Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (Everybody Get Up, It's Time to Slam Now)

Ever since I posted about OFF, people have been saying: "You should write about another obscure indie RPG with a bizarre premise, a post-apocalyptic setting, and a protagonist who plays sports!" Actually, no, I don't think anyone has said that, ever. But in any case, you're all in luck! Introducing Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, or as it's properly called, Tales of Game's Studios Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa.

Really.

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden follows the story of Charles Barkley, real-life professional basketball player extraordinaire, living in an alternate timeline ravaged by the Cyberpocalypse. B-ball was once one of the Post-Cyberpocalypse's few joys, but all of that changed when Barkley performed a dangerous maneuver called the "Chaos Dunk" in the middle of a heated b-ball game; the resulting cataclysmic death and destruction led to the sport being banned and many of its greatest stars hunted down and executed. Barkley was one of the few survivors, but the world was never the same without b-ball, and he still carries the weight of his sins.

And so the stage is set for an adventure that is essentially one long running joke about basketball, the Internet, and the RPG genre as a whole. Honestly, without a premise like that, this would be a pretty ordinary game. You explore dungeons, fight monsters, level up to fight stronger monsters, and eventually get to fight some really strong monsters to win the game. The environments are simple, with few puzzles of any sort to be found, and while combat mechanics are surprisingly solid, they're rarely used to much effectiveness. All in all, it would be an average RPG.

Except, y'know, it's Charles Barkley doing all that stuff.

But this is not an average RPG. This is Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and with a name like that, presentation is everything. Not that the presentation here is good, mind you; for starters, virtually all of the game's graphics are "borrowed" from various other games and shoved together haphazardly (although the soundtrack is both mostly original and pretty sweet). No, every moment of the game, from the moment the theme from Space Jam strikes up on the title screen, is devoted to pushing the sheer ridiculousness of the Post-Cyberpocalyptic world as far as it can go. Nearly everything is devoted to the glory of b-ball, from the real-life basketball stars who populate both this world and the next, to the bouncing and dribbling ghosts and referees who make up the bulk of Barkley's foes, to a character whose skin is replaced with basketball leather. References abound to the great teams and b-ballers of the past, as well as to the aforementioned Space Jam, that '90s movie where Michael Jordan teamed up with the Looney Tunes to beat aliens in a basketball game. (By the way, the events of that movie are canon to Barkley's plotline, and provide an important plot point.) It's all about as cheesy and over-the-top as you can imagine.

Our heroes visit the B-Ball Dimension.

When Barkley isn't hamming it up on the court, it's parodying those RPG games that all the nerds are playing off the court. The plot could be described like nearly any other game: our strong and masculine hero with a dark and troubled past makes new friends, faces betrayal, and overcomes impossible odds to defeat a mysterious villainous organization set on acquiring a mystical artifact with the potential to destroy worlds. Sure, said hero is Charles Barkley, and said mystical artifact is a scientifically-engineered basketball, but when this is stripped away, Barkley shows that RPGs in general are just as ridiculous already. Several specific common tropes show up and are quickly slammed, particularly the tendency of many games to bring up new plotlines out of nowhere and drop them just as fast, and throwing in new antagonists and dei ex machina just to shake things up. The result is a story that, while obviously flawed, shows a clear sense of self-awareness that keeps things fresh and humorous. Indeed, the impression that I got from much of the game is that the developers could have made a really great game if they wanted to, but instead intentionally chose to create Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.

Unfortunately, Barkley is not the perfect parody one would hope for after seeing such a title affixed to such a game. Its sense of humor is very referential, both to professional basketball and to the video gaming community. The things I "got" gave me plenty a chuckle, and even some of the more obscure in-jokes had enough context to still have hilarious effect. However, referential humor is bound to fail at some point or another. References to great basketball players and sports events were generally lost on me, and even as a self-described Person Who Cares Way Too Much About Video Games, I still found myself running to Google on occasion to figure out just what an Angelique: Tenkuu no Chinkonka is and why I should care. And generally, jokes that require the recipient to run to Google to figure out the punchline don't work.

At least I learned a lot about Ghost Dad.

More importantly, though, there are times when Barkley's attempts to be wacky and off-the-wall cross a line and become offensive. Much of the dialogue is filled to the brim with swear words for no real reason, which could be interpreted as making fun of games that do similar to make themselves seem "edgier", but here it just gets annoying (and definitely not child-friendly). While the game generally tries to avoid straying into racist or sexist territory, it's to be noted that there are approximately three major female characters in the entire game - a game whose all-male player party is made up of four people. Being a game about pro basketball, one might be tempted to give it a pass here (pun absolutely intended), but it's still pretty jarring when the number of women in the game is about equal to the number of people named Barkley. And insensitivity even extends to the gameplay itself, where standard RPG status effects like "poisoned" and "confused" are replaced with real-world conditions such as "diabetes" and "Asperger's" and other things which are generally considered Not A Joke.

I don't want to end this article on a low note, so have this picture.

Is Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden a good game? That's certainly debatable. But Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is not about being a good game. It's about slams and jams, about the squeak of shoes on the court and the bouncing beat of b-balls on blacktops, the three-point shots that tie up the game in the fourth quarter and the slam-dunks that write and rewrite the history books. And it's a game about being a bad game. Whether or not it's successful at failure or just plain a failure is...also debatable. If you want a good RPG, go try out OFF, or Star Stealing Prince, or Undertale. But if you want an RPG where Charles Barkley can take on a trenchcoat-wearing Michael Jordan in space with nothing but two double-dribbled b-balls and raw athletic skill, look no further than Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden.

Oh, and be on the lookout for The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. To be released in 2013. Mark your calendars now.