Review: Criminal Girls (Vita)

Explore the depths of Hell as you lead a female gang of delinquents on their quest to absolve themselves of their sins and be reborn on Earth. But be careful, leading a crew of delinquents to battle and discovery isn’t as easy as it sounds. Wrestle with the girls’ conflicting battle plans, spend some one-on-one time keeping the girls motivated to be their better selves, and uncover their deepest, darkest secrets on the way to reforming them into not just upstanding citizens, but a cohesive, and effective battle group.

Pros:

• Cutesy anime style graphics.
• Simple controls.
• Uses touchscreen for certain parts.
• Full Platinum trophies.
• Opening and ongoing tutorials.
• Gameplay is very much a dungeon crawler with character progression and team management.
• Turn based combat.
• Story is entertaining and plays out very much like a weird cell block H anime cartoon.
• Kooky spooky soundtrack.
• Random fight encounters.
• Big boss fights.
• Fast forward text conversations.
• Map uncovers as you discover it.
• Quick save/load option whereby quick saving sends you back to the main menu.
• 48 save slots.
• Earn Cm, Cm is the currency used in game.  You earn it from kills and missions.
• Cm can be used to buy items or motivate characters.
• Can escape fights easily with a simple button press.
• Take the game at your own pace,  Take your time and level up or you can steam through and do the story missions as they unlock.
• Find hidden chests.
• Earn experience to level up characters which in turn increase you health and magic points.
• Find/rescue new party members.
• Portals allow you to fast travel between previously unlocked portals.
• Infirmary: Here is where you can rest (heal)  your party,  buy items from the shop,  motivate your team and of course hard save your game.
• Motivation: Level up characters levels within this area,  Doing so unlocks new powers and abilities. It is a self contained levelling system and to actually earn experience you do the mini game where you must swipe, smash and bang away the temptations in order to earn the exp.
• Unlock new game mechanics like party management,  change move sets and a whole lot more.
• Field skill: These are abilities you can only use whilst roaming the dungeons.  Example abilities are things like treasure tracker,  heal members or even drag enemies to you.  Loads to unlock and use.
• Girls wish are side missions unlocked through play and are completely optional.
• Combat is fast and easy to control,  You can do single attacks or combine with other players for more devastating moves.
• Hours upon hours of gameplay.

Cons:

• A lot of grinding is needed in order to level up to be strong enough to fight the bigger guys.
• First hour or so is really slow and stop start. A lot of reading and learning mechanics.
• Difficulty spikes are rife.
• Network features get disabled.
• Cannot rename characters or add any personalisation.
• Maps/dungeons are quite small.
• Random encounters frequency is high with fights happening every few minutes.
• Doesn’t use touchscreen in so many places.
• Earning experience and cm is minimal which in turn causes you to level up slowly.
• The moves you do in battle are predetermined by the game and with that can make battles quite tricky.  you can on the flipping unlock the ability to change it but for the first few hours at least,  you are stuck without it.
• Same formula over and over.  A lot of fetch quests.
• Can be deemed over sexy and borderline Porno graphic.  Case and point is the motivation area.  As you whack the temptations away,  you have a girl in the background half naked moving around and stuff.  I’m not going to go all Youporn up in here but a few of the movements are umm suggestive to say the least.
• On the motivate area you have to quickly react to the icons popping up,  Much like whack a mole (There is a joke in there but I’m gonna leave it)  and the notification text comes with the icon and obscures the view so getting precise hits and swipes is tricky.

In Summary,  Let’s not get it twisted,  I hated this game for the first few hours.  The leveling up was slow,  the fights were constant and repetitive and boss fights bought it all to a grinding halt.  I then had to grind over and over to earn cm so I could unlock new moves which make it all easier.  But then after a fair few unlocks and new moves with new party member,  The game finally started to click.  It still has loads of grinding and annoying fetch quests but the combat does start to pick up and get a bit of variety.

The story is a weird one but a good one for a change.  The game has loads of content but you really need to be dedicated in order to extract fun from it.  With so many dungeon crawlers on the Vita,  The competition is high and with such a high reliance on grinding and slow pace it may well struggle to shine over any of the other well known dungeon crawlers.  in short, If you put the time in you will have a good game.  If time is something you don’t have,  Leave it and move on.