Pico Combat: Bandai's Fixation on Violence in Edutainment.

Man, I'm loving the titles I make for these entries so far.

... Anyway!

Bandai was also a substantially large Pico supporter, making significant contributions to the Pico's library both in terms of sheer quantity and, um... the "strange novelty value" some of the games have.

I'll focus on one example in particular in this entry;

This game here is "Kamen Rider Agito and Kuuga Wild Battle" for Pico, dumped by Team-Europe a while back. If you're unfamiliar with Kamen Rider as a franchise, then I'll toss around Wikipedia links.

This article's gonna focus on the fact that what you're seeing here is clearly a "violent video game" on the Pico.

Of course, it needs to be said that at that time, Japan's censorship standards were light and lax compared to other countries. Fist of the North Star had to spawn from somewhere, after all.

Not that this is anywhere near the level of Kenshiro's head-sploding adventures. But this probably would not fly in the international Pico market. If you need any proof of that, recall that Sonic the Hedgehog's Gameworld got censored pretty heavily.

Bandai put a pretty substantial amount of Tokusatsu-based games on the Pico, including games based on Sentai and Ultraman. Here, in fact, is a strangely similar game based on Hurricanger and Gaoranger.


They also made a lot of Mahou Shoujo stuff... but that's for another article.