Tokyo Tattoo Girls (PS Vita)

While there is definitely nothing wrong with focusing heavily on appealing character designs for a title, Tokyo Tattoo Girls puts all its eggs in that particular basket, hoping that its selection of cute anime girls will be the hook that catches players. While some love was definitely put into trying to make the girls look interesting and different from each other, they unfortunately lack the solid gameplay foundation that would make interacting with them enjoyable.

Tokyo Tattoo Girls takes place after an unknown force devastates the city of Tokyo. In the wake of the destruction, girls bearing strange tattoos that give them power emerge in the city and start conquering the city’s 23 wards in a bid for control, the outside world sealing Tokyo off to leave these women to their own devices. While they have achieved some degree of peace through joining together as The Syndicate, the city is still in shambles and the alliance is certainly uneasy. Playing as a tattoo artist whose ink can give the special abilities, you get to select one of six companions to assist in the conquering of Tokyo, all of these thus far tattooless girls hoping to unite the wards into a more peaceful city. Their reasons for doing so vary, some just goodhearted, others hoping to protect or find their loved ones after the cataclysm, but since game sessions don’t last too long, it is pretty easy to play as all six and see their own stories.

The six main characters are perhaps the least interesting designwise though, aiming for more generalist looks befitting a protagonist. They aren’t without some merit, each girl still trying to represent a strong character trait or idea like a tomboy, spiritualist, or energetic cat girl, but perhaps the most unique and fun of the six selectable girls is Chofu. While seemingly a selfie-obsessed wannabe movie star on the surface, her ridiculous personality leads to her hoping that she’ll find her grandmother by way of starring in adult films simply because her grandma apparently kept a box of them in her house. She’s certainly on the more ridiculous end of the spectrum compared to girls like Kayako who is a rich, reserved girl uniting Tokyo out of a sense of obligation, but they serve their role adequately and there is likely at least one personality or look that will resonate with a player.

Over the course of a play session, whenever a ward is conquered, the girl of choice will meet with the ward’s ruler. The girls representing the 23 wards are definitely the more interesting designs on offer, each one heavily leaning into one concept or gimmick. The girl in charge of the festive Taito Ward is dressed to match with feathers in her hair, ornate jewelry, and an explosive fireworks cannon that makes her a perfect fit for the ward. The girl from the Koto Ward is a technological expert, decked out with a raygun, wearing an outfit befitting old-fashioned science fiction, and surrounded by floating blue screens. Not every design is so loud or on the nose about the girl’s interest, although the flight attendant girl is perhaps too generic in how she pulls off the look, but others like the street tough, bookish nerd, and mechanic contain cleaner interest integration to their design and some like the girls interested in fashion and modeling look good even if their gimmick isn’t immediately apparent. Their interests and design also serve a practical purpose in the plot, as during their conversation with them when you’re about to defeat them, you get better rewards if you figure out the right response to their question. The rewards are both gameplay related and tied to providing a better image of the girl, the game certainly banking on their appealing designs to motivate players.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides to the 23 Syndicate members. First, each girl is packing a unique weapon, from blades, cannons, shotguns, grenades, and odder choices like a paper lantern, purification wand, and microphone. These give the girls an interesting angle if you were actually fighting them, but instead this part of their design is pretty much pointless since there is no true combat in Tokyo Tattoo Girls. Perhaps worse than weapons they can’t even utilize though are the tattoos themselves. Very rarely are the tattoos worked into the designs well, often feeling like afterthoughts slapped onto where some exposed skin can be found, and if there isn’t a unique spot left they haven’t used on another girl, they’ll add random holes to an outfit to give the girl her own special tattoo location. Perhaps the bigger problem then location though is their coloration and design, many of them leaning on the same blues and purples that don’t show off the designs well. Without the ability to look closely at many of the girls, some are indistinguishable blue messes, meaning that the girls who ultimately look the best are the ones that can integrate or hide their plot-required ink the best in their design. The main six girls actually start off without ink and at least have that design angle going for them, and even when you do start inking them for power boosts over the course of the game, it remains on their back, the bareback tattooing process certainly meant to be sensual as the game further hopes the character looks will do all the work.

Unfortunately, when it is time to play Tokyo Tattoo Girls, you’ll find an incredibly flawed strategy game that hardly even rewards strategy. Most of the gameplay involves you looking at a map of Tokyo, and after picking which ward you want to attack first, the game basically takes over the process of taking over Tokyo. You have no real control over which wards you attempt to conquer here, the game just arbitrarily deciding when its going to send your forces into the next ward, often fighting on many fronts all at once and not ever waiting to finish one off before heading into the next. You don’t have to worry about losing forces, the process of taking wards giving you more people, but the conquering really is just about waiting out the gradual depletion of enemy numbers. There is no visual flair to the fights, just a ward being a different color than ones you haven’t got into, but if you are stirring up trouble in one, it can eventually turn red, meaning it’s on alert. If it is not dealt with soon, the alert will damage your honor, which is essentially your health, the game ending either when you’ve conquered all of Tokyo or when your honor is depleted.

You are able to influence the takeover of Tokyo somewhat. You can’t stop the AI control of your forces from taking stupid risks, spreading itself thin, or biting off more than it can chew, but you do have some means to react to it and influence the success rates of the conquering. Taking control of areas and clicking on randomly appearing cash will earn you protection money (shortened to PM) you can spend in a few ways. You can spend it to use character specific abilities that can do things like convert enemy forces to your side, reduce a ward’s alert status, double your earnings, recover honor, and other small functions that are mostly reactive or meant to prevent you from getting screwed over by the odd way the game moves your forces. It doesn’t make up for how hands-off the process is and how uninvolved you are by design, but it gives you something to actually do during the gameplay besides click money. Tattoos are also tied to the PM, but their influence is difficult to gauge. When you’re tattooing the back of the girl, you’ll find many preset ink locations that will impact the conquering process in different ways. Some are clearly useful like increasing PM income, but most of them tie to increasing your efficacy against certain types of wards. While these no doubt help in some small capacity, their impact isn’t really felt due to their low influence over the affair, and since you enter wards randomly, it’s not really worth trying to be strategic with which tattoos you get. You won’t know the next wards you conquer in advance and the tattoos don’t seem important enough to bother figuring out which of the current wards you’re fighting could be sped up. Money often comes quickly enough to buy plenty of tattoos and then gradually upgrade them anyway, the ability use the only other expense and the balance between them easy to manage since the tattoos aren’t much of a priority.

The tattoos and abilities do reveal another problem with Tokyo Tattoo Girls, that being some are locked off initially. The game has an unreasonable expectation that not only will you play through Tokyo Tattoo Girls to see each protagonist’s story, but you’ll do them over and over again. Unlockable abilities, difficulties, skills, items, and more require constant replaying of a gameplay style that gets old even before you’ve had the chance to play with every companion, the player’s impact on the course of events too small and mostly amounting to trying to right a boat that is constantly trying to tip over. Since each ward has a set girl as well whose optimal conversation option is set for each companion, even the part with the appealing characters and sometimes fun conversations won’t make replaying it any more interesting. Why they thought people would want to constantly replay a game that is too hands off to be engaging but still requires some degree of babysitting to succeed escapes me, but they were probably hoping the anime girls were attractive enough for some to encourage this unearned level of devotion.

THE VERDICT: Tokyo Tattoo Girls hopes its selection of 29 unique and attractive anime girls is an appealing enough carrot on a stick to motivate players to forgive a terribly conceived strategy game where strategy hardly has the room to be a factor. Taking over Tokyo is a process outside of the player’s control full of frustrating moments where the game plunges them into pointless trouble, and while the abilities and tattoos give them some options to react to and influence the awful conquering AI, it’s not enough of to give them a proper sense of control over the course of events. While some story ideas and character interactions can be cute or funny, Tokyo Tattoo Girls is mostly about doing your best to wrangle a self-defeating war effort that you don’t have enough influence over to be invested in its success.

And so, I give Tokyo Tattoo Girls for PlayStation Vita…

A TERRIBLE rating. At times, Tokyo Tattoo Girls feels like it wants to be an idle game, the kind of experience you don’t pay much attention to until certain highlight moments crop up. However, the city conquering paradoxically requires constant attention despite your actions feeling like they lack any meaningful impact. Success does require periodic use of PM to keep your self-defeating automatic army commander from ruining a run even on the easiest difficulties, but even with your required involvement it never feels like you’re doing more than averting disaster, the tangible outcomes of your action too miniscule to be rewarding. Quite rightly the game does bank on its character design to be appealing, and the moments where they interact are definitely the closest thing this game has to a saving grace. However, I would much rather the character designers have worked on a game where the characters could have more room to act and wouldn’t need to have tattoos awkwardly slapped onto their skin. The frustrating, repetitive, and hands-off strategy game buries the ladies beneath unenjoyable play, but at least on its easiest difficulties it can be pushed through without feeling like you’re always walking on a tightrope.

The Steam release of Tokyo Tattoo Girls contains a digital art book as DLC, and considering it contains all of the in-game art plus extra details like being able to actually see the tattoos properly and independent of the characters’ flesh, it might actually be the best way to experience the most appealing part of the game. It does require owning the game already unfortunately and it doesn’t include the fun and silly interactions between the girls, but the fact the art book is pretty close to being superior to the game it’s tied to speaks for how poorly the gameplay side of Tokyo Tattoo Girls was handled. The interesting designs are the game’s best hook after all, but it would need more than cute bait to please potential players.