Shout Out / Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden

Warning: The shout-outs you are about to read are canon.

• To start with, the game's full title ends with "Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa".
  • As a meta: the developers are named "Tales of Game's Studios".
• The title screen has a rotating series of messages, the first of which is "You don't need a reason to help people" - a quote from Final Fantasy IX.
• The game has two language options: English and Al Bhed.
• Most of the game's art is taken from other sources (most notably Chrono Trigger and, of course, NBA Jam). In particular:
  • In battle and in his dialogue portrait, Hoopz is identical to Skate in his Streets of Rage 3 incarnation.
  • Likewise, both Neo New York and Balthios take their appearances from X-Kaliber 2097.
  • Dr. Allard's battle sprites are (intentionally) badly-compressed rips from Toe Jam And Earl.
  • Michael Jordan's battle sprites come from Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.
  • Balthios' section of Cuchlainn's Tomb has him facing three soldiers - the first of which resembles RoboCop, the second of which is Master Chief, and the third and final one of which is a very badly-compressed Kratos.
  • The final boss's first form has a single angel wing, just like Sephiroth. Its second form is Diablo (the dinosaur from Primal Rage) with Barkley's head badly photoshopped onto it.
  • The sprite for the Bainshee is derived from the sprite used for the Succubus class in the Disgaea series.
  • Some of the battle backgrounds used in the game were heavily modified from those used in Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. The battle background for the Dragon's Neck Coliseum from Final Fantasy VI, meanwhile, was imported into the game without alterations.
• One of the first healing items you find are Hi-C Ecto Coolers (a discontinued albeit much-beloved flavor spawned from a promotion for The Real Ghostbusters).
• The Non Player Characters of Cesspool X include Quickdraw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and Jabberjaw.
• The Whistle enemy plays a sped-up MIDI of Proto Man's theme in its "Magic Whistle" attack.
• The fights with Vinceborg use "Eternity" as background music.
• Ghost Dad is an early boss. Later on, it's revealed that before his death, he was named Dr. Cosby and worked for the Spalding company.
• A plot-important substance is named "Manufacted Slamicite", spoofing the Manufacted Nethicite in Final Fantasy XII.
• The metadata title for one of the songs is "In Memory of Kaworu".
• The save pump is a massive weeaboo. Among its favorite games are the Final Fantasy series (pre-FFX), Star Ocean, Wild ARMs, Arc the Lad, Chrono Cross (especially composer Yasunori Mitsuda's "celto-tropic" soundtrack), Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia, The Legend of Zelda, Angelique: Tenkuu no Chinkonka (you'd better get the romanization right!), Kana: Little Sister, and Crescendo (JP). It's also a big fan of Pocky and Visual Kei culture, as well as Nobuo Uematsu and Motoi Sakuraba.
  • On the other hand, it spares no expense to denigrate, disparage, and deride Western video games (though not other Western media, as it seems to enjoy Fight Club and perhaps Shakespeare), such as Baldur's Gate, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Quake, and especially the Madden NFL series (perhaps doubling as a partial facetious jab at American Football, being a game about basketball).
• Both the final save pump and the credits chastise the player for not getting all four library cards (something which is impossible to do). This is a reference to the video game adaptation of The Pagemaster, where assembling the library cards was a matter of trial and error, but mandatory to beat the game.
• After the final battle, right before unleashing the Chaos Dunk on Shadow Barkley, Barkley quotes Revelations (albeit in improper order): "I am the beginning and the end. The alpha and the omega. The first and the last." It also serves as a reference to Xenogears, which uses the same lines (but quoted in proper order) in its opening movie.
• Dr. Allard is most likely named after J. Allard, the former head of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division. His backstory about being a "pasty, balding wreck" that worked for a software company until he gave himself a extreme makeover mirrors Allard's own evolution◊.