PlayStation Basement #17 - Board Game Top Shop

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on December 22nd, 2018. It has been edited slightly for formatting.

Brrr, it sure is chilly these days for the most of North America. I went out a bit, but there’s always some time for the PlayStation Basement. Every Saturday, I’ll be reviewing an overlooked or odd game for the original PlayStation. As always, I’ll be using a nine-point scale where 9-7 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad.

Have you finished your holiday shopping? I just did some last minute shopping today after rethinking some things. It sure was busy at the stores I went to, even though two of those were small businesses in my city. While I did not go to a mall, today’s game is about one. This is Board Game: Top Shop, another A1 Games budget game like the previously reviewed Crossroad Crisis. Like many games in A1 Games’s short series, this game includes the genre in the name and was, in its second release on PlayStation, a SuperLite 1500 Series game. Board Game: Top Shop was released for PlayStation and Sega Saturn on February 11th, 1998 in Japan as Tenant Wars; the SuperLite 1500 version followed in July 1999. The game did not come out in America until December 4th, 2001 and only on the PlayStation. Board Game: Top Shop was developed by Kid who mostly made games for the Japanese market. In the early 90s, they did have some games published in North America, mostly on the NES and Game Boy, such as Burai Fighter Deluxe, KickMaster, Isolated Warrior, Fastest Lap, and Sumo Fighter. Some games, such as Summer Carnival ’92: Recca would eventually see release on Nintendo’s Virtual Console.

The cover to Board Game: Top Shop follows A1 Games’s template of a colorful block with the game’s genre and, usually, title. The rest of the art shows three of the game’s silly, anime characters in front of one the game’s malls. The odd part here is the sloppiness of the cover; if you look closely, the background is blurry. It’s like the publishers took a screenshot from the game and had to blow it up. I really like the design overall, but the sloppy background has issues. The original Japanese version shows all the characters on a sky background, and the second Japanese version shows some grey buildings as SuperLite 1500 games do. The American cover is the best, as it actually shows the mall. I wish that that mall wasn't so blurry.

Graphically, Board Game: Top Shop is bright and cheery. There are many unique designs for stores and characters. The interface is easy to read and looks good. My main issues are the lack of animations for much of the game; the backgrounds have none, and the characters don’t have enough. This is a letdown, as a mall should be a pretty lively place with shoppers and clerks moving about. It’s not like background animations would have been entirely unrealistic either; we saw them in many of Capcom and SNK’s fighting games at the time and even before this. Unlike the backgrounds, the playable characters are certainly lively but just come out kind of choppy. The game has a nice design aesthetic, cute and colorful, but could have used a bit more movement to be the best it could be.

The sound of Board Game: Top Shop is similar to the graphics; it succeeds with a few issues that prevent it from reaching true greatness. The game’s songs are bright and cheery like the graphics. It’s all pop with slight funk and jazz flourishes. As this is a game in the style of Monopoly, games of Board Game: Top Shop take more than a few minutes, and the song for each mall just keeps going and going. Though there are some different songs when event cards are flipped over, the rest of the time you’ll just be hearing the same happy, little melodies. It gets a little repetitive like this. The songs themselves are not particularly complex either. They do sound pretty nice through my 5.1 system. The sound effects are simple and nothing more than you would expect, many chirpy blips and beeps. Most of this is stuff you’ve heard before.

As I have mentioned, and as you could probably gather from the title, Board Game: Top Shop is a board game. Though pretty common in Japan, board game video games don’t up often in North America beyond video versions of Scrabble and casino games that usually end up in the bargain bin. Board Game: Top Shop takes after Monopoly with the players selecting a fun character and moving about a mall using a pencil with numbered sides as a die. I don’t know if pencil dice are really common in Japan, but I did discover a cool line of pencil battle dice called Batoen while doing some research. There was also a recent Kickstarter scam for pencil dice in the last few years by infamous tabletop RPG Kickstarter scammer, Ken Whitman.

Anyway, the pencils aren’t that important. The players move the number of spaces they roll or draw an event card. Event cards cause random effects such as gaining money, having to sell a store, or suddenly wearing the mysterious “Chirp-Chirp Shoes”. Moving gives you the choice of buying an empty store, restocking your stores, or having to buy from an opponent’s store depending if you and on an empty space, a store you own, or a store an opponent owns respectively. You also gain money when passing or stopping on the bank and can use the elevator to head to a random floor if you land on that.

There’s some extra stuff too. Players can buy opponent’s stores that are out of stock, hence the need to keep your store in business with products on the shelf. More expensive items cost more for the player but, as all items sell for double their stocking price, give a bigger turnout. More expensive items also have a higher chance of being returned, giving the buyer their money back and netting a loss of stock for the seller. You can get better items for your store by increasing it into neighboring empty spaces if you happen to land on those. One last thing is the accrual of points. Points allow you to have big effects happen such as obtaining a random store, causing an opponent to lose money, or switching turns with another player. These effects all happen at the bank. You get points when you buy items sometimes. In this way, points work to balance out players that have many stores and players that have few since the players with less tend to land on opponents spaces more often than their own. The points can cause great changes in the playfield, so it’s a very important part of the game.

Board Game: Top Shop can be played solo or with up to five other players. There is a story mode about Meower, a chubby yellow cat, making money with unlockables, but it will take some time to clear. The opponents are a worthy challenge; you might not releasing you are losing until it’s too late.

In the end, Board Game: Top Shop is a fun and simple game with a cheery veneer. Unfortunately, it is a bit repetitive with long games. I wish that the game had been a bit higher in budget to get some more music, sound effects, and animations. However, as it is, Board Game: Top Shop is a worthy title that you can take a look for own your own shopping trips for retro games.

Board Game: Top Shop receives a Good (7).

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