Just like Fear Effect and Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, Rumble Roses is a game I remember more for its marketing than any discussion around it. It's one of those games, where the jiggle physics is cranked all the way up, and any opportunity to sneak in a fanservice shot is seized upon with such ferocity you'd think some poor animator had on a collar rigged to blow if they don't fit in as much TNA as possible, like some pervert's version of Speed. Every print ad for games like this was carefully framed to tantalize the teenaged male demographic, with characters pressed together or caught in some compromising pose with "Mario Bros. doesn't have... BOOBS!" written in big blocky letters. Everyone who fell for one of those has a YouTube channel now.

Speaking of YouTubers, my friend and current Xenosaga hype machine, TransWitchSammy, is the only person I've met in my entire life that has actually played Rumble Roses as a proper video game. I still wasn't very interested until she put me in a mandible claw hold and forced my compliance. I had to look up names of wrestling holds for that joke, by the way. I don't know anything about the sport, I just remember seeing Dean Ambrose bring a Coney Island hot dog cart he stole to a match once, and besides that it's periodic updates from Appreciations about what Cum Punk is up to post-WWE.

I am likewise just as uninitiated with wrestling games, but as I understand it, most of them are total garbage. I can't say how Rumble Roses stacks up against its contemporaries or even modern wrestling games, but in isolation, it's got more going on than I initially thought while still not having enough to sustain me beyond clearing 40% of the roster in story mode.

Much like fighting games, which I often describe in how "responsive" they are and how good the impact of landing a hit feels, I'm so much of a philistine here that I can't articulate the more technical aspects of how this game works. I'm no expert on frame timing, I can't count let alone perceive input delay, I navigate these games the same way I would a real fight, all elbows and open-hand slaps (see: button mashing.) But the specials in this game are ridiculous and bombastic in the way real wrestling techniques are, and they look just as likely to cause real, severe, long-lasting damage when executed by a non-professional, so I'd say Rumble Roses ticks the right boxes.

The story is also appropriately bonkers, and I've made several attempts already to describe it as a mashup of wrestling storylines and fighting game narratives but scrapped all that after realizing they're basically the same thing. Dr. Cutter is doing a whole sexy nurse gimmick, but she's also like, brainwashing wrestlers and turning them into heels in an effort to harvest them for her cyborg, and that's something that feels as ripped from the WWE as it does Tekken.

It's just a shame then that Rumble Roses does so little with the heel/face alternate scenarios for each wrestler. Though this does double the size of the roster, each character's second scenario is truncated, with fewer fights and threadbare narratives that amount to an opening and closing cutscene to establish and bookend their gimmicks. Reiko - a certifiable babyface and the lead character - joins a biker gang, and she is completely unconvincing in the role, like a child wanting to be taken seriously. It's really endearing and silly, but you get so little of it. Likewise, there's a real drought of interesting costumes, with each character getting a normal outfit and swimsuit and a single pallet swap of each. Maybe I'm spoiled on Dead or Alive, but I feel like this misses some of the pageantry of wrestling. I just... I wanna dress up the pretty ladies......... .

There are also only three rings to fight in, one of which being a mud pit, and several wrestlers share moves with one another, which resulted in the game feeling a bit long in the tooth after only a few hours of play. The "glass half full" way of looking at this is that my biggest complaint about Rumble Roses is there isn't more of it. This is apparently something Rumble Roses XX addresses, but I've also heard more divisive things about that one... I'd love to say that since I'm buying Xbox 360 games up already that I'd just grab a copy and find out myself, but that thing is 70 damn dollars on average. I like Rumble Roses but not that much.

Anyway, 3/5. Would let Dr. Cutter perform unethical surgery on me.