Game:

Beach Volley (1989)

Duration: 1:03:17

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12

Volley...ball! Again!

A G-MODE recreation / reissue of old mobile phone games, this introduces "G-Mode Archives 16: Beach Volley Girl Shizuku 2: Hishō-hen". They've released quite a few reissues for the PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch and it's good to see them getting ported from old defunct hardware for posterity. Of course, most of them have not aged well and this is more for novelty than anything else, but it's a commendable project and I hope many more old mobile phone games can be salvaged such as the BREW service titles, J2ME releases and older Android / iOS titles. There are a few games I really WANT to play such as Climax's 2006 iteration of "Lady Stalker" ("Waltz of the Labyrinth", which has practically been forgotten) and many Western Java games on mobile, to name a few, but this is a good starting point. There have been projects for years now slowly integrating old mobile titles for use in emulators.

That said, while this is a great recreation of 2008's "Mobile & Game Studio" title, it's a functional and improved sequel in a pretty nice series overall, with three other games (and a demo) that are related to each other. One title that will most likely NOT be covered is "Beach Volleyball Girl Shizuku Training Camp Edition" which was a free flash demo distributed for the "Pico Pico Mixi" (aka "pikomiku") between August to September of 2008. Said title essentially takes place somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd game as the two mains are doing intensive training. When you look back at games like these, it's truly impressive how far mobile phone gaming has come in such a short time (but at least these titles weren't predatory like many of the phone games we have today).

G-Mode has done what they need to on their part with a few basic configuration elements, the ability to scale up to 1080p and the ability to turn graphics filters on or off (though the in-game filter here is pretty good without making things blurry or too pixilated). The same jerky, low framerate is also here (for better or worse) and the game has gamepad support which doesn't seem to suffer any issues in terms of lag or latency. Even with the game's low framerate, it's easy to control for the most part, but you can't control things with maximum efficiency like most games in the 30/60FPS range. The story has a smidgen of depth for a series about volleyball and actually builds upon itself with each subsequent release. In this game, a year has passed since 16-year-old high school juniors, “Shizuku Asagiri” and “Haruna Minase”, won the "Cinderalla Cup". After winning the tournament and even defeating one of the former top players of Japan, Kamishima Ran (the masked rival), Ran becomes a coach and asks Shizuku and Haruna to play on the world stage instead of locally, travelling all over. The plot stays mostly centered around those two, but we do learn a little more about the other players as well, with several new characters making an appearance.

The game is 2-vs-2 paired volleyball and is easy to operate. Unlike real volleyball, the game is broken into sets where the player must reach a set amount of points first based on the rules (10 points for a single set by default now). Another thing that differs from real volleyball is that you have special volleyball powers and can take the outfits and skills from your defeated opponents to use in matches. By default, Shizuku has the "Phoenix Attack" (which is probably the cheapest, most versatile skill in the series against the CPU besides "Hellraise", so I never changed it other than to experiment). The reason I say Shizuku and no one else is because you can ONLY play as Shizuku... yeah. While the game has a Story, Versus and Collection mode, you can only select what opponent you want to face for practice, and you can't switch between your partner, which is why Shizuku learns skills in the first place (to minimize the need to use other characters). A ranking system now determines what you can unlock.

The actual gameplay is mostly what you'd expect: Blocking, Jumping, Serving and Spiking all make an appearance. As this was originally a phone title, the game automates a lot of the movements and positioning for you, but you will still want to go manual in small doses (especially when a special attack comes your way). The Collection Mode has expanded to include tan marks and character profiles, and the story has expanded to include a flow chart, so you can alter the course of your journey and get multiple endings now. Special attacks still function by jumping and pressing down on the pad, but it's much more responsive, and blocking at the net is faster and more satisfying. The graphics and sound are fairly good compared to other G-Mode titles and have been upgraded here with more detailed locales, better sprites and more animation (the camera moves more too now). It's a good follow-up to the first game, but the final game is the best. This is a video of some things in action.