Beware the Robot Squad!: Missing Muffins #52: 100% Orange Juice

Video game board games are often a silly thing. Hitting a button to roll dice is never not a sobering reminder that you're digitally simulating one of the few fun things you can do in the company of friends that isn't dangerous, unhealthy, and/or illegal.

Until you bump me back to start, then things get Beyond Thunderdome real quick.

To put it succinctly, 100% Orange Juice is like Monopoly, but with 100% more catgirls and 100% less capitalism. Or Mario Party minus the mini games (you know, the part that makes Mario Party interesting). That, my friends, is a recipe for fun.

Pictured: Fun.

The basics are pretty simple. The game is played with four players. Each player starts out on their own "Home Panel" at level 1. The goal of the game is simply to reach level 6. How do you do that? Each time you land on any home panel, the game will check if you've completed one of two objectives, called "Norma". If you do, you level up. You can reach higher levels of Norma through defeating a certain number of enemies, or collecting enough Star currency by landing on bonus panels, rumbling your opponents in a duel, using cards, or at the beginning of every turn.

You don't wanna know the things I would do for 100 stars.

Scattered throughout the boards are panels that warp you to other spaces, panels that make you drop stars, panels that put you in an encounter with an enemy (often ruthlessly overpowered birds) and panels that give you a card. Cards have all sorts of effects, from drawing more cards, healing some HP, setting traps for other players, or giving you a bonus to your battle stats.

Battle in the game consists of the attacker and defender both rolling a die, and after a character's latent pros and cons to Attack, Defense and Evade are added in, damage is done. It's largely random, but the character you choose can have an effect so it's not entirely a matter of praying to the RNG. That doesn't help ease the acute rage you feel as the CPU rolls a six for the thirtieth time in a row and steals half of your stars.

Seriously, the computer controlled characters in this game are at the same time both dreadfully stupid and stupidly clever. Though it's really just a matter of the game's "random" luck "coincidentally" making things difficult for you. The CPU never picks fights it can't win, even with supposedly "random" outcomes. And cards that do damage to "random" opponents always seem to hit you...

To mix things up even more, the whole board can be under the effect of specific events, such as the Mine Layer event, which places a random trap card on the board, or Random Warp, which is programmed to teleport you completely to the other side of the board when you, and only you, are close to your Home Panel (probably).

After any player reaches level four, a boss shows up on certain spaces. They kick everybody's ass but the damage is cumulative so whoever lands the final hit is bathed in stars.

After battle, your performance nets you experience and stars, which you can use in the in-game shop to buy new boards, cards, costumes and what have you.