Developer(s): Onion Soup Interactive
Publisher: PQube
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One
Hours played: 15 hours
Oxford University, 2019. A bunch of nerds decide not to go clubbing that night because they have five hundred essays to do the next morning. A cup of warm chai in somebody’s room seems to be the order of the evening. Butts in chairs or on cushions, chai in hands, a voice utters those immortal words: “Let’s play Nippon Marathon!”
This was a very common scenario during my uni years. For a steeply-priced, content-light, and ugly party game for weebs on a console expressly designed for, and loaded with, quality multiplayer titles, Nippon Marathon was always a strong contender for our evening entertainment. It’s the game everyone wants to play when I relax with my friends over some video games.
Critics don’t seem to have shared our enthusiasm, however. A reviewer at Video Chums argued that “its annoying gameplay is only tolerable in short bursts”. Nintendo Life stated “those eye-wateringly janky visuals […] and the nature of physics-driven racing are an acquired taste that most people are going to tire of, fast”. A reviewer at Cubed3 went as far as to call the game “The kind of ‘wacky’ that is trying far too hard to be funny and failing in every way […] Absolute shovelware”. Ouch. In total contrast, one look at the game’s Steam page reveals that Nippon Marathon has struck a chord with consumers, receiving ‘overwhelmingly positive’ reviews (90%+ of user reviews rated the game positively). So why the disparity? Why do my pals and I find ourselves coming back to this void of quality assurance time and time again?
After pouring in way too many hours into this oddity, both with casual party gamers and hardcore enthusiasts, I have an answer. Not necessarily a satisfactory one, but an answer nonetheless. It’s Nippon Marathon’s jank, the target of much critical ire, the neutering of any kind of strategy. It’s the culturally aware and irreverent set dressing that asks players not to take anything seriously, not to question wonky collision detection or expect things to work like this is a video game or something.
Let’s get the genuinely and pretty objectively bad stuff out of the way
Game journos aren’t pulling criticisms out of thin air when they talk smack about Nippon Marathon. It’s got some serious problems owing to readability, stability, and predictability. While the game is trying to be jank by design, this doesn’t excuse some quirks that genuinely detract from the user experience.
Nippon Marathon has some of the least readable level design of any platformer I’ve played. There are moments – particularly in Mura Village, Kawa River, and – where the way forward is a total crapshoot. You’ll take what appears to be an alternate path for your character to double over in pain, telling you that you weren’t supposed to jump on that rock or walk on that paththat looks identical to the correct path forward. The isometric viewpoint makes depth perception a more threatening opponent than Handsome Hazuki. While it is hilarious to see your friend dive into the side of a building or completely miss a ferris wheel pod, it won’t be winning the game any level design points any time soon. Some of these courses are so baffling that the CPU opponents actually give up and started doing doughnuts in the middle of the street. On two occasions I’ve seen a CPU try to take a shortcut across a pond in Mura Village using the pineapple balloon item (you know, actually using the item for its intended purpose) for the camera to snap away from them and boot them out of the round. Imagine getting a mushroom in Mario Kart and using it to hit an off-road ramp but just as you reach the apex of your jump the game snatches you away, telling you you went out of bounds. The cacophonic sound design only serves to exacerbate these problems. The bridge in Kawa River will break apart, entire streets will bend under seismic activity, all without any sound effects or fanfare, but as soon as someone wants to entice you into a restaurant your ears will bleed from their cries. The game’s audiovisual design fails to communicate even the most basic information to the player. This can lead to some whacky experimentation and player-driven comedy, but more often than not it feels cheap and unpolished.
Speaking of cheap and unpolished: the performance. On the Switch, the platform Nippon Marathon is begging to be played on as the optimal local multiplayer machine, the game chugs super hard and loads for an eternity between courses (which is funny considering how ugly the game’s character models and environments are when they do eventually load). I cannot speak for the PC version but I assume issues like these are less prevalent. Something I know the PC version can’t fix without modding is some of this collision detection. There’s more random tripping in this game than Super Smash Bros. Brawl (what a nerdy reference), but sometimes you’ll collide into a piece of geometry and keep running no worse for wear. Sometimes a watermelon powerup will land nowhere near you but you’ll go careening into the stratosphere. Sometimes, you’ll run through a rice paddy into a sake factory to find that the interior just hasn’t loaded, leaving you to slam into a black wall. Sometimes you’ll jump off a bus in Super Ichiba Sweep and phase straight through the floor, forfeiting the round. The unpredictability of the physics engine is a great driver of the game’s comedy but it essentially neuters any attempt at something resembling strategy because you never truly feel in control. Some randomness in games – in say, a roguelike – is good, adding replay value and testing the player’s knowledge of the mechanics on the fly, but those mechanics need to be readable and consistent. In Nippon Marathon, most of the time I feel like I should be handling the game with gloves lest it should explode my Switch.
So, to summarise: this is a platformer with illegible level design, inconsistent physics, and a habit of collapsing in on itself. Add to this the fact that it only has eight levels that take five minutes apiece; there’s no online multiplayer but given the game’s performance in local multiplayer that’s probably a blessing in disguise; the story mode is lackluster, recycling the same eight maps in the same order for the four main racers with slowly-loading cutscenes with pitiful presentation sprinkled in between. By all accounts, Nippon Marathon should be a disaster, right?
It is. A beautiful disaster.
Embrace the chaos
In the moment, when actually playing Nippon Marathon with my giggling pals, Play-Doh graphics, busted levels, and nonsensical geometry are the furthest things from my mind.Most of the above criticisms melt away in the right party game setting. It’s far easier to forgive the game’s inconsistencies when they’re the source of such merriment amongst your mates. Much like Takeshi’s Castle and other Japanese game shows, their light-heartedness and chaotic setups are charming enough to forgive some cut corners.
The levels might be impossible to read sometimes but they do a good job at providing funny scenarios. Cheering your friend on as their sweating character barely manages to stay in the round and then laughing uncontrollably when their foot grazes a shiba inu, causing them to assume the fetal position until the camera sweeps them away is a great time. Oncoming cyclists will plough into you without mercy. You’ll jump off a bullet train onto a herd of charging cows and then from those cows onto another bullet train. Monkeys will jump on your head and start throwing banana peels behind you as you run. Pressing Y in mid-air propels your character forward in a dive but also into the mercy of the game’s physics. Seeing everyone fling themselves in unison into a lane of shopping trolleys or down a steep hill is tonnes of fun. The developers knew this because there are a lot of downhill sections or vertical chasms that can be cleared with a good ol’-fashioned dive. This is to say nothing of the random events that can play at the beginning of a new round. It can be a pachislot that gives you an item; you can get kidnapped by a half-naked Australian stereotype who forces you to run through his lab rat maze, or something more involved. At times, the famous news reporter Wedy Jones will descend from the heavens with her jetpack and interview the contestants. She will ask a question and players then have to form an answer with up to four parts of a sentence mapped to the face buttons. The only catch is that each option can only be chosen once, so you have to fight over the answers to make something intelligible. The results aren’t always great, but when they are they get a hearty laugh out of me.
On top of all this chaos is the sound design. I’ve mentioned some of the disappointing omissions of sound effects, but in general the soundscape is a hectic treat of broken records. Every spectator you run into has one of two screams but there will also be times when a scream at the end of a race keeps playing in the background while the next course loads. After the end of a race, as results are being tallied up, you’re still in full control of your character and can crash into the spectators beyond the finish line. This also applies to the award ceremony, where you can hop off the podium and punt the crowd around the room at 2 frames per second. In fact, there are a lot of odd places where the player is still in control of their character. At the beginning of a race, players can spam the duck move to contort the racers in bizarre ways. Since realising that holding this button down while running looks like Naruto running, I’ve gone entire races without letting it go.
At least 90% of my enjoyment of this game has to go to the commentator, who will regularly chime in in broken English to give such glowering observations as “I’m not quite sure, what to make of this” and “Snuguru Maestro ran straight into that object”. In true Nippon Marathon fashion, however, the commentator’s lines often cut each other off as he tries to keep up with the mania ensuing onscreen. According to the developer Andy Mabin, for the game’s soundtrack “he made the musicians listen to some of his favourite soundtracks from games like Persona 5, Katamari Damacy, and Jet Set Radio”. I can definitely hear Jet Set Radio and Katamari Damacy, but I think that’s doing Persona 5 a bit of a disservice. Jokes aside, the J-pop and J-rock tracks are super infectious and set the perfect tone for a crazy race. The game’s final level is this Kaiju-inspired romp through a city with giant contestants and J-pop blaring out and it’s just a dream.
Nippon Marathon’s extra modes definitely deserve a mention here.
Two words. Trolley. Bowling.
For whatever godforsaken reason, one of the crowdfunding goals for Nippon Marathon was an extra mode in which you fling yourself into a trolley down a ramp to play bowling. This minigame is almost worth the price of admission alone. Once you realise that the player character functions as a second ball and that you don’t need to be in the trolley, that’s when the serious fun begins. With this tech, it’s possible to score some crazy splits that would be impossible in conventional bowling. And of course, you can get up and run around in the gutter and run into pins you may have missed on the way down, because why not. The extras menu hides some neat settings, too. You can turn off items for some hardcore, MLG Pro Nippon Marathon, or play with only one type of item. There’s even a Devil May Cry ‘turbo mode’ setting with makes the whole game run faster. As soon as I found that, I whacked it on and never looked back.
There is genuinely good content in Nippon Marathon and laughs to be had. It’s an eclectic audiovisual experience that feels unique in video games. Its chaos isn’t for everything, but if you can find the humour in it, then you’re in for a good time.
Easter eggs that will make you say “nani?!”
If racing and trolley bowling were all you did in Nippon Marathon, the story would end here, but for some unfathomable reason, the game also has a popularity system that contributes to your score on top of the platforming. If you’re a weeb like my friends and I, these mechanics add a whole new game’s worth of replay value. Essentially, certain actions during a race will add or subtract from a point multiplier that is applied at the end of a course. Each of these popularity triggers is a kind of easter egg whether they’re inspired by Japanese culture (making sure to return bows, crashing into giant-headed mascots, or accepting an item from a geisha) or simply making yourself look silly (diving from high platforms, knocking over commuters, avoiding spectators, shiba inu, and monkeys). Some are obvious but some are so obscure and context-sensitive that there’s no way you’re going to discover them naturally, or even expect them from this janky little party game. This is a game that can barely program floors, yet it has the depth and complexity to penalize its players for consuming an item on a train because eating or drinking on public transport is frowned upon in Japan! Every time I play Nippon Marathon, I discover a new popularity mechanic and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
So why is this in the game at all? Stopping to observe social norms hardly complements the primary aim of getting to the goal as quickly as possible. The popularity meter is so small in a game that’s already so hectic that you won’t even notice it fluctuating half the time. In an interview with PC Gamer, producer Andy Madin said “I was thinking about whether or not I’d accidentally managed to offend people, because I don’t have first-hand experience of Japanese culture. All of the game is through the eyes of someone who has never actually been there.” Madin goes on to explain that the popularity system exists purely as a gesture to show Japanese players that he did his research and was serious about engaging with aspects of their culture. If that’s not the cutest thing ever, I don’t know what is.
So out of the two main mechanics – racing and popularity – the former is too unpredictable to be competitive and the latter too esoteric to gel well with the running. This conflict between systems has the potential to make or break the game, and transform it from a poorly thought-out mess to a happy accident. The PC Gamer article continues, “On finishing, players obtain badges based on certain actions they performed, being rewarded for things like popularity, bravery, and smell. He hoped this would foster camaraderie between players, as they reflect on the round.” I think that word “camaraderie” really hits the nails on the head. Nippon Marathon excels in sparking conversation, in provoking cries of “did you see that?” or “woah, I had no idea you could do that!” Playing this game, players very quickly come to a consensus that the physics are too broken and the popularity system too complex for points to mean anything, so they instead derive enjoyment from experimentation with those mechanics. It’s a team exercise in breaking a video game and doing stupid things to see just how deep its culturally inspired popularity mechanics go. Its levels are jungle gyms designed for engineering gags and pratfalls. It’s a magical mystery tour through a warped gameshow version of the land of the rising sun in which a feeling of communal confusion reigns, a feeling of camaraderie.
A marathon, not a sprint
Had this game had a bigger budget and team working on it, online multiplayer, more content and customization options, I genuinely believe Nippon Marathon could have been a kind of Fall Guys before Fall Guys: a battle royale platformer with loveable characters plastered all over Twitch. The appeal is there, and while it’s not the universal, marketable, every-brand-ever-will-want-to-be-associated-with-it phenomenon kind of appeal, it’s a Takeshi’s Castle-inspired, physics-based platformer with a lot of exploitable (and unexploitably random) jank. Hell, both games share a luminous pink, green, blue, and orange colour scheme. I wouldn’t want Nippon Marathon to sacrifice its eccentricity and obsession with Japan to become Fall Guys, but I can’t help noticing similarities in tone and gameplay between them – even if Fall Guys has more competitive merit to it. If you’re feeling all beaned out, maybe give Nippon Marathon a go, at a socially distanced gathering or with the people you live with, of course.
I think there is absolutely a place for games like Nippon Marathon, these shamelessly broken comedy simulators masquerading as competitive party games. More than any other local multiplayer game I’ve played, Nippon Marathon has this equalising randomness that narrows the gulf between gamers hardcore and casual. It asks us to accept everything that life throws at us, from Shiba Inus to meteoric watermelons, and run with it.
Special thanks go to my sister Amy for running through this crazy experience one more time to collect screenshots and footage.
Edit: between the time I wrote this and the time of publication, I was contacted by the community manager for Nippon Marathon 2. I genuinely had no idea that a sequel was in the works and I was so excited to suggest potential new features. If you have enjoyed Nippon Marathon yourself or play it on the back of reading this article, consider donating to Nippon Marathon 2‘s Kickstarter and following Onion Soup Interactive’s Twitter account for updates.