Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou 3 (爆笑！！人生劇場３) is a Famicom board game that was released on December 20, 1991. The game is about a toddler who goes through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and eventually senior citizenship. There are decisions to make (dating, marriage, telling the truth, whether or not to peek at Christmas presents) and sometimes an elderly figure that represents God intervenes to help players determine their best path in life. Turns can be lost due to illness and bad weather and gained when the player buys an automobile for 15,000,000 yen. This money can be earned back much later in the game at a casino if the player decides to go on a vacation. Once all players reach the "finish line," God tells individual players about their destiny after retiring from work and into the life of a senior citizen. Things that could happen include: the loss of a spouse, becoming a world traveler, becoming terminally ill later in life, and striking oil in the desert.
Marriage almost always results in children but divorce occurs randomly just in real life and is symbolized by a falling leaf. As the player gets older, the female characters' faces get wrinkles and the male characters' faces get facial hair and the shape of the face become more chiseled. Tokyo Disneyland is included as a cameo role in one of the squares that the player can land on near the beginning of the game. The game decides whether the player gets lost in Tokyo Disneyland or not, either adding to or subtracting points from the avatar's intellectual strength. In addition to the standard game boards, there are also game boards for vacations, leaving the parents' home by either airplane or train, and incarceration.
Like other games in the Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou series, university education is a completely optional path that leads to all career paths being enabled. Career cards have to be chosen in certain squares in order to represent a successful or a failed venture within the career. However, university education has a mandatory interactive quiz that must be done successfully in order to enter university. Failing this quiz twice will result in the player being bumped into career mode. Since the questions are in Japanese, there is no possible way for a non-Japanese reader to play the game without skipping university and straight into career mode. Choosing this path will offers limited choices and lower pay unless a career book is purchased later in the game for 300,000,000 yen. Only this important tool allows a choice of multiple careers either with or without a university education. Most of all, this game is the penultimate sequel to Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou and Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou 2.
Tips and Tricks
- For those players who do not understand Japanese but want to go to college, remember this tip. "Save" your game using your emulator's save state feature before answering the first question. If you get it wrong, then "load" your game and give another answer. If you are right, then "save" the game before answering the next question. Keep "loading" the game to undo incorrect answers and "saving" the game after correct answers. This will guarantee that your character will pass the university entrance exam.
- Players don't have to worry about a university exit exam and once this exam is passed, it never has to be done for the remainder of the game.
- The businessman is male version of office lady career while the office lady is the female version of businessman career.
- A female professional wrestler who trades jobs with a salary man (male person) would become an office lady, not a salary man. Likewise, a male entertainment who trades jobs with a female office lady would become a businessman (salary man), not an office lady.
Trivia
- Career options include professional wrestler, military officer, entertainer, fast food worker, computer programmer, salary man (businessman), office lady, physician, and teacher. Each career option has a different salary - the fast food worker gets paid the least while physicians, salary men, and computer programmers get paid the most.
- The entertainer is considered to be the lowest career in the game and is automatically chosen when the player lacks the educational (social, intellectual, and/or physical) requirements for other careers.
- The entertainer also has a random chance of drawing a scandal card which means either losing a statistic (for lying) and going to jail for a random number of turns (for telling the truth).
- The computer programmer can force another player to lose his or her next turn by forcing him or her to repair computers.