by Stephen DeckAlso available on PlayStation Vita and Windows
Review written by Stephen Deck; originally published 02/01/2021 on Teacher by Day, Gamer by Night
If you’ve ever wondered what Earth Defense Force would be like if it were clunky, stupid, and horny, then I have good news; I’ve found the answer. Gun Gun Pixies is a third-person shooter where you play as a couple of tiny alien soldiers sent to Earth to study interpersonal relationships among Earthlings in a dorm setting so you can figure out how to save your home planet’s society from collapsing under the weight of its own narcissistic introversion. It’s a dumb story full of cute anime girls and far more upskirts than is necessary. In that aspect, it’s your typical Idea Factory/Compile Heart game. What’s not so typical is the egregious lack of quality control. Compile Heart games are usually mid-tier in terms of quality. This is solidly below that.
Visually, the game looks fine. You can tell that it was originally a Vita game that got bumped to Switch, but it looks totally fine. It runs decently well, too. You’ll notice parts where the frame rate dips and other parts where it suddenly feels way smoother than before, but all in all, it stays acceptably near 30 fps. The problem is the controls. They’re horrendous. The jumping feels horribly imprecise, and while that doesn’t matter in most third-person shooters, there’s an infuriating amount of platforming that you need to do. They’d be no big deal if the jumping controls were even decent, but they’re downright awful. The camera controls are just as bad, too. At the default sensitivity, they’re jerky as hell, but if you lower it enough so that they’re not frustratingly jerky, they suddenly start to feel like they’re submerged in glue. There’s no middle ground. Way overly sensitive, or not nearly sensitive enough. This game may not require Sniper Elite levels of precision, but you need to be able to hit specifics parts of your targets’ bodies, so it requires enough precision that these controls make the game a lot more challenging than it would normally be.
The other glaring problem here is even less forgivable than the controls and jumping. Those are just bad technical design and coding. The more unforgivable flaw in my opinion is the translation. It’s as if literally no one proofread the translation a single time before shipping the game. It’s not just translation errors although there were a few sentences so awkward that they couldn’t possibly be anything but a translation error. No, the game’s dialogue is RIDDLED with typos. Simple careless typos that any random person off the street would likely catch if they proofread it. The fact that this made it into the game and remains in the game nearly four full years after release is just astounding to me and shows utter negligence on the part of the allegedly existent QA team. Things like “one the topic of” instead of “on the topic of,” “fan faction” instead of “fan fiction,” “put you to the rest” instead of “put you to the test,” “partnet” instead of “partner,” and “I don’t they’d suit me” instead of “I don’t think they’d suit me;” and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. You’d think having Neptune, my goddess, and Noire, my Neptunia waifu, make cameos in chapter 4 would redeem the game in my eyes, but not even they can redeem this disaster of a game. If they weren’t here, my rating would be even lower.
The game is also just needlessly horny. I mean, it’s an ecchi bishojo game, so that’s to be expected to a certain extent, but that’s basically all the game is; the rest was built around that concept so the game could have an excuse to exist. At least Senran Kagura games have fun gameplay and at least halfway decent stories; Gun Gun Pixies has neither. I’m an ecchi lord of the highest caliber, and even I was like “Dude, why is this game so damn horny?” It honestly went from fun to kind of creepy about a third of the way through. I’ve certainly played worse games, and I don’t regret having this on my shelf, but I’d be hard-pressed to recommend this to anyone except ecchi lords who are even more of a degenerate than I am because this was just too much. It’s funny at first, but it plays like a Dane Cook stand-up show; after a while, you realize it just does the same things other games do except worse.
