Criminal Girls: The guiltiest pleasure of them all

Ah, the Criminal Girls controversy. This game ignited the latest massive moral debate in the gaming landscape— a debate not as virulent as the one surrounding Mortal Combat’s gory Fatalities back in the days, granted, but still prominent enough to generate heaps of internet ranting, both in the game’s favour and against it. In the end, and ironically enough, no one seems to be satisfied with Criminal Girls: some slander it for being too kinky, some for being too soft and heavily censored, and others for simply existing.

What is that game that generates such intense controversy and seemingly fails to cater genuinely to any audience? With its title vaguely reminiscent of the ’70s Women-in-Prison flicks, Criminal Girls: Invite Only positions itself as a fully mature game aimed at the adult audience that supposedly favours the Vita. This 2014 Vita remake/port ramps up the fan-service considerably when compared to the original Japanese-only PSP instalment; however, everything else was left untouched, from graphics to gameplay mechanics. Upon coming to the West, the game was famously censored, to the utter dismay of some gamers who wanted the whole package, moans and crotch shots and all; this added another layer to the already existing controversy, with a portion of the targeted audience now being unhappy with the final product. Some went as far as importing the original game from Japan, which must have delighted Nippon Ichi Software as well as Imageepoch.

Where do I stand in all this, you may ask? Well, I’ll be blunt: I absolutely adored Criminal Girls. In fact, it’s fair to say that I was literally glued to my Vita during the course of my Criminal Girls run: I would play for hours on end, entranced by the intoxicating gameplay, and didn’t touch any other game in the meantime—heck, I didn’t even think of any other game in the meantime, so deep was I stuck in that Criminal Girls trance. And yet, when all was said and done, I felt some strange reluctance to write about that game that I had loved so much. I was wondering how to talk properly about Criminal Girls, or even whether I should talk about it at all. The game has been so thoroughly dissected due to the controversy surrounding it that one feels there is nothing more to say about it: from the fighting system to the scandalous mini-games, everything has been mulled over ad nauseam, and the prospect of repeating the process here didn’t thrill me in the slightest. After a bit of pondering, I decided to concentrate on the game’s overall concept, deliberately glossing over the technicalities of the gameplay.

Gameplay in a nutshell

I’ll still dedicate a paragraph to the matter, though—just in case someone who never encountered any other review of Criminal Girls is reading that post and wants to figure out what you actually do in that game. (Highly unlikely, but you never know.) I’ll keep it short and dry: Criminal Girls is a pure dungeon crawler with turn-based random battles. The encounter rate is decent, you can flee from battles and encounters can be avoided entirely. The characters level up quite fast and regularly from beginning to end. New abilities must be learned by successfully completing touch-screen based mini-games involving rubbing and poking the Vita’s front and rear screens. These mini-games are obviously the infamous kinky bits involving risqué shots of the characters, and you cannot skip them if you want to be able to progress: the bosses are tough cookies and you cannot hope to beat them without mastering the abilities granted by the mini-games. “Mastering” may not be the exact word, since you cannot freely choose the move you want to use while fighting: instead, you have to select one of the four moves suggested by your party—one suggested move per character. This introduces a welcome dose of strategy in all things fighting, as well as an uncertainty than can be thrilling; and since the A.I. is usually spot-on, there is virtually no risk of losing a battle due to bad suggestions. Resting is free, you can save anytime and anywhere and there is a good range of useful items and field skills designed to make your roam easier: as a whole, Criminal Girls is very user-friendly. There is a modicum of narrative, woven into the dungeon-crawling in a clever and seamless way—which is rare enough to be praised—as well as a couple of sidequests with benefits. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the gist of Criminal Girls’s gameplay for you.

Unexpected ties

Now that I’m done with the gameplay exposition, I can focus on a deeper, juicier analysis of Criminal Girls’s premise: in other words, the pervasive and in-your-face fan-service, which was by and large Criminal Girls’ biggest selling argument. Unlike the campy fan-service present in Senran Kagura Burst, which was merely an addition to the game’s rock-solid mechanics, the fan-service in Criminal Girls is tightly woven into the gameplay and thus pretty much unescapable. It impacts the storyline as well as the gameplay mechanics in a way that I found very reminiscent to a much more famous gaming series. More than reminiscent, in fact: the similarities are seriously uncanny, and so blatant that they may have been at least partly intentional. For, lo and behold, Criminal Girls is basically a risqué, human-based take on the Pokemon gameplay mechanics, and could easily bear the subtitle “Pokemon: Pervy Version”. Here’s how the striking resemblance unfolds:

—The two games feature the same core principle of forcing weaker creatures to do your bidding through the use of brute force. In Pokemon, you beat down wild animals a hair’s breadth away from death in order to be able to capture them without resistance; in CG, you whip young women into submission. The infamy of your actions is somewhat concealed behind weak justifications such as “Pokemons get hurt fighting in the wild, so it’s actually better for them to be under the protection of a Trainer” or “These girls are have committed minor crimes and are on their way to commit bigger ones, so they must be put back on the right track by any means necessary for their own good”, but these pretenses don’t survive a sharp examination. Sugar-coat it all you want, but the bottom line is that you’re acting like a big coward bully by forcing your will on free, independent beings that were asking nothing more than to live their life and follow their own way unhindered.

—Once you forcefully enrolled these free beings, they are expected to fight on your behalf, standing in the front line while you shout orders in the back. Of course, they also fight on their own behalf in order to avoid being killed; but the point is that the character you incarnate is not physically involved in the fighting, preferring instead to oversee the operations from the safety of the rear. As a result, Pokemon and CG focus primarily not on the Trainer/Warden that you incarnate, but rather on the charges that are in your care, who then reap the biggest part of the fighting glory—which is only fair. Of course, your main character—and thus you— is also regularly hailed as a great leader who managed to steer the course of action in the desired direction—the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove.

—In Pokemon as well as CG, your charges seem to accept their destiny as semi-slaves quite quickly and without too much resistance. Sure, they are wary and sulky at first, and follow you somewhat grudgingly: an analysis of your newly enrolled ’Mons’ gaits will reveal that they don’t feel too warmly about you, and the CG delinquents will regularly snap at you and rebuff your attempts at kindness. However, said ’Mons don’t go straight for your throat as soon as they are out of their Pokeballs, and said delinquents don’t try to give you the slip or to sting a knife between your ribs when you’re asleep like any real wild animal or delinquent would do in such circumstances, so they can definitely be considered compliant. This unexpected meekness can alleviate your own guilt over enslaving your charges, should you have any: since they keep following you even after it becomes clear that they could take you down in two hits, together or separately, then they must somehow be happy with the whole situation and consent to it.

—In the wake of this begrudging acceptance of their uncomfortable situation, your charges develop a serious case of Stockholm syndrome by becoming exponentially attached to you. The more time they spend with you fighting on your behalf, the more affectionate they become. You will suddenly discover that the analysis of your ’Mons’ gaits reveal a deep fondness for you and a complete trust; as for CG’s delinquents, they will start singing your praises in earnest, and their grimaces of pain and insults during and after the punishment sessions will be replaced by dreamy smiles and thanks.

—The feeling is mutual, since you also develop a sincere fondness for your charges in the meantime. You may consider them from a purely utilitarian point of view at first, but that will change as playing hours go buy and allow you discover them and witness their interesting evolution—in every sense of the word. (Interestingly, CG’s delinquents can go through a transformation that is very similar to Pokemon’s Evolution, granting them a new appearance as well as more powerful moves. Even the transformation scene itself is strikingly similar to the Evolution scenes in Pokemon.) Before you know it, you will find yourself lovingly cooking puffins for your ’Mons and showering them with accessories, or diligently running all around the place to find some lost items that the delinquents care about and pouring all your energy into helping them overcome their hurdles. The evolution of CG’s punishment sessions, or “Motivation Time” as they were renamed in the Western version, also shows plainly this change of heart: the punishments get lighter and lighter, until you finally tickle the girls lightly with a feather duster and massage them gently with a soft cushion. Well, that’s certainly a major improvement from whipping or electrocution. In a highly ironic turnaround, you finally find yourself in a position where you serve your charges instead of the other way around: you may be the one bossing them around, but the whole game is about them, and they are at the heart of the action. This aspect is even more pronounced in CG, which completely glosses over your main character: the whole game is about the delinquents’ life and struggles, and your character is only presented as a helper assisting them on their path to redemption.

—To crown this evolution, the two games serve you a positive finale in which everyone’s warm feelings towards one another are cemented and presented as the basis for fruitful and enduring relationships. Pokemon games treat you to the grand Elite Four victory, in which your Trainer and ’Mons are presented as a seamless unit and collectively hailed; if you didn’t already feel the deepest devotion towards your  ’Mons by that time, this scene will certainly tip the scales. As for CG, it veers towards a romance sim right before the end, and keeps steering in that direction during the whole postgame segment. As a result, the pre-postgame end treats you to a romantic ending with one of the girls, while the postgame part allows you to woo the other delinquents and delivers a “harem ending” in which all the girls are seemingly smitten with you and make plans to keep you in their lives, hopefully forever. As a whole, your interaction with your charges is presented as an unabashedly positive experience that only brought favorable changes: your charges became stronger and wiser, you became kinder and gentler, and everybody reaped some love and fulfilling relationships in the process.

Whether or not you’ll be able to appreciate or even tolerate Criminal Girls really depends on how readily you can take in that whole Stockholm syndrome-friendly development. Compared to this chain of events, the actual content of the risqué mini-games is a moot point: there is really nothing more to it than randomly rubbing your fingers over a collection of suggestive images ten times tamer than anything you can find in a hentai anime—not to mention that you’ll be too busy keeping track of the areas to rub to ogle at these pictures in earnest. To see the girls repay your bad treatments with love and promiscuity is much more disturbing, and swallowing the whole concept requires a good dose of suspension of disbelief—and dignity.

Flailing about

Although I totally adored that game, I won’t deny that I also felt a modicum of discomfort at times, and the malaise only increased as the game went on. This uneasiness can be blamed on one main factor, and that factor is the striking lack of focus and direction of the whole fan-service package. Unlike the brand of fan-service at work in Senran Kagura Burst’s or Code of Princess, which was blatantly self-derisive and campy, the fan-service featured in Criminal Girls doesn’t know if it wants to be parodic, titillating or romantic, and ends up mixing all three moods together in hopes of getting an enticing result. Unfortunately, it is not happening, and the result comes across as an incoherent clutter sending uncomfortably mixed messages.

Take the infamous rubbing mini-games, for instance: despite being at the center of the controversy surrounding Criminal Girls, they clearly lean on the parodic side. The tone is set from the beginning, when it turns out that the reason why the delinquents don’t wear their prisoner garb during these segments is because your character asks them to wear cosplay outfits before starting. I swear that I laughed out loud when I discovered that ridiculous justification, and that was only the first of many laughing and cackling fits generated by the mini-games. The subsequent poses of the girls and the fact that their outfits seem to crawl mysteriously back on their bodies, conveniently revealing increasing amounts of flesh, are so over-the-top that they definitely come across as more hilarious than salacious. I could nearly picture myself surveying the operations and issuing ridiculous orders to get these results: “Okay, now take that pose… Good…And now, lift up your top a little more… Voila!” Add to this the wonky theme track and the exaggerated moans, insults and comments emitted by the girls in the original Japanese version, and you get a package that looks and feels like an assumed parody of your average otaku’s hentai fantasies.

On the other hand, the fact that the delinquents wear short and revealing prison garb by default, completed by sexually laden accessories such as dog collars and high socks, is obviously designed to arouse the player. So is probably the round sofa on which they lounge while in the “Infirmary”, which seems to come straight out of a porn flick and makes the place looks more like a brothel than like the infirmary it is supposed to be. Things get even more lascivious toward the end, as the girls go through the Knight transformation and shed their prison garb to don outfits that are considerably more risqué. This is a very straightforward and transparent attempt at titillation that doesn’t pack the slightest bit of self-derision: the purpose is clearly to shove as much eye-candy as possible into the game in order to satisfy the player’s ogling urges. It could also explain Criminal Girls’ refusal to follow the current hot trend in its own niche, namely the addition of a male touch into the fan-servicy mix. Senran Kagura 2 comprises a male character who can be stripped just as easily as its female counterparts, Akiba’s Trip integrate as many males opponents as females, and Conception II is rife with bromance and yaoi innuendos; yet Criminal Girls didn’t dare to follow that trend, maybe for fear of alienating its intended audience and spoiling its own candid attempt at titillation.

Last but not least is the romantic side of Criminal Girls, which comes into play late in the game. After they go through the Knight transformation, the delinquents are bound to start experiencing feelings of love toward your main character and expressing them in unambiguous fashion. This new direction involve cheesy sentences along the lines of “I want to make you happy” and “Please let me stay by your side forever”, as well as an ultimate mini-game that looks like some kind of foreplay and insinuates in hardly veiled terms that you and the involved delinquent will have sex afterwards. When you beat the final boss, you get a romantic happy ending with the delinquent of your choice, all frolicking around and swearing eternal love to each other; then, the postgame lets you woo the rest of the crew before treating you to the ultimate “Harem Ending”, in which the girls chat together about their feelings for you and decide to take turns on dating you, giggling about the fact that you’ll certainly be vigorous enough to satisfy them all despite your ripe old age. This sequence is a little bit sickening: although it’s fun to see the tables being turned and the girls talking about using your character like some kind of sexual prop for their own gratification, it’s hard not to feel grossed out by the cynicism of the whole thing. I do admit that this particular scene and the romantic direction as a whole screamed “Stockholm syndrome” a little too loud for my comfort.

Needless to say, these three highly different tones clash vigorously with each other. The romantic orientation comes completely out of the blue and feels like it has been hammered into the game, either to cater to the mawkish love fantasies of your regular otaku or to soften the impact of the game’s softcore sadistic undertones—maybe both. The in-your-face attempt at titillation comes across as bland and run-of-the mill, the kind of tired fan-service seen a million times before in a million games, and the parodic charge of the mini-games is defused by both the unsubtle eye-candy and the late romantic twist. I really wish Criminal Girls had picked a single mood and stuck to it all the way; this would certainly have made the whole experience easier to digest and less nauseating. My design of choice would have been to tone down the eye-candy and restrict skin exposure to the mini-games, thus making them more rewarding, and to drop the saccharine romantic outcome entirely in favour of a grittier ending in which everybody admits that their time together is done and proceeds to follow their own path without turning back. No syrupy crap such as going to school together and living happily ever after as a harem, but rather something like “We had some unpleasant moments together, some much more pleasant, and we all learnt and grew from the experience; but it was just a phase, and it’s over. Adieu, you pervy warden, and may we never meet again!” Proceed then to show the utter dismay of the abandoned main character, who sincerely believed that women would fall in love with him even if he treated them like crap just like in all harem animes, and you’d have had the cherry on top of the parodic cake. Or, had Imageepoch had the guts to follow the “male touch” hot trend of the moment, they could have included sequences in which your main character had to endure the punishment sessions at the hands of the girls—what goes around comes around, karma’s a b*tch and all that, you know. That would have been hilarious, and I would definitely have loved to see—and play—that kind of twist.

Still, there’s no denying that I loved Criminal Girls through and through, despite its uneven tone and Stockholm syndrome-laden intrigue. It is a brilliant dungeon crawler with gorgeous aesthetics that offers a deeply fulfilling roaming experience, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to any aficionado of the genre who feels they can stomach the game’s peculiar brand of fan-service. As for me, I will most certainly play it again sooner or later, although I may abstain from clearing the sickly postgame segment during my next run. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!