Original Release: G-Collections, 2007, PC
A squad of Pretty Soldiers must repel the attacks of an army of rapey mutants in this turn-based sci-fi strategy title.
Pretty Soldier Wars A.D. 2048 (PC, G-Collections, 2007)
Where to Buy: ebay
Review by: Master-B
Pretty Soldier Wars mixes hentai in with a futuristic strategy-RPG, and doesn’t really do either one all that well. It does the game bit a little better than the hentai, I suppose.
The rather brief setup is that it’s the future, there was a nuclear war and the fallout created scads of mutated monsters. Who, of course, have tentacles to spare. And a need to lovingly caress animu ladies with them.
I’m not sure if this is a clever nod to the improbable setups of many ’90s hentai visual novels or just laziness, but the story has you as an average college kid who is slapped into commanding a bunch of bio-enhanced female soldiers for no particularly good reason. You go through a series of missions, usually composed of two or three levels each, in which you fight the tentacle mutants on the beaches and in the fields and etc.
The strategy-RPG fundamentals are actually not bad. You’ve got a squad of eight biochicks, each with their own specialties. The ones with handguns move fast and dodge attacks often, you have a couple of slow tanks with heavy weapons, a sniper, a mid-range with an assault rifle, and so on. You can deploy six in each level. There is no permadeath, but if a soldier gets killed they’re forced to retreat and are unavailable for the rest of that whole mission.
Tactics actually turn out to be important here, as you can literally do nothing but move and fire. No magic or “techniques,” no healing items, no support skills, no nada. Maps tend to boil down to identifying and controlling a natural chokepoint to keep the monsters from surrounding you.
Unfortunately, maps also boil down to a lot of blind luck. There are some little complaints, like the fact that the monsters all tend to start clustered on one end of the map and just Zerg Rush you en masse. But the primary problem is that these girls have absolutely atrocious aim. Depending on the distance from your enemy and your weapon, you’ll get a “chance to hit” percentage estimation. Just ignore that, because it’s total bullshit. Even at 90% chance to hit, really it’s more like 30% or 40% every time.
The constant Final Fantasy 1-level whiffing could be tolerated if all the maps were like the first few; though your squad is always badly outnumbered you also greatly outclass the enemy monsters, and if you have unlimited time to move and draw them into favorable situations it’s all quite manageable. It goes to shit a few levels in when there start being turn limits in each stage. Through no fault of your own, your girls will often whiff too many high-percentage shots which is just enough to leave a couple straggler fleeing enemies alive when the time limit runs out. You lose, you start the whole 30+ minute process from the beginning.
The girls do level up, but the whiffing never gets better even when their stats otherwise improve significantly. You have to assume every shot has a sub-50% chance of landing no matter the circumstances. It’s inane, it ruins any attempt at real strategy and it’s unbelievably time-consuming and tedious.
The level-up process is also opaque and weird; I’m still not sure exactly how it works. The girls don’t level up intra-mission, you have to complete the whole set of stages and then they’ll randomly improve before the next mission starts.
Speaking of opaque and weird, there’s also a “dating sim” element in-between levels although it’s literally as barebones as you can get. The girls hang out in a lounge, sometimes talking to them triggers a date which very quickly turns into the standard H-ing. My best guess is it’s the first girl who leveled up in the previous missions that you talk to each time.
The adult content in those scenes is about as tame, standard and boring as it gets. There are many more gratuitous scenes during the missions, and these are more hardcore tentacle stuff. For some reason, the toughest two or three monsters in each map are toting around a random civilian girl raping the hell out of her while fighting you. When you first attack them, you get a couple gratuitous shots of their tentacle molestations. These scenes aren’t gory or brutal at all, in fact it often appears that Nemesis is making very tender and considerate tentacle love to them. They’re absolutely doused in random slime, though, and probably won’t do anything for you unless you’re into that.
Almost a noble pixel perv effort, but the gameplay flaws and uninteresting “adult content” really bring it down.
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