Harmful Park ~ High-Brow Gag & Pure Shooting

I went through a cute ‘em up phase where I was determined to find the perfect cutie patootie shootie. (aHahaa yeah I totally did that this is a serious gameblog unsub immediately) To my horror, I learned there actually aren’t a lot of options in this subgenre and I didn’t enjoy many of the ones I tried. I despaired. Then, I found it. The grail.

Harmful Park is a slow-scrolling horizontal cute ‘em up released on Playstation in Japan by Sky Think Systems. It is one of the most perfect games that has ever existed. I am slightly incredulous that Sky Think Systems released two random puzzle games, then this one, and vanished into the night, forever lost to to us, but that’s how it goes.

Harmful Park is about an amusement park that has been taken over by a mad scientist and the young women on flying motorcycles who must liberate it. The player can cycle through four weapons: ice cream cone (focused/laser beam), pie (grenade-type), potato gun (standard bullet), and jelly beans (weak homing weapon), and all of these have limited secondary functions. Weapons can be powered up 3x. Colorful levels, from a haunted house to a roller coaster to a zoo, filled with strange and inventive enemies await; the attention to visual detail is tremendous. The game includes 3 mini-games for coop play. Newcomers will enjoy endless continues and forgiving base difficulty while veterans will want to sink their teeth into high difficulty and a multiplier-based scoring system.

Here’s the bad news. Harmful Park had a limited run and is a highly-sought rare on the aftermarket; a copy of the Japanese PS game fetches exorbitant prices ranging from $600 to $1,200. Isn’t the retro market great! :)))

The good news is Harmful Park was released on Japanese PSN for a delightful ¥617. To play it, US PSP/PSV/PS3/PS4 owners need only set up a Japanese PSN account and use a Japanese gift card.

I will never understand why this game was never ported. You can argue it’s a niche within a niche, and you’d be right, but Harmful Park is a damn good game, it’s fun, and it’s incredibly accessible, which is increasingly rare in the shooter genre. I know, “This is perfect for Switch,” has become a meme but, seriously? This is perfect for the Switch.