“It’s great to see our years of effort finally paying off as visual novels containing adult content gain more mainstream acceptance and recognition as a valuable medium for artistic expression.

This is monumental news for the industry as a whole. Everything will be open and up-front with this release; no off-site patch or workarounds.Kindred Spirits will be sold on Steam completely uncensored. Seeing frank depictions of same-sex relationships welcomed on such a major gaming platform is a true testament to the open-mindedness of our society and the growing desire for mature entertainment that people of all walks of life can enjoy.”

While I agree this is great news for yuri fans, I also feel it’s important to realize that Kindred Spirits is reportedly extremely soft-core, so if you’re hoping to see a flood of hentai VN’s on Steam soon you may be disappointed. Still, this great news for developers of adult games and hopefully opens the door to more localization of not-porn-but-adult visual novels.

The post Lewd Lesbians Now Allowed On Steam appeared first on Gamesline.

The game will feature two currencies, a premium ‘zenny’ currency used for cosmetic DLC and faster unlocks, alongside a free currency earned by playing the game which will…also unlock things, but slower. So, uh, yay! I know that personally the expense of purchasing all the DLC characters stopped me going deep into SFIV, so this is welcome news!

The post Street Fighter V freed from awful yoke of paid character DLC! appeared first on Gamesline.

In many ways it’s easy to see that game has been made by the team that did Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and that’s exciting. But The Shadow of the Colossus was made ten years ago, and while The Last Guardian was utterly unique when it was announced back in 2009 the game industry has changed a lot in these past six years.

It’s being made now, and that’s awesome, but the question remains. Will it be good?

Here’s the trailer, place your bets in the comments.

The post The Rumors were true. The Last Guardian was at E3 2015. appeared first on Gamesline.

VGCC: I guess first off, would you all like to take this chance to introduce yourself? Who *is* Lupiesoft? What do you folks do?

Lupiesoft: We’re just a small dev team. Right now we’re focusing on Visual Novels like The Reject Demon: Toko but we’re not strictly a VN developer.

VGCC: You guys are a pretty off the radar sort of company. I found out about you when I played the Toko sample Taosym posted on the Lemmasoft forums back in 2014, but I was totally surprised when I found you again in my steam recommended list. How can I keep track of what you guys are doing? Inquiring minds need to know!

Lupiesoft: We’re very active on twitter and we have our own website at http://lupiesoft.com/. For the most part however we don’t go around advertising ourselves, we like to give reviewers keys and we figure that it’s a good way to spread by word of mouth. We’re also a very small team and what money we have we’d rather spend on game assets then on advertising on websites.

VGCC: You guys are a small team and you’re working on four different games at once. Isn’t that a ton of work? How do you manage it?

Lupiesoft: Three technically: There’s Dizzy Hearts, The Menagerie and The Reject Demon: Toko. Both Dizzy Hearts and The Menagerie are set in the same universe during the same period, whereas Toko is a modern fantasy set in a fantasized Earth. There are other games we’ve talked about like The Vagabond, a title set in the same city/time as The Menagerie, but we’ve not actually started working on it yet. But we like to keep to ourselves and we just focus on writing fun stories.

VGCC: You guys make yuri VN’s in the west. That’s a small sub-genre in a genre that’s already pretty small. Do you ever have concerns about the size of your market?

Lupiesoft: We can get pretty niche on top of that in regards to The Menagerie, since It’s not a typical eroge(editor’s note:Visual novel with adult content). Not that those games are bad, but that our ideas are often unusual. I think most publishers would probably think the ideas are far too outlandish if we tried to propose them.

I think our fans realize the risk we’re taking, and if we didn’t take those risks we probably wouldn’t attract the people who see what we’re doing and want to encourage us in it. We don’t want to appeal to people if it means changing who we are or the games we make.

VGCC: Why yuri? I’ve heard at least anecdotally that otome (editor’s note: Romantic visual novels targetting women) stuff tends to do better over here.

Lupiesoft: We like it! We’re not opposed to otome, and we’ve often wondered what our idea of an otome game would be. We’ve not ruled out that idea at all. But at the moment yuri games are what pique our interest.

VGCC: VN’s have made a lot of headway recently in the West lately. Why do you think that’s happening now?

Lupiesoft: People are beginning to branch out and not just copy Japanese games now, or copy Katawa Shoujo. The games popular now are games that are interesting in their own right, they’re themselves and don’t try to be anything else.

VGCC: Usually when I think of Western VN authors I think of Christine Love with the Digital/Analogue series, or something like Sunrider, so in a way seeing you guys making such traditional games is a bit interesting. Have you ever had any concerns about trying to match up to the kind of interface stuff you see other authors making?

Lupiesoft: I don’t think much in the way of UI. I like things to be very minimalistic in games. In MMOs I like playing with as minimalist of a UI as possible, so those are the kinds of UIs I would like to make. Simple, but evocative of the setting.

VGCC: What do you think of the current state of western VN development?

Lupiesoft: As you mentioned above it’s growing. I think people are leaving insular dev clique communities and growing out into the internet, and VNs are gaining mainstream appeal. I think that will lead to a wider variety of games in the future.

VGCC: How’d you get in touch with Sekai project? They’re a very translation-oriented publisher, so it’s a bit surprising to see you get picked up as a western developer!

Lupiesoft: It was after the Kickstarter for Dizzy Hearts, they were just getting started too and they were going to bring Dizzy Hearts to Steam. It was later that we decided to do the same for Toko as we worked on this much bigger game.

VGCC: What’s it been like working with them?

Lupiesoft: Great! They’ll be down at Anime Expo, and I’ll be there to walk the floor and talk to folks.

VGCC: I know they’re often very concerned with licensing voices, songs, etc. Did you have to go through that sort of thing?

Lupiesoft: Well they’re concerned with licensing the original songs from the game, and without that they couldn’t legally publish in the US, but for us we own the rights to our assets.

VGCC: I noticed you put Toko through Greenlight on Steam even though you had a publisher. Why was that?

Lupiesoft: We opted to go through Greenlight rather than straight publishing because for us it was a way to connect more with the fanbase, gauge interest and all that.

VGCC: Was Greenlight your idea or Sekai Project’s?

Lupiesoft: It was an option when talking about things we could do. For the reasons above we decided we were going to do it that way.

VGCC: So you’ve put Toko out on Steam, but I know you guys also work on some more erotic titles like The Menagerie, and I was wondering what it’s like finding a place to sell those.

Lupiesoft: It’s difficult. People in the west are often very outspokenly close-minded towards erotic content of any kind. It’s always been around however, and for us it’s a matter of being unashamed about the subject matter.

VGCC: I noticed that the link for The Menagerie demo goes to Mangagamer(Editor’s note: NSFW link). Why Mangagamer for The Menagerie?

Lupiesoft: They typically don’t license western games, but I think that many publishers are seeing that it’s a growing thing and are capitalizing on that. Mangagamer has been pretty welcoming towards The Menagerie and we’ll be sharing something special regarding The Menagerie at this year’s Anime Expo.

VGCC: Did you consider doing direct sales over your website?

Lupiesoft: We did, but we don’t have a large enough fanbase to support that and opted to sell on other sites.

VGCC: I know that Sekai Project recently put a censored version of  the game Nekopara out on steam, with a NSFW patch easily found on the forums. Was such an approach considered for your other games?

Lupiesoft: In retrospect to Nekopara and Huniepop I believe that Steam has said devs are not supposed to make uncensor patches to skirt the erotic content rules.

VGCC: There’s not a ton of western-made VN’s, but there’s even fewer Western eroge. What got you guys into making them?

Lupiesoft: We like porn!

VGCC: So, I know you’ve mentioned before that you’re concerned with exploring affirmative sexuality and empowering the characters in Toko. Do you have similar concerns with character agency in some of your more erotic titles? I could see that sort of thing being rather difficult in a game like The Menagerie, where so many of the characters are in captivity.

Lupiesoft: Well The Menagerie it’s a story that can be incredibly lewd but can at times be dark, and at times can be empowering. But overall it’s a challenge especially when you’re tackling a game set in a brothel and the protaganist is a sex slave.

People tend to hear sex positivity and they close their ears. It’s almost become a bad word to the general public. It conjures visions of sex or sexuality robbed of everything that makes sex ‘fun’. In reaction to that people who are sex positive often react to that angrily instead of with understanding/compassion.

Fundamentally this is the fault of the people advocating for sex-positivity that they treat people who don’t understand it as intentionally acting terribly, the unknowing person is confused, gets attacked and they’re left with a terrible impression of what it means to be sex positive.

VGCC: That kind of sex positivity can be rather hard to find in a lot of Japanese eroge. Does that bother you at all?

Lupiesoft: I think there’s a tendency among the western media to generalize every eroge and say “this is exactly like Rapelay”, It’s a confirmation bias. Those games are the type most likely to be translated to english, because either they’re most requested or have the broadest appeal due to fetishes, but there definitely are sex positive eroge in Japan. it’s not even all that rare. Tsukiakari no Raspberry and it’s prequel are examples, but there are lots more that I’ve never had the opportunity to play due to both time and the language barrier.

I’m just scratching the surface however. I think that Japan if anything tends to be more open to meeting every interest, and typically the west is very selective in what gets imported, mainly due to cost-effectiveness. (Marketability?)

VGCC: So, your games tend to have rather varied body types which is really refreshing. Nadia for instance was really exciting as a character for me on a personal level. Is that something you intentionally go for when casting out a game, or is it just something that happens when you’re designing different characters?

Lupiesoft: I try to mainly think of characters that are distinct from each other. It’s not just body type but every facet. Just by looking at a character you should be able to get a surface-level grasp of them, the clothes they wear and how they’re posed should be able to tell the reader what kind of character they are.

So usually, long before I design the characters I tend to figure out what kind of character they are, how they’d act and talk. Then while I’m designing them I’m thinking of the scenes they could be in, the kinda faces they’d make, etc.

There are people who thank me for making bigger girls like Nadia in Toko and Jouya in Menagerie. But there are just as many who say same the same thing about doing a very boyish and lanky Ginxhou.

VGCC: Are there any less obvious ways that sex positivity impacts the games you make?

Lupiesoft: I’m not sure. We mainly strive to make things fun, and we don’t want to ever preach anything, or make our readers feel dumb, get on a soapbox. It’s been the bane of so many games where they forget they’re telling a story a ornd instead they’re telling a lecture.

People don’t play games to be lectured, they play them to be taken to different worlds where alternate realities, events and beings are possible. Making things sex positive in The Menagerie or Toko are design choices of things we like, like Elves and Demons, but they’re not like a subject of a thesis we’re delivering to a class. People can tell when they’re being talked at, rather than talked with.

VGCC: OK, last question. I need to know: How is Toko so damn cute? How’d you do it? What’s the secret?

Lupiesoft: I always wanted a fun, stubborn and hot-headed protagonist, but one that wasn’t always right. Toko is a fun character because she can be really stupid sometimes and she can be really honest and a character with flaws that’s a good person at heart is really endearing to me.

The post Lupiesoft interview appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a brawler spinoff of the Neptunia series made by Tamsoft, who you might know better for Senran Kagura, the “ass is hometown” game. What this means is that you can expect women’s clothing to tear and there to be lots of titillacious boobage. The game does give you the option of disabling the clothing breaks with some unlockable equipment, but let’s be real: This is a Neptunia game, and Neptunia stands for fan-service.

Surprisingly enough, the writing is incredibly heartwarming and innocent. There’s no real sexual tension and all the dialogue tends to centered around the relationships between the CPU’s and their sisters. It’s incredibly cute, even if doesn’t make a ton of sense. The plot is practically token and the villain may as well not exist, but none of that matters. You’re playing the game to watch the girls snark at each other, and the game delivers that in spades.

And when I call the story token, I mean it. A pair of game journalist characters representing Dengeki and Famitsu want to write a fluff piece about the CPU’s doing quests, so they drag the goddesses out to kill monsters. That’s it. A few plot threads are introduced asking where the playable journalist girls get their powers, and why there are so many monsters, but in the end neither really get addressed.

As a brawler, the game is good, but held down by a lack of mission variety. Most missions just involve defeating waves of trivial enemies in the presence of some slightly threatening enemy, and while it’s kind of fun in a Dynasty Warriors way, it still gets stale after a while. The game does mix in some more interesting ‘hidden objective’ type missions, but they’re far too few to really help throw off the feeling of grinding. A lot of the time I never really even felt like I had to pay attention to screen; I just kind of stared at the minimap and repeated my mashed out infinite combo in the general direction of the enemies until the game told me I was done. I’d max out the combo counter, then the damage counter, and then run out of interface elements to keep me interested beyond a simple kill counter to victory. It can be fun in a mindless kind of way if you’re in the mood for it, which is pretty fitting for an Idea Factory title, but it still feels a bit disappointing.

It’s really a shame, too. The game has an excellent combat engine, and it’s kind of disappointing to see it go to waste. Combos feel great, character movement is mostly pretty fluid, and if you bother to pay attention then working out dodge cancels for different characters to make custom combos can be pretty fun. Sure, there are some issues with camera control, but really a lot of the time you don’t need to really look at what you’re cutting down anyways so it’s not a huge deal. It feels like Neptunia U lays out the groundwork for something more substantial here, but the only time it ever really comes into play is a small post-game fighting tournament mode that’s treated more as a distraction than anything. Senran Kagura had an online multiplayer mode where the depth in combat actually came into play, but Neptunia U lacks any sort of multiplayer, so in the end that depth is just wasted.

In the end, while Neptunia U has a few flaws, and while it may not have any parts that shine much either it still managed to put a big dumb smile on my face. It’s fun. Dumb fun, but fun. If you’re looking for something cute and fanservicey that doesn’t take a whole lot of brain power, you could do worse than this one.

The post Neptunia U: Action Unleashed review appeared first on Gamesline.

If you’re interested in picking something up, you can check out the following links to see what’s available on your system of choice:

PS3: http://j.mp/1Kb9iSt
PS4: http://j.mp/1Kb9gKq
Vita: http://j.mp/1Kb9iSu

The post Surprise! PSN Flash Sale! appeared first on Gamesline.

Perhaps the best word to describe Bloodborne is focused. The Souls games, for all of their grand innovations and beautifully ruined landscapes, can be rather scatterbrained at times as a result of trying to enable so many styles of play. Bloodborne cuts the fat; You will engage in melee combat (the series’ speciality) and you will like it. Sure, there are firearms and semi-mystical trinkets you can use to attack from a distance, but such tools are almost always positioned as tactical assists to your melee weapon. Do you want to outrange your foes and strike from relative safety? Well then, you’d better pick up a poleaxe, because that cannon won’t carry enough ammo to take down bosses all on its own.

Still, the heart of Bloodborne’s combat remains true. Sure, the game (mostly) cuts shields and has a greater focus on aggressive play, but at the end of the day the core principle of these games is the same: Stick and move. Bloodborne merely embraces it in a way that past Souls games have not, challenging you with fast bosses and crowds of enemies that require you to frantically maneuver your character into better positions to strike. In this way, Bloodborne sets itself apart, offering a feeling of immediacy that the Souls games never had.

It’s almost a shame Bloodborne is so visceral; the game is incredibly beautiful. Sure, maybe it lacks the sheer technical sophistication of your average triple-A title, but the art direction makes up for it in spades. The towering gothic spires of the early game alone are beautiful, but the buildings are just the beginning; As the game progresses the tone shifts more towards horror, with trash-strewn streets giving way to dark grave-filled woods and twisted otherworlds best left unspoken. And that’s not even getting into the monster design: Mouths sewn on wrong-ways, cage-hats used by hidden cults, many-eyed flesh horrors driving you mad from afar, the game oozes creepy style. Bloodborne never fully shifts fully to being a horror game, but the integration of horror-like art design really helps drive a sense of desperation to the combat, and it definitely helps give the lore more punch.

The game isn’t perfect unfortunately. Souls games have historically had pacing issues, and while Bloodborne’s problems in this regard are comparatively minor some classic FromSoft mistakes are definitely present. There’s not really any increase in the story’s dramatic tension until the final third of the game, and while that finishing stretch has some beautiful areas, the game still lacks a real iconic mid-game gatekeeping boss, leading to a rather tiring stretch near the middle of the game.

This doesn’t sound so bad until you realize the game is quite short. Bloodborne has a lot of content, but quite a bit of it is locked away in optional areas and spaced out such that when you finally reach the end of the game you’re left with a sense that things ended early. The game’s three endings are all good, but without a complete dramatic arc to support them they all feel somewhat sudden.

It seems that From wanted players to pad out their adventure with periodic dungeon crawls through the game’s random dungeon system, but in an uncharacteristically naive move they neglected to stock these dungeons with adequate loot. The main rewards for these dungeons are randomly generated weapon upgrades, but better ones can usually be found by progressing through the main game anyways, essentially undermining any reason you’d have to go through the lower ranked dungeons early. This culminates in an unfortunate late game grind through easy content just to unlock the better dungeons.

The dungeons themselves are a classic case of having a good idea, but implementing it poorly. Even though the dungeons have great enemy variety they reuse the same basic structures and rooms leading to a certain tedium from traversing the same basic area over and over, making it easy to get lost and run in circles for tens of minutes looking for that one door to allow you to progress. From probably should have taken some hints from the Roguelike genre, with a greater variety of random traps and dungeon features, but as it stands the dungeons are definitely more Skyrim than Nethack.

If you are simply looking for more Dark or Demon’s Souls, you’ll probably be disappointed in Bloodborne’s focused content and rather short story, but make no mistake: The game is beautiful in its own right, with incredibly tight combat and a wondrously threatening atmosphere. It may not be what you expected, but if you’re possessed of a certain insight and willing to see the souls games with a fresh set of eyes give Bloodborne a try.

The post Bloodborne Review appeared first on Gamesline.

And to Compile Heart’s credit, they did a good enough job on HyperDevotion. The game competently ports the Neptunia battle system to a tactics RPG interface, and I’d even go so far as to argue that on a mechanical level, HyperDevotion is superior to previous Neptunia titles, if only just for making positioning your characters important.

The actual combat is pretty standard tactics RPG fare. You won’t really have to think too hard during missions, but the systems are competently put together and there’s a good variety in terms of objectives. Combat stays fresh even in the late game, the various characters are all appreciably different in combat, and the game gives you good reasons to use the whole cast. All in all, it’s good, if not particularly inventive.

HyperDevotion’s transition to being tactics rpg wasn’t completely smooth, however. The game still takes a very JRPG approach to grinding, which would be fine, but the battles in a tactics RPG are much longer than in a JRPG. I’ll often be farming for a specific drop from a monster, kill the monster, and then have to spend ten minutes cleaning up useless trash I don’t care about before I could try again, which kind of undermines that relaxing feel of progress one normally associates with a well made grind. This isn’t a huge issue, a lot of the grind is pretty easily ignorable, but it’s still rather frustrating if you want to really sink your teeth into completing all the game’s item recipes.

Visually, HyperDevotion does a great job. Compile Heart reuses art assets heavily between games, particularly with regard to monsters, and while this is usually fine, their games sometimes have problems with their art style being inconsistent. HyperDevotion resolves this problem by chibi-ifying the cast during the battles and scaling the various monsters so models with excessive detail tend to be larger in size. This helps the game feel much less patchwork, and the deformed versions of the characters are super cute to boot.

I like HyperDevotion Noire as a game, but at the same time I feel it’s a failure as a Neptunia game. Normally, the appeal of Neptunia games tends to be the writing, with all-woman casts and huge amounts of homoerotic sexual tension. Sure, there are also elements of character comedy and lots of fandom in-jokes from other series, but let’s be honest here: This is a game where the main heroines are moe console-girls who transform and lose their clothes: You’re here for gay women and/or their boobs.

I was surprised then to discover then that HyperDevotion introduces a new main character, in the form of an explicitly male self insert who serves as the titular Noire’s secretary. That’s fine, but the game also pushes this character as some sort of harem protagonist, with almost every other cast member fawning over him in at least one scene. His inclusion undermines much of the game’s subtext. Sure, the women of the cast may kiss each other in battle, but really at the end of the day they’re going to go back to the secretary. It’s queer baiting of the worst sort, which is far below what I’d expected of a Neptunia game.

It doesn’t help that even though the self-insert is bland as hell the game goes out of its way to give him lines and try to include him in the story. Despite being having tons of lines he still manages to contribute no humor or perspective to any situation that another character could not do better if given the chance.

This is even more sad because HyperDevotion does so many other things right. The female cast sharing kisses to power up each other’s attacks when next to each other is a great way to pander, and the actual scenes when the main character isn’t involved are excellent. I liked how Compile Heart stepped away from personifying companies and instead set to try and personify genres with the sports game girl, stealth game girl, etc, and even though some characters are perhaps a bit too heavily typecast, it’s still a nice break from the typical Neptunia companies.

So, is HyperDevotion worth your time? Well, if you’re not too bothered by the main character undermining much the subtext, and if you like tactics RPG’s, sure. The game is competently made and the girls are cute. If you liked Neptunia for the yuri subtext or shipping however, HyperDevotion will probably let you down.

The post Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart Review appeared first on Gamesline.

In their announcement at GDC 2015, Valve stated that “We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform.” It’s interesting that Valve mentions Epic and Unity in this announcement, as while Valve did license the original Source platform out to third party developers it was not considered by and large to be a ‘commercial’ engine such as Epic’s Unreal Engine or Unity. If Valve does move forward in marketing Source 2 as a licensed engine, it will be interesting to see what their monetization strategy is exactly.

The original source engine was used in most of Valve’s first party releases, including Half Life 2, CS:GO, and the Left 4 Dead series. Source 2 itself was also a frequent subject in the rumors relating to a possible, “Half Life 3”, however Valve has not confirmed any new Half Life releases following the release of Half Life 2: Episode 2 in 2007.

The post Source 2 finally announced, will be free to developers. appeared first on Gamesline.

Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a strange name considering that none of the girls in this game ever invite you to do anything. Indeed It almost seems the localization team realized that rape is a crime, and instead tried to hide it beneath a veneer of implied consent. Like any good prosecutor however, I don’t play to make just one charge: Not only is Criminal Girls: Invite Only deeply misogynistic, it is also criminally boring.

That’s a shame, too! The core concept of the game could be really interesting if it were executed well. Seven residents of hell are offered chances at redemption, and you have to be a sort of leader to them as they travel up out of the pit on a journey of self-discovery. It could be touching, right? Redemption’s a powerful theme, right? Unfortunately, Criminal Girls ruins its good premise by forcing you to, sadly, sexually assault your charges.

Oh, of course the game would never say that. AO ratings aren’t marketable in English-speaking territories, and so NISA had a fine line to walk between being too-disgusting-for-the-rating-boards, and appeasing the “I hate censorship give me anime rape porn” male customer base, which has lead to such wonderful euphemisms as ‘motivate’. It’s not sexual assault, it’s ‘motivation’. You do it to ‘purify’ the girls, especially that man-hating one who punched you in the face at the beginning of the game. Don’t worry, it’s not sexual, we removed all the audio clips of the girls moaning and making comments as you use a violet wand on their ‘temptations’. Please, just ignore the gym uniforms, cat ears, and open-chest sweaters, we just thought the girls would get tired of their jail outfits. We’re definitely not trying to feed you BDSM cosplay porn, and anyone who says otherwise is probably just in need of a good whipping by the explicitly-male protagonist.

It doesn’t help that the minigames associated with these scenes are all dull as hell. Each of them usually involves some sort of ‘temptation’ (read: tiny monster) appearing on the screen and you having to tap it, drag it, or press on it until it disappears. Pink ones use the front touch pad, blue ones use the rear. The issue here (beyond being really cliche) is that you can’t enjoy lewd CG’s when you have to awkardly scribble your finger all over the Vita’s rear touchpad. I get that the developers wanted you to feel like you were putting your hands all over some girl, but the Vita is just not that soft. I’m sorry.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the way the game eroticizes sexual assault is how the game tries to suggest that the cast ‘deserves it’ in some way. However, because the game also needs the cast to be likeable, most of their individual backstories cast them as the victim, leading to some very uncomfortable victim blaming. Whether it’s the cult-goddess girl who was just trying to please her parents, or the “I was stalked” girl who was trying to protect herself, or the “I was bullied for being poorer than my classmates” girl who did paid dating to get the money to stop herself from being bullied, the idea of having to molest them back into being obedient post-game girlfriends is…icky, to put it lightly. The game, however, doesn’t seem to have any degree of self-awareness and indeed even goes full tilt with Persona 4 style ‘shadow selves’ the cast has to defeat in order to move past their defense mechanisms. It’s all very disturbing.

Even worse, when the game isn’t implicitly having you rape girls into obedience, you have to play possibly the least exciting JRPG imaginable. The game has a battle system where you don’t actually control any of the characters. Instead, each of your cast members suggests an action and you can pick one of them to execute while the rest of your party does nothing. Early on this is tolerable, as your cast will not have many actions by virtue of you not having had the opportunity to rape many into them. As the game progresses however, old actions are obsoleted and become basically a waste of a turn, leading to many turns spent buffing in random encounters until you manage to generate an action that can finish the battle in one shot. The battle system isn’t bad per-se, but it does drag out easy battles which tend to get very boring.

Out of combat, the best way I could describe the game is uninspired. The entire game is spent in a linear dungeon devoid of traps, surprise encounters, or any kind of non-story threat beyond random encounters. The dungeon floors themselves look like something out of a mystery dungeon game (so dull), and generally they tend to be built to force you to do a lot of extra walking, forcing you to go back in order to hit switches, retrieve plot tokens, and do other such mundane things. The obvious goal here is to make the player fight more random encounters, which ties into the game’s character advancement. Monsters drop currency you spend on consumable items (wastes of money) and rape scenes required to unlock skills (the only “worthwhile” use of money). You could hypothetically run from fights, but then you’d end up behind in money and be unable to pay the sexual assault tax required to keep the cast on-par with the monsters. Also, the game has a problem with making you walk too much, and there is no run command.

It really hurts to play Criminal Girls because I can actually see a lot of promise in it. The character designs are cute, the writing is actually pretty touching when it’s not trying to justify sexual assault, and the idea of a BDSM themed eroge does actually seem kind of hot. Unfortunately the rape, boring-as-hell dungeon crawling, and terrible touch-screen minigames ruin the entire thing. Now, please excuse me while I go take a cold shower.

The post Criminal Girls: Invite Only Review appeared first on Gamesline.