Remembering Toaplan: Pipi & Bibi's

Toaplan made an Elevactor Action-style single-screen arcade game featuring a bunch of weirdos, and also made it an eroge. Sure, why not.

Toaplan rose from the ashes of two other short-lived developers, and made a mark on the arcade scene of the 80s and early 90s. They were influential, they were innovative, they made the games they wanted to make, but they couldn’t survive the changing landscape of arcades, and shut down in March of 1994. Still, their influence continued both because of the games they had made and the games the branches of their family tree would go on to make, and Toaplan is now seeing something of a revival in many ways: all of this will be covered throughout the month of March. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Toaplan wasn’t known for their eroge games — that is, their erotic video games — but the studio did develop them. They drew some fresh illustrations for a couple of Mahjong titles early in their existence for SNK and Data East — games that Toaplan mainstay Tatsuya Uemura said were otherwise just “decompiled” copies — then published their own, Mahjong Sisters, in 1986. Beyond that, Toaplan tried to make their money with shoot ‘em ups and action games instead of the promise of naked ladies.

And then it was 1992, and someone at Toaplan wondered what would happen if they combined an action game with that very promise. And that’s how Whoopee!!, known as Pipi & Bibi’s outside of Japan, was made. Pipi & Bibi’s is an Elevator Action-style single-screen action platformer with some fascinating gameplay elements that make it hard it hard to walk away from once you start playing. It also features congratulatory art of naked women in it, if you’re able to earn the chance to see them.

It’s a strange choice in some ways, because Pipi & Bibi’s probably would have been a bigger deal in arcades if it hadn’t been an eroge, too, since it would have opened up who would have been able to play it or even wanted to. It peaked at 19th among table games at the start of May of 1992, fell to 22nd by the middle of the month, and then didn’t rank again by Game Machine’s count. Despite that short-lived success in the arcade, Pipi & Bibi’s was recently remade in the present for Windows and Switch as Spy Bros. DX, with the eroge bits removed: a tribute to the strength of the core, fully clothed gameplay portions of the title, one that not every Toaplan game from the past has earned to this point, to boot.

Pipi & Bibi’s title screen tried to let you know there were women in various states of sexy undress in this game full of weird, cartoony characters.

Don’t take any of this as a personal problem with eroge games or nudity in art or what have you: they’ve obviously got their place in the market, and no one would be making them if they weren’t paying the bills. Consider: Fire Emblem Heroes doesn’t have any outright nudity, but it’s not just the gameplay that’s had it take in over $1 billion in revenues, but instead a complete lack of subtlety from its artists, wink wink, say no more. It’s just funny that Pipi & Bibi’s was one such attempt at an erotic title, and for reasons beyond just the core game’s competency: just look at some of the game’s artwork and consider how it juxtaposes with “here’s some boob.”

This, to me, looks a lot like filling a game with a purposefully deformed and grotesque art style with an attempt at realistic, erotic nudity. What if you completed a level in Pizza Tower and then were hit with some posing, realistic nude models, you know? It’s just so funny that this even exists, and even funnier because Toaplan didn’t separate the two sides! When you manage to successfully undress one of the women — NSFW links incoming — it turns out she is a giantess and your weird little playable guy of choice will be standing on top of her shoulder or on her hip or whatever making bug-eye faces or giving peace signs or dancing or all of the above as the camera pans over some lace panties that probably took a very long time to draw with that level of detail.

It’s deeply hilarious, and the remake, sans eroge bits, manages to be deeply funny in its own way: they replaced the reveal of the undressed women with a bonus round where your character parachutes out of a helicopter and attempts to collect point bonuses before they hit the ground, but it kept the same exact music as the eroge portion of the original. If you’ve never played the arcade version, you wouldn’t know but might wonder, rightfully, why you’ve got these soft, plinky synths going during some skydiving, but if you are familiar with the original context, hearing that music again is just so stupid [complimentary].

Now, if you want to be able to see any of this giantess fetish stuff, you’re going to have to learn to play the game. You play as one of two spies, armed with long-range stun guns. You use those stun guns to temporarily knock out guards, or, if you’re lucky and they have nowhere to land when they fall from one floor to the next, knock them right out of the level for a slightly longer time. You can stun them for just a second and try to sneak by them before they wake back up, or hold the button down until they slip to the floor below, but be warned: you get points for for the latter, but you also might create situations in which you’ve overloaded a floor with baddies who will swarm you faster than you can stun them. Be mindful of where they’re dropping these stunned guards off at, and plan your paths instead of just going any which way.

The paths you’ll be making are to computers, which you need to plant bombs on. Once you’ve placed a bomb on every computer in a level, a timer starts, and you’ve got 20 seconds to make it to the exit. If you plan to plant the final bomb at whatever computer is closest to the exit you’ll need to take, then 20 seconds is more than enough time, but things don’t always work out that way, since “closest to the exit” and “safe to get to and away from” aren’t always the same thing. If you die before planting all the bombs, it’s fine, you just start at the beginning of the level but with all the progress you’ve made still intact. If you run out of lives and need to insert another credit to continue, that still applies, so you can muscle your way through the game by sheer force of having a lot of quarters in your pocket... sort of.

That’s not completely true if only because of how the game works once you’ve managed to plant all the bombs in a level. If you die on your way to the exit — and a single hit from any enemy will kill you — you have to start the entire level over. You can’t brute force your way through that. You actually don’t lose a life when this happens, which is a small mercy, but all that progress you made is gone, and whatever money you might have spent to place all of those bombs in that level is gone, too. You really do need to plan out your movements and path, especially later in the game, when the stage is full of moving pieces you need to plan around.

You still complete images with the coins in Spy Bros. DX, but they’re of the in-game characters and imagined scenes from the game now instead of eroge content.

In the odd-numbered stages, of which there are three, you’re always in an office building of some kind, and have to contend with elevators and stairs. In these levels, you don’t just have your stun gun, but also a slide attack you can perform as you enter or exit an elevator: press in the direction you want to go, and you’ll automatically kick the legs out from under any foes within range of the slide. They won’t be knocked down to the next floor like with your stun gun, but it’s a good way of dealing with an elevator or hallway full of guards attempting to get on or off the elevator you’re headed off of or into. In the even-numbered stages — again, there are three — instead of elevators and stairs, you have… trampolines. These bounce you as high as the ceiling is above them, and you can shift to the left or right while in midair to land in a different spot than the trampoline below you. It gets chaotic, to the point you might even need to leverage the brief period of invulnerability you have after dying and coming back in order to make it to where you need to go.

When you plant your first bomb, a coin labeled with “H” appears: it’s worth 10,000 points, which is great on its own just to help you earn those extends, but it’s also your key to progress the undressing of the naked ladies you forgot about while you were thinking about elevators. You see that progression after each level within a stage, four levels per stage: first you see some feet and legs, second level a skirt, then a top, then a face, and then, if you collected all four coins, it’ll switch to a nude or near-nude portrait that pans up and down or left to right, depending on the image in question. Again, with the little weirdos dancing or signaling or bug-eyeing as this happens. And then it’s back to planting bombs with said weirdos.

Pipi & Bibi’s visual style is loads of fun, and pairs well with its energetic, catchy soundtrack. The character designs are all oddballs, with exaggerated mobsters and evil-looking scientists, and also a guy in a swim cap and trunks who swims, not walks or runs, across floors without water on them. And does so pretty fast! There’s a huge muscled dude in a speedo that’ll come down from doing pull ups to moon you and block your path, and you need to figure out how to get past him and his backside. Dancers in tutus partnering with jumping cartoon cats in pants and floating, bored-looking dogs whose touch will kill you like anything else in the game, clowns, hired muscle… Pipi & Bibi’s didn’t try to make thematic sense or present a unified sense of anything besides “this is weird, right?” but Toaplan certainly succeeded at this goal. It works!

Spy Bros. DX released in February of 2023, without the eroge portions, but with an extended version of the game to play instead. When you complete Spy Bros. DX with one of the classic spy characters, it then unlocks Spy Sis.: Mimi & Gigi, where you no longer have the stun guns, but can slide attack at any time instead of just when exiting or entering an elevator. Which means this isn’t just a re-skin in some new levels like with various Snow Bros. releases where you get to play as the princesses instead of the princes, but is a new interpretation of the original game that forces new strategies on you. Long-range attacks and defense are no longer an option: you’ve got to get right in there to stun the opposition and make your way to the computers.

Spy Sis. is a far superior experience and add-on to the modern re-release of Toaplan’s Snow Bros., which added new stages and enemies that didn’t fit in super well either mechanically or visually with the original game, because Spy Sis. looks and feels like a sequel we were always going to receive, or like it had always been there to unlock for anyone who completed the original and wanted a different challenge. It’s an important addition, too, because if the vast majority of people who would play Pipi & Bibi’s are ever going to play, it’s going to be by way of 2023’s remake-ish release, and not by loading up a three-decades-old eroge game into MAME on their computer. For gameplay and quality purposes, the remake, licensed by Toaplan successor studio Tatsujin, is the definitive version of Pipi & Bibi’s, which you can grab for $8 on Switch or Steam. If you want the cut eroge content, though, well, I already reminded about MAME, the rest is up to you and your bomb-planting strategies.

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