Ok, so I finished this and it was flawed but good.
First of all, the concept behind the game was to make a KEY game. For those who stay away from anime/icecream threads, KEY writes a specific style of visual novel which my friend calls the "sad girls club". Their games (Kanon, Air, Clannad, etc...) are about a bunch of girls who are traumatized by horribly depressing pasts and through the help of the main character they are able to overcome their traumas and live happy lives. The idea is the player gets to "white knight" a bunch of virtual women and save them and then feel appreciated in return. Yeah, I'm not even going to try to defend that from a societal standpoint. But the other reason why KEY games are popular is because they're very well written with richly developed characters and emotionally strong tales.
Criminal Girls was Niinou saying let's make a KEY game but instead of the gameplay consisting of sitting and reading 1,000 pages+ of boxes of text, let's make the gameplay an exciting fresh SMT/EO dungeon crawler. Sounds fine to me since I hate reading pages of pages of Japanese text and I love dungeon crawlers!
The battle system is quite good from start to finish. There's a bit more luck involved than a normal rpg, but managing your party by switching members in and out every turn and using items and buffing/debuffing and using support skills and knowing when to defend takes a good amount of strategy. The battles are quick and look fine.
The game balance is the best of any Image Epoch game I've played. It's a similar curve to an SMT game where it starts off HARD when you're abilities are limited, then gets easier and falls into a normal FF difficult in the 2nd half and then at the end it gets tough again and the final boss will hurt you, bad. Sands of Destruction & Last Ranker had some of the worst gameplay balance I've ever seen, so this was a good improvement. The field skills are all useful so as you get those it makes things more manageable and crawling more fun.
The story was surprisingly nice. If you can ignore the marketing that tried to sell the game as some perverted harem game, the actual story is a lot closer to Haibane Renmei meets KEY than anything in the fanservice department. The story is about these girls who've sinned in their past life and have to come to terms with their pasts that have emotionally traumatized them and through the help of the MC they overcome their tragic pasts so they can be reincarnated. The backstories for each girl are actually quite good and some of them are pretty powerful. The music and acting accompanying these depressing stories is really well done and makes them stick out as something beyond your average jrpg tale. Similarly to a KEY game, the main character narrates his thought bubbles and like KEY type games, in the end you get to choose a girl and get a specific girl ending complete with vocal song by that girl. From a story perspective it's essentially an icecream genre of visual novel plot.
The art is also really good. Dungeons has all kinds of nice effects running through them, the enemies/bosses are well designed and the characters and menus are all quite nice. No matter how good or bad an Image Epoch game is, their art department is always top notch. They are artists first, then game developers and it shows. But their game development is getting better all the time.
Music is alright. There's one section with really nice SMT-ish depressing piano music, but the rest is fairly typical.
Length is also not bad. Game takes about 20 hours for the main game with 7 branches and endings right after the final save point. I would do some of the others but the last boss is REALLY F-ING HARD. When I died 8-10 mins into my first attempt and the boss was 2-3 hits from dying and my character did "REVIVE ALL ALLIES AND HEAL ALL" super move and then the boss acted first and killed that character I raaaaged
2nd time I had better luck and my best character kept rolling their ultimate attack "no damage all party for 2 rounds" and I baaaarely made it through. Needless to say I do not want to fight that boss anymore! But yeah, on top of the main 20 hour game with 7 ending paths there are two bonus dungeons with true final boss + ending #1 and true true final boss + ending #2. So it'll take about 30-35 hours to do it all if you want.
Now the problems with the game, as there are a bunch.
First of all the punishment system is awful. It adds absolutely nothing to the game and only detracts from it. It feels entirely like it was thrown in by the marketing department so they could advertise the game to the creepy market, similar to how they'll throw annoying moe characters into a mecha show for no reason but to try to appeal to the moe audience and gain more sales. The punishment system in gameplay ends up being annoying because you have to do all these stupid mini-games over and over to unlock all your skills/abilities for the entire game. The mini-games are shallow and the controls are more annoying than fun. The ero side of them is also lame and feels completely disconnected from the sad drama story going on in the plot. If they ditched the punishment system I'd give the game a half point more because it'd help the pacing and get rid of the stupid.
Second of all the game is fairly repetitive. There's like 5 main dungeons and 2 bonus dungeons for a 20-35 hour game. There are no towns or anything else. You walk through the dungeon, keep getting into random battles, watch cutscenes along the way, and fight the boss. Which is fine for a story-based dungeon crawler, but there definitely could've been something a little more. There are sidequests but they just involve warping back to an old floor or two and picking up an item. The game can also be kind of grindy if you let it, especially if you have OCD and have to unlock every skill/ability currently available before moving on. My advice would be to never grind and just keep moving and you'll probably be ok. Just think of picking which skills/abilities you want as being part of the strategy.
And lastly the luck factor isn't perfect, because luck-based battles really can't be. For the most part I think the Baten Kaitos style luck of the draw helps the battle system be more fun and exciting, but at the same time every so often you can be annoyed by it. I'm glad it's there and I do like the battle system but I also think it's a flaw; hard to put my finger on it.
Overall I enjoyed Criminal Girls. The story was touching and the dungeon crawling along with the battles were exciting. But at the same time I'm glad it's not a hugely long game as it was fairly repetitive and all those hours I spent doing minigames were a blot on an otherwise good rpg. Because of the flaws and the creepy marketing it's not really a game I'd recommend to most people, but even so it's definitely the best Image Epoch game I've played having played Sands of Destruction, The Last Ranker, and some of Arc Rise Fantasia. CG shows me that Image Epoch is getting better at making good gameplay systems with actual BALANCE to go along with their nice art. Makes me want to play 7th Dragon as I hear it was pretty similar and may be their best game to date.
If it wasn't for the punishment system it'd be ~a B+, but as is it's more of a B- game.
![[360º]](/images/smilies/nuevos/vueltas.gif "como la niña del exorcista")
