Criminal Girls: Invite Only Review

Criminal Girls: Invite Only might look like a standard JRPG with cute anime characters, dungeon crawling and a rather simple battle system. Dig a little deeper though and you'll find that those cute 'girls next door' are actually associated with the seven deadly sins, and the only way to motivate them and redeem their lost souls is through some lite BDSM tactics. Still interested? Read on my friend.

NIS has decided to translate and bring over Criminal Girls: Invite Only, which was originally released on the PSP. It was a bold decision, sure, but fans of NIS might already know what they're getting themselves into, and the questionable content to them might not be so jaw-dropping.

Criminal Girls: Invite Only revolves around your main character getting a job in the far reaches of Hell's prison. You're not dead or anything, you're just asleep. Here you have the daunting task of watching over seven deadly maidens with latent criminal DNA. It's your job to work with these girls, motivate them to better themselves, and ultimately redeem them so they can be reborn back on Earth, sin free. You'll only start off with four of the girls in the beginning of the game, but as your progress, you'll eventually unlock the rest that will join up and offer up their combat expertise.

The game is a pretty run-of-the-mill dungeon crawler with environments that tend to get a little too repetitive for their own good, but it's the combat where Criminal Girls shines. Its unique combat system revolves around the girls telling you what move they want to perform, whether they want to team up with someone else, or whether they want to use a special ability. Since you always have four girls in a battle at once, you always have four choices. In the beginning, a lot of those choices will be very similar, since you won't really have a whole arsenal of attacks unlocked yet, but as you progress and new moves are learned, you'll have a much larger variety to pick from. You can always only pick one move to perform at any time. Once you picked, the next round starts and the girls may or may not offer a completely different set of moves.

While this randomness seems like a bad idea for turn-based combat, the girls do a pretty good job at giving you options that usually make sense for the occasion. Has your party just suffered a pretty explosive blow and is now left with very little health? No problem, Yuko (assuming she's learned it) will suggest a skill that heals the entire party. Is the monster charging up for a big attack that damages the entire party? No problem, Ran will suggest the Guard option which decreases damage for the entire party. And these types of situations arise through the entirety of the game. The best part though, is that the game doesn't lock you in that strategy. If you want to ditch guarding that giant attack, you can instead prepare for an attack with healing items or items that boost your defense.

As you delves through the vast reaches of Hell, you'll be battling all types of monsters, leveling up and growing stronger, but leveling only serves to raise your characters base stats. If you want to learn more skills, you'll have to 'motivate' the girls. This is done through various hands-on tasks like whipping or electrocuting the girls while they pose for you in a rather suggestive manner.

Now this is where most people will realize the game is simply not for them, and I can't really fault them. While I personally didn't take much offense because I'm more accustomed to Japanese culture, I can see the typical consumer thinking that this is just a little too much. Each motivate section starts off with pink fog covering most of the screen, though by the time you get to the higher tiers, more screen will be transparent, save for the girls' erogenous zones, and even though I'm perfectly comfortable with playing games like this at home or around friends, I'll admit that I would feel uneasy playing this while sitting next to a stranger in public transport. It also doesn't help that the girls do look quite young. Though rest assured that there is actually no nudity whatsoever.

Each girl will also have personal Orders that they'll ask you to carry out as they reach a certain level of motivation, which will usually require a bit of backtracking. While it's mostly there to serve as playtime padding, they also serve to get to know the girls a bit better. For example, you'll have to travel back to pick up a piece of jewelry, or perhaps a snack that one of the girls spotted a few map screens back. Thankfully, the game has a pretty easy to navigate teleport system that makes backtracking way less tedious

It's a shame that the game will be mostly judged on the short, but completely necessary motivation parts, because the rest is actually very good. Each of the girls has distinct personalities that you slowly uncover as you progress through the game, and you learn why they all act the way they do. You'll learn why Kisaragi is feisty and why Ran would rather throw a punch to the face, than to have a normal conversation. It's these character progressions through the game that actually make it worth diving into.

Being simplistic is also one of Criminal Girls' strengths. While that may seem contradictory, RPGs these days require massive amounts of dedication, character stat and skill development as well as item management. Criminal Girls pretty much ditches most of this in lieu of a much more simplified and streamlined system. The aforementioned battle system lends itself to this very well. There is no gear to speak of really, and the only character building is through the various Motivation sequences. It's an RPG that's easy to pick up and equally easy to put down, and simply play in short spurts.

While the character art is absolutely gorgeous, doubly so when playing on a PlayStation TV, you can tell that the exploration aspect of the game has been directly lifted from the PSP, complete with rather simplistic character sprite animations. It's not necessarily a negative per se, but if you're expecting the game to be a looker, you might be somewhat disappointed.

The main big changes from the original Japanese version and our localized one, is that NIS has left a few fog elements on various erogenous zones on the females that simply never goes away. The other, and probably more important change was that all the voice acting was taken out during the Motivate sequences. It's probably a smart move since a lot of the voice clips in the Japanese version sounded just a bit too sexual. What you have left though is still a rather accurate representation of the original game, with all the rest of the content still kept intact.

While I'd love to say that those questionable instances of skill progression are completely optional in order to make this game much more appealing to the public eye, it's simply not the case. In fact, it's very much the opposite. And even though there are many gamers like myself who won't take offense to the game's material, I think that we happen to be in the minority here. Japan's gonna be Japan, and I can't fault them for