Kouchuu Kakutou Mushi-1 Grand Prix - aka Beetle Grapple Insect-1 Grand Prix - is a game released by Rocket Company on November 24, 2005. It is a beetle fighting game (this is a genre you'll never see outside of Japan) for the Nintendo DS, apparently intended as competition for Sega's Mushiking series.
For a limited time, a few stores also had these sweet decks of Beetle Grapple playing cards available:
I know, I want them too. I don't even play cards and I want them.
Anyway, the game looks amazing from all the promotional material. Realistic 3D beetles participating in overly-dramatized miniature MMA matches! Yes! I had a lot of interest in this game, especially in the beetle models themselves (they would be perfect for papercraft, I think. They're all real species too, so it's scientific and stuff!) So, I went ahead and successfully ripped all of the models, but I decided I needed all of their species names and would have to play the game to find those.
Should be fun though...
...right?
Let's Play Kouchuu Kakutou Mushi-1 Grand Prix!
So, when you first start the game, you are greeted by a data error. Um I mean, after you set the save type, you are greeted by a Rocket logo and the title screen. There are no beetle battle demos, or an intro, or anything of that sort. There is no options.. option either, only starting a new game.
You are allowed to name the anime-haired male protagonist with 5 katakana/hiragana characters. I assume he has a default name, but since his looks irritate me I couldn't be bothered to go see what he's called in screenshots on Rocket's website, and I named him Rachel. You can take this to mean one of two things, either A) these are my beetles and character-design-disaster-boy has nothing to do with it whatsoever, or B) his parents were excessively cruel. I would go with A but leaning towards B simply because they let him out of the house looking like that.
Anyway, to introduce the rest of the cast...
From left to right we have Dr. Beetle, Rachel, Blue Hair, Kid Dracula, and Pink Hair. As you can see, I wasted no time in learning any names that didn't belong to insects.
Starting out, you're shown how to beetle grapple by Dr. Beetle. Your starting beetle is Allomyrina dichotoma, basically the main type of grapple-beetle in Japan. Your kabutomushi wins the intro battle and then he lets you on your way to explore the whole wide map at your leisure!
Wow!!! This is the whole map. Well, there's actually one more location that opens up on top of the mountain after some amount of time/battles. The rest of the spots are four battle areas, and Dr. Beetle's shop where he sells you new techniques.
Now, picking techniques is where strategy comes into play. I mean, should come into play. You only need one strategy, and that is to buy Rolling Slash (the first technique) and utilize Retreat (a technique given to you by Blue Hair early into the game.) I'll explain how battles work so you can see the brilliance of this strategy in action.
(I took these screenshots after I'd beaten the game twice, but they apply to every battle)
Here, Blue Hair accosts Rachel in one of the random battle areas. These kids blabber ENTIRELY TOO MUCH, I assume about beetles and being the #1 best grappler and why do our parents let us hang out in the woods with Dr. Beetle..? so I just jam A through it and get to the important part.
Prebattle setup consists of choosing which beetles you want to use, and setting their techniques. Each beetle has their own stats and default moves, but the most important thing to remember is that none of that matters whatsoever.
Here we have the beetledex and status for Chalcosoma caucasus. The beetledex lists the approximate size, nationality, and description of each beetle. The status page shows HP, three stats, 1-2 default moves, star rating, and your current amount of points/currency/beetle chow. You can call the stats whatever you like, they are completely unimportant. I like to think of them as Robustability, Scuttling, and Shinyness. Default moves are only important right up until you have the beetle chow to buy Rolling Slash, after that they are obsolete. The star rating shows how many special techniques the beetle can use from 2-4, but again this is useless because you only need two (Rolling Slash and Retreat.) You can also heal your beetle between battles from this screen by paying out beetle chow.
After you've selected your first beetle, you can set its techniques. Giving the beetle Retrat allows you to select a second beetle, and giving that beetle Retreat allows you to select a third. No you can't have a fourth beetle, that would be preposterous. ON TO THE FIGHT!
The two beetles show down, sporting adorable nationality flags, then the battle begins. The commands are as follows, Move / Default Attack / Technique / Mystery Option. I have no idea what Mystery Option does and never used it once throughout two playthroughs. The map shows the current positions of each beetle on their stump battlefield, and the number at the bottom is turns remaining. Battles are won when you either KO an opponent beetle, or time runs out and you have more health remaining (a draw counts as a loss in the latter case.)
On your first turn, you're gonna wanna Move since you can't hit your opponent from this range. 90% of the game is watching the beetles select Move and tromping across the stump.
After you think you're in an appropriate range, select your Rolling Slash from Technique. The green area is your selected move's range, Rolling Slash allows you to pick two squares in that range to target. Most battles consist of guessing where your opponent is going to move, and because the AI is beetle-brained this isn't exactly difficult. If the opponent happens to Move into a selected square, your attack will connect. If he moves to another square, nothing will happen to him and you'll lose a small amount of HP for missing. If you both attack each other and either both or neither moves connect, the turn ends in a draw and both beetles are injured slightly.
But this turn our Rolling Cutter connected, flip BAM woosh woosh! You generally want to get them into about 50% health with Rolling Slash, then Move around the board until time runs out because they're much more likely to Retreat if they're low in health. Retreat swaps the current beetle for the next one, at full health, and it's a cheap way to snipe a win when there are only a few turns left. If your opponent is even slightly injured, it doesn't matter how much HP you currently have as long as you keep out of their range and Retreat with at least 2 turns left on the counter.
KO and Win! For some reason every beetle roars in this game, I forgot to mention that. Well, now you know. Winning generally gets you a beetle (if you haven't gotten one of them yet that your opponent had), some beetle chow, and occasionally a new default attack for one of the beetles you brought. You don't lose anything if the battle ends in a loss, except your precious time.
That's it for battles!
Exiting out of the Map gives you the Menu, which consists of Start (the map), Wireless (you will never use this), and Beetledex (the most important part of my project.) It took me exactly two playthroughs to collect all 24 beetles, and here they are with screenshots!
Spoiler!
Spoiler!
OH RIGHT I almost forgot. I said there was an extra location, didn't I? Well, it's a boss fight!
With..
Oh god, seriously? Yes, Dr. Beetle went insane, hollowed out the biggest insect he could find, and wore it on his face to scare the children he brought to Illegal Beetle Island. The first time you fight him is uneventful, but the second time is a 30 turn battle immediately followed by a 50 turn battle because he had to whine about losing.
With that, I'm done with this game. I also ripped the soundtrack, which I'll upload a bit later. It's not awful, but it's extremely forgettable.
Alright, here's the soundtrack in 2SF format (aside from the title which was a regular sound file and got converted to WAV.)
If you don't have a 2SF player, here's a plugin that works on a few players - http://www.zophar.net/utilities/2sf.html
I went through and named all the tracks I could identify, there were two I couldn't remember whether I'd heard them or not so I didn't name those, but meh.