So I have a dirty little secret.  I’ve been playing, and enjoying, a game about cute cyborg girls with big guns.  That wouldn’t be too shameful, on the face of it, but there’s one thing I feel desperately compelled to explain.

I’ve been playing it with the English dub voices.  I feel dirty.  Please let me put this in context.

Last October, my twitter feed lit up with ads for “Nikke: Goddess of Victory”, which I initially wrote off as yet another “Oh, Korea, what are we going to do with you?” sort of mobile cash grab.  I signed up for it before release, it dutifully downloaded to both my phone and tablet on release day, and then it kinda sat there.

In April, I finally got around to launching it.  From what I’m gathering, skipping the first few months was a good idea since it was notably a little rough.  The power of procrastination!

Anyway, I played for a couple of hours, just long enough to get through MOST of the intro but not enough to get to the point where the game starts throwing systems at you.

The story is essentially “Mankind has been largely wiped out by killer robots from outer space, and driven underground.  Your mission is to try to reclaim the surface by blowing up aforementioned killer robots.  Build a team of cute cyborg girls to save the world.”

It didn’t really hook me but I had to admit that the character designs for your starter team were nice.

Rapi is the duty-minded “adult” of the team.  She has a perpetual headache from keeping these two under control:

Anis is the requisite smart-aleck hothead.

And Neon is the adorable glasses girl who really really likes to blow things up and shoot increasingly-bigger guns.  Naturally she should be Best Girl, right?  Well, it’s complicated.

Oh, and she’s been put on the team as an infiltrator to send data back to her corporate overlords.  But she’s not very good at it.

Anyway, six months later I went to Japan and was browsing the shelves at an Animate in Ikebukuro with my wife, who was doing some research.

Research topic: “How Much ‘Link/Click’ merchandise has been released, and how much of it can I fit in this shopping basket?”

There was a section devoted to Nikke and Blue Archive, another mobile game I’d tried out and not gotten hooked on.  Since both games are pretty, I picked up a little merch.  Nothing huge, just a pair of mousepads with art from each game and some acrylic stands from Nikke featuring the starter squad members.

Then I got back to the US, unpacked my boxes of swag, set up the little Nikke acrylic stands and thought, well, maybe I’ll give the game another try.

OK.  So I am normally the sort of person who looks immediately for the “switch voices to Japanese” option in any game, so when Nikke booted and all of the characters were speaking English I assumed that it was just the only option.  Obviously since I’d played it before I would have turned off the dub, right?

I finished the REST of the game intro, to the point where the whole thing opened up and presented me with all kinds of amazing bars to fill that would fill up and go “ping!” and unlock other bars to fill, and that’s about where I got hooked.  I have the sort of brain that loves having bars to fill that go ping.

There are five red dots on this screen.  Every one of those red dots represents somewhere I can go to fill bars.  I have already filled many bars today, so most of the red dots that were previously there are gone now.  Tomorrow there will be more red dots.

To be a little less silly, the game loop is pretty much centered around building up teams of cute cyborg girls, leveling them and getting them better gear, and throwing them at cover-based shooter missions to slowly unlock the story.  Honestly, you could probably swap out all of the art with Manly Men Doing Manly Things and still have a pretty fun game, but probably one that would sink immediately to the bottom of the App Store charts and be forgotten after a month.

While there’s no “energy” mechanic to slow you down, most of the resources you can use to improve your team come from a bar that fills over about twelve hours and can be tapped at any point to empty.  The speed at which your resource bar fills increases as you finish story missions and is further improved by some things you can do in the base building mini game.

Oh, right, there’s a base building mini game.

Not too far into the story, you unlock the “Outpost” which is initially a bit of a boring blank slate.  As you go through missions you find building blueprints, and bringing them back to the Outpost lets you construct a variety of buildings which generate resources and more story sequences where you get to interact with the Nikkes outside of combat settings.

Also, you get an office of your very own, which your team immediately takes over from you as it has a working shower and a couch.

In what I think is a sign that the original intention was to monetize the heck out of this, every time you place a building there is a slight delay while a “construction time” counter counts down from 5 seconds.  My assumption is that the initial design was to have the player wait hours for buildings to complete unless they were willing to fork over some of the game’s premium currency, but that this was dropped before release.  I can’t prove this.

So coming back to what I was talking about earlier, while there is no “energy” mechanic there is a cap to how many resources you can collect in a day and this affects how strong you can make your team.  So you are effectively capped by the strength of the team compared to the difficulty of the story missions, which does ramp up fairly rapidly.

Maybe I should talk about those a bit.

The world outside of your Outpost is pretty bleak and covered with killer robots.  Every level (so far) has involved maps to slowly clear of killer robots.

Walking in to one of these encounters presents you with information on your team, your relative power compared to the difficulty, and the rewards you’ll get.  You can check enemy composition here, which can be useful to find out things like the encounter will have distant enemies making it a good idea to swap out one of your team members for a sniper or lots of close-up enemies meaning that a shotgun or two would be a good plan.

After determining your team, it’s time to stare at butts and shoot robots.

There is a LOT of visual data being thrown at you in combat, and it can get a little confusing at times, but you get used to it.

You can swap between your five team members to choose one for manual targeting at any time, and the other four will more or less do their own thing while you control the fifth.  Missions are either “defeat a boss” or “defend a point” or “prevent killer robots from crossing a line” and are very short affairs with lots of satisfying explosions.

After the mission, you get a wrap-up screen with your rewards, some bars fill, and it’s off to more killer robots.

This would get boring pretty fast, if it weren’t for the frequent breaks for the story to advance.  There’s a good balance of shooty bits and visual-novel-style sequences, most of which are told with character sprites.   For Big Drama moments, you get the occasional custom CG.

Wait, I almost forgot!  There’s also a guy you occasionally have to talk to.  He’s kind of your mentor and frequently steps in to save you from the corporate drama and politicking that provides the game’s recommended levels of angst.

I think the designers were like, we need to prove that we CAN draw men.  So they knocked out  Andersen, here, and then got back to the much more lucrative process of designing waifus.

Speaking of, let’s not pretend that the game is being run as a charity.  While it’s fairly generous at handing out currency you can throw into the game’s “recruit” gacha, the end goal IS to make you open your wallet.  So it has characters to suit ANY taste, though naturally the one you WANT never quite seems to fall out of the machine when you shake it.

Biker girls with leather pants?  Naval girls with no pants?  There are dozens of options.  You’ll get one of these SSR characters every once in a while, but be prepared to get out your credit card if there is one you MUST OWN AT ANY COST.

There is a pity system of sorts, in that you slowly collect tickets from the gacha system that can eventually be turned in to purchase specific characters.  I haven’t interacted with the gacha enough times to build up enough tickets to explore this, but I’m told it exists.

I made the EXCELLENT decision to start playing this game during its first anniversary celebration, so it has been deluging me with free gacha draws and I have gotten to build up a pretty good team of characters.  If I was spending much real money I might be more critical of it, but it has been a blast and I felt like gushing about it.

OK, now for the Real Talk.  While Neon SHOULD have been the Best Girl, it did not take long before I realized that the real Best Girl was, in fact, Anis.  Apparently I like… angry girls?  I’m not sure how to process that.

Also, I eventually launched the game on my phone, rather than my tablet, and discovered that I had switched the game audio to Japanese on the phone, meaning that I was no longer stuck with the English dub!  Progress, right?

…except.

…Anis’s Japanese voice is really boring by comparison.  It’s kind of generically cute as opposed to perpetually-snarky.

I can’t get over it, so I’m stuck with the dub, and I feel I have lost an amazing amount of geek cred by admitting this.

I mean, it’s a Korean game right?  So even the Japanese voices aren’t the original language, right?  There’s NO SHAME IN CHOOSING THE ENGLISH DUB SINCE EVEN JAPANESE IS A DUB, RIGHT?  I’M NOT ABANDONING YEARS OF ANTI-DUB SNOBBERY HERE, RIGHT?

please forgive me I have sinned.