The girls of the reformation program have a lot to prove, both to themselves and to the program instructors guiding them. They’ll need to face their inner selves in order to overcome what awaits them and prevent themselves from entering into Hell.
I’ve already written a fair number of my thoughts in my Initial Thoughts post for the game so I don’t want to repeat too many of them here. Criminal Girls 2 is the sequel to the original Criminal Girls that came out on Vita nearly two years ago, and in general the gameplay is largely the same from that one. The biggest different is that Criminal Girls 2 was properly made for the Vita as opposed to simply being a port from PSP.
The difficulty of the motivations in Criminal Girls 2 will largely depend on whether you are playing the game on Vita or PSTV. I played the game on a combination of both systems and generally found them easier to do on the Vita. I found the touch controls to be more responsive, especially on some of the later motivations where you had to do weird aiming if you used the button control scheme.
As far as the difficulty of the main game, this will largely depend on whether you play on Casual or Normal difficulty. I highly suggest switching to Casual as this difficulty will still provide you with a fair bit of challenge. The difficulty will still be all over the place even on Casual so you will still need to be prepared for some tough battles. One of the most notable for this difficulty spike is the Final Boss which will involve you getting slammed with a large number of status ailments every other turn.
With the new Coaching mechanic I ended up training my girls in a way that I could just select one type of coaching to get the best benefits on each. All this really involved was making sure my girls were on the correct side of the S/M bar for their skills from motivation.
Another returning feature is the Girl’s Wish mechanic. These will unlock after you complete specific story events during the game, followed by you going in to do a quick motivation for that girl. These are fairly simple, though they will send you all over the tower (and Hell) to find the correct items or enemies.
My thoughts from the initial thoughts continued through to the rest of the game – I enjoyed the game, though the difficulty spikes were annoying. I do wish that the button controls for the motivations were better, but I recognize that they at least tried there. The game also has a more fleshed out story than the original Criminal Girls and you’ll expect to spend around 30 hours beating this one. I enjoyed the improvements that Criminal Girls 2 made, and as such enjoyed the game in general. If you’re looking for a decent RPG to play – so long as you can look past all of the sexual content – then Criminal Girls 2 is a game I’d suggest looking into, and you don’t need to have played the first game to make sense of it either!
Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors Review Score
4.5/5
As I mentioned, I suggest reading through my Initial Thoughts as well to get a larger idea of what I thought about it.
Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors is available now for Vita via Amazon and PSN.
I would like to thank NIS America for providing me with a copy for review purposes.
