In Animal Kaiser, the Circle of Life is when a polar bear shoulder-checks a lion directly through a mountain

I spent a bit of Labor Day over at the Brooklyn Bandai-Namco showroom. When I first visited, I wrote it off as a tourist trap I didn’t really need to visit again: Bandai toys and model kits were on sale for market prices, but gashapon toys and arcade games cost a pretty hefty $3 per token. Toys cost 3 or 4 tokens, arcade games one: either way it's pretty damn spendy.

(If you're going to whale Bandai Gashapon in the tri-state area, go to the Mitsuwa food court in Jersey, it's $2/token and the selection is almost as good.)

I came back for the arcade games. Arcade games require frequent maintenance, especially the pack that Ban/Nam had chosen to put in this place. I had been skeptical that large installations like the multiplayer highway racer Maximum Tune, the notoriously breakable Taiko no Tatsujin drum game, and the four-cabinet Gundam Extreme Vs. 2 setup would be kept in shape for very long after opening. These games require trained employees to keep them in playable shape, and I was curious whether the company was really serious about this part of the experience.

Taiko and Max Tune appeared to be working fine, but Gundam was turned off. There doesn’t appear to be anyone on the repair beat here, which is unfortunate considering these machines are quite expensive and probably didn’t make their money back. Of course, at $3 per game, they’re pretty prohibitively expensive to play, as well.

And I didn't play any of those. I was really there for a certain arcade rarity: Animal Kaiser Plus. This isn’t the only one of these machines in the States, but from what I have read about it, the number is probably pretty low. If I didn’t give this bizarre children’s card game a serious try today, I probably was never gonna get around to it.

(I've also read these machines shut down when they run out of cards until they're refilled, and if they don't maintain the machines at this arcade, well, it'll just turn off one day.)

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Animal Kaiser is in a subgenre that’s almost exclusive to the world of the Japanese arcade: kid’s card arcade games. I’m not sure what the original of this genre is (probably Mushiking or Love and Berry?), But they are characterized by a simple structure— quick battles, nothing else— with extremely basic gameplay, using a button or touchscreen that a child can work out on their own. If there is any doubt as to who these games are for, the Animal Kaiser cabinet itself stands at a height well below an adult’s eye level, with no chair to sit at: it’s meant for the little ones. Of course I’m what you'd call a Big Friend— listen, I’ve played Pripara and Kamen Rider Ganbarizing, this ain’t my first rodeo— so I brought a chair over from the One Piece card game tables. They can afford it.

The appeal of Animal Kaiser is quite basic: realistic images of real animals from all over the world fight each other in with cartoonish moves that are anything but a nature documentary. Lions pulling off Izuna Drops, tigers doing Rider Kicks, a polar bear knocking my lion into a mountain with a shoulder slam. I laughed out loud at the machine several times, particularly when I got a UFO dropped on me from space. The crazy animations are the heart of the game, and you end up wanting to try different cards not because they’re necessarily stronger, but to see more of the animations.

The clincher of the genre is that after every session, players get a new card. In your next game, you take that card and scan it on the machine (the scanners on the Brooklyn machine are already starting to break) to change your player character, gear, or special move. All the “game” is really in the meta-play of the cards, their types and their abilities. The flow is addictive, as you have to play and play (or skip the game entirely to immediately buy a card) to get the perfect deck combination.

I decided I was going to go in on Animal Kaiser with a powerful adult economic weapon: 24 American dollars. My very first play got me what appeared to be the best playable character in the game, a gold foil card of a mighty lion (these guys don’t have names, they’re just Lion and Leopard and so on), so I was locked in trying to beat the hard mode CPU for the next hour or so. (Easy mode is beatable without any cards at all.) I only got a full working deck, complete with “Miracle”— basically a magic spell, if you wanted to summon earthquakes, lightning, or a UFO— on my very last play. There is a degree of compatibility going on here: each animal has their own preferred attack type and you want a Strong card— your gear, effectively— that will favor that.

The “gameplay” of Animal Kaiser, if we can quite call it that, consists entirely of stopping a roulette wheel to see what kind of attack our animal is going to use. A second roll determines who actually gets to attack this round: loser gets nothing but beat up. There is a degree to which you can sight-read the wheel and hit the attack you want— each animal has their own specialty, and you can usually pick it out if you read the wheel closely— but there appears to be some randomness in when the roulette actually stops, which works both for and against you. I don’t believe the game is rigged for the player to win or lose so much as it is forced random. Sometimes you’ll hit that super move right on the mark even if you didn’t really, and other times the roulette will crawl three more notches than it was supposed to, and it’s neither at the moments that save your ass nor the moments that doom you.

Win a few rounds against the computer, and hilariously, you will see a direct rip of the famous Pride Rock scene from The Lion King. Listen, the kids seeing this have only ever seen the remake.

Despite my optimal character, decent deck, and sheer will to defeat this child game for little babies, I was not able to beat the final boss of the hard mode. The tiger, I suspect, is the direct rock-paper-scissors counter for my poor top-tier lion, and he repeatedly one-shotted him. Maybe next time.

I decided to stop for the night when I got hit by that damn UFO, got a craving for some taiyaki for dessert… and realized I’d been playing so long that the entire building was closing. Whoops. When I checked Ebay at home, turned out my lion is worth $70. Quite a return on investment after all.

I love to dig into niches like these because they’re a reminder that “video games”, in the form of the narrowly defined genres we play on our PCs and consoles, are not the only forms of computer games that exist or that could exist. Nor do “video games” need to be for traditional “gamers” in particular. Shit, they don’t even need “gameplay,” necessarily. And I’m not saying that as a negative. Just look at Animal Kaiser.

(My failed never-gonna-happen the-time-has-passed Kawaiikochans arcade mega-project was intended to be about a lot of this subject.)

(The only game in this genre you can play in English on a console that I'm aware of is Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission. It is a little meatier than Animal Kaiser, but you’ll get the idea. I recommend you play on either a Switch or a Steam Deck, as it’s not at all the same experience without a touchscreen.)

The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!