Akazukin Cha-Cha: Osawagase! Panic Race! (赤ずきんチャチャ お騒がせパニックレース) is a top-down board strategy game released for the PC-FX on October 25, 1996. It is based on the 1991 manga & 1994 anime, Akazukin ChaCha. Out of all 4 official games based on the series, this is one of the only 2 to not be published by Tomy.
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 Unfortunately for our favorite little witch, she never got any games as good as the the Sailor Senshi did (Well, not officially). Instead, NEC Interchannel & Tomy decided to milk the franchise dry before putting it in a coma for about 15 years, with only different parts of the manga being released from 1997 to 2000 & an English dub being produced. Good job, developers and publishers!
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Gameplay
Up to 6 players can play the game, but in 1-player mode, you can only play as ChaCha while the rest are AI characters. Each player advances throughout the board by rolling dice to numbers 1 to 6 or higher with multiple dice. Landing on different spaces leads to different results: finding items, being attacked, being able to attack the enemies, etc. The game's mechanics are somewhat expanded by giving each character abilities and statistics of their own, that have to be used only on special occasions. Certain obstacles are only solvable if two or more characters gather on the same spot.
Why It Lost the Race
- Misleading title: You would think that it'd be a racing game similar to that of the kart racing genre, or sort of a pre-Sonic Riders kind of game since it's about a "panic race" the characters compete in, but instead it's an unnecessarily complicated board game.
- While the idea of an Akazukin ChaCha video board game sounds like an okay idea on paper(especially since the main trio do play with the giant map like it's a board game in the anime at episode 36), it is executed very poorly here.
- The music is taken straight from the anime with nothing else as music. Sure, it's in passable CD quality like your usual CD-ROM game, but that is just unoriginal & lazy. At least the also crappy Game Boy game had original music!
- The voice clips in-game, while not taken from the anime, can become really annoying because you'd be hearing them a lot, especially when your character is going more than 6 steps throughout the board.
- The in-game graphics look like a Dingo Pictures movie in comparison to the full motion video footage, complete with stiff and jerky limited animation that is somehow worse than anything by Dingo Pictures.
- Speaking of which, with the exceptions of the opening sequence before the title screen & the endings, the footage shown is taken directly from the anime itself, which is again very lazy.
- Not to mention they are used outside of the original scenes' context, which can make people who haven't watched the anime confused as to what's going on, and people who have watched the anime will notice that it leads to continuity errors everywhere.
- The actual gameplay in this game has so many things wrong with it that a complete exploration of everything wrong with it can take all day.
- The part where your character moves throughout the board, while not very long, can be rather tedious.
- The combat sequences involve around FMV sequences that are again lifted from the anime out of context where you'd have to defeat the enemy. It is one of the most tedious parts of the whole game, with the enemy being able to deplete your character's health almost all the time until you're done with. Being able to attack your enemy is a luck-based chore; even when you do give out a blow to your enemy which you can do just before the battle really begins, it isn't satisfying in the least.
- Using two dice is an option, but it isn't that useful outside of getting further onto the board hoping to get ahead of the race.
- Some spaces are marked differently, but do nothing. Considering the game apparently has different functions for each space, it makes you wonder if there's any cut content that they removed later on just to further make the game frustrating.
- There are X marked spaces, which if unlucky to step on, can cause something bad to happen to your character. This is very annoying, especially if you end up in a situation where there's no other choice, but to either take damage, or go back several spaces.
- The RPG elements they try to add just complicate the games even more; considering that the combat sequences are luck-based, you'll have a hard time ever thinking that there's any advantage to higher-level characters compared to lower-level characters.
- The characters play mostly the same with very few moments where character-specific actions are used, which further proves how little they cared about making it.
- Those actions of which can range from okay to very much useless. Some of the forced ones are especially stupid, such as the one where Riiya can open Dorothy's door, even though this game is supposed to take place after the first 56 episodes.
- Sometimes you'll need more than one character for an action to happen, which can be very annoying if one of the players' characters is ahead of the other one by more than 20 spaces.
- This & other poorly made licensed games were enough to put the franchise into a slowdown coma for about 15 years before Akazukin ChaCha N released in 2011 as a one-shot manga before becoming a full-time series. The last parts of the manga & the English dub were made as damage control.
The Only Redeeming Quality That Won the Race
- The ending cutscenes are not only original, but there's one for each character. Plus, they're actually pretty funny. Not to mention they actually look like they're from the show, complete with well-done animation. Therefore, at least you get something good in the end.
Reception
The game was never reviewed by actual gaming magazines back in the day but has garnered a negative reception for being a poorly made game that would fit for the Philips CD-i which has been better received than the PC-FX despite being more infamous.
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