The original Disaster Report games back in the PS2 days, developed by Irem, were about as pulpy a take on that sort of story as it got. They usually were some pseudo-detective affair, where the titular reporter would have to investigate the government inadequacies that let the disaster happen the way it did. They weren’t exactly Raymond Chandlers, but they understood what makes a mystery story compelling and did their best at it. The rest of the game would usually see such over the top sequences, like platforming your way up a collapsing tower engulfed in flames, that even the often goofy writing could be taken in stride as part of the exaggerated tone of the world.

Granzella’s Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, on the other hand, seems to want to take a stab at a more sober tone. Seemingly an attempt to document the human reaction under a truly frightening display of the earth’s magnitude, inspired by Japan’s very real experiences with earthquakes in 2011. Unfortunately, this more serious tone, removed from the original PS2 game’s silly conspiratorial action romps, also takes away a lot of the charm of the series. One would expect an endeavor like that to be fairly somber, touching, and dramatic, but sadly the writing chops are simply not there to deliver on such a feat.

A lazier version of myself would call that the review right there. If you’re asking whether you should play DR4 then the answer is probably not. To be the kind of person for whom the experience would mean something, you have to go in already willing to work for it and meet it halfway. I showed up with my running shoes, ready to go to the halfway point and maybe further for this game, and let me tell you that at many points that felt like a really thankless task.

The game isn’t without its high points, mind you. The traversal experience is extremely unique. And it really manages to make you feel like you’re in a real disaster. Whenever you are transitioning between areas, having to brace for an aftershock at any moment makes the situation feel authentically perilous. If you take refuge in the wrong spot, a lamppost, sign, or even an entire building may fall on you. You find yourself calling upon all of your real-life earthquake-safety knowledge in these moments, which really lends gravitas to the experience of simply walking around the crumbling city.

It’s also downright funny a lot of the time. In a silly way, to be sure, but it made me laugh nonetheless. The fact that your character has the chance to declare their undying love for every female character you meet upon your first interaction gets pretty humorous by the third time and it just keeps going. It is a bit stale, to put it generously, that this option is only available for females, but if you’re feeling charitable it can lend the game a lot of levity. But there are equally ridiculous options for anything from impersonating a CEO’s child or rubbing the situation in annoying people’s faces if you’re feeling like a jerk that day. It is a very wacky game, with such a commitment to providing you ridiculous dialogue options that at times I wonder if the entire thing is not one big joke. Like a sort of, all-jokes, not-spooky version of The Twilight Zone. But I think it is supposed to be read as a “serious game with lots of funny bits” rather than as outright farce.

Sadly, the positives really end there for me. Most of the game can be reduced to 20-minute vignettes where you simply stumble into cutscenes and humiliatingly didactic dialogue until you’re able to proceed to the next area. The character writing in this game is truly atrocious, sometimes even beneath the standards of the original PS2 title. I struggle to even find a word to describe it without it being demeaning to whatever I’d compare it to. I mulled over calling the characters “muppets” or “cartoons” but even the last game I reviewed, which featured anime representation of warships meant to get players horny, had characters more multifaceted and nuanced than the entirety of DR4’s cast. And that’s not even mentioning the emotional depths that Jim Henson’s puppets could achieve sometimes. Caricatures, I suppose, is the most fitting term, when all but a couple of storylines in this game wouldn’t feel out of place in a children’s storybook starring talking animals.

I spent roughly 90% of my time with the game looking for the main story to kick in, navigating through goofy vignettes that were sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, but often shallow and underdeveloped. When the “main story” actually revealed itself for what it was, it turned out my character had barely been involved in it and had run across its main players roughly 5 times over the last 15 hours or so, none of which had been particularly remarkable. A couple of hours later it ended on a twist that was unrelated to anything else that had happened in its own subplot anyway.

Which is not to say it’s all terrible. Most of this seems to spring from a relatively strong commitment to what is, essentially, a testimonial lens to the narrative. Disaster Report 4 seems to have no thesis, instead choosing to present a bunch of mini-stories with the implied tone being “these are many of the ways humans react to disaster”. This is a really unique angle for a game to make as its central conceit all by itself, and it does make playing the game an experience like no other. Unfortunately, there are so many of these, and there is so little time spent with each character, that there is very little opportunity to develop them at any depth beyond the most basic of understandings. Sometimes it might come across in poor taste, due to how quickly, and lightly it touches on things like murder or racism before moving on. In the end, the value you might get from it depends on how much you appreciate running into a vignette that shows you something you hadn’t considered would happen in a situation like this. And there’s bound to be at least a couple of ‘em, given the dizzying amount of them you burn through every hour.

The gameplay can be reduced to going from point A to B, sometimes fetching an item a couple dozen metres away, which will be the only thing you can get said location so it’s not like you could have gotten wrong anyway. The game is entirely linear too, making exploration not a factor. Stumble into a random city square, rub yourself against a few walls pressing x, talk to the only NPCs that have cutscenes dedicated to them, and you will find success and progress with little obstacle. This structure is largely shared with the old PS2 Disaster Report games, but it’s been greatly simplified. In those titles, there would be key items for you to hold onto and collect throughout the story, waiting for the moment where it would become important. And the gameplay, whilst simple and forgiving, at least tried to translate the situation into more traditional gaming platforming. Disaster Report 4 eliminates all platforming, instead of making all climbing entirely contextual and eliminating jumping entirely. This makes it so the only thing required to get to the end is to hold the stick in the direction you have just been told. At least when you are not put upon the task of navigating what are, respectively, the worst vehicle and stealth sections I can recall playing in a video game. And don’t get me started on the dizzyingly slow and monotonous pre-baked platforming sections, which are impossible to fail and take way too long to get through.

Previous Disaster Report games had a somewhat aggressive thirst gauge that would make inventory management an important part of the game. It would force you to keep an eye out for beverages and to maintain enough room in your backpack for your supplies and quest items. DR4 would seem to double down on this with a hunger and a bladder mechanic on top. In practice, however, these are almost entirely cosmetic. I tried to go an entire in-game day without tending to any of them out of pure curiosity and I never once ran into any negative effects. An additional gauge to keep track of: the stress meter, would initially seem to be more concerning, given how it shrinks your available health proportionally, as it grows whenever you are exposed to uncomfortable situations. This one is easily done away with at any of the many checkpoints that are available whenever you finish the aforementioned 20-minute vignettes, though, so… yeah, it’s also completely ignorable. I can’t imagine a situation where you could be submitted to enough stress to reduce your life bar enough to matter without the opportunity to rest at a checkpoint in between.

Perhaps the game’s most intriguing idea is its odd commitment to roleplaying. The game opens asking you how you would act in a disaster situation and gives you a fairly thoughtful gamma of answers to choose from. Throughout, you are given the opportunity to reflect on what your character would be feeling in that particular moment, often with little to no actual consequences in the game world. At the bookend, it asks the opening question again, which would obviously prompt the player to reflect on their experiences and give a slightly more informed answer on how they believe they would approach a real disaster. It is interesting, and it shows at least an honest attempt to make the player truly live the situation. It is undercooked but kinda nifty.

Technically the game is an absolute mess, at least on Switch. I looked at some footage of the game on PC and PS4 and it seemed to perform better, but for me, frame rate drops and chugs were constant throughout the experience. Not to mention atrocious camera work whenever I had to work within confined spaces, which made a mid-game incursion to an apartment complex completely nightmarish.

The game is going for a very realistic look so there’s very little to comment on. Certainly buildings look very impressive when they collapse, and the trails of smoke that they leave behind, sometimes lingering for up to a minute, can be genuinely intimidating. At times it would seem like the game is going for a fully cinematic look, but the cinematography and choreography of the in-game models is quite poor and lets down what are otherwise some pretty good vocal performances. They feel especially underdeveloped when it’s time for one of the several musical montages of the game when an emotional and actually affecting insert song sees itself paired up with cookie-cutter pans and fades over clumsy and stiffly animated models.

Also I swear a recurring character, who tries to scam people to pay exorbitant prices for essential items during a disaster, is supposed to be played by a recognizable Japanese actor that I am just unaware of, as a westerner.

Disaster Report 4 is kind of a mess, but it is a very unique experience that can be very special to those who would appreciate it, and at some precious few moments it can actually prove an interesting lens to human reactions to an act of nature. But all that sees itself constantly buried under unengaging gameplay and VeggieTales level writing. It is extremely disappointing to see a returning series fail to reach the standards of the 20-year-old game that it’s bearing the name of. If you want to play this game, truly want to play it, you’ve already bought it and played it so this review is more of a critical conversation for you. But if you’re feeling doubtful I’d say skip it.

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After NIS America announced plans to port Disgaea 4 to PS4 and Switch, it seemed somehow the company had avoided disaster and was ready to move forwards. However, a recently published shareholders’ report states that following the drop in stock price caused by Disgaea RPG’s troubles, NIS increased its compensation limits for executives up to 500%. This has caused speculation that NIS’s executive branch is paying themselves as much as possible before an imminent bankruptcy.

We’ve talked about the unfolding NIS situation on the podcast a few times, and this seems to be heading off to just about the worst end imaginable. Though it is worth noting that rumors of mistreatment of employees at NIS go all the way back to the exodus of the original Disgaea team to Idea Factory, it seems that whatever happened this time may well prove final. I’m not going to tear up over a corporate entity, but here’s hoping all the employees can land on their feet and hopefully get some sort of severance. If we’re really lucky some other publisher may pick up NIS stalwarts like Disgaea and Phantom Brave.

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About three months ago, Fangamer whipped up a frenzy on Kickstarter wheeling out a new accessory called the “Flip Grip” that lets players play with their Nintendo Switch sideways, in portrait mode – as opposed to landscape mode as it normally sits at default, and at PAX West 2018 our correspondent Solon was on the scene and got to get his hands on it while testing out the new SNK 40th Anniversary Collection that will be releasing in November. As you can see in the short video, those 90 degrees radically changes the way we can play with the Switch. Since the Switch has often been used as a platform for porting many retro and mobile games, this will be an exciting new toy for those games as they are developed!

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The basic combat flow of SNK Heroines is frustrating. The core structure of a fighting game involves spacing, movement, combo potential, and so many other things. Even if you’re not taking a fighting game seriously, there are things you pick up on quickly just by moving your character and pressing buttons. SNK Heroines ignores basically all of that. Yes, you move around the screen and have to worry about your attacks hitting, but compare how this game plays to almost any other fighting game and you’ll feel a lack of feedback and confusion over nearly every input.

Instead of light, medium, and heavy attacks with inputs for specials, your face buttons are set to light, heavy, grab, and special. A simplified control scheme isn’t inherently awful, but this almost feels more obtrusive when you consider that there’s also a block button, as opposed to the standard “hold back to block” method most games use. Mortal Kombat and its related games use a block button, but those games were built with that in mind, SNK Heroines has seemingly grafted this method onto a game that doesn’t mesh well with that at all. In order to get around the constant blocking, you can pick up items that have the chance to go around the guard. These include a slippery banana, a bouncing pinball, a statue that drops and causes your opponent to become dizzy, and standard HP and super meter fillers. These can sometimes be fun, but instead of adding to the combat and making it more hectic, often the player is almost reliant on these items to have any kind of chance of making progress. Combine all this with the lack of any crouch (meaning you can’t mix up, only attacking from the air or at eye level) and you get one of the least fun control setups I’ve ever experienced.

Perhaps the most unfathomably dumb decision made about this game is the victory condition. Instead of just reducing your enemy’s health to zero, you have to lower their health until it turns red,  then hit them with a super. SNK has not learned from Playstation All-Stars’ follies, and has seemingly done one worse by making special moves drain your super meter. And no, I don’t mean EX versions of special moves, I mean using any and all special moves drains from the bar.

Basic combos become a chore as you must now pay closer and closer attention to your super meter, constantly worried that your characters are below the limit to toss a super out and end the match, or if you need to wait for your backup to recharge while waiting in the wings. This is seemingly the only reason why there are any tag team elements in the game, as swapping out mid-combo is the only way to do any kind of meaningful damage. In other tag fighters, using your entire row of characters is an advanced tactic used to get big blowout combos, but in SNK Heroines, if you want to do more than 10% of your opponent’s health bar, you need to swap out, which gets vastly aggravating as time goes on playing casually.

The root of SNK Heroines’ problems is this; It is a cobbled together, slapdash mess, mostly made up of a handful of King of Fighters XIV assets and throwaway character models. The only character that isn’t a straight model-rip from the previous game is Girl-Terry, while everyone else just gets stereotypical costumes to stir the proverbial pot. The sexy costumes don’t even really fit many of the characters, such as Luong, who normally dresses in a pretty sexualized Vietnamese ao dai, getting a schoolgirl outfit for some reason. Admittedly, some match, such as Athena’s magical girl attire, but it just goes to show how swiftly this must’ve been thrown together that the horny attire wasn’t even well thought out.

Even the story is a strange, unnecessary mess. The girls are whisked away into a pocket dimension by Kukri, a character from XIV who controls sand and has no known ties to dimensional rift-walking or being a pervert from previous lore. In this dimension, he has a statue that, once fully fueled by the girls’ despair, will allow him to meld this world and the real world, so all the women in reality will be dressed in skimpy outfits for him. Your chosen tag team barely interact, instead cycling through short scenes of one of them standing around, mumbling about how bored they are while a camera ogles their privates. It’s boring, just absolutely boring. Even if you’re coming to this game to get your jollies, there’s not enough to supply that. You’ll see worse on pretty much any anime currently airing.

SNK Heroines is wasted potential incarnate. When the game was announced, I was initially excited at the concept of a spiritual sequel to Neo Geo Pocket Color game Gals’ Fighters. Instead, Tag Team Frenzy feels like a rushed game without any soul, a game for perverts that feels like the people making it weren’t even excited by what they were making. To get a better experience of equal merit, go buy the excellent King of Fighters XIV and browse Pixiv’s 18+ section. At least then you won’t get blue-balled by both gameplay and sex appeal.

Small edit: In the review I claimed Terry was the only new character model added to the game. That’s incorrect, as Shermie was a new model. Sorry!

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Taken as a full package, Danganronpa V3 is pretty much what you expect: a group of students trapped in a school are given motives to murder each other, and after each murder, they hold a trial to find and punish the culprit. This basic outline continues to support engaging stories, with plenty of fun whodunit moments and unique, heartbreaking character interactions. The trials in V3 are some of the best in the series, save for the second, whose culprit felt chosen purely for cheap drama. Personally, I guessed who did it randomly, because the game didn’t properly set up any clues pointing to the perpetrator. Otherwise, cracking cases was generally enjoyable, with V3’s new mechanics adding loads of entertainment. On the flip side of the coin, the fifth trial was especially exceptional, upending the investigation practices of every trial beforehand, and calling into question who the victim even was.

The largest addition to V3’s gameplay is lying. That’s a weird phrase, yes, but in a game about finding the truth, the introduction of lying is near-revolutionary, and is sometimes the only way to bring out the truth. You can swap the meaning of any piece of evidence you have, swinging things in your favor and slightly changing the outcome of the trial. You are even rewarded for finding unique lines of thought using lies, as the trials will take different paths. Other fun mechanics include the Psyche Taxi, an Out Run pastiche with neon visuals, and a new version of the standard non-stop debate with multiple characters arguing over each other. These mini-games, coupled with clever writing and intrigue, keep investigations and trials as good as ever; if not moreso.

However, the game dips in quality once you interact with characters outside of trials. Most characters in DRV3 are one note and trite, with absolutely aggravating character quirks. The artist character, Angie, doesn’t talk about art at all. Instead, she brings up her god Atua every time she opens her mouth. Miu, the inventor, is constantly filthy. It’s a legitimate 50/50 shot over if she’s going to talk about masturbation or her breasts. Even a character I liked, Kaito, quickly lost his sheen when I realized he was just a cheap knockoff of Kamina, one of the main characters of the anime Gurren Lagann. The worst offender is Tenko, an Akido master whose main gimmick is acting like a strawman feminist character, screaming about hating “degenerate males” for no reason. In previous games, characters had quirks, and some were better than others. However, a large chunk of V3’s cast is either forgettable or downright awful. Monokuma’s children, the Monokubs, are also terrible, taking up massive amounts of the game spewing unfunny jokes and nearly overshadowing the original bear in charge.

Thankfully, the aesthetics of DRV3 are master-class. The music rocks, going so far as to improve the classic banger “Mr. Monokuma’s Lesson.” Even the dislikable Monokubs have an amazing theme. Classic tracks mingle with the new additions flawlessly, with both accentuating scenes with humor, suspense, or a mix of both. The menus and HUD are colorful and slick, and the character’s designs are pleasing to look at, even if what’s coming out of their mouths makes my eyes roll. Tenko may be a horribly written character, but seeing her smug sneer whenever she thinks she got one over somebody is always a treat.

In order to properly convey my feelings on DRV3, I must make general reference to the ending. Without spoilers: the ending of V3, and the franchise altogether, it seems, has undermined years of work in favor of being meta and smarmy. At the end of the game, I felt a sense that the writers of Danganronpa thought their fans were the real villains, punishing them for supporting the franchise in the first place. I’m not sure where they got this idea, but as someone who was moved to tears by the ending of Danganronpa 2, feeling like the writers understood my struggles with depression and anxiety, then being told in the sequel that getting something out of those stories was wrong is completely flabbergasting. It reminded me of Undertale’s message: to let a story speak for itself, and not let it get beaten to death by overthinking it. Instead of leaving it at that, Danganronpa V3 keeps hammering its flimsy message in, essentially saying you’re a bad person for getting invested in the stories and characters the writers themselves came up with.

It’s hard to parse Danganronpa V3. On one hand, the trials are excellent, the mysteries were engrossing, and the music is still on rotation for me as we speak. On the other, multiple characters made me groan in frustration every time the camera shifts to them, and the ending is legitimately one of the worst I’ve ever encountered in fiction. Danganronpa is over, and after that ending, I’m more relieved than anything.

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The set is being made by NIS America in collaboration with Rising Star Games. As you can see, there’s a lot of stuff included, like a soundtrack CD, an art book, a deck of cards, DLC codes, and of course, the Director’s Cut of the game itself. Of course, there may be changes in design prior to release, especially considering that neat map is being more or less used without permission. Whoops.

Right now, the set is $49.99 and available for preorder directly from the NISA website. A release date is set for November 24th and it looks like it’s only coming for PS3.

I had joked about doing a “five years later” retrospective article on Deadly Premonition, but maybe this set will actually justify it. Then again, you never need a reason to play your favorite game again, right Zach?

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Ultra Despair Girls takes place in between the original visual novels . Komaru Naegi, sister of DR1 main character Makoto, stars in this entry, teaming up with Toko Fukawa, the first game’s Ultimate Writing Prodigy,  whose split personality is a serial killer. Komaru has been imprisoned in an apartment ever since the world was nearly destroyed by The Incident, a series of riots that killed millions. Set free by the mysterious Future Foundation, Komaru must escape  Towa City with the help of a megaphone that fires disruptor blasts that destroy bear robots that children control.

That probably sounds like a load of hooey if you’ve never played Danganronpa before, so this isn’t the place to jump in. Another Episode is very much a fan’s game, filled with winks and nods to past events, but none of them really go anywhere. A good chunk of this game’s cast are relatives of characters from the first game, but the game never does anything interesting with them besides using them for some very cheap despair. There’s a lot of that in this game, which is a stark contrast from the other games building characters and eventually introducing problems into their lives.

Most character interactions in this game feel rushed and forced, save for the great dialogue between Toko and Komaru, who slowly get used to each other’s quirks as the game goes on. Their relationship is perhaps my favorite part of the game, and I’m glad Toko gets time to shine, as she didn’t in the original. Monokuma, who was the best character in the original games, is used as cannon fodder here, losing a lot of the levity he gave to some of the heavier scenes in the originals. There’s none of his infamous wisecracks, no physical comedy, he has so few lines they didn’t even bother dubbing him in a few cutscenes. Two Monokuma-esque bears make appearances, but one is a goody-two shoes and the other isn’t very funny at all.

(I’ll be dipping into spoilers a bit here, but I’ll be ambiguous. Fair warning.) Another Episode’s main villains are a group of children called the Warriors of Hope, and their inclusion is where the game becomes most difficult to recommend. Each of the children had a rough home life, and for the most part, their backstories are handled well. One child in particular, however, is disgustingly sexualized, to the point where an entire chapter is ruined. Instead of handling her abuse properly like the rest of the cast, there are multiple scenes of highly inappropriate sexualization, and the girl (who, mind you, is supposed to be elementary school age) is written as a pervert throughout. It’s a huge disappointment and I wish none of it was in the game. The first two games weren’t perfect but the objectification of such a young character is some next level grossness.(End spoilers)

The writing may not meet standard Danganronpa levels, but everything else about Ultra Despair Girls passes the quota. Masafumi Takada knocked it out of the park again with this soundtrack, which sets the mood perfectly for a depressing yet haunting city being ravaged. Cutscenes switch between anime, 3D models, and sprite conversations, and all three look sharper than ever before. The art, music and gameplay all remind me of the experimental games you’d only find on the original Playstation, I almost expected an Intelligent Qube minigame to pop up at some point.

Playing Ultra Despair Girls was a much more fun experience than I expected. The shooting is standard third person shooter affair, but the introduction of a variety of new bullets and upgrades throughout the game keep things fresh and allow for new puzzles right up until the end. Variety, such as a bullet that lets you control Monokumas for a short time, or a spotlight that lets you find secrets or solve riddles, is the real spice of this game. The puzzles in general aren’t much to sneeze at, but challenge rooms that are peppered throughout the game add unique twists to defeating Monokumas, often asking you to create chain reactions to wipe a floor of baddies in one shot. While these challenges were fun, sometimes the game wouldn’t consider them properly cleared even when the objectives were met, which doesn’t halt gameplay but does affect your end of chapter score.

A nice bonus is the inclusion of Genocide Jack as a playable character. If things are getting a bit too rough, pressing Triangle switches control to the scissors-wielding serial killer, who is both invincible and incredibly strong. There is a time limit for how long you can control her, but battery pickups are as plentiful as most ammo, so Jack will be back to let ‘er rip quickly if need be. It’s an interesting choice, obviously for those who get frustrated when stuck or don’t know much about third person shooting, as the game’s creators anticipated its audience to want to get right back to the story. There are long stretches in between gameplay segments in the early game, which could have been counterbalanced with some walk-and-talk segments of some kind. Giving you a short burst of gameplay followed by half an hour of cutscenes is MGS4 levels of whiplash, but thankfully it doesn’t go on for as long and evens out by chapter two.
When I finished Ultra Despair Girls, I felt similarly to how I felt when I completed Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. There’s a lot of great action and amazing artistic choices that made me excited for the future of the franchise, but there were also some extremely poor choices in portraying sexual assault in both games that gave me pause in recommending them. There’s definitely more to Another Episode than the objectifying scenes I take umbrage to, but it colored my opinion of the game, and makes it that much harder to give a glowing score. At the very least, be aware of that, because there’s fun to be had in Towa City. 

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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.

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The game’s controls are entirely mapped to the Vita’s touchscreen and rear touchpad by default. Using the screen, you guide Lumen, a firefly, who in turn guides the heroine, Mion, through the game. Tapping the rear touch pad allows you to switch to a “shadow view”, where you control a second spectre. In this mode, you can reach things you otherwise couldn’t, activate traps to block the path of enemies who inhabit the shadows, or outright kill them, with the catch that you can only move within intersecting shadows. It’s an interesting idea, but the rear touchpad isn’t terribly responsive when it comes to moving around, and this gameplay mode quickly becomes a chore. The touchscreen isn’t much better in terms of responsiveness, and too often you’ll find Mion standing there, unsure of where you’re guiding her or what you want her to do. Things go south even further when the game demands you navigate Lumen through tight, winding corridors, where touching the sides results in death. In these sections, it’s often difficult to see where you are in relation to the walls, due to your finger being in the way, and given that you’ve got to be pixel-perfect, it really tests your patience. Worst of all however are the sections where the game forces reversed controls on you, turning an already dire mess into an unresponsive catastrophe. These sections drove me insane and made me want to put the game down – with one section in chapter three making me want to quit altogether – the controls reducing them more to luck than skill. It’s not the puzzles themselves, but rather the controls that provide responsibility for most of the game’s issues, and in many ways, htoL#NiQ is it’s own worst enemy. The use of the screen and touchpad is finicky at best, and feels like a needless gimmick. Worse still, the controls break the sense of immersion that the game builds through it’s visuals and sound design. You can opt to use the left stick if you dig through the options menus a bit, but even then the controls are clunky and floaty at best, so while it’s more tolerable, it’s still not good.

The game also struggles with some trial and error gameplay, with many of the puzzles coming down to the player’s ability to correctly time things. Too often, you have to be absolutely perfect, as if even one pixel is off, Mion will meet her doom. Once or twice I noticed traps on the other side of a wall had to be completely avoided due to some slight clipping issues, but this wasn’t exactly game-breaking. htoL#NiQ isn’t particularly long – there’s only two to four hours worth of actual content here, and it feels like the poor controls and trial and error puzzles are there by design for no purpose other than artificially lengthening the experience. It’s poor design, and it’s really unnecessary. Thankfully, checkpoints are frequent – typically following each puzzle – so you’re never gonna find yourself trudging back through an entire level to cover your mistakes, and despite the trial and error gameplay, the puzzles never really feel like they’re being unfair to you. It’s crucial to any puzzle game that players are challenged without feeling like they’re being subjected to purposefully obtuse trials. Thankfully, htoL#NiQ succeeds in this respect, with very little that’s outwardly egregious standing in your way, and you do feel genuinely accomplished when you advance past a particularly mentally taxing section, and even better on the occasions where you nail a puzzle on the first try.

Where the game really shines though is in it’s world-building, aesthetic, and sound design. The game is drop dead gorgeous to look at, and for my money, might just be the best looking thing on the Vita. The visuals are reminiscent of Child of Light, but with a slightly more Eastern disposition, and everything pops right off the screen. Even the industrial backdrops, so often reduced to bland, cookie cutter set-dressing in games, have their own personality and feel curiously vibrant, when combined with the serene, elegant soundtrack and great foley work. We know very little about the world in which htoL#NiQ takes place, and yet it feels like a world with it’s own story, identity and history. It’s truly an accomplishment in terms of what the Vita is capable of doing from a technical standpoint, and stands above essentially everything else on the platform in that regard.

The game’s story is barebones in terms of it’s execution, but this actually plays perfectly into the world with which we are presented. There’s no dialogue nor voice acting, just brief, playable flashbacks, activated by finding glowing pink flowers in the stages. As short as these are (on top of being entirely optional), they’re bursting with life, energy and color, and serve to add a layer of emotional tenderness and depth to the gameplay that’s hard to put into words. Through these aphoristic scenes, Mion’s character becomes one the player genuinely feels for, and wants to succeed, meaning that you’ll want to go and find each one to reveal more of the backstory. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a game that tells it’s tale through such simple visuals and non-verbal imagery to make you root for it’s protagonist to such a degree, and it’s something for which htoL#NiQ deserves praise.

Regrettably though, htoL#NiQ is a beautiful and fiercely interesting piece of art hampered not by it’s own ambition but by poor gameplay. The game’s atmosphere, world, and visual panache are up there with the best of them, but it just can’t get over the shackles placed on it by it’s gimmicky controls. It’s brief but untoward, an utterly charming experience despite it’s significant flaws, and if you can stomach those issues, it’s something worth experiencing, especially given the cheap $20 price point. The short tempered, however, should look elsewhere.

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And a trailer!

Another Episode is a pre-sequel in the Danganronpa series, bridging the gap between Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair. You play as Komaru Naegi, the sister of Makoto, the original game’s protag. You fight Monokuma robots by shooting them in third person. It’s a unique game, and I’ve been anticipating it for months since it came out in Japan. Let’s hope it’s good!

Disgaea 5 was also confirmed for a fall release date in the US. The game is a standard sequel to the beloved strategy game, but it’s the first game in the series to come out on PS4. A trailer was shown, and here it is!

Other games were also detailed, including hotL#NiQ The Firefly Diary (Vita, Feburary 24th), The Awakened Fate: Ultimatum (March 17th), Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy (Vita, June 9th), and Rodea: The Sky Warrior(Wii, Wii U, 3DS, also this fall). Not much new info about those, but DR and Disgaea are NIS’ moneymakers, so it’s understandable. Either way, get hype!

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