Title: Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $26.99
Release Date: 09/18/2025
Story
In this SNES fighter, you take control of the cast from Cho Aniki. You know Cho Aniki and their memorable characters! You have the main duo from that first mediocre game, the bald muscle guy from the sequel, various bosses and some blue thingy. Anyhow they’re all goofing around in a tournament to become the best muscle fighter or what have you, it doesn’t really matter.
The game has no Japanese text outside of the credits and title screen. The endings are all basically the same. You just fight and do dumb stuff.
Presentation
We have yet another company for these Edia reissues, this one seeming to be for their SNES ones. Not OGIX, not D4E, but instead MCF Co. This company is one I’d never heard of before, but yet again they appear to carry over a lot of elements Edia has done for their prior releases and added a few new ones. Right off the bat you have a very cool 3D box replica you can rotate around, and the manual scans return from their other collections. A whopping two pages of it were translated for this reissue, but they pretty much tell you everything you need to know about the controls.
The Cutscene viewer also returns, but to call anything in this game a “cutscene” would be incredibly generous. You have everyone’s continue screen and their ending screen, which is how you can tell that everyone gets the same god damn ending. Posing and then a credits roll. Otherwise you have the usual staff credits for these reissues and legal stuff.
Once you get into the game itself however, you realize this new company is a bit more in-depth with the QOL than Edia’s previous efforts. You now have a rewind feature, which lets you open up a menu and select a frame ala NSO, or just jump around to those frames with a shortcut button and make your game look like a weird stuttering mess as you go back in time.
You can also increase or decrease the speed of the game, which would have helped significantly for those Cosmic Fantasy games. In this game though, it just makes the music sound incredibly funny and maxing out the speed is a good way to make the battles as stupid as they can possibly be. You can’t even pull off special moves at that high of a speed! Lastly, you have your usual screen size options, plus a very lame CRT filter. The most helpful QOL addition is the ability to display the entire movelist for each character on the sides of the screen at all times, so you’ll always know exactly what your chosen character can do. Not even the Capcom Fighting Collections let you do that, and yet the frickin Cho Aniki game pulled it off.
Emulation wise, the game looks and sounds as it should, unlike how Edia dealt with that other 16 Bit Console when working with D4E. Unfortunately, that means you have to suffer from what I can best describe as Penis Music, with the various songs matching the sheer stupidity of the Cho Aniki franchise as much as you’d expect a soundtrack like this to. A couple of the songs are catchy, but most of them I’d describe as outright nonsense, including an ending credits theme which feels like a Youtube Poop Music Video from the year 1995.
Gameplay
In this fighting game you take control of one of several characters, and must defeat all the other characters to beat the game. There is no final boss character, nor any super secret fighters to uncover, just the main cast you see from the start. You can change the settings of the battle before selecting your character, either in terms of messing with the strength of each character or changing the difficulty/round settings.
Anywho once you picked a character, you’re off to the first stage. Here’s where you have to get to grips with the game and the four main attack buttons you have. These are a punch, a kick, a dash, and another attack button. Your character has a meter that depletes with each move, and when it does you automatically become dizzy. Luckily you can recharge it by just dancing around like a goofball, which then lets you pummel and fight your opponent even more until it depletes again.
You have typical fighting game special move staples, and with each character freely flying around the levels rather than being on the ground, you can dash away from your opponent and dance for a meter refill if needed, with each character having their own set of special moves. Some are pretty darn strong while others are laughably lame and unable to do all that much, but once you find your character’s best move or throw, you’re not likely to need anything else to beat the CPU. The CPU is tough on the default settings and can be outright cheap on the higher ones, as per the norm, but even still the moves on offer here aren’t worth experimenting with. There is combo potential here, but if you can just throw your opponent to make them dizzy, why bother figuring that out?
Honest to god, there really isn’t that much here. NCS made a fighting game. There are Cho Aniki characters in it. You beat each other up as Cho Aniki people, and the fighting is really not good. The game is remarkably dull and only after beating one character’s story did I realize how the extreme price of this game was just a borderline scam. At least if it was an RPG you’d have some sort of replay value, but outside of forcing IRL friends to play this and maybe tormenting them extra with those speed toggles, there’s next to nothing here. You fight, you eventually win, you hear the YTPMV, and then that’s the entire game. Not even a scoring system to bother with.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen is probably the weirdest and worst Edia release I’ve ever covered. Yes, this is a port that’s done right and there’s no emulation issues. Yes, they even translated the menu and added some nice QOL features. Then you realize it’s for a Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen and not say, a good SNES game they could have ported like Der Langrisser, and you begin to wonder just how on earth this game made it to the US eShop at all, and why the hell the game is nearly thirty dollars.
The answer to the price is rather simple, since in Japan this was actually a full retail release. Yes, this basic SNES fighter was deemed worthy of being on an Nintendo Switch cartridge by itself and not part of the Cho Aniki Collection from earlier this year, even though it is paper thin and you can see everything this game has to offer in a half hour. I forced myself to play 90 minutes of it.
I want those 90 minutes back, and I wish I had a friend to forcefully make play this game on max speed just to see if they’d break before I would. Because Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen almost broke me.
I give Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen a 3 out of 10.