Psychic Force

About Psychic Force

Psychic Force (1996) is Taito's arcade fighting game in which floating psychics battle inside a force-field cube, slamming each other into its walls, popular in Japan but little noticed in the West.

Psychic Force in Depth

Fights take place in a cube bounded by a magical force field, where the fighters float and move in every direction, although the game plays in 2D. The walls are central to its strategy: a character knocked into one takes damage, though not by moving into it voluntarily, and one hit again on the rebound is stunned and falls, invulnerable while falling. Matches go to the first to win two rounds, and if time runs out between human players, a sudden death round in a smaller space with empty gauges goes to whoever lands the first hit. An eight-way joystick and three buttons, guard, light attack and heavy attack, combine into combos, throws and special moves.

Special moves draw on the Psycho Gauge beneath the life bar; once it is empty, the fighter can only fire weak projectiles until it refills, slowly by itself or quickly by holding all three buttons. A Barrier Guard blocks physical and special attacks at a heavy cost to the gauge, an Evasion Barrier prevents a wall slam for 40% of it, and dashes move fighters quickly, the Quick Dash deflecting weak projectiles. In 2010, people with psychic powers, called "Psychiccers", are shunned until the organisation NOA, led by Keith Evans, offers them a utopia, opposed by his old friend Burn Griffiths of Anti-NOA.

Making Psychic Force

Taito produced Psychic Force for arcades, releasing it in April 1996, and Game Machine listed it as Japan's third most successful arcade game in its 1 June 1996 issue. PlayStation versions followed in 1996 and 1997, published by Acclaim in North America and PAL regions, but it was released with little fanfare and was not a commercial success in the West, though it gained some popularity in Japan. Reviews of the PlayStation version were mediocre: Next Generation and EGM's four reviewers found the 3D movement a novelty that left fights dominated by cheap projectiles and characters sharing nearly the same move set, though EGM praised the anime sequences, and GamePro found it easy to master and boring in the long run. An arcade update, Psychic Force EX, made the boss playable and rebalanced the game, and a sequel, Psychic Force 2012, followed in 1998, reaching the Dreamcast and PlayStation. The original was re-released in Psychic Force Complete for the PlayStation 2 in 2006.