This is a pretty unique game concept to me. You play as Batten the Tanuki, a martial arts master, or maybe he's just okay at martial arts, or something. And you adventure around the very colorful world, using your karate punch and karate kick to beat up other animals that would do you harm.

This is an action game, but it allows you to save your game as you progress, so I might imagine it's pretty long! You pick up a variety of presumably necessary, or at least helpful, items found in treasure boxes, but some treasure boxes contain a swarm of insects that chase after you for a bit. Your power increases, decreasing the damage enemies can do to you, and the damage you inflict on enemies, but at any point you can fall down a trap and die instantly. You only have one life! So it's prudent to save often.

One thing that seems kind of strange is that they made such a unique and eye-catching world and cast of characters, but on the load screen, box art, and poster/instruction manual, they used a photo of a real tanuki. And to my eye, it's not even that great of a photo. Maybe one thing they wanted to do was show off the fairly recent analog RGB standard of up to 4096 colors, but I think they could have gone a little different direction with that idea!