I said this when I covered Zunzunkyou no Yabou, but one of the most important factors for gaining popularity in an arcade was to be as eye-catching as possible. Mortal Kombat is the best example I can come up with for eye-catching style with little substance, but then there’s something like Terminator 2 Judgment Day. It was absolutely godawful, but the two SMGs mounted to the arcade cabinet ensured some people are still indoctrinated into thinking it was actually good.

Even though the incentives behind having unique design and appearance should have driven innovation, it mostly just wound up creating a lot of different flavors of the same game. Pu-Li-Ru-La, for example, looks very unique but plays like a boilerplate beat-’em-up. Or less than that. Normally, I wouldn’t give away my opinion of a game before the first image break, but if you think I plan or edit these reviews for flow, you’re obviously not familiar with my writing method. My flow comes from the soul, and I’m not going to let something like revision and proofreading get in the way of it.

KEYWOUND KEY KEEPER

Pu-Li-Ru-La is a game that tells you its story through textboxes that disappear too quickly and are too poorly translated to actually take in. I think it’s something about a world where towns need to be keywound to get water, and the key to this one town gets stolen. So it won’t rain. Maybe? No, wait, the key keeps time moving. A key gets stolen. That much I understand.

Unlike most bemups where the graphics are gritty and you pile-drive a lot of denim-wearing thugs into the curb, Pu-Li-Ru-La has an art style that looks like a cross between a Ghibli movie and a Nelvana cartoon. Mostly.

I’m now just realizing that this game hit me too fast to really take in. The levels are practically microscopic. There are, like, six of them, and the one that stands out the most is the third, where suddenly there are digitized graphics of human faces everywhere. It is so disorienting. You don’t even have a moment to take in the weirdness before the level ends, and you’re onto something different.

And it’s not that the game is different. You’re still beating up robots, but suddenly, you’re in a desert or something. Aside from the weird face level, none of them are very memorable places to beat up robots.

BUSTER BOARD

The bosses are similar. Some of them stand out to me, but most are almost already forgotten. There is one, in particular, that I couldn’t get over. It’s some stereotypical witch doctor, but with a bull’s horn codpiece. I’m not exaggerating; the dude has a cone on his dick. I assume it’s so he can fuck the drywall whenever the urge hits him.

Hold on, I clearly need to play this game a second time.

I played the Japanese version this time. I think if you’re someone who knows about Pu-Li-Ru-La, you probably know that the North American version was censored. There’s a scene with a row of doors and a giant woman’s stockinged legs sticking out of two of them, with a door in the middle. It only appears in the Japanese version. I would normally give the developers the benefit of the doubt and say this was accidentally provocative, but then I remember the dude with the conical codpiece.

Okay, so a guy can be equipped for coitus with watermelons, but a giant woman can’t have monsters emerging from her crotch door? I’m not sure if that’s a double stand, but it’s strange.

NIGHTMARE MICROWAVES

Pu-Li-Ru-La feels like it was designed by someone who played Final Fight once five years prior and decided it would be better if it was infused with children’s nightmares. It’s combat system is entirely mystifying. You have an attack, jump, and magic button. However, you do different moves by pressing a direction and the attack button at the same time. This makes sense for down+attack and forward+attack, and that’s about as far as I got.

But I looked it up, and there are moves beyond that, but to call them unintuitive doesn’t begin to describe them. Listen to this: During Cane Thrust (down+attack), hold back, and press attack after Cane Thrust Finishes. What are you even talking about? Every time I tried to do it, the character would just turn around and do a normal attack.

The special attacks are similarly confusing, but not in how they’re used. You simply press the special button, and something will happen. However, there are different effects. Sometimes a pack of animals will stampede across the screen killing everything. Sometimes a masked man in his underpants and a clear plastic cape will jump out from a giant microwave, wrap all the enemies in tinfoil, then chuck them into the microwave. Wait. It might be plastic cling wrap and he’s wearing that as a cape.

What attacks happen is completely random. Well, not quite. It’s based on the last two digits of your score, which is just one method to get around the fact that computers can’t truly do random numbers.

But what is extremely baffling is which attacks are actually going to hurt a boss because it seems like none of them. Instead, the only real strategy available is to keep bopping the bosses with your magic wand until they die. Sometimes, this works too well and a boss puts up very little fight. Regardless, it makes the bosses kind of uninteresting, aside from their appearance. 

POO-LI-RU-LA HAHAHA! GOOD ONE!

Pu-Li-Ru-La feels like a project that was directed by its art designer. Sure enough, two people were credited as game directors (Hisakazu Kato and someone under the pseudonym Zawakichi), and both of them are listed first under “Character,” which seems like the catch-all category for artists. That’s not always a bad thing, because aesthetic-first games can be quite enjoyable. It does, at the very least, make Pu-Li-Ru-La memorable. However, there’s nothing behind the whimsy. It’s not a very good beat-’em-up. Not the worst, but not all that worthwhile.

It’s also shockingly short, even for an arcade game. Just north of 20 minutes. On the other hand, you can complete it without sinking too many quarters into the slot, but not in a good way. Not in an Elevator Action Returns sort of way.

In the end, the unique art style is the only thing that really makes Pu-Li-Ru-La worth playing. It’s an otherwise shallow beat-’em-up, but the cutesy and weird graphics just make you want to play it. And for an arcade game, making someone want to play it is half the battle. The other half is convincing someone to stick around long enough to drain their pockets, but when it’s shorter than a wash cycle, it doesn’t even give them a chance.

Pu-Li-Ru-La is like fucking drywall: weird and unsatisfying.

4/10

This review was conducted using the MAME emulator and a ROM. If it lands on the next Taito Milestones collection, she’d probably buy it anyway.