There are a lot of games that don't see a North American release for some reason. They can be based on obscure franchises with licensing issues. They can have so much text that it would be easier to translate "War & Peace" instead. They can be for dying systems or have expensive dubs. Then there are games that are so absurdly niche that it's difficult to imagine them finding an audience. Criminal Girls: Invitation Only isn't a hidden gem that hopes to build a cult following. It's shameless and exploitative, and it's borderline smut.  

Criminal Girls follows the story of a nameless young man on his first day at work. He thought he was going to be a zookeeper but finds that he misunderstood his job. Instead, he's a warden of a group of female convicts who's sentenced to Hell after they die. The girls haven't committed any serious crimes but are destined to live a life of delinquency. They're offered a chance to undergo rehabilitation by climbing a tower full of deadly convicts, and if they successfully change, they're given a second shot at life. The protagonist must go along with them on their quest and assist them in their rehabilitation.

A bulk of the story is taken up by generic friendship speeches and predictable plot twists. The game takes a brief but interesting detour when it gets into the girls' motivations and their "sins," but it never does anything interesting with it. Most of the characters have paper-thin personalities that boil down to one or two things that they constantly repeat. There are a few times when they start to become interesting, but they quickly fade back to their simple selves. There are some amusing jokes here and there, but they're largely overshadowed by the game's idea of "rehabilitation."

The defining, and most controversial, feature of Criminal Girls is the motivation system. Each girl is a criminal and unwilling to listen to orders, so you have to motivate them through corporal punishment. As you progress, you find shock sticks, sticky goo, whips and other devices that you use on the girls in the form of touch-screen minigames. For no clear reason (aside from porn logic), corporal punishment involves forcing the girls to dress in sexy costumes and get into erotic poses.

The minigames all follow a basic pattern. "Temptations" appear on the screen, and you have to use a disciplinary tool to eliminate them. Whipping them involves holding the screen, shocking them involves pulling a switch, and so on. The first two levels use only the front touch-screen, but later levels also incorporate the rear touchpad. Every level begins with the girls surrounded by an obscuring pink fog, but by the end, they are presented fully, except for some mild censorship that somehow makes it look more obscene than if it were uncensored. Successfully disciplining a girl means she gains points. Earn enough, and the girl learns a new skill, with each device having its own set of associate skills. It takes about five or six plays of a minigame per girl to gain all of the skills for a particular device. Playing a minigame costs CM, and as the game progresses, the cost increases. Each minigame is simple, so it's easy to earn a perfect score on each unless the Vita's rear touchpad refuses to register properly.

If you do well enough, you earn a "Girl's Wish" mission, which involves doing something the girl wants to make her like the protagonist more. Most are very simple and involve going to a specific location in a dungeon and watching a cut scene. There are one or two that involve special boss fights or slightly more complex thought. Fulfilling Girl's Wish missions makes the character have reduced MP costs for their attacks or lower CM costs for further motivation. There are dialogue choices, but they don't seem to matter.

As you can tell by now, Criminal Girls is skeevy. The Vita is no stranger to fan service and scantily clad anime girls, but this title takes it above and beyond. It would be uncomfortable based on the idea of whipping a preteen-looking girl until she does what you say, but throw in the cosplay outfits and hyper-sexualized poses, and it's just excessive. The girls plead you to not motivate them, beg you to stop while it's happening, and sound ashamed and humiliated afterward, so it's difficult to overlook it. Games like Akiba's Trip and Senran Kagura are similar, but they're pretty lighthearted. Criminal Girls may have been trying to do the same thing, but it's difficult to be "lighthearted" when you're whipping someone against their will.

It might be possible to overlook the unsavory aspects of the game if it had a strong RPG system, but unfortunately it doesn't. There are no equippable items and little in the way of character customization beyond motivation. Characters have stats that go up as they level, but that is about the extent of it. There is one late-game element that involves a bit of customization, but it arrives so late in the game that it's practically meaningless. The only things that determine if you win or lose are your level and the skills you learn through motivation.

Combat is done in a turn-based style and involves a four-person party, but this doesn't function as expected. Since you're playing as the warden, all you can do is issue commands. Each of the four girls in your party takes an action per turn. Most girls act alone, but several have abilities that make one of the other girls in the party attack or defend alongside them. You have no real control over which actions the girls select, since they're context-sensitive and depend on the current state of combat. The only real control you have over the combat is the ability to use items once per round and the ability to swap a girl for one of your other party members once per round.

Unfortunately, the AI-guided combat doesn't work very well. The AI choices aren't smart enough to make the game work, and the problem gets worse as the game goes on. Certain basic decisions are done well enough. You'll always be able to guard with Ran if an enemy is doing a charge attack, but anything more complex than that leaves it up to chance. If I'm facing a fire enemy, I'll want to use ice attacks every round, but there's a random chance that I will. There are more reliable ways to force it, but even those don't always work. The problem gets worse as you gain more options. Choosing the same moves against the same enemies will not always trigger the same abilities.

There are some difficult bosses, but they're difficult for all the wrong reasons. Bosses hit hard and use plenty of status effects, but they're pretty easy to overcome if the combat AI plays nice. If I could reliably assume that my party members would use the attacks I wanted to use, every boss fight would be over quickly. Instead, I have to work with the selection of abilities that the game gives me. It feels like they attempted to balance strong moves by making them rarer or harder to activate, but the result is tedious. Buffs and debuffs are absurdly powerful, and status effects have huge hit rates, but it's a matter of getting your characters to actually use those moves.

The dungeon design is rather dull. The third dungeon forces players to gradually give up their party members. That would be cool if the game didn't force every choice onto you and turn it into an absurdly lengthy cut scene that ends with you being forced to redo the entire dungeon with a full party. There are side-quests, mostly the Girl's Wishes missions, but they're meaningless. They involve going back to a previous area and walking to an exclamation point or a heart on the map. There are a couple of puzzles, but mostly, you're walking from checkpoint to checkpoint. There are a few hidden treasure chests that contain extra attacks for the characters, but they mostly involve checking out dead ends.

Criminal Girls is a poor-looking game. The map sprites are simple and cute, but the combat sprites are poorly animated, super-deformed character drawings that have simple two-frame animations for attacks. There are barely any enemy types, as the bulk of enemies are recolors of the same foes you've fought before. The environments are boring and generic. The localization also uses an awful font that makes words blend together and renders apostrophes practically invisible. Most of the time and effort seems to have been put into the motivation scenes, but even those involve a lot of recycling with different costumes. To the game's credit, the soundtrack is reasonably good but not particularly great. There is no dub offered even though the game features full Japanese voice acting.

Criminal Girls: Invitation Only is a title with a very, very, very specific audience. RPG fans will find the combat tedious and the plot generic, and those looking for a dose of scantily clad anime girls will probably be turned off by the whipping and electrocution. The game doesn't have any really strong points, and it only sells itself on its BDSM minigames. It's difficult to imagine that Criminal Girls will find much of an audience. The Vita's library has more than its fair share of everything that Criminal Girls offers — without the creepy feeling that you're playing a Guantanamo Bay prison simulator.

Score: 4.0/10