The Misadventures of Tron Bonne [PSX Classic Game Review]

To start, a disclaimer. I’m writing this on my very outdated and recently broken phone (Galaxy S5) and have never done that before and suck at typing on phones as I am not a normie. I just had neurosurgery done on my lumbar spine a few weeks ago and so I don’t want to be on the PC too long, it’s also why I haven’t posted anything in awhile or even a picks post. So please look past typos, words that seem like an auto correct changed it without me realizing, and various other similar issues as well as probably much shorter length or more summarization than usual and mostly all googled images for the game. The screen I can see is also hilariously small, just saying. This app is beginning to lag too.

Also gonna just screw my carpal tunnel up even more, oops.

Anyway, for similar reasons I’ve been mostly in bed or on my recliner couch and when in the former I needed some games so I finally picked up Tron Bonne’s game that I’ve wanted to check out for a long time because she’s a cutie. For the record you can play it on PS3 too, I believe.

After the intro where you play as Tiesel, Tron’s brother, you finally take control of her and the flying Bonne fortress, the gesellschaft.

You’ll spend most of your time here actually, there’s a lot to do and 40 npcs to talk to, train, punish in the Torture Room, and help learn their secret skills. You’ll also use this place to upgrade your mech that Tron will pilot on most missions and she makes sure to change into an even cuter outfit when in the R&D lab.

The reason you do all this is for the 4 mission types you’ll be playing through to amass a couple million zenny to pay a loan shark back. Each mission type is actually pretty fun and we’ll made. The only one I didn’t really enjoy was mission 4 which is “Free” and is just a shitty dungeon with the most obnoxious enemy designs – even with the bazooka they take forever to kill and their only attack is walking into you over and over. Oh and the fucking snakes which are also not a threat but will stay invincible underground for ages.

Anyway the other 3 missions I enjoyed. The first one is going to rob a bank with your mech and 6 little servbots buddies to help out. You can send them into buildings to rob them, have them help you fight, and generally just be cute and run around going YAY.

It’s an action oriented mission type and you basically fight through police and face off with a ditzy failure of a cop girl as the boss each time. It was probably the most fun of the mission types until it turns into robbing cattle from Shart Farms. Sorry – Sart. There the enemies are all obnoxious IM GONNA WALK INTO YOU enemies with too much HP much like mission type 4. Though collecting the piggos and cows was fun and cute, especially the cows as the servbots will ride them to the truck.

My biggest issue was one from playing it on Vita. A big part of the control is using the R2 button to aim where to send the servbots and boy is that impossible until you put the exact spot to touch and hold into muscle memory. Remember, on Vita the L2 and R2 buttona are touch areas on the back. One millimeter off and it will just keep popping up the retical and then turning it off over and over. You also can’t move backwards while shooting which is shitty. Challenging but not hard, just enough to feel like you had a hard time without dying often.

The second mission type is a puzzle minigame, and I’ll admit right out I ended up using a guide after the first couple. I always attempted them on my own but aside the early couple I just couldn’t fucking do it. These are HARD and only allow for perfection most of the time. Even with a guide you make one mistake and you’re totally fucked. I’m not smart enough for that shit but even so I enjoyed trying, but failing so many times i eventually wanted to progress the game. If you’re good at stuff like this it might seem easy, but with the amount of perfection required it’d probably still be at least enough of a challenge to feel good.

The third is another good one and probably the easiest but maybe longest to do each level of. Here you fly a little pig helicopter mini robot around in a cave with your servbots there to do the work. Theres a lot of npcs in here but none really matter, still filled with personality and charm though.

You fly around spamming triangle to make, as Tron says, “funny noises”, and avoid or stop traps while exploring around for awhile to eventually find a big ol crystal on a boss room. I liked these fights cuz they made you use the bots in fun little ways. For example one of the bosses requires having them jam themselves into some like vent holes on the sides of the robot enemy ending up with it taking damage and blowing up that part of it. The bots help in the other missions too but not in such a big way.

There is also a casino you can go to but only if you pick a favorite servbots and have Tron rest. If you do, you get control of the bot (#17 in my case) and can go to the casino to play either bingo or high and low. I had more luck and fun with bingo.

Basically the game is 4 fleshed out and lengthy minigames that you do multiple times. Sadly, not that many times in reality though. I was having a lot of fun getting lost in this while in bed but it turns out it’s about a 10 hour game. Not bad for the time or type of game it is, but I was hoping for maybe 30 – and in my case due to using the guide for the puzzles I only took 8 and a half hours.

The music is also surprisingly very good with a few tracks I had to go save on YouTube after listening to them. My favorite being the one in Tron’s room.

Maybe the most important thing though is the absolutely charming writing and voice acting found in the surprisingly numerous cutscenes and voiced conversations. Without voice work it’d still be cute but Tron and the Servbots are just so goddamn cute and genuinely aren’t even “bad cute”, they do a good job for the time and really fit as the characters and give those characters a lot more personality. The writing helps a lot too, and Tron is given a good fully thought out feeling especially when it comes to her way of treating the servbots at various times. The idea of each servbots being their own person was fun too and learning who each one was over time felt kinda nice. Beyond that the mission types all sort of had mini stories for each one which were also real fun to see develop – and in the case of the cop to see special closure for her in the end of the game.

There are even little details that add to the good feeling of the game as a whole. Something as simple as the pause menus for example, they went out of their way to make mission specific backgrounds for it.

I’ve found that I’m basically a secondary fan when it comes to the MegaMan franchise. I never really enjoyed the mainline games (gonna give them a chance again in the future with all those collections) but I loved playing through the Zero games, look forward to Legends which I’m gonna dive into next, and had so much fun with Tron’s game. Plus the best Roll is in Legends.

Even with it only being 10 hours and having quite a few control issues (at least on Vita) I still absolutely recommend this. It’s super charming, very fun, and just so enjoyable the whole way through. It was also just nice to spend more time with one of the best characters in the franchise especially with the nice mix of her being a huge criminal but also a sweet and good natured girl.