At the tail end of last year, Adobe officially discontinued support for Flash, thus endangering a countless number of indie gaming projects. Luckily for us, though, one of the best Mega Man parody games has been preserved for all eternity! "Rokko Chan" lives again!
Sure enough, visiting Rokko Chan's web page today affirms my greatest fear. The game can no longer be played.
Fortunately, I was very wrong about playing Rokko Chan one last time. During this tomutulous time, as a fan rummaging behind-the-scenes by the name of Fabian managed to preserve Rokko Chan by creating a .exe file for it! So now, the game can be downloaded and enjoyed anytime, anywhere offline! Many thanks to Karakato for sharing the discovery with us all last night!
You can download the game from the link below:
If you're just catching up and don't know what Rokko Chan is, below is a short crash-course with some extra goodies to download!
Rokko Chan is a Flash game made Japanese indie developer King Soukutu. The game is heavily inspired by the 8-bit Mega Man titles and was originally released at the end of 2011. Rokko Chan came at a time not long after a string of high profile Mega Man cancellations. Rokko Chan was a breath of fresh air after all the bad news that, at the time, seemed to never stop. You can check out our initial report on the game here
Rokko Chan is a parody of Mega Man in pretty much every sense. A blue robot takes on six evil robots and has to fight an evil scientist at the end of the game. However, the game stands on it's own as being one of the better indie titles to use this formula.
Story
Rokko Chan was created by Dr Thane who implanted the memories of his deceased daughter into a robotic body.
Meanwhile, news of robots running rampant broke! Dr. Mad, an evil scientist, claimed responsibility for the attacks and has declared war on the world.
Hearing the people's cries for help, Rokko Chan sets out to defeat the evil robots and put a stop to Dr. Mad's plans for world domination.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Rokko Chan is your standard 8-bit Mega Man fare although Rokko's jumps feel slightly, but not too different from what most fans are used to.
Like the Blue Bomber, she can have up to three shots on screen at any one time and although she cannot charge her buster or slide, she does have a Mega Man X-style dash and dash jump. There are also items that act as Rokko Chan's E-Tank equivalent, which can help you if you can find them. The game can be fairly challenging in places; however, for newcomers, I have left something at the bottom of this article that may help you out...
Players can select English or Japanese language from the initial loading screen. Additionally, controls can be customized in the options menu. Personally,I suggest swapping the jump and fire keys around if playing on keyboard since it uses the backwards setup like the Mega Man Anniversary Collection did on GameCube. If, like me, you'd prefer to save yourself frustration and use a controller, programs such as Joy2Key to bind keyboard button presses to a controller work a treat for this game. I was able to play through using my Xbox 360 controller no problem!
Stages
Rokko Chan consists of six Robot Master stages and four fortress stages. Below are the six Robot Masters for this game.
DMN 01 Hockey Man
DMN 02 Volcano Man
DMN 03 Lightning Man
DMN 04 Jet Man
DMN 05 Rolling Man
DMN 06 Forest Man
As with any Mega Man-style game, when Rokko defeats a Robot Master she gains their weapon and changes color, with each boss having a weakness to another bosses weapon.
Once the Masters are defeated, it's time to move on to Dr. Mad's fortress. His decor reminds me of someone else...
Dr. Mad's castle consists of four stages, including the obligatory boss rush fans have come to expect as well as a fight with the Mad Sisters Lancea (Gold) and Francesca (Silver), twin female battle robots.
Rokko Chan became somewhat of a cult hit after its release. Even today, I see a new fan-art pop up on Twitter. Developer King Soukutu did release a few official items for fans, too. The first of these was an official art book, which was released digitally on their website.
Sadly, however, this was also released in Flash format and no longer works on the site. Luckily, fans back when it originally released managed to rip the files and preserve it. Download the complete artbook from the link below!
There was also an official soundtrack released for the game. Hats off to the developers and composer ASAGEN as they went above and beyond on this one.
Not only was there an OST for the game's music but there was also a chiptune remix album, remixing the original 8-bit music as well as an arranged remix album, similar to how Inti-Creates handled the soundtracks to Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, some familiar names such as DJ Cutman did a remix for one of the albums too. These soundtracks were originally funded through Kickstarter, the page for which can still be seen here. The campaign allowed the developers to put out a physical CD. Check out the original pitch video below!
While finding a copy of the physical soundtrack can be hard work these days, you can still purchase a digital bundle of all the soundtracks together over on Bandcamp, the music in the game is great and some of the remixes are very well done too, please consider supporting the artists since it can cost as little as $1!
There were even Rokko Chan T-shirts available for a time as well! However, these have long since sold out. It just goes to show how much effort was put into this game.
What will the future bring for Rokko Chan? Well, the developers did make a demo for a 3D Rokko Chan game which can be downloaded and played from their website HERE. The demo was made for BitSummit 2014.
There were also plans to make a Rokko Chan Dash game; exploring ruins like another Blue hero we know.You can view more about that project HERE. Both this and Rokko Chan 3D have not had updates since 2014. Whether or not we'll see either of these titles come to fruition remains unkown.
The developers also recently mentioned they would like to try putting out the original Rokko Chan on the likes of Steam or maybe even consoles over on Twitter.
Whatever happens, though Flash player might be dead, Rokko Chan can live on to fight for everlasting peace!
Here once more is a link to the game files:
Also, here's something for any new players out there that might want an edge. Use either of these passwords on the password screen to start with additional E-Tanks to help you on your way!
Hope you guys enjoy the game! This is a really great little indie romp and I'm so glad it has been preserved for more people to play it! Thanks again to Karakato for the heads up!
Sources - Karakato, King Soukutu,
Nice to know this game is still around.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of flash games, I recently found out something that went beneath our radar.
The MegaMan-inspired Stinkoman 20X6 finally received its final update right before flash was discontinued. Check it out:
https://www.pcgamer.com/after-15-years-homestar-runners-stinkoman-20x6-gets-its-final-level/
I wonder what would happen to those game of irrigation
ReplyDeleteBeen a while since the last time I saw it. (checks) Currently unavailable. Such a shame, I remember having a lot of fun with Fire Man vs Bass.
DeleteSame with the Flash games from Sky Pirate Arcade, like MML3 Punt Or Pet.
Been looking for an offline version of this game for YEARS! Many thanks for helping preserve Rokko-chan for years to come!
ReplyDeleteBluemaxima's Flashpoint already has this game and many others saved, you should check it out
ReplyDeleteHot dog, dude! I already grabbed all the appropriate files for Stinkoman 20X6 (v8.0) and all, and I was wondering if there was a way to do the same with this game. I would rather have the raw SWF and XML files, but I'll take an EXE, instead, sure!
ReplyDelete… and then I did a quick search and found that the guys at Cutstuff had done this very thing in 2017 and 2019. Go figure~
DeleteJust FYI, you can play any flash games using the Download the Flash Player projector content debugger found here. You just download the flash file and load it into this tool:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html
You're absolutely right… for the most part. Games that load external files still need all the linked files to work correctly.
DeleteThis is one of those games. Heh.
Never played this. But now I am curious.
ReplyDeleteI'd play it on Steam if it ever came there for sure.
There's always the option of keeping flash and use a browser that still supports it. Like Edge. Then again I haven't updated Edge in a while and this is assuming the game never goes offline.
ReplyDeleteNice! Hopefully, Super Mario Bros. Crossover has been preserved, as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's been preserved, don't worry. I'm sure lots of people have gotten it backed up, me included, and the game and its older versions are still on its website so the SWFs can still be downloaded. The only downside is that fullscreen mode's gone since that's tied to the website, but it's a small price to pay and that can be worked around anyway.
DeleteThe swf is still downloadable, but needs an internet connection to work. If it ever becomes unusable I've hacked a version to work offline as an exe file.
DeleteAgreed
DeleteSomeone made SMBDX offline standalone - https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/ifeu1c/super_mario_bros_crossover_dx_fangame_latest/
DeleteI'm actually surprised not many knew about this until about a month ago. The thread in which Fabian posted the archive is literally the first result on Google when you search "rokko chan zip", and the third result on Bing.
ReplyDeleteNever heard of this game until now, might try it out one day.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone ever mange to download and preserve the "Vs. Black Zero" fangame by megacocorock?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb1Gv8fKKVY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZHEuFHX8jU
I have heard of flash games such as this one. I was bored in class, and came across a Megaman X one that was quite fun
ReplyDeleteNice! I was just wondering about this game and came across this article.
ReplyDeleteRokko Chan is a great Megaman clone and I'm glad it was finally made available offline.
If it ever gets a steam release I'll gladly buy it even if it's bare bones.