The Hall of Shame 04.10.08: The Hip-Hop Boys

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 04.10.2008

The pair of bosses who alone show the awfulness of Seven Samurai 20XX and carelessly injecting hip-hop into video games.

There's nothing quite as enjoyable in video games as the Boss Fight. You fight through legions of enemies, build up your strengths, save your data, and then go into a fierce battle to give it your all. Some boss fights will go down as some of the memorable ones in history for how great they were. Fighting Mother Brain in the end of Super Metroid. Fighting "The End" in Metal Gear Solid 3. Fighting all the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus.

But then there are Boss Fights that play out so horribly you wonder why it was put into the game in the first place. Especially if the boss in question is one of the most annoying characters you can possibly come across. This week, I look into one of the most annoying bosses I ever seen in my life: The Hip-Hop Boys.



Before we get into the Hip-Hop boys, let's look into the game they're from. Seven Samurai 20XX is a futuristic revision of the highly praised Akira Kurosawa movie Seven Samurai. In the movie, a small farm village is constantly pillaged by 40 bandits, and the villagers are too weak to fight back. The villagers set out to find samurai to help them, even though they don't have the money to hire them and samurai were known to take women. However, they ultimately find seven of them willing to help. It's about three and a half hours long of it's really worth watching. Over the years the movie has been remade as a western (The Magnificant Seven) and as an anime series (Samurai 7), so it's pretty popular.



Unfortunately, Seven Samurai 20XX fails at being a good revision because it fails to really stay true to the series. The plot revolves around a kid named Natoe who fights a bunch of evil robots with the help of other samurai to protect a village, except where in the movie the villagers need the samurai because they're basically slaves to the bandits, the villagers in 20XX hire samurai in order to protect the "Child of Heaven" that the villagers stole from the humanoids. It feels more like a generic anime rather than a re-telling of Kurosawa's work. Aside from the story, another big problem with the game is the gameplay itself. It's basically Dynasty Warriors except you only really need to press one button constantly, and for a game that's supposed to have seven samurai in it, you only play as ONE of them. Talk about a missed opportunity. The graphics are okay and the music is pretty good, but overall the game was just a boring hack-n'-slash that only had the Seven Samurai name going for it.

But one day in a design meeting, they came up with the idea that would completely ruin the game...

"Okay, so we're going to take Seven Samurai and remake it in a futuristic anime setting. What kind of bosses should we add to the game?"
"How about a pair of teenagers that fight on roller blades?"
"Sounds good, but something is missing..."
"And they rap all the time!"
"BRILLIANT! The kids love rap! It's bound to work!"
[This may or may not have actually happened.]

At one point in the game, Natoe comes across these two kids on roller blades who decide to rap about who they are. They are Chi & Mu, The Hip-Hop Boys.

The following video contains their intro sequence as well as what the boss fight is like. I think this video is from the Japanese version of the game, so some dialog may be different, but it sucks all the same:

Notice Natoe's open mouthed reaction? That's exactly how I felt. As someone who has watched Seven Samurai, I find it to be insulting. I can understand trying to add characters with weird personalities and traits, but a couple of rapping teenagers? Seriously?

They don't even look like they actually fight in the game! They roll around and kick you with their roller blades. Since you've got a blade blade, it should be easy, but whoever was playing this demo got their ass handed to them, probably because the camera decided not to show where one of the bosses were. There is nothing quite as embarrassing as being defeated by a couple of kids who rap and use ROLLER BLADES to attack. It's like getting your ass kicked by Cut Man, or losing to Glass Joe in the first round.

Thankfully however, The Hip-Hop Boys aren't a major part to the story, so once you've defeated them, you never have to see or hear from them again. As for forgetting them entirely...that might be a different story.

When Hip-Hop goes horribly wrong

Hip-Hop is a very popular genre of music that has spawned it's own kind of culture, yet the game industry (and basically a lot of other industries) can't seem to get it right when injecting hip-hop into their product. This is because they focus too much on how it'll make them money and are short-sighted to see what hip-hop really is, so we get annoying characters like The Hip-Hop Boys who are about as gangster as Poochie the Dog. It isn't just the creation of a caricature that can ruin a game, but also trying to inject hip-hop into an already existing character.



Shadow originally debuted in Sonic Adventure 2 where he was supposed to be Sonic's arch-rival and he wasn't a robot like Metal Sonic. At the end of the game Shadow sacrifices his life to save the Earth and it looked like we wouldn't see him again, but then something happened; he became popular. So Sega brings him back into Sonic Heroes where the question of how he survived and if he's the real Shadow the Hedgehog keeps coming up until it's finally answered in Shadow's own video game.

Now Tails and Knuckles had their own video games in the past but they came out on Sega's minor platforms and were more like spin-offs. Shadow's game however was to stick with the canon of the current Sonic storyline, so it was going to suck, then it would do much more damage to the Sonic franchise then Tails and Knuckles' games. Because Shadow has this whole "mysterious past" thing going on, the game would be taking a darker tone. Just how dark was Sega going to take it?

By giving Shadow real life guns. Apparently having chaos powers wasn't enough, so now they have him firing at enemies with all sorts of military weapons. Then as if that's not bad enough, Shadow is also driving around in vehicles. Last time I remember, Shadow is supposed to be as fast as Sonic, maybe even faster. So why the hell does Shadow need to be riding around on a motorcycle all of a sudden?

Let's see...he's got guns, vehicles, and he also swears. Throw in the shiny object that the lord was killed on and what do you know, it's almost as if Shadow has turned into a hip-hop caricature! Way to ruin one of the most popular characters in your series Sega. Bravo.

So to any video game company that decides to use the hip-hop culture to make their game more popular, take a look at those guys above, and then ask yourselves if you really want the negative criticism it will bring you.