YMMV / The Bouncer

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The fundamental idea of Koh's disguise sequence is technically sound, and the idea of having to fool and stealth around genetically-altered super soldiers that are likely mentally unstable is pretty creepy. So why does nearly every single one of them communicate an attempt to see who's legitimate or not through dramatic, sentai and womanly poses?
• Event-Obscuring Camera: The camera loves to zoom in real close so you can focus on beating down one or two targets at a time. Thing is, this is a game where other enemies and even the bosses will totally blindside you from off-camera as a result, and you have nothing but sound cues to know it. With no manual camera control, this can be a real problem. There's also a couple navigation segments in the game where the camera becomes real uncooperative, to the point of having to possibly run towards it to force to turn around to see exit points.
• Funny Moments: Basically half of Koh's general story beats and interactions. Between him not taking anything all that seriously most of the time, to being a surprisingly jovial Deadpan Snarker, and the entire mission of him posing as a Mook and having to strike strange poses to avoid being attacked by the guards, it's hard not to get a laugh or two.
• Game-Breaker: Blocking. The only unblockable attacks in the entire game come from the Final Boss and certain boss grab attacks, meaning your characters can guard against dogs, panther charges, trained super soldiers and even huge robot claws with nothing but their bare arms. It's essential to surviving the game once you've leveled your characters enough in New Game Plus, but all you have to do is hold the button while facing an enemy and you get to pick them down once they're open afterwards.
• Narm:
  • Much of the dialogue, particularly anything said by Sion or Mugetsu.
  • The title. Yes, It Makes Sense in Context since it's about security guards, but was it really a good idea to call your game "The Bouncer"?
    • Or maybe it’s really "B Sion, a man haunted by a tragic past, Within him lies strength and kindness, but also great sorrow, All this will change when he meets a girl named Dominique, These are the residents of DOG STREET, The ouncer ”
  • Koh's whole disguise section. Just, everything about it. Why not take some time away from all the beat-em-up action and plot drama to stumble around disguised as a guard, and having to strike strange and even effeminate poses so the guards don't try to kick your ass? Leads into Narm Charm if you manage to ace the whole section with Koh's cheesy one-liner.
  Koh Leifoh, superspy!
  • The Ragdoll Physics were ambitious, but they're so hilariously goofy because the moment anyone ragdolls, they become like puppets with their strings cut as they lose all control and drop to the floor. Funny in multiplayer or random enemy bouts, hilarious when fighting the serious bosses and everyone flops around like wet noodles.
  • The very fact that one of the antagonists, a woman clad in red who fights really well, is called "Echidna". Comparisons to Knuckles crop up fairly frequently in review videos.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Pressure-sensitive button commands for your attacks. You can change the sensitivity, but in the heat of battle, it takes quite a bit of practice to get down just how hard you need to press to initiate a certain combo.
  • Enemies get powered up based on how much experience the main characters spend on skills. Only the character you use gets experience. The issue is that, the way it is calculated means that if you try to use each character equally, the enemies quickly become a higher rank than all your characters. The only two really viable strategies are to only use one character, since the amount of experience used to power up one character completely doesn't raise the rank that much. The other approach is to spend almost no experience, outside the bare minimum to avoid raising the rank of the enemies at all. In both cases, you power up the other characters by using them for the easy fights and not spending experience on them until you can max out all three characters. In addition, the rank of the unlocked characters is the enemy rank when you face them. So, until you max out all of the main characters and beat the game multiple times (since you can't unlock every character in one playthrough), including getting the Guide Dang It! characters, your unlocked characters will always be inferior to at least one of the main characters (unless you use the aforementioned level everyone evenly approach and somehow manage to beat most of the enemies). The character ranks and main character skill purchases always apply in multiplayer, which leads to the highest-upgraded character being the best choice. By the way, this is a simplification of this mechanic.
  • The player needs to land the finishing hit on an enemy to get any experience at all. The problem lies in the fact that the two characters that weren't chosen are also usually present and not only can they kill steal from you, they won't get any experience from it.
• That One Level: By far, the most aggravating level in the game is the Escort Mission where you try to get Dominique out of Mikado's building. Between the difficulty of the robot guards (who are extremely capable of repeatedly knocking the player down), the poor pathfinding ability on Dominique as well as her refusal to run from danger, and Dominique's near-nil stamina, it's extremely common to watch a robot knock down the player and proceed to turn Dominique into a punching bag, very quickly getting a Game Over. Even when the player has powered up enough to make short work of the robots, it's not uncommon for Dominique to run straight for another while you're finishing one up, making the player lose even though they were otherwise cruising through the level. Generally, the most popular way to clear the level is get Dominique trapped in an otherwise safe area early, clear through all of the robots, then go back to guide her to the exit, which is time-consuming even when the robots require few hits to go down.
• Waggle: Due to the game's use of pressure-sensitive buttons, it ended up requiring an unnecessary amount of finesse with how hard you press buttons to execute many of the game's combos, and ultimately detracted from the game's overall experience. Ironically, it's almost at its worst when attempting to use a standard PlayStation 2 controller.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: A lot can be thrown at the titular Bouncers for their Zipperiffic and gaudy weirdness courtesy of Tetsuya Nomura, but one should pay equal attention to the Mikado forces. Gimp-like ninjas that shouldn't even be able to see? Echidna and Kaldea's Stripperiffic outfits? The peak of it hits with Dauragon himself, as his second phase is throwing his coat off to reveal he was in leather black overalls the entire time.

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