I don’t really know if Taito‘s 1991 arcade game, Pu-Li-Ru-La, is obscure, or if it’s a ‘cult game’, or if it’s based on an existing anime or not, because I’d never even heard of it until recently. It’s a cartoony, one or simultaneous two-player beat ’em up featuring a boy and a girl who are given magical sticks to fight enemies in order to restore the flow of time in a place called “Radishland“…

Pu-Li-Ru-La – as the name implies – is a bit strange. Well, it looks and sounds strange, but the gameplay itself is actually quite simple and straightforward – even if the story and premise are bonkers.

Player one controls a boy called Zac, and player two controls a girl called Mel, and the aim is to move from area to area, pummelling enemies and bosses, and watching the story of the game unfold. Ultimately restoring the flow of time in each town as you go.

Controlling Zac and Mel is joystick-based, with three fire buttons for various actions. One for hit; one for jump, and one for each character’s special magic power, which is limited-use. Defeating regular enemies turns them into animals, which can then be touched to earn bonus points (although you have to do this quickly before they run away). There are boss battles at the end of each level where you have to reduce a boss’s health bar to zero to continue. When bosses are defeated they usually turn into people, then say a few (badly-translated) words before the scene quickly moves on.

The art style of Pu-Li-Ru-La is anime-based and is beautifully drawn and coloured – if lacking a few animation frames here and there – and occasionally there are digitised graphics incorporated into the game (Terry Gilliam-style), which are both strange and hilarious at the same time. At the beginning of stage three there’s a digitised photo of a woman hanging from a flag pole (as though she were the flag), and the face of a man rises from below a precipice and zooms out of the screen while pulling a face. It’s a bizarre sequence and might leave you scratching your head. As will the digitised photos of a man dressed in sumo, or the woman smoking a pipe, in the background of the same level…

It’s worth mentioning that the international English language version of Pu-Li-Ru-La is censored in level three, where a pair of female legs protrude from a building, with a doorway in the middle from which pink elephants occasionally appear… I guess the world wasn’t ready for a metaphorical ‘doorway vagina‘, so in the English version it’s been completely removed. I’ve included screenshots for posterity, but the majority of the grabs here are from the English version, which is otherwise identical to the Japanese original – barring the hilariously bad translations.

Overall, Pu-Li-Ru-La is a reasonably entertaining fighting game that you can keep putting credits into, to continue as far into the game as you can be bothered to go. It’s also a decent enough two-player cooperative game, so works well as a party game too. Don’t expect it to rival the best of the genre (like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Final Fight, Streets of Rage 3, or Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder) and you might just enjoy it. It’s also suitable for kids to play, as long as you don’t mind them giggling at some bare sumo arse cheeks occasionally…

Pu-Li-Ru-La was ported to the FM Towns and released in 1994. PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions, known as “Pu-Li-Ru-La Arcade Gears“, were released in 1997, and an emulated arcade version was released as part of Taito Memories (Volume 1) for the PlayStation 2 in 2005.

More: Pu-Li-Ru-La on Wikipedia