Title: Yuuyu no Quiz de Go! Go!
Release: July 10th, 1992
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
Weirdly I've seen this game before on Game Center CX and through a blog that recaps that show in English. It is a quiz game, it is! I am thinking this is going to be a very short entry on this blog.
Background and Developer
A genre of video game that never really translated to American culture was the Quiz Game. Sure there have been and will always be shovelware ports of game shows and the like (I always think of the NES Jeopardy or the Wii Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?), but the big examples of Quiz Games have been left to digital board games. The latest examples that even come to mind are You Don't Know Jack and *shudder* The Guy Game (gross). I imagine the demand for trivia and quiz games, which age quickly and poorly, have cheaper and easier mediums to be designed for rather than video games, so they really died, in my experience, around the PS2 generation. If you do still see them, they really are considered shovelware.
Is this game shovelware? Yes. This is some kusoge weirdness. The title translates to "Quiz with Yuuyu! Go! Go!" Who is Yuuyu you may ask? Yuuyu is the nickname of Yukiko Iwai, a Japanese idol from the 80s and early 90s.
For the uninitiated, idols are all purpose entertainers in that they are singers, models, and dancers that adopt a persona to interact with their fans. Their appearance and persona are heavily monitored and scripted by their agencies, similar to how Disney has stringent contracts that regulate and set an expected behavior for their actors. While idol culture had its heyday in the 80s and 90s, and is still very popular now, it has notoriously become much more cutthroat and competitive due to the influence of K-pop and the general fracturing of the music industry into more niche genres. Yukiko herself belonged to a girl group called Onyako Club, and was considered the breakout star of that group.
Onyako Club
Here is some of her singles from her heyday...
Yukiko Iwai left the industry in 1997, and really has not been seen in public since 2002 when her group had a reunion concert. Hilariously, one tabloid said that the reason she retired was because she hated children, though I am assuming this meant as fans as she had a couple of children herself.
The game itself was developed and published by Taito who, on top of making a bunch of big games, also made niche products like this.
Gameplay
The game is a series of several rounds of general knowledge questions and some more esoteric Japanese pop culture questions. Yuyu serves as the host and emcee of the quiz, usually in some fanciful or, in some cases, cultural appropriated outfits (I mean look at the front cover where she is wearing a sari). The presentation is colorful, but certainly of its period in terms of the compressed pictures of Yuyu, cartoony sprite art, and a very cutesy/childish aesthetic. This seems like it would have some FMV in it, but instead you get still pictures of Yuyu. It seems a very strange choice to develop a game focused on a the image of a real life figure without the hardware to back it up. This feels like it should be a PC Engine or DOS game from this era rather than a Super Famicom game.
The one thing it does have a lot of is compressed voice clips of Yukiko Iwai, who will introduce new segments and, my favorite, do a delightful "bing bong" when you get a question wrong. The sound design is also pretty fun and well crafted for a quiz game.
The game play does seem to be slowed a good bit by using a text parser in order to enter certain answers. Not really fun to do that on a D-Pad without a keyboard available.
Overall
This seems like a fun relic of its time, but not really something that someone should seek out to play. I don't know how much a modern Japanese collector would get out of this, because quiz games, especially ones endorsed by a celebrity that hasn't been active for 25 years, tend to age like milk. A neat little time capsule of an era in Japanese pop culture, but nothing really there for the general collector.
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