Embedded Files
Introduction
Introduction
Deep Space Waifu is one of those series that I never would have discovered had I not walked into one of my friends playing it in the confides of his darkened college room. He was weirded out that I was in his room unannounced, and I was weirded out by seeing a half-naked girl on his screen as he shot demons from hell. However, is this awkward moment I noticed something really interesting about the screen with the half-naked girl and that was the music and how bloody great it was. It felt something straight out of a 90's synth wave band something that felt nostalgic, but also looking out to the horizon of the future with wide hopeful eyes hoping the best in Humanity would prevail. I listened to this track for days on end. I listened to it while chilling out in my room, while driving, while walking, while doing well basically anything. It got to a point that I had to know where it had come from.
Deep Space Waifu is one of those series that I never would have discovered had I not walked into one of my friends playing it in the confides of his darkened college room. He was weirded out that I was in his room unannounced, and I was weirded out by seeing a half-naked girl on his screen as he shot demons from hell. However, is this awkward moment I noticed something really interesting about the screen with the half-naked girl and that was the music and how bloody great it was. It felt something straight out of a 90's synth wave band something that felt nostalgic, but also looking out to the horizon of the future with wide hopeful eyes hoping the best in Humanity would prevail. I listened to this track for days on end. I listened to it while chilling out in my room, while driving, while walking, while doing well basically anything. It got to a point that I had to know where it had come from.
I went to my friend who I had walked in on (this time he was wearing pants) and I asked him for the title of the game, and it was Deep Space Waifu: Flat Justice. At that year's summer sale, I ended up buying the entire collection of Deep Space Waifu which included the base game, Academy, Flat Justice, Fantasy, and Nekomimi and I took my sweet time playing through Base, Academy, and Flat Justice savoring each and every moment the games provided, and my ears being filled with pure audio bliss.
I went to my friend who I had walked in on (this time he was wearing pants) and I asked him for the title of the game, and it was Deep Space Waifu: Flat Justice. At that year's summer sale, I ended up buying the entire collection of Deep Space Waifu which included the base game, Academy, Flat Justice, Fantasy, and Nekomimi and I took my sweet time playing through Base, Academy, and Flat Justice savoring each and every moment the games provided, and my ears being filled with pure audio bliss.
But when I got to Fantasy, something weird happened. When I booted up the game instead of being greeted with some smooth Synth wave or Vaporwave tracks to get me excited for some shoot-y action I was instead greeted with probably one of the blandest tracks of the whole series. Sadly, however this wasn't where my disappointments would end with this title, which is what inspired me to write this small little article.
What the Hell is Deep Space Waifu?
Deep Space Waifu is the signature IP from developer and publisher Neko Climax Studios. The game consists of the player playing as King Bear, as he tries to get laid.
Most of the games allow players to choose which girl they want to try with. The original game has the player choosing girls on Space Tindr in order to get laid, Academy as a way of getting information to solve a cop case, and so on. What determines your success, however?
By shooting at enemies, avoiding their projectiles, and the main attraction...shooting off clothes off a large assortment of Waifu's. The gameplay is very similar to bullet hell SHMUPs.
Now as crude as that sounds it actually is a simple and honestly brilliant idea. You get the high-octane action of a SHMUP, you appeal to a certain demographic, and you can't deny that sex sells. The blending of doing two things that'll get players blood pumping is done so well that you can't help getting immersed in the game as you watch your Waifu's cloth's health bar go down.
So how does Fantasy take this absolutely winning formula and fumble it? Let's find out.
Positives
Positives
Now before I start with bashing the game there is one thing that needs to be said about Deep Space Waifu Fantasy and that is the game does have some interesting and cool concepts that it wants to execute with varying degrees of success. I feel like it takes steps and tries to push the series to the next level, but due to poor implementation it takes away from the game and makes it feel like they were trying to stray away from the base formula they had. Regardless these are what I believe the game deserves credit for.
Boss Battles
Boss Battles
The game does try to change it’s game play at points and asks you to fight against the girls in a more extreme and challenging environment with one of the best being reserved for the second last girl of the game. It actually is a really fun fight, but once you realize it’s the same patterns in a basic loop it loses a lot of its fun and novelty.
Players fight with this new monster girl and must avoid her attacks and her tentacle attack. Now notice that I put the word attack as singular that's because she literally does one move with them and that's it. It’s just an attack that just happens with no animation from the enemy but just decides to cover up 3/4th of the screen and you avoid it by staying dead center.
This is the only attack she'll do with her tentacles
The tentacle attack is a really novel idea it uses the girl’s tentacles as in attack, but just the fact that the tentacles come up exactly the same way over and over again makes that lose its charm. I mean had the safe zone been slightly to the left or right a bit it'd have added some challenge, but it's dead centre. The place 99% of players will already be shooting at the bosses weak spot. Had the designers wanted to make this part more fun and exciting they could have varied which tentacles could come up and also have the tentacles come up at different speeds to really change up the pace instead of all of them popping up at once. They could have made it such a way that the tentacles not only pop up from the bottom but from left and right as well and players would have to avoid these tentacles and shoot at them before they can shoot at the boss's weak spot.
There’s another girl who kind of makes use of her abilities and that’s the girl who has eyes at the end of her tail. Her eyes shoots bullets towards the player allowing the player to weave and bob through the bullets to shoot them. The fact that this enemy makes the player think not only of the bullets that are already on screen and the bullets being shot from the eye makes this a so much more engaging fight as players must plan out a path and hope that they execute it perfectly. The bullets are slow enough that a player can make a clear path, but fast enough to destroy anyone who isn’t thinking past on their feet and executing.
Another really fun boss battle is another girl who brings up spiked tentacles essentially trapping players in a confided space and forcing them to move and doge bullets in this claustrophobic area. It ends up adding a lot of tension to this boss battle as you finally feel like a small insect in front of this Goliath monster girl who wants nothing to do but toy with you before she finishes you off.
Drunk Fight
Drunk Fight
The game also engages into what could have been a really fun concept, but they just don’t take full advantage of the concept to make it a really new and changing experience. One of the girls is a fairy and gets drunk so the entire playing area has this weird curvy like texture to simulate being drunk, but nearly everything else looks the same. Just because you put a small effect on the playing surface doesn’t impact the game all that much if at all. Enemies go along the same paths they do in other levels, players move with the same movement speed and control, and bullets also have no change on them.
How much more interesting would it be if players couldn’t move as fast as normal, the controls sometimes gets messed up while playing, if enemies themselves act in a different way, or even if the music slowed down and sounded more distant to simulate that feeling of being drunk?
It would make that level so much more memorable and distinct, but it’s honestly so pedestrian that you can’t help but forget it after a point.
Now let's focus and try to examine what did the developers did wrong when it came to making Fantasy.
Negatives
Negatives
UI
UI
Now when you’re playing a SHMUP the number one thing you should see on the screen is enemies, bullets, and the player character and especially with DSW you also need to be able to see what article of clothing is available to shoot off.
Now the problem with the UI is actually a problem that arises due to being authentic to the theme of the game which is Fantasy. When you think Fantasy, you think RPGs like Final Fantasy where numbers fly above enemy heads when you attack them, but the thing is is that DSW is not an RPG. The inclusion of those numbers as you try to avoid enemy attacks makes it all the harder as your brain needs time to process if the moving thing is a number or a bullet. In that time period of processing, it’s so easy for a player to be hit and lose a life. It’s a very cool way to incorporate the whole theme of the game, but the fact that it adds nothing to the game play, is easily overlooked, and essentially doesn’t even serve as the only visual feedback. There’s no reason to keep those numbers from showing up when an enemy is hit.
Even during boss fights, it’s much easier telling how much a player must hit the boss by using just a slowly dwindling bar rather than including numbers to indicate health. During these intense attack pattern no one looks to the boss’s numeric health and calculates how many more shots are required to stop the boss. Players just don’t have the time to do anything of that, DSW is all about fast movement and shooting enemies down, there’s absolutely no need for the health numerical values.
Tell me what am I supposed to be concentrating on??
Enemies
Enemies
Enemies are beyond lazy in this DLC because the amount of effort they put into the enemy variation is approximately zero. All the enemies present in DSW, Academy and Flat Justice are repeated with the same exact behavior and even the sprites. The sprites being robots and clearly mechanical beings really takes the player out of the experience. If the developers wanted to reference RPG’s and mess up the UI then they should be consistent and make the enemies look like iconic RPG characters or even just basic RPG grunt minions.
Even when a new enemy is introduced, it’s just so mediocre and bland and I’ll show this with an example of the Fire Diamond.
The fire diamond is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in my life. Not only is the diamond the exact same sprite as the normal diamond, but it has a even worse behavior than the base model. It moves in the same pattern as before, but emits flames as it goes along its path. Not only does it lead to very dumb deaths, but the fire it emits looks absolutely so cheap and barely animated. It was static and it’s not a fun enemy as it doesn’t make the player move around or even look visually impressive. It feels like a very tacked on and lazy enemy.
A very common problem in this game however is how enemies come from the sides of the level. There is no indication or warning and enemies just pop out even at lower parts of the level, which can lead to a lot of cheap deaths and become infuriating after a point.
Now every girl ends with a main enemy that players must defeat kind of like a mini-boss battle. The sprites for these as well have been recycled, but thankfully they do make changes (albeit very small ones). These mini-bosses are honestly what saves enemy variation in the game as they are fun to engage with, force the players to move and weave throughout the bullets and offer a decent amount of challenge.
Story
Also why is Lesure Lion a Mufasa from Lion King rip-off? Is there a Lion King RPG that I’m not aware of or does some part of Lion KIng remind people of RPG’s? Why do you start off an RPG in the middle of what I can assume is inspired from an African Savanna?
Now am I insane for asking for a decent story in a SHMUP where I have to shoot the clothes off anime woman? Yes, but I can’t help it after I’ve played through DSW's other two DLCs Flat Justice and Nekomimi. Fantasy was also teased at the end of DSW Base game as a continuation of the story, so you expect it to do something fun and unique that really carries the energy and style of DSW.
Fantasy has the most basic story, the way it makes fun of RPGs isn’t that fun at all and the girl’s personalities barely shine through. Fantasy’s story is our Main Character has been transported to the Land of Hentalia and given a ONE HANDED SWORD by Leisure Lion. He is sent on a quest to find the CLITORUS but first he must find two halves of the map that will lead him to this location. Sure it seems like an easy enough set-up to get through the whole game, but there’s not much in it that makes fun of the genre of RPG’s.
Flat Justices writing was so much fun as it actively made fun of very cliché cop tropes and seeing our main character acting like a grizzled old cop as girls try to throw themselves onto him is a very funny set-up, but in this one our main character is just a bear. That’s it. We are never explained why he wants to escape Hentalia, we never see if he enjoys what he does or not, nothing is revealed about the bear at all.
The writing in the game ranges from an exhale from your nose to just painfully awful and it’s kinda hard seeing that after the comedic writing in Flat Justice and the over the top sexual nature of Nekomimi. Also the game forgets the main quest in approx 0.5 seconds as the Map to the CLITORUS can is found even if you don't find both halves of the map.
Not only that, out of the 12 girls only 4 seem important to the main plot, with the rest acting as a filler. If they were going for the concept that those girls are supposed to be side quests, then make fun of side quests tropes with the girls. Make the dialogue in such a way that they feel like they are side quest materials and not just say two lines of dialogue that have nothing to do with each other and then leave to never be seen again. Make use of the theme and fully embrace it! Imagine the humor that could come from making the side quest trope into something sleazier and more perverted.
Power ups/Specials
Power ups/Specials
Now Fantasy adds these buffs that can be applied to the character before starting off a level. The more stars you unlock in the game the more abilities you can unlock to use, but honestly these power-ups don’t have much use in game with some of them being straight up useless.
One such example of it is the mythical one handed sword. This is the last power-up you get (shouldn’t it be first because it’s the first thing you get when you start the damn game in the VERY FIRST CUT SCENE) and it is kinda underwhelming. All that happens it when you click it rotates a sword around you...once. It honestly doesn’t even seem to do a lot of damage to the enemies that get caught with it’s arc. Had it been a sword that rotates constantly when the mouse is clicked or even deflected bullets when it spun once it would have been a so much cooler and fun power-up. The fact that you could destroy bullets with properly timed mouse clicks could lead to some really fun game play changes or even spinning continuously could encourage for more aggressive game play, but as is this one handed sword adds no new game play change.
Also maybe this is just me, but it also feels like the one handed sword doesn’t even pop up every time it’s supposed to. If a player clicks multiple times the sword doesn’t show up at all. So we pretty much have an ability that is useless and doesn’t work half of the time.
Specials are also kind of a let down as they used specials that they had already used before and added a brand new one: The Mystic Dice. Now the problem with Mystic Dice is that it feels like it can absolutely break the entire level especially when combined with the potion that gives you a special at the beginning of the level.
Essentially what it does is that it rolls a d20 and whatever shows up it does that much damage to the enemies present on screen. Now the part that’s broken is that if a player rolls above an 8 they get their special meter bar filled allowing them to use the attack immediately after. That’s a solid 60% that the player will receive a special right after they performed it once and this thing is so overpowered that it wipes every enemy on screen no matter what number is rolled on the dice save for bosses and mini-bosses. How much cooler would it be if the dice did different things depending on what number got rolled on the D20? Like if you roll a Nat 20, then the screen clears off all the enemies and rains down power-ups that the player can pick and choose before the next wave of enemies comes. Imagine rolling a Nat 1 and the enemies become faster for a certain amount of time. This would add so such to the theme of the game and make it so much more exciting to use the power-up throughout the game.
Girls
Girls
As weird as it sounds the selection of girls in Fantasy is not the best. The usage of this theme should have let the artist’s gone crazy and wild with their artwork. Where are the Centaurs, Dwarves, Mermaids, Nymphs, Demons, Dragon-girls, and all?
Barely half of the girls in the entire game that actually uses the theme of Fantasy to make a unique and fun looking girls to shoot at with the best one being, the Snake Lady. When you shoot her she shows off her pitched fork tongue and her snake bottom half is an absolute beauty, but in terms of artwork it looks really rough. Almost as though the tail and body were drawn by different people and just haphazardly photo shopped together really makes it an off putting sight. The main intention of the game is to show off girls and appeal to fans of a certain theme, but if they can’t get those two things right then what’s even the point of playing.
Music
Music
As insane as this sounds the reason I got into DSW is because of the soundtrack. A friend of mine was playing Flat Justice and the soundtrack 2092 started playing and I was so enticed by it I had to play the game myself, so imagine my disappointment when I loaded up Fantasy and was immediately disappointed with the theme song. I figured that maybe the song quality will increase in the levels themselves, but it never did. This may be a matter of personal opinion, but Fantasy has a very forgettable soundtrack.
You can listen to 2092 from Flat Justice just by clicking the link above. You have a chill beat that kicks into a trance like beat that you can’t help, but bop your head to. It starts off slow, but you feel that build up happening as the base starts to come into play and it goes back down when the vocals kick in. WHen the beat drops however you feel it through your body you can imagine yourself going forward kicking some ass or doing something insanely cool. It fits well within the futuristic theme and makes the player excited to play through the game. Nekomimi’s theme is fast paced and engaging that it makes you want to just go out guns blazing.
Now this is a track from Fantasy and in my personal opinion one of the best songs from this game, but what does it convey? Does it convey exciting and tense game play where the player could lose a life at any moment?
Fantasy doesn’t have any good any drops or even any intensity to them. The way the songs start off are very low and soft sounding and that kinda goes throughout the whole game. It’s not a soundtrack that lets me think Yes now it’s time to blow enemies up and remove girls clothing, but instead makes me think of white noise and makes me sleepy. That's not to say there isn't any good songs a really good example being "Crocodile Tears", but it genuinely doesn't do a good job setting the tone for the game or make the player excited for playing.
Conclusion
Now in spite of me absolutely destroying the game right now I still think it’s a fun game. Maybe it doesn’t reach the peaks of the other members in the franchise, but the franchise itself is such a joy to play through you can’t help, but enjoy the ride. I feel that Nekoclimax made some mistakes, but I’m really happy to see that they fixed the mistakes and took some of interesting and cool concepts forward and improved upon them for Nekoclimax. Fantasy may not be the best in the franchise, but honestly for a game that’s less than $2 its a fun enough experience.
Google Sites
Report abuse