Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? is a strategy game with some RPG mixed in where you, as the God of Destruction, need to help Badman, the overlord, help to save his underground empire.Genre: Role-Playing
Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software
Developer: Ride On
Release Date: July 1, 2009
Before we go any further, let's listen to that little voice of Robin in our heads. You know you want to. Now, wonder who at Atlus decided this would be a name to trademark. Imagine that the title fits the actual game just enough to be even more hilarious. Just three minutes convinced me that Atlus has invested wisely in a game that truly captures its name like few other games on market. I mean, a lot do better and a lot do worse, but this one, right in the middle and seemingly intentionally so? That's a rarity.
The basic premise of the game casts you as a god of destruction, called upon by an evil overlord, who is upset with all the heroes that come to wreck his house. Your job, is to dig up dungeons that will be successfully best invading heroes ... with your only interaction being to destroy the dirt.
The game operates on a 2D board, vaguely reminiscent of Dig Dug's fields in a strange way. Simply move a cursor around, and destroy dirt to make tunnels. (You are a God of Destruction, after all). Nutrient-filled tiles you cut into will spawn various different monsters to best those heroes.
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman: Why Did I do to Deserve This operates on a 2-D board and is vaguely reminiscent of Dig Dug's fields in a strange way. You move a cursor around, and destroy dirt to make tunnels. (You are a god of destruction, after all). Nutrient-filled tiles you cut will spawn various different monsters to best those heroes.
One rather critical problem, though, is that those heroes can't feed your entire monstrous army. You need to make the dungeon have fairly complete food chains by getting different monsters into the place. For example, the worm-like "omnoms" and their evolution "omnom flies" eat slimes regularly, so you want plenty of slimes for lizard men to eat. The results, while fairly simple in theory, end up becoming very complex in practice, especially when that one hero cuts a major hole in part of the chain. The entire food chain consists of generic role-playing game monsters. More than anything, though, the gameplay ends up reminding me of games like SimEarth, where you're basically destroying your way into creating an ecosystem to best the heroes with, which ends up being rather strangely poetic.
To help keep things funny, the graphics and sounds are, in their entirety, done in a 16-bit style, even on the box art. It's hard to take creatures very seriously when they're eating each other while you're working with such simple graphics and keeping the game from producing existential themes. Instead, it's simply very humorous and creative. Silly names, color variations, and other RPG tropes are put into use either straight, or as a parody, as well.
Hopefully, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman: Why Did I do to Deserve This?
will turn out to have enough play to last on more than its name, for what I saw was quite interesting. Then again, that name alone might be enough to carry it.More articles about What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord?!