It's new to me: Appare! Gateball
Gateball is a popular mallet game in Asian countries based on croquet, and the makers of Wonder Boy and Bomberman got together to make a video game of it.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The relationship between Hudson Soft and Westone went way back, and is most famously highlighted in the deal the two sides cut so that both could make some more money off of the Wonder Boy concept. Westone created Wonder Boy for the arcade, but sold the name to Sega, who also published the games on their systems. As Westone still had the copyright to Wonder Boy, they were able to license the idea of the game elsewhere with a new name and graphics, which Hudson Soft did in order to create Adventure Island on the NES. That got the Famicom and NES a version of Wonder Boy, sort of, and Hudson got to profit off of that workaround, as did Westone.
The two would work much more directly together in the future when Hudson had a console, the PC Engine/Turbografx-16, that needed some games on it, where they could serve as a publisher. You would think that, given the kinds of games these two tended to work on in the late-80s, that we’d be in for some kind of platformer or action game, but no. Appare! Gateball was the result of this joint venture, and if you don’t know what that is, I’ll break it down as simply as possible: it’s essentially croquet.
Croquet, but only a variant of it, one that’s popular in a number of Asian countries, where it’s known as gateball. This game does not feature any special powers or health meters or monsters or bombs. There is no weird, sports but make it video games bit to it. It is simply an adaptation of gateball, with the rules of gateball, with regular people who would play gateball doing just that. It’s kind of quaint, in a way, to be so strict about it, but then again, it’s not like there were a ton of gateball games out there that they needed to be in competition against. Baseball games started getting a lot weirder when they needed to stand out from the rest of the market, you know.
Whether you enjoy Appare! Gateball or not is going to depend entirely on one thing: how much patience do you have? That’s not to say that the game is bad or poorly designed or anything. It’s that gateball is, inherently, a slow-moving game. You have to be committed to the idea of playing gateball in order to enjoy this game — there’s no other hook here outside of enjoying gateball for being gateball. The good news is that, if you do enjoy gateball or at least fell that you’ve got the capacity for enjoying it, then you’ll be satisfied with this adaptation of it.
So here’s how gateball works, straight from the source I had to read so that I knew what I was even doing in Appare! Gateball. Let me tell you, I got wrecked the first couple of games despite having a handle on the actual controls and such, because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing from a strategic point of view. Reading through the rules at Gateball.asia helped solve this problem, and suddenly I was able to play competitively against computer opponents that, even on the lower settings, seem like they’re both good and bloodthirsty.
It’s a five-on-five game where you try to score as many points as you can in 30 minutes. In actual gateball, anyway: in Appare! Gateball, you can choose shorter games, with 10 minutes being the shortest option. The clock keeps on ticking, so that’s 10 minutes of real time, as well. There are gates set up around the field — three of them — and a pole at the center. Players take turns, with teams alternating, and eah player has a number, one through 10. So, player one takes the first swing, and if they get their ball through the initial gate, they can continue on with a second hit, and also, they remain on the field throughout the duration. Failure to pass the first gate brings you back to the starting point, but you don’t get to try again right then, no: you have to wait for your next turn, which means too many of your players missing out of the gate, as it were, will drag you down in the long run.
Easy enough so far, right? Get the ball through the first gate, then aim for the next gate. Make your way around the playing area on your turns by getting your ball through these gates, each of which is worth a point, and then, after you’ve cleared all three, you can aim for the pole at the center and earn an additional two points. If you make it through a gate, you’ve earned the ability for a “continuous stroke,” which is to say that you can go again, allowing you to clear your ball out from the gate area and toward your next destination.
Simple, yes, but that’s not the whole game. Oh no, there’s a PvP aspect to gateball, and it will be your salvation or your doom, depending. You see, if you strike another player’s ball with your ball, you then get a second shot on that turn, which you will use to send your opponent’s ball somewhere uncomfortable. No, not the back of a Volkswagen, but way off its intended path, even out of bounds entirely, if you can smack it away hard enough. This part of the game is touching and sparking. Touching being the actual act of an in-play ball touching another ball, and sparking being the part where you can send an opponent’s ball into orbit through a very specific kind of strike. Observe, via Gateball.asia’s rules explainer graphic:
You use your own ball, which touched your opponent’s ball, to then send the former flying out of bounds, or, at least out of the way. You trap your ball under your foot, so it stays where it was and where you wanted it to be, but the energy it transfers from the mallet to your opponent’s ball results in the opposite happening to their own plans. It’s devious! And also, in Appare! Gateball, the computer will always put themselves in position to be ruining your life like this, at every opportunity, even on the lower difficulty levels.
Keeping score in gateball can be a bit difficult, considering that… well, let me just have Gateball.asia explain this one:
One point is added to the stroker's ball immediately after the stroker makes a successful pass. Gateball is a team sport. The team who gained more points will be a winner but each point is not directly added to the team but to each stroker's ball. When the game begins, all balls are zero-point balls. Every time it passes the gate, the point of the ball will change from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3 for the first gate, second gate and third gate, respectively. Each stroker's ball can pass the specific gate only once. Passing the same gate twice or passing the gate from back side is not regarded as successful passes. They are not fouls, though.
Luckily, Appare! Gateball keeps track for you, so you don’t have to worry about that. What you do have to consider, however, is when to hit that pole in the center: doing so is called “Agari,” and while it gives that ball another two points out of a possible five it can contain, it also removes said ball from the field of play. Which means one less, enforcer, let’s say, to keep your opponent’s balls from making it near the pole via touching and sparking. There’s a lot of strategy to gateball, in addition to whatever skill you need to successfully hit balls where you want to hit them, and not understanding the strategy means you will get wrecked by someone who does.
Appare! Gateball has a couple of modes. You can play against another person or the computer, for one, but even more importantly is that there is an “Action” mode and a “Simulation” one. Action mode has you not just choosing where to aim your shots, but also pressing buttons for a power meter to determine just how hard of a strike you want to make on a given turn. You can, of course, mess up the timing, and not hit the ball hard enough or hit it way too hard, which is a problem unto itself. There’s a second layer to this in, though, which is that you have to choose five characters from a larger group of available ones to make up your team, and each has different strengths and weaknesses. Some are better with the longer, harder hits, some are much worse and should be leveraged more for their highly accurate short game.
In Simulation mode, you don’t have to worry about anything besides aiming, which is actually fairly easy to do since you get a little inset window showing you what is, essentially, the first-person view of your character even as you make the shots themselves from a top-down perspective. If you’re aiming for the gate, and you don’t see the gate in that little window, then buddy, you aren’t aiming for the gate at all. This also lets you see exactly where the balls in your field of vision are, which isn’t necessarily clear from the angle you’re working with otherwise. This window also exists in the Arcade mode, of course, but it’s the only thing you really need to worry about here as far as striking decisions go. Everything else is strategy, but again, there’s lots of it.
Gateball is meant to be an all-ages game, one both children and the elderly can enjoy, and that’s reflected in the character designs here. The best player in the game is an old dude with no weaknesses, but there’s just one of him, so you’re going to have to make decisions otherwise based on your own strengths and weaknesses. Each player is graded on a score of three smiley faces, with half-smileys denoting half-points, and while the descriptions are all in Japanese, you can figure it out pretty easily on your own either through experience, or by flashing Google Lens in front of your screen to have it translate from Japanese to English, and give you a sense of who is worse at what.
Appare! Gateball is certainly something of a weirdo rarity, but it’s also been made available multiple times since its initial release in 1988, on other platforms. It was put on the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007, but only in Japan, and it’s included as one of the games on Konami’s Turbografx Mini, which included nearly 60 games from both the Turbografx-16 and PC Engine libraries, regardless of whether you bought a North American edition or a Japanese one. Granted, you can’t get one of those mini consoles nowadays without taking out a loan first — Amazon, where it is exclusively sold, is selling them for $500 now when they were originally $99 — but still. Even Konami didn’t let it slip through the cracks when they were putting together the library for this project, which is a miracle on a number of levels that led to me being able to play a perfectly legal copy of Appare! Gateball in 2024 instead of. You know. Not doing that.
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