I miss ‘cool Japan’. That post bubble economy, hyper-cute, retro futuristic land of dreams. I basically miss when everything was like a Puffy AmiYumi music video. It seemed that everything cool came from Japan in the late 90s, and video games were no exception. It’s thanks to Konami’s Bemani division that flooded the market with their catalogue of technicoloured, well-timed button mashers. Peripheral games like Beat Mania, Guitar Freaks, Dance Dance Revolution and Pop’n Music dominated the arcade, while more ‘call and response’ styled games such as Bust a Groove and UmJammer Lammy found their home on consoles. Konami dominated the arcades with rhythm games, but another key player in the waning arcade market hadn’t contributed to the flood just yet. I’d say Sega would’ve been focusing more on the upcoming release of the Dreamcast at that stage, and merely dipped their toes in with Samba de Amigo – a cute, but safe entry with maraca peripherals.

It was also around this time that Shibuya-Kei was at the peak of its popularity. Taking influence from French yé-yé music, jazz and synthpop – Shibuya-Kei was a perfect example of Japan taking a western influence and offering up a bizarre interpretation. Pizzicato Five were frontrunners in the genre, with a distinct French influence tied in with the kind of lounge music you’d hear in a hotel as a kid and wonder what it’s like to be a grown up. As with any distinct music genre in Japan, a fashion trend tends to emerge to support it, and Shibuya-kei brought a simplistic version of Mod back into the public consciousness with shift dresses, bobbed hair and platforms.

The Dreamcast encapsulates everything I loved about ‘cool Japan’ – the too much, too soon approach, the early attempt at online gaming, the stupidly huge controller, the even stupider name (though still no competition for the FM Towns Marty)…the list goes on. But what I loved the most, was the unbridled creativity on show for the console’s brief lifespan. The Dreamcast showcased next-gen takes on familiar genres with a fresh twist.

There wasn’t a better platform to showcase the fusion of late 90s trends. So, with the rhythm genre at its peak popularity, Space Channel 5 descended from the heavens in a flash of neon and short hemlines. At age 10 I was entirely unaware of its existence. I didn’t own a Dreamcast, and the one friend that did was too preoccupied with Crazy Taxi to care about a girly rhythm game. In my late teens, during my gaming renaissance of filling all the gaps of what I’d missed over the years, I saw a couple of screen shots and that was it. This damn game haunted me for the next two years until a girl I worked with pointed out that a drawing of a 60s cyborg girl that reminded her of Space Channel 5. Then it clicked, and so the search began. I put this game on the highest pedestal, and I hadn’t even played it yet. I started listening to the soundtracks, and as an early Capsule and Pizzicato Five fan, I got hooked instantly.

Then I found a copy of the PS2 port on eBay by chance. It was destiny. I was going to own this game, then I was going to be amazing at it, and then I’d be able to tell all my friends that I was the best at this relatively obscure game. That’s what I thought at least. Wrong. I have decent rhythm for a white girl who doesn’t dance or is not in any way musically inclined. Usually I’m pretty great at rhythm games. But my main downfall is that I cannot remember successive instructions for the life of me. I made it through the first level with only a few mistakes, but then Space Channel 5 turned out to be a very stressful game very quickly. I wanted to be good at this game so desperately. It was as if a higher power had prevented my idiot hands from moving fast enough to input the commands, or screwing up and shooting the prisoners by mistake. I stubbornly kept with it, until I hit a block around stage 4 that I just couldn’t pass. I hadn’t felt this demoralised since Gitaroo Man. I gave up. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. I didn’t have the patience for this kind of game any more, my backlog was starting to pile up and my will to take down the Moralians had vanished. I filed the game away on my shelf and haven’t touched it since.

But then Sega had to go and release an HD version of Space Channel 5 Part 2, didn’t they? And like the eternal chump I am, I got suckered right into buying it. I justified that the physical copy was far too expensive on eBay, thanks to the Michael Jackson cameo. I’ll give it a shot, I thought. Maybe they’d streamlined the game a little the second time around.

Well I wasn’t far off the money. It was streamlined, and it was indeed much easier. But I still got stuck, at the boss fight where Space Michael joins you no less! I couldn’t even get to the best part of the game! I shut it off and attempted Jet Set Radio instead (with similar results, unsurprisingly). I come back to Space Channel 5 Part 2 every so often to see if I can beat that boss fight, and nope. No dice.

I guess the moral in all of this is to never have expectations of anything, and you won’t be disappointed. While I still maintain a ridiculous level of nostalgia for something I was too much of an idiot to finish, I shouldn’t have placed it on a pedestal. You put it up there as the perfect game – you have so much in common, you both like the same music, you have a couple of laughs and then it just shuts you down when you try to get serious. Essentially, Space Channel 5 friendzoned me. But at least it’ll always be there as a nice memory that I’ll look back on years from now when I’m off with some buffman grimdark shooter that I swore I’d never play.