Money is really depressing to me. Not only have recent events left me with a deep anxiety about finances, it seems that a lot of people are struggling, and the best you can hope for is to struggle less. I don’t want to discuss this on a deeper level, so instead, let’s talk about Wall Street Kid.
Wall Street Kid is actually known as The Money Game II: Kabutochou no Kiseki in Japan, meaning that, yes, it’s the second in a series, with the first game never seeing a release outside of Japan. You could also look at the games as a spin-off of another Sofel series, Casino Kid, but they’re not actually related aside from sharing a developer.
I want to note off the top that I wouldn’t consider Wall Street Kid to be kusoge. It’s really not that bad, and Sofel did a great job localizing it by basically rebuilding everything to be more Western-friendly. It’s just such a bizarre game that I didn’t see myself covering it any other way, and it fits best in this column. I’m mad with power.
The game looks easy, that’s why it sells
Wall Street Kid places you in the leather wingtips of the eponymous protagonist as he’s informed of the death of a family member. Apparently, your distant uncle has passed and left you his absurdly colossal fortune, but only if you prove that you’re already privileged enough to deserve it. Uncle Benedict has some pretty specific demands that you carry on the family name with undeserved dignity.
You’re given $500,000 of seed money, and you need to play the stock market to build up your life. You need to buy a house, get married, honeymoon on a yacht, and then re-obtain the family castle. For some reason, you need to do this in four months. Otherwise, the $600 Billion (wtf!?) in assets goes to… I don’t know, probably some greedy charity or something.
Those are some pretty incredible demands from a dead guy with too much money and no children.
Essentially, it means that you have to have enough money to pass certain milestones. At the end of the first month (April), you need to buy a $1 million home. That’s pretty funny nowadays with an out-of-control, overpriced housing market.
Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy
What’s funnier is that, at the start of the game, Mr. Kid already has a fiancée, and you’re now obligated to keep her happy in order to receive your absurdly massive inheritance. That means she’ll keep coming to you wanting you to buy her expensive things and will leave you if you don’t. Ah, true love.
She must know about the inheritance because this is practically extortion. She can demand anything she wants because if you don’t give in, she can just leave, and you can kiss that money goodbye. It’s a hilariously effective and cynical approach to a relationship. Every time the phone would ring, I’d find myself chanting, “Please don’t be my girlfriend,” before advancing the text. Video games have always been great at teaching children about adult relationships.
To be fair to the fiancée, you can say no to some of her demands and still succeed. It’s just if you don’t give in occasionally or ignore her outright that you lose.
Failing upwards
Games that simulate the stock exchange weren’t uncommon, even when Wall Street Kid hit the market. The concept is already pretty abstract and rooted in mathematics, so it’s a perfect fit for a video conversion. As such, there were attempts at stock exchange simulations before video games even left mainframe computers.
The milestones you have to reach are perhaps the only thing that really makes Wall Street Kid stand out. The day-by-day task of betting on stock is pretty boring. You get the newspaper in the morning that tells you what stocks are doing well, and the best way to succeed is to just put your money into one of the day’s top performers. I never had one severely crash out on me, but for that matter, I never lucked out and won big on something. It’s a rather predictable market.
Actually, I’m not sure if there’s even much room for skill here. The best strategy seems to be buying as much high-performing stock as you can at the time. When it stops performing, you just sell your stocks and trade over to something else. Whether or not that stock continues at that rate or not is kind of just random. Sometimes, not much of anything would rise in the market for me, so it wouldn’t matter what I picked. Realistic? I don’t know. I’m not an investor.
Since there’s a newspaper, I would have expected that it would cover events that impact certain stocks. Something like a worldwide telecom outage that affects the prices of ATNT or a war breaking out that boosts steel prices. There’s none of that. Categories of stocks just do well some days, and that’s about it.
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew
At the end of June, you get to bid on the Benedict family castle, and by the end of July, you need to have enough money to pay it off. My playthrough video of Wall Street Kid is clocked at over 2 hours, but I accidentally said “yes” to something I shouldn’t have in my first attempt and lost in the first month and had to start over. Really, you could probably put a bow on it in an hour if your wheeling is up to par with your dealing. And you don’t accidentally select the wrong dialogue option.
I failed at the end, falling a hair short of affording the castle.
So, I guess I don’t “earn” the astronomical inheritance. How heartbreaking. I guess I’m just going to have to live the rest of my life as a failure with my wife, dog, million-dollar house, yacht, and $2.5 million in assets. All that hard work for nothing. Why must I suffer?
But I’ll start over, and this time, I will have that inheritance that I deserve. Then, I will rub elbows with the other elite of this world. The champions who reign above average humans. And then I will gradually lose touch with the common person and form a spiritual hole where my humanity used to be. I will try to fill it, and when that doesn’t work, I’ll just hide it behind dead eyes, an empty smile, and a passionless relationship. I’d obscure it by establishing a charity for some popular cause. I’d show it to those beneath the heel of my boot that I still have a soul – some sort of compassion – while at the same time using it to dodge taxes and funnel money into my other corporate endeavors before it lands right back into my pockets. Not one drop of my money should be touched by the disgusting sorts of people who seek charity. What have they done to deserve it?
Not like me. I earned every dime. I played Wall Street Kid.
