If you read that title and thought, “There’s no such thing as too many crotch shots” then congratulations! You just found the perfect video game. You can die happy now.
I first became interested in Doki Doki Suikoden when I watched a video about it on Youtube. This was shortly after I’d finished Motto Nuga-Cel, so I was amused and intrigued to learn that there’s more than one Japanese game out there where you fight by stripping girls to their underwear. In retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. It’s just typical Japan.
The decisive difference between Dokisui and Nuga-Cel is that the latter is actually a game. The former is a visual novel. In Nuga-Cel you’re trying to take over Tokyo. Stripping is just a means to that end. In Dokisui, the whole point of the experience is girls, girls, girls. You don’t have to strip the girls there either, but then there’s no other point to the game.
Sure, lots of people aren’t bothered by excessive fanservice. Some people would even buy an entire game just for that, but I’m not one of those. If the underlying game/story is good enough I can ignore the panties and focus on that. But otherwise I’m not so bored or desperate that I’ll play just anything no matter how cheap and unappealing.
And so I played Doki Doki Suikoden for for 2-3 hours and it was a real disappointment, even for a visual novel. The character designs aren’t exactly bad, and the art in general is more than decent, but not enough to make up for the lacking nature of everything else. The story is so typical it doesn’t even bear mentioning. If I recall correctly, my main character is a transfer student who just moved back to his old town after 10 years. On his way to school the first day, he runs into a girl with her skirt flipped up for all the world to see.
That should have been my clue to stop, but I didn’t listen. I never do. The girl’s name was Haizel, and the pom-pom things on her head showed she was an alien. Instead of pursuing that potentially interesting line of inquiry, however, the game makes me join Haizel’s newspaper club, spends an hour talking about a bad sempai, and finally lets me corner him for a battle. It would be faster for me to show you what battles play out like than to tell you, but unfortunately I can’t find a relevant video, so:
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You fight in pairs: boy x girl vs boy x girl. You can only attack the person directly in front of you. Every turn you switch who you’re facing. i.e.
Turn 1: Boy A vs Boy B, Girl A vs Girl B.
Turn 2: Boy A vs Girl B, Girl A vs Boy B, etc.
The way to win is to defeat the boy, who usually has puny HP and ATK. But of course you don’t want to do that – you want hit a poor girl until all her clothes fall off. You monster.
Nuga-Cel proved that a battle system based on ripping your opponent’s clothes off could actually be interesting and fairly challenging. I’m sorry Irem, but you know you’ve failed at life when Idea Freakin’ Factory has a better battle system than yours.
Problem number one: fights take forever because you do pathetic damage to the enemy. Even focusing on the leader takes a few turns, and all the switching around drags it out even longer. Secondly, dressing your girls up in cosplay outfits is supposed to be part of the charm, but – get this – you can’t put the outfits on before battle! You have to start the fight then waste up to 4 turns putting clothes on one item at a time. Thirdly, there’s no point to undressing the opponent’s girls. “Undressing them IS the point,” you say. Well yeah, sure. But what I mean is, you can win a lot faster and more easily by just ignoring the girls and focusing on the invariably male “leader.” This makes even more sense because after the battle the game will undress them for you anyway.
This leads to scenes with girls with their legs wide open because a boy placed a lizard in her clothes and they needs me to get it out again. Suuuure. I should have just walked away at this point, but no sooner had I recovered from the stupidity of this scene than Haizel forced me to take her to the swimming pool. Again the story was that she wanted to research it for a newspaper article, but in truth she just wanted to rub her crotch on my back…-__-
And you know how normally visual novels have choices for you to make? Here the only choices you make are how and where to touch the girls when the opportunity presents itself. Will you use one finger or all ten fingers when “extracting the lizard” from a girl’s panties?
Wait, I just realized I might be making the game look and sound a lot better than it really is. And I suppose it is, if a fanservicey visual novel is what you’re looking for. What I was told to expect was a dating sim with turn-based cosplay battles. Perhaps I was too optimistic, but I thought at least either the battles or the sim part would be good. Instead both reeked, leaving the fanservice, and if fanservice is all you’re after, there are thousands of games, manga and anime that will provide the goods without making you read for 3 hours and fight a long, boring battle before every scene.
Before I leave, I should probably explain why it’s called Doki Doki “Suikoden.” It has nothing to do with Konami’s Genso Suikoden series of RPGs or the original Chinese novel. It’s called Suikoden is because it was based off an April Fool’s gag by the developer, Irem. It was supposed to be a parody dating sim with 108 girls to choose from. Eventually the game did get made, but only 6 girls and no other resemblance to the original concept. Yes, they should have changed the name too, but expecting someone who makes a game like this to have any brain cells left at the end is probably asking too much.
tl;dr – visual novel, moderately cute girls, useless otherwise, not related to Suikoden, don’t waste your time and/or money.
I don’t know much about this game other than the name because I thought it was funny (even though I already knew it had nothing to do with the RPG series), but the fact that the game’s name had absolutely zero relevance to the concept at all is ultra lame.
Anyway, looks like nothing of value was lost.
It’s a complete waste of everyone’s time, including the developer’s. The original parody idea with 108 girls might have had novelty or at least comic value, but this? Yeah, don’t bother.