I am not, in my heart of hearts, a gamer. I mean, sure, I’ve logged a few hundred hours in Final Fantasies, I’ve beaten Super Dodgeball on average once a month for the past four years, and I’ve even played my share of hacked/homebrewed/famicom-only ROMs on my trusty little computer emulator. But despite all of this, I am jack-shit for a gamer. I’ve never gotten past the 5th world of Mario Brothers. SMB3? I warp whistle to World 8 and lose every life on the first level. I used cheat codes on Starcraft just to beat it on Easy. I couldn’t beat Halo because I could not find the exit to the last level.

One of the worst offenders? Mega Man 3. This is a game that I’ve been exposed to since 6th grade, easily. I’m pretty sure I made a (COPYRIGHT-INFRINGING!) homemade board game of it. The Top Man theme is easily one of my childhood’s most memorable songs, somewhere just before Ray Stevens “The Streak” and just behind that “My Name is Zoom” birthday tape. Hell, a month or two ago I even bought a prog-rock opera concerning Dr. Light and his two rapscallion boys. Basically, I know my Rock n’ Roll. But can I beat the damn thing?

NOT EVEN CLOSE.

I mean after years of playing, I can recall only once getting to Wiley’s Castle, and even there there was probably some god-awful obstacle in my way involving instant-death spikes or pits with ridiculously speedy platforms that can’t be bothered to hold the fuck still, or worst of all, those thrice-damned phasing blocks. That sound haunts me in dreams. Eight balls of light disappear across the screen, the air rings with their deathly echo, and the blocks phase mercilessly on. The screen lingers on them, consuming soul after soul without even a Bald Bull victory chortle. They are soulless, godless, communist monsters, and by far Wiley’s greatest evil.

Oh fuck that, it was just some Japanese programmer with a fetish for timing. I HATE those guys.

I like options. Do you like options? of course you do! If I want a mind-numbing game of calculations I can fill out a sudoku block (an activity I have no excuse for performing so compulsorily as I do). I want a game where the challenges are varied, where I can take different strategies to different enemies and terrains. And do you know what happens when you add options like those to Mega Man?
You get COCORON.
Actually, to get Cocoron, you would also have to add a couple of doses of bad Ambien, becuase this game is one crazy nightmare (well, literally). Sure, robot cats spitting flea-bots at you might have messed with your head a bit in Mega Man, but this game asks you to fight parachuting armadillos as you swim through a lake of milk, armed only with grenades loaded to the brim with flower power. The bosses range from a deck of cards to the goddamned moon (The cards are actually harder). Were this the entire charm of the game, it would hold a place in my heart. But the game holds one massive, all-powerful feature that catapults the users comments from mere “check out this Famicom Rom that you haven’t heard of” all the way up to “SHUT UP SHUT UP ONLY COCORAN MAY TALK”. This feature is the character design system.

Upon starting the game, you are asked to pick from a selection of 8 heads, 8 bodies, and 8 weapon types. Let’s do some quick math shall we? A SHIT TON is the answer we would have come to had I even asked the question. I’m getting too impatient to play to bother with all the niceties here folks. Each body part contributes to the character’s overall speed, HP, and jump height (HINT: I BET THE GIANT SPRING LEGS LET YOU JUMP HIGH AS HELL). The weapons which range from pencils to shruiken (the pencils are better! noticing a trend?) determine the angle, direction, and strength of your projectiles. The game really shines in this department: can you angle your crystal fragments just right to hit those high power-up eggs? While your flower-power cluster bomb works great for inflicting multiple hits on a boss, is the long reload time practical for the slew of minions before it? Is the fully-powred pencil really bad ass? (YESYES).

So once you’ve finally picked the character of your dreams and named him something appropriately obscene, it is time to play one of the five levels. What’s that? you wanted more options? OKAY. So not only do you get to wander off to any of five different levels from your little dream hut, the level will start and end differently depending on your start and end destination. You *can* return back to the hut after every level, or you can just wander off to the next location and fight in a longer and slightly different level. But that also makes NEW ENEMIES appear as you trace through the once-familiar territory. And what’s that? your perfect character cannot adapt to these brand new enemies? Well go beat a level, you pansy, and as a reward you can make another. Go on and shun your first-born son! Power up everyone’s weapons except the smiley face on a spring that shoots out musical notes! All the game is missing is a digital attic for you to lock him in. But as I was saying, once you’ve created a new character, you can fight EVEN NEWER enemies, becuase the game knows you’re a cheap bastard and will try to exploit it! this is Cocoron, my friend: where video game exploit you.

The only downside to this absolutely brilliant piece of Nintendo-dom is the simple fact that I can’t figure out how to beat it yet. OH CRUEL IRONY. Apparently there is an “Egg” where Cocoron is being held, an egg that seems to not be anywhere on the map of places out of which I’ve already kicked the crap. But you can bet I’ll be like a sperm in my search for it, becuase there’s enough replay value in frankensteining together little fighting monsters that I can ensure constant sleep deprivation and general daytime unproductivity for the rest of this year. So Hooray! and 512 stars out of ten.