Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s (PS4)

Kenji Kojima is a young Japanese man who believes he has women all figured out, or, at least, he thinks he knows how to figure them out. Rather than needing to talk to them and get to know them that way, Kenji believes the true window to a woman’s soul is her panties. While the premise for this short point-and-click/visual novel mix might sound like it’s teeing up ecchi antics involving a perverted protagonist using comedic tricks to sneak saucy peeks at some ladies, Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s is a surprisingly chaste realization of the concept, the underwear hunting not involving anything the girls are currently wearing and even then, a good deal of the ones you collect are freshly bought or completely clean.

 

Kenji’s quest to collect panties that aren’t currently on a person or even freshly worn is facilitated by taking on odd jobs while working his way through university, Kenji encountering a few attractive women that he wishes to get to know to see if he has possible chemistry with them. The main story of Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s takes place across four chapters, the first three being used to introduce you to Kenji’s targets. Your first encounter is with the friendly and flirty Haruka, followed by visiting the apartment of a pair of sisters named Anko and Yukari. Anko is an athletic tomboyish sort while her sister is her opposite by being gentle and reserved, but the final lady you meet is the rich and frigid Anna, the cast ultimately providing a good mix of personality types that make the final chapter where they all accompany Kenji on a trip to the hot springs one with some decent potential for playful conflicts.

However, your efforts to get to know these girls the more traditional way as well as performing almost any task in Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s will be impeded by one unfortunate reality: the English grammar is absolutely abysmal. Things start simple enough in the opening chapter where your panty raid at Haruka’s apartment hits odd hitches thanks to clunky phrasing, but the chapter with the sisters is where things get incredibly rough. Kenji and the sisters will talk back and forth for a bit in such a way that it feels like no one is truly responding to what the other said while what they are saying can be hard to parse, the game clearly moving from mistakes you can tolerate to nonsense that impedes your ability to even understand the characters. Things do clean up a touch in Anna’s chapter but it is still a nuisance that weighs down the simple but functional writing, but when you reach the hot spring chapter, suddenly things improve a fair deal. There will still be grammatical errors, but things are comprehensible and dialogue more naturally transitions between characters. In fact, the hot springs chapter is a highlight in general since it shifts the game’s focus away from panty collection almost entirely, electing instead to spend time letting the ladies interact with each other. All four female leads are fully voiced as well, and while this can feel rough when Anko’s voice actress is being forced to read her chapter’s unnatural writing, the performers do their job well for that final chapter in giving you a glimpse of what this game could have been if every part of it was more carefully curated.

 

However, before that highlight hot springs visit, the first three chapters are primarily underpants hunts, the player spending some time getting to know the ladies but often trying to get out of their sight to search around for loose panties. Progressing to new chapters requires finding a set amount of underwear, but the main thing that will foil your hunts is the high amount of premature endings Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s features. In fact, this game actually what might be called a “death collector” where some of the appeal is trying to see every bad ending on top of completing the main story. For a game like this, most of these will arise from being caught red-handed or being too overt, although there are a good deal of comedic outcomes, or at least, nominally comedic ones. One problem with the premature endings is, you might imagine, the bad English grammar robbing them of their impact, but many of them are also unfortunately abrupt and uninteresting. You might get a decent absurd gag like Kenji leaping out of a window in embarrassment, but not only is it not shown, the text describing it is often over a plain white screen. A few early deaths are still worth seeing, but a good deal of them are a drag to pursue because they are not only incredibly underwhelming, but they force you back to the chapter’s start afterwards. For some chapters like Anna’s where you need to do an imprecise bug squashing minigame on her computer to even access most of the bad endings it can get fairly repetitive pursuing these alternate outcomes that can’t even be bothered to be written correctly, and while some are more obviously triggered, others are annoying landmines since figuring out where panties can be in a room is already pretty much a guessing game.

A few small interactive puzzles make up the point and click side of Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s, although considering the need to repeat the mercifully short chapters so much, thankfully they’re kept pretty simple or are essentially an interaction you need to figure out once and never again. Some chapters will have a secret to uncover about the lady whose home you’re scouring that ends up paying off a bit in the hot springs chapter as they’re all fleshed out a bit, that chapter even having alternate endings that tie a cute bow on your time with the girl you choose to pursue thanks to actually giving them time to show their personality off more. There is definitely an intentional contrast there, the hot springs chapter having a purpose behind changing the gameplay type beyond just making for a more enjoyable experience, and there are also a few unlockable scenes to find in the previous chapters that flesh out the leading ladies a bit more by showing moments in their life.

 

Anko, Yukari, Haruka, and Anna all actually end up somewhat appealing despite the many barriers to letting them show who they are, and that is certainly helped by the game’s nostalgic art style. The 90s anime look is realized superbly and is essentially the one part of the game that came out flawless. The four ladies all have a few poses that allow them to show off a decent range of expressions that reinforce their personalities well, they are lip-synced adequately, and the backgrounds are able to be detailed while fitting nicely in the aesthetic. The gentle music adds to the dreamy retro style, it little surprise the game’s title made sure to have room for announcing its efforts to invoke this appealing art style of the past. The character poses and voice acting really help the last chapter feel like a breath of fresh air after stumbling through so many choppy conversations and annoying ending hunts, but it’s not really a huge leap and more just the game reaching what should have been an acceptable baseline before working up from there, and Kenji still feels out of place with his juvenile perspective weighing down moments that could have lead into proper romances in a better written game.

 

Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s is rated M for Mature but on PlayStation 4 it might as well not be. Finding panties laying around a house isn’t exactly lurid, and while the game’s cover art on the PlayStation store promises a beach visit, this never occurs in the story. In fact, the game even seems to avoid potentially raunchy moments, the hot springs having Kenji calmly sit in his hot spring even as he hears the girls in the adjacent room setting up what sounds like it’s going to become a chance to see something naughty. The PS4 release did strip out the truly mature elements, a few collectible erotic photos removed despite them featuring fairly tame nudity, and weirdly enough it seems the PC version also allowed you to change the protagonist’s name, which leads to hitches in the voice acting to account for this now missing feature. Even if you aren’t interested in the potential eroticism that comes from the game’s rare indulgence in adult matters, the PC version does feel the superior version despite any version of Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s feeling like it’s not worth investing much interest in beyond perhaps looking at screenshots of the throwback artstyle.

THE VERDICT: Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s nails its nostalgic look and even adds some personality to its four leading ladies through some solid posing choices and effective voice acting, but the promise of the idea only really squeaks through in the final hot springs chapter. Most of the experience is a guessing game of clicking around and hoping you find the path to underwear, a good deal of options leading to premature endings that often aren’t funny or really that interesting to search out. The terrible grammar really undermines the already thin potential of the writing during the early chapters as well, leading to nearly incomprehensible segments or nearly decent moments lacking impact due to the clunky phrasing.

 

And so, I give Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. Kenji belongs in a more lurid adult game where his love for panties can be effectively explored, but the artist of Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s as well as its four leading ladies all deserve to be in something better. Haruka, Anna, Anko, and Yukari are not particularly robust characters, but the hot springs chapter shows a flicker of what they could be in a game that spent more time developing their personalities or setting up for potential romances. It’s not hard to imagine a more genuine romantic adult visual novel using these characters, voice actresses, and artist, but they’re all hitched to panty hunting segments that sideline the game’s strengths in service of a repetitive death hunting format that doesn’t have the interesting payoffs to make that approach effective. If the game is going to emphasize the premature endings so much, they should be given proper spotlights, be it amusing art or even just more of a back and forth between characters rather than plain white screen with pink text. The story does eventually make a mild point about Kenji’s misguided effort to get to know women through his unusual fixation on their underwear, but the hunt for underpants at best adds a few decent interactions but more often feels like it is a waste of time, especially when Anna’s chapter buries so many past an easy yet poorly executed minigame you can’t skip. You can at least speed through some segments so forcing a full chapter reset on a loss isn’t too devastating, but you also aren’t going to be rewarded much for your persistence when you retry again and again to find the right routes to unlock later parts of the story.

 

While I’ve given some praise to certain people involved in the game, the artist Midnight Myon certainly carrying a great deal of this game’s few effective elements on their back, perhaps it is the English editor who is most at fault for the sorry state of this experience. Perhaps with proper English it would merely be Bad, the panty hunt still the least effective part of the design due to the many underwhelming pitfalls to the process and how it ultimately denies you more time spent with the four women who could be promising characters in a story where they are given proper room to grow. A name like Pantsu Hunter: Back to the 90s does indicate where the priorities lie, but we’ve seen games like Punch Line thrive despite their naughty panty-based premise. Here though, the creators squandered what did work and put too much emphasis on the worst parts of the game.