the player character, getting attacked by Demon King Ariinoh and thrown back in time to the 80’s to hang with kid Arino, this time it’s backwards. As the “Sanchoume no Arino” (Arino of Third Street) title implies (or rather doesn’t), this time Arino is thrown back to the 80’s to the little town of Third Street, which is where you live. You’re told by a magical voice in the sky that Arino has amnesia, and he can only regain his memories by completing the various challenges given to you in the (fictional) retro games you’ve got to play. It’s certainly very different in literal content to the previous games, but I don’t want to knock this points *just* for being different.
What I *will* knock it points for is that it’s just all around a less well executed conceit for a story. The town of Third Street is populated by a bunch of wacky characters all based on regulars from the GCCX show. It’s a pretty big cast, so it means we get a lot of representation from the various producers, staff, and ADs from the show’s first decade, but that’s a double-edged sword. So many characters means no one gets all that much screen time, so most characters are just boiled down to one or two memorable jokes that repeat each time they appear (from cameraman Abe’s coolness to the unfunny-every-time fat jokes about Watanabe). It’s a *lot* of in-jokes for fans of the show, and the game even provides a sort of encyclopedia to reference from the title screen that’ll explain them to you as you unlock each new one. It’s a neat touch for fans of the series, but it ultimately still adds up to a lot of shallow reference comedy. I normally wouldn’t criticize a licensed game for leaning on its license like this so much, but given how well the earlier two RGC games do their comedy without needing to lean entirely on the source material like this, I can’t help but compare this unfavorably to what came before. If this had just been the first GCCX game, I would’ve called this a noble enough effort to bring the humor of the show to an interactive medium, but given that it’s the *third* entry in this series, I cannot find it reasonable to be that soft on it.
Sadly, that extends to the quality of the in-game fake retro games as well, and to a far greater extent. Just like the earlier RGC games, there are eight 80’s-inspired retro games that G.rev have made that you’ll need to complete challenges for to complete the game. The main difference between the older RGC games and this one, however, is that where the first two RGC’s fake retro games were *inspired* by Famicom era games, trying to evoke the fun and fashion of them while adding polish and refinements from the intervening decades, G.rev’s fake retro games seem to misunderstand the assignment. RGC 3’s fake retro games don’t so much feel like they’re polished, modern reimaginings of classic retro titles so much as they feel like they’re trying to evoke the feeling of classic retro games as they were, warts and all. G.rev have recreated too accurately the feeling of mid-tier 80’s video games, and they’re appropriately not actually that fun to play. The overwhelming feeling of playing virtually all of them is what it feels like playing wannabe titles on the Master System, PC-Engine, early Mega Drive, or even the Famicom itself that were very clearly just trying to ape the most popular titles available on the Famicom without actually understanding what made those games fun in the first place.
There’s Roomie, which is a Mario Bros.-like arcade game that’s got a clever gimmick but is ultimately way too unforgiving and awkward to play to be nearly as addictive or fun as its inspiration. Then there’s Wing Hero which is a pretty unimpressive but competent sidescrolling shmup. Given that G.rev’s specialty is arcade-style shmups, it makes sense that the games they’re best at here are in that genre too. Zouma’s Hidden Treasure starts off as a fun sort of mix between a maze game and Tower of Druaga, but it’s far too slow and plodding to actually be anything but tedious beyond the first two minutes. Saurus Boy is a competent enough action game, but it gets repetitive and boring very fast because the movement and stage design are so lifeless and dull. Breakshoot is one of the few standout games in the collection, in that it’s actually worth talking about. This is a fake Neo Geo game that’s basically a combo of Breakout and Wind Jammers, and even though the single player mode leans a bit too much into the former (so it drags a fair bit), this is a game that’d probably be great fun in multiplayer due to the similarities to the latter. Then there’s Zoliates, which is a decent enough vertical shmup even if it’s nowhere near as good as something like GunDuel from RGC 2. Finally, you’ve got your Final Fantasy-inspired RPG, Blood of Dragon, and your Zelda-style action/adventure game Nejima Kingdom.
While it’s a neat idea on paper to make a more FF-style RPG in a RGC game after the previous two went for Dragon Quest-inspired RPGs, in actual practice, it demonstrates very adequately why the previous two games did DQ-like games. Blood of Dragon is a very mechanically bland turn-based RPG that also has a TON of story. There is so much story to read so constantly that it ends up dragging out the experience by a TON, and this game seriously outstays its welcome. The challenges for this game take so long that I ended up playing this game for over 6.5 hours, so it was nearly half of my entire play time of RGC 3 all on its own. It commits a ton of sins of old mediocre FF-wannabes (padded dungeon design, poorly balanced encounter designs & wild swings in difficulty, and a far too high miss rate to name a few) and, to its credit, really accurately recreates the vibe of playing an old, mediocre RPG. It just doesn’t have the excuse to make all the mechanical missteps it does because it was released in 2014 and not 1991.
Nejima Kingdom is a Zelda-like, and a totally adequate one. It reminds me of competitors to Zelda 1 that I’ve played such as Neutopia. It’s got some issues with backtracking, sure, but it’s definitely one of the stronger games in the collection if only because there’s nothing glaringly tedious or bad about it, but that’s not exactly high praise (maybe it just seems that much better after going through a slog like Blood of Dragon). I could go on about the various issues in these games for a lot longer, but pretty much all of the pains of playing them come back to the same fundamental problems. It’s a lot of “that thing you’re already familiar with but with more”, but the “more” very rarely leads up to anything approaching “better”, let alone even “good”. What you’re left with is a collection of underwhelming games that are very wanting in both charm and fun, and the challenges you have to clear rarely do anything but badly exacerbate the existing issues with these games.
An innovation (if you can even call it that) between this game and the previous two is that you’re sometimes actually given more than one challenge possible to complete at a time. This seems quite convenient and a great quality of life improvement, but then the reality of the implementation sets in. In a far worse version of a not unheard of problem from earlier Retro Game Challenge games, the challenges in RGC 3 are serially too focused on earlier parts of the game as well as too respectively time consuming. You’re also kicked out of the game upon completing a challenge, so there’s ultimately not a ton of point to having multiple open at once between the slight convenience of needing to redo very slightly less content. This doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, because this still amounts to replaying the earlier parts of these already slow-paced games ad nauseum. It makes it that much harder to ignore how repetitive and frustrating the games are when you’ve gotta bash your head against their earlier sections over and over again, and this is only made worse by the increasing number of challenges per game as things progress (while you get away with only three challenges in the earlier games, you’ve got to put up with five per game by the end of it all).
There’s also the new approach to challenges this game brings, because in a big change from previous games, the challenges in RGC 3 are just that: challenging. I was routinely surprised at just how merciless some of these challenge requirements were given how hard/unfair the games themselves already felt, and that never really lets up as you progress from one game to another. Like in earlier RGC games, there are *some* cheats codes or secrets that you can learn in-universe on how to make things a bit easier if you’re struggling, but in usual fashion for this game, it’s somehow far worse than ever. For starters, unlike in the previous games, you can’t reference any of the hints you’ve been given while you’re mid-game. In older RGC games, you could back away from the TV and reference manuals, magazines, or Arino himself for info on how to get past where you were stuck, but RGC 3 makes that completely impossible.
In fact, you can’t just not reference the information you’ve collected mid-game. You can’t reference *anything* mid-game. If you want to look at the “manual” (basic controls share a menu with your learned secrets, as this game doesn’t have actual manuals or magazines to look through like the previous games did), check how a code is input, or even just check what the challenge you’re currently working on even *is*, you’ve got to completely quit out of the game, most likely resetting your current progress, to check it. This turns into quite the trap for early players as well, as many challenges are actually remarkably unintuitive by only looking at their name. It’s frequently totally impossible to actually understand the requirements of a respective challenge by the title of it alone, so if you don’t look at the detailed description asap, you’re going to be doing nothing but wasting your time trying to complete it right away. If you’re anything like me, that’ll happen a good few times before you’re done with the earlier parts of the game and realize that poorly described challenge titles are the rule, not the exception.
It’d be *more* of a pain to not be able to access cheat codes or such while you’re mid-game if this were either of the previous RGC games, but this game actually has very few cheat codes, secrets, or such staples of retro gaming. While there’s two or three in total across all games, the much more common method of making things easier for yourself is just having the game do it for you. This is a very negative change from the earlier games, but it takes two forms. One is in the form of automatically scaling difficulty. Some challenges will just get easier the more times you fail them, and you have no way of turning that off or affecting it. For example, if you’re struggling in the rather merciless (and tedious) high score challenges in Zoliates, the high score you’re meant to beat will just gradually go down each time. While I did somewhat appreciate this, as it’s a very repetitive series of very difficult challenges replaying the same in a rather middling shmup, it felt like the opportunity to actually improve, to just play the game more, was being taken away from me with no choice on my part. Sure, I didn’t enjoy playing Zoliates first level or two over and over again trying to do a series of timed score bonuses perfectly, but I would’ve at least preferred the *option* to make it easier rather than the game just deciding that for me.
One thing the game does let you decide whether to use or not is the latter form of challenge assistance: just doing it for you. The in-universe explanation for this is that (much like Arino sometimes does on the show) one of your friends (kid versions of the show’s various ADs) will offer to just play the game for you. You’ll get a summary of what they managed to do (whether just doing the level grinding for you or getting you past a particularly difficult part), and then you have the controls handed back to you. While I don’t think this is, in theory, a poor idea, it’s such an aggressive step down from the earlier games’ methods of making games/challenges more approachable that I can’t help but dislike this lack of effort on the game’s part. For starters, the former method, the automatically adjusting difficulty, is just a clumsy way of making up for the poor/overly difficult challenge and game design in the first place.
Second and more importantly, the latter method is a really bad-feeling way to progress in something you’re struggling with. In previous games, yeah, you had secrets and cheat codes you could choose to use, but it was still *you* who had to do them. You got them from magazines just like you would’ve back in the time period this game is harkening back to (and taking place in), and it was up to you to utilize them in a way that would still let you win. You may’ve had a level select, secret level warp, or 99 life code, but you still had to get to that ending yourself. It was a much more elegant and player-centric way of letting you choose how difficult you wanted a respective challenge to be, and RGC 3’s method completely throws that away.
Letting the game just skip the “boring/bad parts” for you begs the question of why they even bothered putting in those boring/bad parts in the first place. More than that, letting an in-universe CPU solve a problem for you is a completely different experience from letting a real-world friend you’re going through a game *with* get you past a difficult part. One is an aspect of community in gaming, working cooperatively with a real person to achieve a goal together, and the other is just telling the video game that you want to play it less and receiving a positive answer in return. I never used any of these “play the game for me” options because I wanted the fresh experience of how bad or difficult something was. Yeah, it’s absolutely true that I would’ve had a better/faster time playing Blood of Dragon had I just let the game play itself for me, but if I’m going to just let the game play itself for me, then why am I playing the video game at all (fun or not)? In short, the bumbling of accessibility options to make the quite hard challenges/games easier is an embarrassing leap backwards from earlier games, and even just reusing RGC 2’s method of “you have the ability to skip a challenge you’re struggling with if you want to” would’ve been far better than this.
The aesthetics of this game are a mixed bag. For the fake retro games themselves, they’re largely alright. Most are passable graphically, even if some like Saurus Boy take a more uncanny valley approach of “graphics like newer consoles, animations like older consoles” which make them look less than nice. The actual town of Third Street and everyone in it, however, I frankly think look quite poor. Everything is flat and weirdly washed out, and it's the kind of thing that'd make me think something was wrong with my TV were I not playing it on a handheld where that kind of thing isn't possible. They’ve gone for a sort of paper craft-looking design for everyone, but it mostly looks more like a cheap, low-animation style chosen for cost-saving measures than it does a more dedicated graphical style. I’m not saying that was the reason they chose it, mind you, but that’s certainly how it comes off with just how bad it looks. However, as negative as I’ve been towards so much of this game, one thing I can’t be negative about is the music. The tunes in this game are largely quite solid, and it’s a testament to their quality that, no matter how bored I so often was, I almost never had a podcast or something on in the background because the music was just that solid.
Verdict: Not Recommended. This isn’t just worse than the other two GCCX games. It’s a bad time, full stop. It’s a tedious, frustrating experience that lives deeply in the shadow of its two older siblings in both the design of its games and the use of its license. G.rev seem woefully out of their depth in designing these fake retro games. They have terribly misunderstood the assignment at hand and made a collection of games sometimes that, while charming in its references (like the coin machines you can play at the candy shop, just like Arino always does in the show), is never close to adequate when it comes to the actual execution. Game after game feel like just a series of boxes were ticked to put them together without any meaningful thought given to what actually makes that particular genre appealing (either from the perspective of gamers in the 80’s or from a modern viewpoint). This a game people were correct to be unhappy with, and the English-speaking reviewers who advised this game be avoided were absolutely right.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
