Today Criminal Girls X developer Mikage hosted an event in Yokohama Chinatown dedicated to its upcoming game and its future projects, then revealing its content via press release.
The story will prove in part familiar to fans of the Criminal Girls franchise. The protagonist goes to the world of Shura (basically hell) to rehabilitate his loved one and then bring her back to life to live together once again.
In order to achieve this, he needs to rehabilitate her and 23 additional heroines.
As an additional complication, the god who gave him this chance took his memories away and turned him into a cat.
Through his mission, he’ll have to lead the heroines to defeat terrible Oni and an even scarier, mysterious enemy.
He’ll have to collect the memories of the heroines and have them face their own sins in a given time of one year. Can he bring them all back?
First of all, in the gallery, we get to see all the 24 heroines included in the game on top of the hero and two more unknown relevant characters.
Another image shows the main menu of the game. There you can select “Battle” which lets you play dungeons through the main story and drop items that let you improve your weapons.
“Memory” lets you relive the memories of each heroine after collecting memory fragments from boss battles.
“Equipment” and “Weapons” let you organize your items. “Sales” is a gacha that lets you draw equipment.
“Movie” lets you watch an ad once an hour that lets you accrue points that can be used in the gacha.
“Daily Reward” does pretty much what it says on the tin.
The gallery also shows the battle screen and battle gameplay. You can combine heroines, weapons, and equipment to sortie and challenge a dungeon all the way to the boss battle. This can be enjoyed both on a normal screen and in VR.
Targeting and normal attacks are automatic, but you need to reload. On top of that at a given interval (the higher the level, the more often this happens) the heroines will make proposals to change your strategy.
By changing these parameters, the gameplay is basically akin to a turn-based JRPG in which you make selections and then the action unfolds.
We then see the 2D adventure part of the game in which the main story and memories are narrated, and the 3D adventure part, which is also included in the main story.
Once each heroine is rehabilitated there will be a “reward scene,” but since they’re still in production, Mikage is keeping them under wraps for now.
More information about the game will be revealed during a follow-up event on December 29.
On top of this, Mikage has reached an agreement with Nippon Ichi Software to bring Criminal Girls X to home consoles including VR support. Development will start after the launch of the game for iOS, Android, and PC in spring 2020.
On top of that, a mysterious “Original Overseas Version of MikageProject” has been announced in partnership with Aksys Games.
This will come to PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Steam, with VR support where applicable. Details will be announced at Anime Expo in the United States in July 2020.
At the moment, we don’t know if this project is directly related to Criminal Girls X.
If you’re unfamiliar with the project a while ago Mikage launched a crowdfunding campaign to revive Nippon Ichi Software’s JRPG franchise Criminal Girls.
Hosted on the local platform Campfire, the campaign started with a 6,000,000 yen goal, which translates into roughly $55,400. After the end of the campaign, pledges summed up to 15,767,532 yen (approximately translating into $145,700) which is over 2.5 times the initial goal.
The aim of the campaign was to provide a “console-like” experience that players will be able to enjoy forever, even after the service for the free-to-play version has been shut down. Those who pledged for the game will receive a full version unaffected by the free-to-play business model.
It’s likely that the console version will have a similar setup, but at the moment no further details have been revealed.
