Tamsoft today might be working on big licenses like the Captain Tsubasa game they did for Namco Bandai, or the upcoming new Bleach fighting game, but i will never forget that they cut their teeth and for most of their career they were hacking out a lot of budget games for D3 Publisher, eventually making franchises with Oneechanbara, curating various hack n slash spin-offs of series like Neptunia (also, the cancelled Hinomaruko project, i remember) and working on pretty much all Senran Kagura titles in some fashion, even the later spin-offs.
But today we’re reminiscing (this is a rewrite, FIY) about one of their absolute worst titles ever, with Demolition Girl, one of the many titles they cranked out for PS2 in D3’s Simple 2000 Series, some already reviewed in these pages like Shogun’s Blade, others that might be worst revisiting and talking about again, as with the horrendous Deep Water (AKA The Daikaiju) and Zombie Attack, or freshly feature here, stuff like “Taxi Rider” or “Pink Pong”, i feel like i should clarify yes, they were brought over in NA and-or PAL territories with those titles for real, i’m not altering them for a lark.
As to why this one over so many shitty games from that era of the company… you’ll soon see.
The premise is exactly what the cover (well, the PAL cover) shows, it’s about a japanese giant woman in a bikini going on a “rampage”, like a more japanese version of Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (or a more fetishy Gynormica from Monsters VS Aliens), with the plot featuring D3 Publisher pin-up/idol/mascotte character Riho Futaba, chilling on the beach when an alien crab-squid thing bits her, making her kaiju sized, making her confused and going on a clumsy stroll through the nearby area, causing destruction and forcing the military to step in, even more when aliens come by and try to control her, because she’s the size of a Godzilla foe (in a plot beat also stolen from a Godzilla film, Invasion Of The Astro Monster), i guess.
As this is a budget release, the story it’s presented with a combination of text dumps on a black background, still images and some rare cutscenes filled with text boxes, but even those are presented without any kind of audio to it (not even ambient sounds), the defeaning silence occasionally broken by Riho’s VA doing grunts, moans or otherwise speaking brief sentences in japanese that were left completely untranslated even in the English-only PAL release.
There’s music… in the mission briefing, the vehicle load out screens, and the mission themselves, sure, but overall presentation is abysmal, terrifyingly cheap that it’s embarassing even for a Simple Series release, even if this does have some speech in cutscenes unlike the original PS2 first Oneechanbara on PS2, which had the opening and closing cutscenes (the only 2 in the entire game, too) just completely silent, only in that detail Demolition Girl is slightly superior.
Not that it matters much, since Riho Futaba does look like an inflatable sex doll given life via black magic, and moves as if she became more ditzy in the process, with of course the budget being mostly spent on jiggle physics for the bikini-confined breasts, which do move around if made of Flubber, like they’re encasing living things that are trying to escape their bosom prison.
While it’s disappointing that you don’t get to play as the giantess herself, i honestly can’t be too arsed about that anymore, given how many Godzilla games let you play as the Big G, his friends and foes and can still suck ass through a rubber suited straw, i don’t even need to shame again the PS3/PS4 Godzilla game… but i will, so yeah, that’s disappointing, still, but not the issue.
The issue is that you play as the military trying to stop the giant girl and no, this doesn’t mean “giant fetish EDF”, sadly, it means you’re tasked with piloting various vehicles over the course of 6 missions, where things go from weird to wacky and weirder, including stuff like taking the three sizes of the giantess (which does include having to lock on on her to “acquire Buttocks Data”), sedating her while using comedy items spawned à-la Capsule Corp, protecting her when alien squids attack her, defeat the alien Tentacool-esque parasite that attachs to her and makes her shoot Kamehamehas, use a semi-automated tank to massacre the popolation that escapes from the giantess as they decide to slam their cars against the tank in panic (i guess) while you shoot at her, and finally you shoot medicine into Riho as she scales a palace in Shinjuku like King Kong, while also keeping at bay a giant alien squid.
All culminating in a stupid ass ending that spends time doing the same “slideshow” cutscene and explain shit you already know via the aforementioned silent text dumps.
The problem is that this sounds stupid fun, but it’s just plain stupid, as not only the mission design becomes more and more senseless, the controls go from bad to horrendous, honestly some of the worse i’ve ever seen and used. If you think the helicopter controls like ass and the targeting is iffy, the jet will induce gag reflex, and the tank being the less horrid vehicle to control is made so only because that level has the tank move forward automatically in a runner-esque section.
You do get some customization with these, but it’s barely there, you can simply change the vehicle skin and modify the load-out with 3 max special weapons/shots. That’s about it.
And that’s about it in terms of content as well, it just 6 missions, which can be done in 1 hour max (it can honestly be finished in 30 minutes), not only being embarassingly short but also piss easy, even with the shit controls and cheap design.
Once you beat it, you just unlock Free Mode, which is just a mission select, and there’s technically a bit more to do because the “Quest” menù (in the same fashion as it is works in the first Oneechanbara PS2 games) it’s actually just a collection of in-game achievements/objectives (like finish a certain level at a specific difficulty or under a certain time limit) that just net you images, plus there are some extra costumes to unlock. Even for a budget game, this is barren beyond belief.
But sadly, that’s not even the worse part, because i know this game sounds like a fun “bad game”, due to its trashiness, but i need to stress that this isn’t fun, this is the kind of game that exist sorely to be entertaining review (or streaming) material but not a fun game in itself, to play, regardless if it’s crap or not. After all, there are plenty crappy games people enjoyed none the less.
And mind you, it’s crap, it’s utter dogshit, made worse because honestly i still feel nothing substantial even when lambasting it (twice now), even the first two Oneechanbara made me frustrated but they made me feel something, garbage games but you could sense the developer trying to do something, even if i hated their guts for making the final levels an absolute inferno of cheapness and bad design meant to literally waste hours for naught.
For Demolition Girl i don’t believe even Tamsoft itself cared about it, even for the sake of satisfying their own kinks, it just feels like they had some wacky fetishy ideas but lost interest midway through and apathetically slapped together something for D3 to publish on a PS2 disc.
Fun “bad games” are rarer than “so bad it’s good” movies and this is yet another title that confirms this rule, because there’s bad, there is abysmal, and there is shit, obvious garbage that doesn’t care about anything, putting up a wacky pantomime but still coming off as soulless, boring trash, where nobody cared about anything about shipping the thing as a functional game, which it’s just the worse, making for a colored note or a funny playthrough on Youtube to see, at the very best.
Also, nowadays an original PAL copy of the game goes for way too much on Ebay and the likes, so i can’t even recommend it to the trash videogames’ collectors with 5 bucks to spare, any more it’s too much and arguably even the 3 euros i paid for it sealed years ago are a bit excessive.
Wise Cafe (International) 