Anyone who knows me should immediately think of me when hearing the title for this game. When I first saw the pre-order screen for this pop up on Play-Asia, that flew into my cart faster than the KKK flew to the polls on election day. Having played through all of the main missions and about half of the side missions I can safely say that this game is solidly and in every way "okay." For a perv weeb game, it's fantastic. And let's be honest - no one is going to buy a game called "School Girl/Zombie Hunter" expecting any depth of story or gameplay. Speaking of story, I have no fucking idea what was going on. The whole damn thing's in Japanese, and the extent of my Japanese is "Konichiwa" and "Ryokai!" From what I can gather, there's some king zombie that's opening portals...or something...through which other zombies are coming into this high school, and everyone except these five hella unlucky chicks got out, but they're trapped in the school. Fortunately the school focused on preparing Japan's youth for a second invasion of Manchuria once China and the United States go to war under President Trump because there are dozens and dozens of guns - including a rocket launcher - and an unending supply of bullets. So they've got ammo and weapons to defend themselves. They decide that the zombies have fucked around, and it's time for them to find out, so they start looking for these communication beacons linked to some kind of government zombie killing taskforce and try to hunt down the boss zombie. And their zombie doppelgängers. Not sure if it ever explains why there are zombie versions of the girls, but there are. The gameplay is pretty standard from what I've come to expect from D3. It's the spiritual successor to the Onechanbara series, and that's very apparent - it plays exactly like Onechanbara but with guns instead of swords. The controls are a little stiff, and the aiming seems a bit random with regards to whether or not a lined up shot will hit, but for a campy mid-budget game designed from the bottom up to give you an excuse to kill zombies as a girl in her underwear, it does its job well. The graphics are similarly okay. They look fine, but they're not pushing the PS4 to its limits or anything. It is worth noting that, despite the Japanese-only language settings, I did see online someone had translated the menus. I managed to get through the game using Google's instant translation smartphone app, though. It's the kind of translation you'd see from a student who scraped out a D in his Japanese class by the skin of his teeth, but it gets the job done. You've got a fair variety of zombies - regular zombies, cop with gun zombies, big fat guy with huge butcher knife zombies, big beefy guy with huge hammer zombies, creepy CatDog zombies, gravitationally confused ceiling zombies, explodey zombies, explodey poison zombies, rabid cantfuckingoutrunmebitch zombies, and a handful of boss zombies. In addition to your guns, you've got a melee attack in case they get all up in your grill, but it takes an enormous amount of your stamina bar. The missions mostly consist of find shit in the time limit, kill X number of zombies in the time limit, reach an arbitrary point in the time limit, or defend the thing for the time limit. Honestly, the time limits are the hardest part of the game save for a couple of tricky bosses. You've got five girls, and each of them defaults to a different weapon, although you're permitted to pick any weapon you want. You've got pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, and (eventually) a rocket launcher. Truthfully, though, the rocket launcher is useless; you can unlock significantly stronger shotguns and sniper rifles, and the rocket launcher has to be reloaded after each shot (obviously). It looks cool, and explosions are always awesome, but as a weapon - especially against bosses - it's just not worth it. School Girl/Zombie Hunter really isn't a bad game. It's not a good game, per se, but it's definitely not a bad game. It is, however, every bit as shallow as it looks. If you want some T&A with some mindless zombie killing, then look no further. If all you want is a fun game, then give it a shot. If you want a good story, though, I wouldn't look here. I mean, I don't know Japanese, so I've got no clue if the story is any good or not, but if the Onechanbara games are anything to go off of, it's probably garbage. Gameplay and visuals don't stand out either, but both get the job done for the aforementioned zombie killing T&A. The game's okay. It's not amazing, but it's not bad. My Rating - C |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
March 2024
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