Tensai Bit-Land Glamon Battle

The doodles you draw become three-dimensional! They work! And they fight!

JP release: 3rd October 2003
NA release: N/A
JP release: N/A
Developer: Garakuta Studio
Publisher: Taito
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

While many lists put this under the name “Gramon Battle”, this seems to be a mistranslation of how the name was written in Japanese. I believe (my Japanese knowledge isn’t that good) that the characters used represent how a Japanese person would pronounce the English of “Glamon Battle”, as the name itself – short for “Gladiator Monsters Battle” – is used throughout the game. The game seems to be based on a segment from a long running Japanese variety show called Tensai TV kun, which seems to feature live action segments with CGI monsters, alongside songs and other things. There’s not a lot of information available in English, but it seems like it started in 1993 and is still going on in some form.

Glamon Battle starts out with a load of lengthy tutorials explaining how to create a monster. It’s all spoken with no subtitles, so no translation, but I was able to mostly figure it out. You choose body parts, draw shapes and the game extrapolates it into a 3D object. Once you have a body, you can add legs, feet, wings and other parts that move or flop around, along with a weapon. I made a sword wielding duck thing, although I didn’t realise you have to pick a colour first and I managed to make it sideways.

Once you have a monster, you can take part in tournaments and make your way through a battle tower using a turn based system. You have a few attacks, along with the option to charge up or reflect the enemy attack. With the language barrier and me being awful at turn-based games, I couldn’t get far, but it seems like it could be a decent system.

The creation tools are quite robust (it reminds me of Spore and you probably have more freedom than Spore) and I do appreciate that the first tournament is made up of monsters that seem as badly drawn as mine (there are much better looking ones later on), and they give you some neat ideas as your body parts don’t have to connect. The second battle was against two little creatures, which is a great example of what you can do with it.

Fun

It’s a game adaptation of the corner that originated from an NHK children’s program, and this is quite interesting. Victory or loss is a so-called Rock Paper Scissors system, and if you lose all of your opponent’s HP (Kogeki, magic, barriers), you win.
100%伝説, Amazon JP (Translated)

Remake or remaster?

Even without the context of the show, the creation aspect is a neat part. It would be good to see a monster game use it again.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Bit-Life Glamon Battle.