Gun Gun Pixies (Switch)

The premise of pixies no bigger than your finger going up against comparatively massive but mundane humans is certainly one that can go in some creative directions, and games like Mister Mosquito have tapped on some of its potential in the past. However, I was under no illusions about the true intent of Gun Gun Pixies, because rather than recontextualizing regular people as gigantic threats, Gun Gun Pixies is set in dorm full of high school girls where the conflicts are mostly set up so you can ogle the girls while they wear skimpy outfits. There are certainly cases where a game can have its cheesecake and eat it too though, so despite its lewd intentions, I still hoped it could deliver on the gameplay side of its premise.

Gun Gun Pixies begins by sharing the plight of the planet Pandemo. This world much smaller than ours is so focused on personal improvement that few members of the alien species bother to make social ties, but this lack of interaction has stunted their growth and could lead to the eventual extinction of their race. Two unusual members of the race, known by their nicknames Bee-tan and Kame-pon, have shown they do value friendship, so to better understand and tap into the advantages of social cooperation, these two pixies are sent to planet Earth to research how humans benefit from friendship and love. The two pixies end up assigned to an all girls dorm called The Lilypad for this mission, and while Gun Gun Pixies is about firing upon the human characters, it turns out the weapon you’re using fires Happiness Bullets that are meant to invigorate whoever gets hit by enough of them. By spurring the human girls to interact with each other via these bullets, Bee-tan and Kame-pon hope to save their people, but soon a grander plot of a Phantom Thief stealing entire buildings enters the picture as well, adding a new objective to their mission.

A lot of Gun Gun Pixies focuses on its story to the point it’s nearly on the borderline of being a visual novel. The chapters in Gun Gun Pixies usually focus on some drama unfolding in The Lilypad that the pixies observe from the sidelines, but the Phantom Thief plot builds up in the background until it starts demanding the later portions of the plot. Bee-tan and Kame-pon have a fun enough dynamic. Bee-tan is all too happy with their situation since she’s absolutely enamored with virtually any woman she comes across, so needless to say she appreciates the many chances to catch the girls in their underwear or other compromising situations. Kame-pon is more focused on the mission, trying to rein in Bee-tan’s lust and keep them focused on the objective, but she’s not so serious that she’s a killjoy. The problem with these two is that they almost always fall into those descriptions with only brief glimmers of depth, the game sometimes even feeling it necessary to directly point out the moments where they aren’t just recycling their shtick.

The human girls face a similar personality problem. There are five main human girls in the dorm with other characters coming and going and even the main girls slowly being introduced so that you have a chance to get to know them. However, there isn’t too much to learn about the core characters. Amayo has perhaps the most nuanced personality because she doesn’t slot into one description too easily. She’s best described as supportive and naive but she has her own personal demons like struggling with her weight, so if there’s one character you can depend on as being an almost regular person, it’s Amayo. The sisters Misa and Kira on the other hand are remarkably one note. Misa’s thing is that she eats a lot so her response to most situations is to suggest eating food or she promises to make someone food to cheer them up, while Kira is working on lurid visual novel games so she views the world through a lascivious lens that rivals Bee-tan’s carnal desire for whatever women might be around. Their third sister eventually enters the picture as well, her prominent trait being her near perfect mastery of anything she tries, and the final consistent member of the household is Minami who assumes a dark lord persona that thankfully she can stray from but still makes up much of her dialogue and interaction style. Other characters can drop by briefly or influence the plot such as Neptune and Noire from the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, but most of the game’s focus is on the interpersonal drama between the five shallow main women.

The good news is that when the serious matter of the chapter gets addressed, a lot of the girls will drop their shtick and talk like regular people. It’s not quite a huge departure from their established personalities so it does feel like the same characters are holding a conversation, but the focus on things like food and ogling women are pushed aside so they can discuss things like growing apart from old friends, the struggles with weight loss, and other simple topics that can’t just have characters spout their usual stuff at each other. Most of the game is still made up of them constantly falling back on their most prominent trait, meaning that the moments where their behavior is intended for humor feel a little flat since the character has been talking about the same thing the whole game. The Phantom Thief plot is at least a decent mystery to give the plot something more substantial to work towards, but the visual novel aspect does wear out its welcome even with the somewhat animated characters and heavy amount of Japanese voice work done to make it more appealing.

It is little coincidence that almost every time the girls speak in a scene though they jerk a little so their chests bounce. Gun Gun Pixies never crosses into outright fully visible nudity, but the gameplay is definitely designed to give you plenty of titillating angles on the girls. There are three forms of gameplay in Gun Gun Pixies, the most common one involving you exploring the dorm rooms to progress the plot. To further the personal stories of the humans you’ll often be asked to locate objects or mildly interfere without getting seen, so these segments usually involve you climbing around a room in search of the areas of interest. If a human girl is lingering in the room, she might spot or hear you, and if she realizes there’s a little pixie running around her room, that will give you a Game Over and force a mission restart. There are very few dorm rooms so the locations become very familiar quickly, but yet that limitation doesn’t help you easily locate the exact areas the game sometimes wants you to find, a few areas involving you scouring for the exact right spot to stand to inspect an object you weren’t even told is important. Avoiding a girl’s attention is usually easy at least and even if she sees you you can pose to trick her into thinking you’re a figurine, but one area the game had some potential in is introducing the similarly small squid enemies. Little squid creatures with suggestive headwear begin appearing around the dorm, the player sometimes needing to fight these little aliens to avoid being damaged. Shooting makes noise though, and sometimes posing as a figurine leaves you open to a squid’s attack, but these are a mild complication at best due to low aggression and how spaced out the squids often are. Some sections do focus on direct conflict with the squids though, so sometimes there is something akin to a back and forth battle in Gun Gun Pixies.

The next mode and the game’s moneymaker are the segments where you’ll need to shoot one of the girls with your happy bullets. Circumstances will somehow conveniently line up in a way where the girl needs to dress or act in a suggestive way, the player asked to make them happy by firing on different body parts until their happiness reaches the maximum levels. This is certainly where the game gets its most lewd. The Happiness bullets can have the girls drooling with bliss by the end of it, the player is sometimes asked to directly target the butt and breasts, and the activities the girls are engaging in sometimes don’t even pretend to be reasonable. Amayo and Neptune doing yoga aren’t out of line and Minami’s darkness shtick means her dressing up in something skimpy for a ritual isn’t too unusual, but when the girls start poledancing to let off steam and Misa climbs aboard a random mechanical saddle and suggestively sucks a popsicle, the game has just decided it knows what most players will want and it’s going to give it to them without any illusion of realism. Firing on these girls as they do their little activities usually isn’t that difficult. They release negative auras that can damage you, but there are sniping spots you can stand in that not only heal the clothes tearing damage you take, but power up your shots, meaning there’s little reason to stray from them unless the girl is very mobile. The girls can sometimes move about a lot or potentially damage you if they’re doing something like falling from the pole that sends out a small shock wave, but these segments are often slow and more about appreciating the view than facing some sort of challenge. You can speed up these by buying upgrades to your weapon and character, but that doesn’t change the fact the gameplay isn’t really riveting here unless you enjoy the eye candy.

The final mode in the game is one where the girls are taking baths… and surprisingly, this mode with the most flesh on show in the most intimate situation is perhaps the most forgivable. It’s structured like a bonus round, the bath time only lasting a few minutes at most unless you apply the endless timer upgrade. Here, you just fire upon the bathing girl to get extra cash for buying stuff with, and if you can coax the girl to get sit tub side, you can leap up onto her for huge coin bonuses. Bubbles cover the important bits, but the simplicity of the gameplay and its low run time make this a pretty reasonable reward for a player coming to the game for such content. These usually cap off a chapter and don’t really have a failure state, so Gun Gun Pixies didn’t have to sacrifice interesting play to tap into its attended appeal of having beautiful girls on display in titillating ways. I won’t pretend that everyone would be content if the only inappropriate material was found during bath time minigames, but some of the actual gameplay could have focused on the enjoyability of the action instead of the sexiness of the situation if Gun Gun Pixies had been content to make suggestive scenarios tied more to bonus game style segments instead of trying to put it everywhere it will fit.

THE VERDICT: Gun Gun Pixies isn’t bad because it is built around attractive women in suggestive scenarios, it’s bad because the artifice for doing so is sloppy and rarely fun. Rather than rewarding the player with lewd bonus games like the bath tub segments, all of Gun Gun Pixies is trying to give you a chance to ogle the women, and as such the gun shooting gameplay often feels like it lacks any danger or challenge. The story focuses mostly on shallow characters who only gain fleshed out personalities when a topic is serious and the moments of one-note character interaction and boring dorm exploration end up making up most of the experience. When you’re facing squids or following one of the few interesting story threads Gun Gun Pixies can be a bit more bearable, but if you’re not here to ogle the girls on show, this game has very little to offer you.

And so, I give Gun Gun Pixies for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Gun Gun Pixies spends a lot of time doing very little. Scenes where the girls talk can circle around the same simple character traits they exhibit without doing much, exploration of the dorm can be aimless or grow incredibly stale due to the limited rooms available, and the segments where you shoot happiness bullets don’t have the proper level of pressure to feel exciting, especially since you can stand in the healing spot with few repercussions. So much of the fat could be trimmed to make a brief, punchy experience with many of the highlight moments that people looking for some story could enjoy and those that people looking for lewd content would enjoy, but the biggest problem with the game is certainly is that it is shallow despite its length. Punching up the shooting segments, making the squids more threatening during exploration, giving the girls more to say outside of serious moments, and other little areas of added depth would make this game worth sticking with for more than seeing girls in bathtubs.

I still find it strange that the part I praise most is the one most brazen in presenting the women in undress. It balances the game’s true intentions with a gameplay segment that is unobtrusive and rewarding, and the game should have done more of that with its suggestive scenes instead of sacrificing interesting play or plot to contrive reasons to ogle ladies. There is already a free camera feature in the game that would allow players to sneak whatever peeks they want of the character on show, so the game could have provided cheesecake with that and moved the action towards interactivity more and reduced the emphasis on the spectating side of play. As I said earlier, I knew going in the reason behind the set up of tiny pixies and giant young ladies, but there’s no reason you can’t have enjoyable views and enjoyable gameplay. Gun Gun Pixies relied on sexiness to carry it, and thus it’s not as good as it could have been.