"It is strip rock, paper, scissors like you have never played it before...."

When I got a hold of a copy of The Yakyuuken Special, I had no idea what it was, other than some obscure 3DO game. Little did I know that it would quite possibly be the strangest game I had ever played. The whole goal of the game is to get women naked. While this may sound like a great concept, it is one that is a familiar one on the 3DO. However, the strange factor is not in the nudity but how the nudity is accomplished; you must best each girl in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. For every round you win, the chosen girl will remove an article of clothing to the worst music in the history of pornography.

What makes this game different from a majority of the adult themed 3DO games is that it is Japanese. While the Japanese are no strangers to nudity themselves, they do it in a very quirky way, at least through the eyes of a North American. I suppose the best thing about this game is that it requires no knowledge of the Japanese language to play. While there are words in Japanese all throughout the game, there is enough English and the game is simple enough that I could navigate my way through the entire game without much difficulty.

You get two choices when the game starts, one being Single Play and one being Multi Play. They are pretty much the same thing, except you choose multiple girls in Multi Play. Big surprise there. You have to defeat all five girls to beat the game. The order you choose is entirely up to you. To help you make your choice, you can choose to see the profile of each girl. A very short clip of one girl will play with her lying on a bed, wearing revealing clothing, but with no nudity showing. On her profile will be various stats like date of birth, measurements, blood type and her name. Unfortunately, the names of all the girls are in Japanese so they all remain nameless to me.

After you make your choice, you will be taken to a new screen. The girl will be in the middle, most often her whole body can be seen. There will be the hand signals for rock, paper, and scissors on the bottom and a win/loss column on either side. Audio will play of the girl counting down (or possible saying, 'rock, paper, scissors') in Japanese. You must quickly make up your mind and press the corresponding button for your choice of the three objects with A being rock, B representing scissors and C standing for paper. A video will accompany the audio and the girl will make her choice as well.

For every time you win a round, you will have the choice of removing one article of clothing off of the girl, either a top or a bottom. You have to start with the outer most layer and move in, so you cannot remove her bra before you remove her shirt. You can choose to alternate between top and bottom or strictly remove one or the other until nothing is left and the game automatically moves to the other half of the girl's body.

Each girl wears a total of five articles of clothing, meaning you have to win five rounds in order to have her be completely nude. Should you lose five rounds, you get game over and must start all over again. Once nudity is achieved, a full screen video will play of the girl posing in a different location. Some of the locations are out there a little bit. One girl poses on a corkscrew staircase with statues of dogs surrounding her and another one sits on shelves and a chair in what appears to be an art museum. While I certainly do not object to the idea that the human body is art, it just felt out of place with the other videos which featured a girl in a hot tub and a girl in the shower.

The good thing about the presentation of the winning videos over the stripping videos is that the winning ones are presented in full screen. The stripping videos are between a quarter and a third the size of the TV which detracts from the fact that girls are removing their clothing. The full screen videos actually look better than the other videos. While they are far from perfect in terms of quality, they do not appear to be as blurry or as washed out as the other ones. However, in both sizes of video, the typical hardware limitations show through such as not enough colors being able to be displayed as well as pixelization and generally blurriness.

If you choose to play multi play, you can choose between one and five girls and you will go up against them all at the same time. On the right side of the screen there will be a small snapshot of each girl. You can switch between girls after any round and you only need to win five rounds total to get all the girls naked. They will all remove an article of clothing for each time you win, even if you were not playing against them. When you win five rounds, you will be treated to still photos of the selected girls all together in the nude in various locations like on a bed and on a couch. Everything is soft core, so unless this is the very first time you have ever seen a naked girl, there is nothing to get excited about.

There was something about this particular game that I have not seen in any other adult title for the 3DO. I was strangely drawn into this game for some reason. It is a challenge to struggle watching most of the adult themed "games" for this system, but this one I was actually into, for a while anyway. There is actually a level of challenge to automated video rock, paper scissors. The game seems to make some very strategically calculated decisions based on what you already chose. There will be times when you choose paper four rounds in a row and the girl will do exactly the same. Then when you think it is time to switch to rock, the girl will do the exact same thing. Then you choose to go back to paper and the girl chooses scissors. Losing five rounds in a row is not uncommon, but winning more than two in a row is near impossible.

Since I did not know what to expect when I turned the game on for the first time, the fact that there were women taking their clothes off caught me off guard at first. I then wanted to see them all naked. When I finally got to four wins against one of the girls, I was pretty excited, as sad as that is. Then when I got that fifth win and it was time for her to remove her panties, I was very disappointed. She kept her hand over her crouch the entire time. I was very confused when the next girl and the next girl did the same. Then I remembered that you very rarely see total nudity in Japanese porn. There is almost always censoring. This was a bit of a let down, especially from a novelty standpoint. If you cannot get a girl to fully expose her self just because she lost a game of rock, paper, scissors, what's the point in trying? I suppose it still retains some comedic value and would be a fun thing to randomly start playing at a party some time.

One thing that distracted me greatly was the unattractiveness of the girls represented in the game. They all had mid 90's hairstyles which I have never cared for, even in the mid 90's. Also, their, shall we say assets, were very small. So small in fact that mine are bigger than all five of the girls featured in the game. I have never been a fan of big and fake breasts, but I would have liked to see something just a little bigger on the girls.

The choice of clothing for all but one girl was atrocious. Perhaps it is a cultural gap or just suppressed memories of fashion statements from fifteen years ago, but most of the girls I could not wait to get naked, not because I wanted them to be nude, but because I found their clothes, and sweaters in particular, to be very ugly.

It is obvious to tell that this game was produced by a company that did not have high production values. In addition to the general unattractiveness of the women in the game, there were just some things that were not done well. One of the funnier things comes when you ask a girl to remove her jean cutoffs. She unzips them and they immediately fall to the floor. She then steps out of them and bends over seductively to pick them up and drops them. She the picks them up again and throws them off screen. Is it really that hard to shoot that ten second scene over again so she does not drop them, or at least pan away from her face so that when she does drop them, you do not see the look on her face? Other atrocities that scream low production value are during the videos when the count down starts, just before the girl picks her hand gesture. The audio is off from the video at times, up to one second in some videos. This makes it very difficult to make your selection before the game locks you out. Thankfully it does not count as a loss if you fail to make a selection though.

One of the strangest things occurred not within the game but while I was playing the game. As naked breasts adored my television screen, two Mormon missionaries came knocking on my door. I could not help but think that there was some sort of Divine intervention trying to wedge its self into my life. I did not answer the door though, so I suppose I will never know. I will take tiny, unattractive Japanese breasts any day.

Another thing that got to me is actually the age of the game. While in 1994, this would not have been an issue, the age of the girls bothered me slightly. According to the profiles, the oldest one was born in 1968, making her forty at the time of this writing. While she does not look that old (she was only twenty-six then), I cannot help but think that she is a little old to be appearing in porno in the back of my mind.

The controls are another area that, while not bad, fell like they could have been improved. After every round, after every selection, and even at the title screen, you have to press the P button to select it. I can only think of a handful of games that require you to use a start button or some variation of that for every selection. The B button allows you to move backwards in your menu selections which is odd. The C button would have been a better choice. The L button brings up a help menu, but the menu is entirely in Japanese which does not help if you cannot read it. A will do nothing except choose rock for your input. It is very awkward reaching across for P rather than using A to select something within the menus.

Quixotically, the music that is played during the profile videos as well as in other parts is in English. While there is not a single sample of music that is recognized, it is sung in English by native English speakers. This feels really out of place considering that a majority of the text is in Japanese. The music sounds like it is a soprano version of a Berry White parody. It has that sensual tone to it, but is sung in a manner that would probably turn most women off.

Should you manage to defeat all five girls you will be treated to an extra scene after the full screen depiction of the last girl. While the credits roll at the bottom, at the top you get to see the girls recording their voiceovers for winning, losing, a draw and not putting in a response. While this is not anything great, it reminds us that these nude women are people, just like you and me and do deserve respect.

For all the reasons to hate this game, there is one reason to like it that trumps all others. It is just plain hilarious. Never has such an easy action as winning a round of rock, paper, scissors ever garnered a women to get nude. It certainly is not the vest game on the 3DO and I do not think anyone would argue a case for it. However, it is amongst the better of the adult themed games I have ever played. It actually gives you a reason for the nudity, and is rather challenging at the same time. However, once you get every girl nude, you will have little reason to repeat the process unless you want to remove the clothes in a different order. There are enough combinations that it will be different for a few times through. However, the end result is the same.

Fans of the 3DO will probably want to add this to their collection. Those who love obscure and random games will probably get a kick out of the game. However, this is not for the serious gamer. While it is a challenging game of rock, paper, and scissors, it is not very challenging compared to just about every other game in the history of time. It is a great game for those who do not know anything of the Japanese language as it can be figured out through trial and error rather quickly. If you want some cheap laughs at some bad nudity and porn music, this is where you can find it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/20/08

Game Release: The Yakyuuken Special (JP, 11/11/94)