Punch Line (PS Vita)
In the anime industry, a lot of the profit a show makes comes not from its production and airing but from the merchandising, tie-ins, and the bump in sales to the associated manga publication. It can almost be viewed as advertising to get people interested into all the more lucrative parts of the business, but Punch Line took a very strange route with how it structured itself. An original anime production not based on a manga and a self-contained story told across 12 episodes, Punch Line decided to wrap up its anime with a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion while promising its tie-in game for PlayStation Vita and PS4 would have an alternate ending that proved to be a better fit. Strangely enough though, the game itself follows the events of the show so closely that it’s practically like watching it in game form, down to the fact it will outright use long animated segments from the show for cutscenes and the climax is, in fact, one long animated segment.
Since they are so close in construction that watching or playing one is fairly close to experiencing the other, it does feel like whether or not you choose to play the game comes down to if you want the better ending it presents, but its more relaxed pace also allows for the story to be told without the requisite need to break for commercial or condense important information and recaps with air time in mind. However, Punch Line’s game does still split itself into episodes, coming in at 21 compared to the anime’s 12 as a show of how it has more room to breathe despite covering the exact same story beats and reproducing the show’s scenarios. Each episode in the game does have an opening theme and end theme that you can skip if you aren’t interested in seeing it, so other than seeing the show’s well done animation in full rather than just its highlights, Punch Line’s visual novel adaptation does feel like it might be the preferred method of experiencing the story if you’re willing to put in the time.
Punch Line’s story begins aboard a bus as a group of hijackers attempt to use it as a platform for projecting their doomsday messages to the world. However, a magical girl hero named Strange Juice comes to the rescue, and right before a terrorist can end up killing her, a passenger named Yuta awakens a special energy inside him and tackles the hijacker. The two fall out of the bus and into a river below, leading to Yuta practically dying in the process. His spirit pops out of his body as some other soul slams in to take advantage of the moment of spiritual vulnerability, and now Yuta must receive help from a time-traveling ghost cat named Chiranosuke to not only get his body back, but to save the world from an upcoming meteor impact that is guaranteed to happen if Yuta can’t puzzle out how to return things to normal.
Chiranosuke is Yuta’s guide to living as a ghost, the two balancing the need for plenty of exposition with moments of goofy humor pretty well. There are a lot of concepts to keep track of in terms of the supernatural side of things as well as the budding sci-fi elements that enter the plot, but they all work together well because of their measured rollout and how they tie into the central mystery. The meteor impact being tied to Yuta is presented as a fact by Chiranosuke without much info to go on at first, so the player joins Yuta in trying to puzzle out why this cataclysm is bound to happen, what ties the hijacker group from the start of the game have to it, and other mysteries like the power Yuta used on the bus and where characters like Strange Juice tie into it. It’s a pretty compelling mystery that hangs over events and the details are distributed at key points to keep you guessing while providing you with enough material that your theories can pan out to be partially true even when certain withheld aspects end up necessary to understand the full truth. Many episodes begin with mysterious flashbacks to a group of kids, and even though both Yuta and Chiranosuke posses some mild time-traveling powers, it’s mostly used to distribute interesting tidbits about the future rather than skipping the gradual unraveling of the fascinating truth.
Perhaps more important than all the high concepts hanging over the story and the mystery of the meteor crash is where the entire game takes place: Korai House. Yuta’s possessed body has locked itself in one of its rooms, and even though it is technically his room, the spiritual Yuta can’t enter it thanks to various wards placed around. To get his body back will instead involve influencing the other residents of this complex, and here is where Punch Line really finds one of its major appeals. The supporting cast of four women all hang out in their rooms, Yuta able to communicate with them by influencing objects in the environment. However, while they play a vital story role in helping Yuta get his body back and even start to play a part in the grander mysteries of the meteor, terrorist group, and strange powers certain individuals can tap into, their bigger appeal might be just their interactions as characters.
Mikatan is actually the true identity of the super heroine Strange Juice, something the game makes no effort to hide but her poor attempts to pull off the magical girl lifestyle are a frequent source of humor. Her upbeat and chipper attitude leads to her being one of the kindest and most straightforward of the four girls, her demeanor helping her break through some of the other women’s more stubborn aspects. Ito for example spends most of her time in her room gaming and not taking much care of herself, but this isn’t just because she’s a burnout as the game eventually reveals a more dramatic source for her reclusive lifestyle. Rabura on the other hand is an extreme extrovert eager to land a man but also trying to work as a medium despite believing she has no talent for it, and while she can have some of the goofiest moments in the game, when more serious or emotional matters arise she has some of the most mature and grounded reactions to them. Meika is the owner of Korai House and thus can be more demanding or bossy when the other girls push her buttons, but she’s also a genius looking to do good and struggles to balance her work-focused mind with how it impacts others emotionally.
A lot of the game is spent with Yuta observing these four girls interacting and learning from them, sometimes needing to assist with their personal problems first so they can focus on some task he needs them to do to help with the grander picture. However, the time spent watching these girls is equal parts hilarious and dramatic. Punch Line has made me laugh more than games devoted completely to their comedic angles because it does a lot of work to establish these characters before whipping out some absurd surprise made all the better by knowing the participants involved in the strange moment. Sitcom-like misunderstandings don’t lead to any needless drama but instead ride through purely on their comedic purpose, the characters knowing when to be down to earth so they can discuss sometimes dark subjects or focus on personal development and actually hashing out their problems like adults. Ito on one occasion might be desperately trying to hide the bear cub she keeps as a pet by pretending the abundant salmon are for her to eat and the weird cries coming from the animal are her, but on another occasion she’s having a heart to heart with Mikatan about abuse. The proper space is given so there isn’t emotional whiplash, but this set of four ladies becomes a complex set of individuals who can provide strong dramatic moments, to the point you might find yourself ready to cry during a particular scene involving Meika and the bear cub because so much work had been put into establishing who she is, how she feels about the cub, and how she feels about life in general.
The story that unfolds in Punch Line is one that covers plenty of bases when it comes to mystery, suspense, action, comedy, and drama, and by that time the final episode turned into a full on animated conglomeration of all those elements it’s easy to be enraptured despite the lack of interactivity and eager to see how everything pans out. However, there has been a certain incredibly important element of the plot that I have been keeping from you deliberately to avoid coloring your opinion, and that is something that is absolutely vital to both how the story unfolds and how you interact with the game during its interactive portions: panties.
A focus on women’s underwear would definitely lead to some people immediately dismissing the game as some perverse waste of time while others might overlook its many positive aspects simply because they only care about that angle, but Punch Line’s panty focus feels like it’s straddling the line between something here to increase its appeal to a certain subset of people as well as something that plays a role in the story. Yuta floating around invisible as a ghost in a women’s dormitory is going to invite lurid assumptions off the bat, but rather than encouraging the player to play Peeping Tom, looking at the girls’ underwear is actively discouraged. If Yuta is overstimulated, he actually becomes unable to function and the meteor wipes out humanity, meaning any time a lady’s undergarments are on screen he needs to look away to avoid putting all of the planet at risk. The absurdity of those stakes is another source of humor and one you can look past easily if it doesn’t strike you as particularly funny, but while the game is telling you not to look at panties it is also doing things like plastering them on the save screen and allowing free peeks during certain scenes.
Whichever way you lean after learning this revelation, it shouldn’t let it harm how you enjoy the rest of the title. In fact, near about the halfway point, a lot of the panty focus is pushed aside in favor of purely focusing on plot. It does do a few more shots that seem almost there to appease anyone who missed them too much, but the game keeps these unfortunate angles away from its more serious moments and takes long breaks from them when it needs to cover important details or focus on the story and characters. The second half of the story is also the one that plays more like a visual novel in that it mostly just asks you to make a few choices to help events unfold, but in the early game you actually are playing the role of poltergeist and picking which objects in an area you need to move to grab a girl’s attention.
Most of the early episodes contain long story stretches with two interactive segments placed near the middle. Yuta needs to up his spiritual power by surprising the ladies of Korai House, so the player moves around their room and picks which of the available objects they want to use to catch them unawares. Some of these do nothing and often you need to consider what the girl is up to or her headspace at the time with what you influence, and while there are some marked with an exclamation mark that are guaranteed to work, these segments aren’t very hard to win since the options are kept low. However, you do need to avoid taking a peek at those panties during these segments as it can lead to the apocalypse, and moving around the preset viewing spots sometimes means you’ll need to quickly look away to avoid failure. The more difficult segments involve setting up a chain of events with your poltergeist activities so that the girls all head to the right spots or interact with things properly to help you in your quest to get your body back. These almost Rube Goldberg like setups can sometimes be hard to glean until you’ve picked some wrong choices but they’re also never all that hard despite being a bit unclear in how you’ll impact the girls with your choices. This mild interactivity can feel more like it’s meant to get you on board and thinking about the girls more before they’ve become so well established that you enjoy simply sitting back and watching them interact, so while the gameplay side of the experience is definitely rather basic, it does at least rope you into giving the story the attention it deserves.
THE VERDICT: A wonderful mix of character drama, goofy sitcom humor, science fiction and supernatural elements, and a compelling mystery, Punch Line is a great story that covers a range of emotions while dishing out plot details that keep you hooked until the glorious animated ending. The ghostly pranks you pull seem more an excuse for interaction rather than something you’ll get heavily invested in, but if you can accept that sometimes Punch Line indulges itself with perverse elements, you find yourself with a game that contains plenty of lovable and hilarious characters on top of a story that only grows stronger the more you discover about its world.
And so, I give Punch Line for PlayStation Vita…
A GREAT rating. Putting aside the perverse peeks at panties Punch Line both deliberately includes while actively discouraging, this anime turned video game does an excellent job building up characters you can care for not just as sources for drama or cute ladies to look at but as people who can carry different tones and can tie into the grander narrative mysteries without ever sacrificing believability to get there. This is a world with robots, superpowers, spirits, and so on, but the Korai House’s residents can have grounded concerns, comedic misunderstandings, and then slip into the overall plot in believable ways when suddenly the meteor’s arrival and the terrorist group become issues Mikatan, Ito, Rabura, and Meika are all involved in. Yuta does wait until the back half of the game to really get to the point where his own personal stakes and personality get to shine as brightly as the ladies, but everything culminates remarkably well and it is easy to forgive certain underdeveloped concepts since everything else was given the right amount of attention and paced well to keep the player hooked. The minor gameplay segments aren’t really engaging mechanically but aren’t so important that they define the experience, the player definitely meant to enjoy the visual novel aspects more, and the moments where it does feel like Yuta’s influence has a bit more of an impact can at least justify the light interactivity.
There are definitely some aspects of Punch Line that I’m not sure I agree with, one major one being the potential sabotaging of the anime’s ending to withhold the better one for the video game adaptation, but it also benefits from the anime’s existence as it can transplant so much of the work that went into that here where it can enhance the visual novel into something with higher production values and cleaner scenes. I’m sure the preoccupation with panty shots, no matter how they’re framed, might swing people’s decisions regardless of anything else I’ve said about the game, but whether it seems to enhance the prospect of playing it or deters you, know there’s definitely a strong visual novel experience with an intriguing plot and wonderful characters waiting for you if you do give Punch Line a chance.