Pretty Girls Panic! Plus Review (PS5): Something For The Weekend?

Pretty Girls Panic! Plus has got to be one of the fastest reviews I’ve done. Why is that? A deadline? There’s not much to say or do? I was disgusted with the content and abandoned it immediately? None of those. I binged it all in one go (almost) and enjoyed my time with it.

Do note that there isn’t that much content once you’ve finished it, but it’s still worthy of replay value based on the challenges/leaderboards, and – I don’t know – perhaps you like ogling at the pretty girls of the title?

This isn’t my first venture into the ‘Panic’ universe, as I covered another title, Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic, on the PS4 earlier in the year. Pretty Girls Panic! Plus is almost exactly the same: you have to cut into the screen to reveal an illustrated woman underneath. To do this, you etch vertical and horizontal lines into the screen without being touched by enemies or their projectiles.

Like the other Panic title, the same strategy can be applied by sectioning enemies into more manageable areas and then eliminating them by closing off a section. You can take your time in the easy setting, but in Challenge and Arcade modes, the larger the area you cover and the faster you are, the better the score.

There are no attacks in the game, so you have to make the most of the available power-ups, such as freezing time or earning a well-deserved speed boost. It’s all very well avoiding enemies by not being touched yourself, but your trailing line of red is vulnerable to collisions, and with later enemies that shoot projectiles, you’ll get caught with your pants down. They were anyway, amirite?

Pretty Girls Panic! Plus is a relaxing game despite the risks, but you have to take them.

The bigger the area you cover – by default, a minimum of 80%, the faster you can move on to the next girl. What do you do with all these wins? Well, the more stages you beat, the more girls you can unlock and view in the extra modes, such as the gallery. Here, you can zoom in and out of an illustration in a range of poses and, well, I don’t know. 

As mentioned many a time, anime/manga girls don’t do anything for me, and the images for each stage could be anything from The Annual Stepladders of 1974 catalogue through to Chairs In Unconventional Poses. It doesn’t matter what the images are, for me, as the gameplay is fun and addictive. The challenge is just right, but I would have preferred it if the platinum wasn’t up for grabs so early on. There’s the incentive to go above and beyond that and try to climb the leaderboards, but I fear that there will be those who’ll bail on it by then.

That wouldn’t be fair, as Zoo Corporation and Eastasiasoft have done a good job. Perhaps there could have been a few more variations on power-ups in the game and some alternative challenges, but in fairness, I wouldn’t know what type of extras would be best suited. It seems there’s a market for the dressing up sections in the game, and if that floats your boat, go for it. I’m not one for でかぱい. 

The only thing I didn’t really like about the game was the excessive vocals. It was so frequent that my wife had to ‘have a word with me’ about the constant superlatives in Japanese (she’s Japanese, so I suppose it was the equivalent of an English speaker hearing someone playing a game that had constant outbursts of “Excellent!” every five seconds). When she saw what I was playing, well… 

Is Pretty Girls Panic! Plus any good? If you liked any of the other similar titles, you’d like this one, too, so yes. It’s pretty repetitive and not unreasonable to say you’ll ace it in a fairly short time, but it’s well worth a go if you like chilled out puzzle games. And there’s the bonus of anime girls if that’s your bag, baby. So yeah, get it if it’s piqued your interest!