Rakugaki Showtime
Rakugaki Showtime is a Japan-only wacky Fighting Game by Treasure, telling the story of a few doodles drawn to life by the God Hand (not that one) for the purpose of defeating a group of evil doodles... also drawn to life by the God Hand, who is merely staging this epic battle for its own amusement (sounds vaguely like Super Smash Bros.'s Master Hand, doesn't it?).
The gameplay can be described as Power Stone meets Super Dodge Ball: the two-dimensional fighters move around on a 3D plane and can attack each other at will, but will spend most of their time picking up whatever they can and throwing it at their enemies. Gameplay is fast and frantic, the visuals are amusing, and the story is simple enough to be understood with little knowledge of Japanese.
- Action Girl: Sasami, Marina.
- Ambiguous Gender: The God Hand has a child's voice that could easily belong to either gender.
- Art Initiates Life
- Art Shift: Momentarily, in the intro animation
- BFS: Excalibur's schtick. His sword is so large he can't even throw items... and doesn't need to.
- Big Bad: Daddy...except he's just another pawn in God Hand's game.
- Defeat Means Friendship: The God Hand grants the doodles their freedom after getting thoroughly trashed by them.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?
- Dynamic Difficulty: The game will increase or decrease difficulty based on your performance.
- Excuse Plot: Within the context of the game: the doodles fight each other on rather flimsy pretenses and stop fighting when they no longer have to.
- Fighting Game
- Guest Fighter: Marina from Mischief Makers, also by Treasure.
- Happy Fun Ball: The Smiley Ball. God help you if you underestimate its power.
- Large Ham: Daddy.
- The Man Behind the Man: The God Hand stages the entire plot to amuse itself.
- Mooks: The comically inept Zako, and the slightly more imposing Ultra Johnny(s).
- Nintendo Hard: The game itself is not hard to beat... but to beat the game on hard mode, you not only have to be good enough to get to hard mode, but good enough to stay there (see Dynamic Difficulty above).
- The Rival: Jon Calibur/Jon MkII.
- True Final Boss: After defeating Daddy, the God Hand will move to erase him... provoking your character to pick a fight.