Muscle March (Wii) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
488A playthrough of Namco-Bandai's 2010 action/bodybuilder posing simulation game for the Nintendo Wii, Muscle March.
This video shows all three stages played in full.
Muscle March is an oddity, to say the least. The less sense you try to make of it, the better you'll understand it. You are one of a bodybuilding...team, I guess you'd call them, who keeps getting their "protein" stolen by random passersby like aliens, robots, and gay pride parade quarterbacks. In a panic, the whole squad runs after the bad guy. As the bad guy runs through walls he leaves a hole shaped in the position of his arms when he punched through. Using the Wii Remote and the Nunchaku, you have to match the same position to continue - if you don't, you hit the wall and lose energy. At the very end of the race you have to flail wildly with the controllers for a final speed boost to tackle the thief.
As a game, it's beyond simple - each arm has two positions, and that's all you need to worry about. The motion controls are awkward though - you have to have the controllers tilted in a very specific way for changes to register, and if you aren't quick about it you'll run into a lot of stuff.
But this isn't something one plays for the game play. The draw, of course, is the insane presentation. From the playable characters, you can pick a polar bear or Sazh (seriously, tell me that's not Sazh!), and there are some hilarious things going on as you run through city streets and people's houses - it all feels like an even more surreal Pepsiman, or like a Pepsiman Gaiden where they reveal that Pepsiman was secretly Hard Gay all along. (If you don't know who Hard Gay is, he's low-brow Japanese comedy at its absolute best. It's not dirty, just ridiculous - look it up!). Or one of Cho Aniki guys. And I dare you to try not staring awkwardly at the bodybuilders' butts as they run. It looks like somebody took a page from Team Ninja's playbook and added "bouncy" physics.
I remember seeing an article about Muscle March shortly before it came out on the WiiWare service, and it sounded just so bizarre and Japanese that I knew I had to have it. We spent hours making those stupid poses until we could get through all of the stages and it was a blast. It took less than a week to go through and it never got touched again otherwise, but I wasn't disappointed. It was an experience, to say the least.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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