[Review] Panty Party

Panty Party

Nintendo Switch

Reviewed by: Senpavo

Developed by: Animu Game

Published by: Cosen

Category: Arcade, Action, Shooter

Release Date: April 25, 2019

So…Panty Party. Expect a lot of panties, Japanese voices and overall weirdness. But it’s not as bad as you’d expect. It’s actually…good? Or, at least, a little bit more than decent.

Panty Party is a fast-paced arcade action game about flying panties that are ready to fight against one another. And, as the description of the game says, “NO hentai contents in this game! All you get is funny and stupid panties!”.
You take the role of Yurika, a high school girl, which one day, during her walk to school, is stopped by a flying, sentient pair of underwear named “Baka Panty”. Baka Panty tells our hero that she’s the “Warrior of Love”, a person that loves all kinds of panty, and needs to defeat the evil Panzi, that wants to turn everyone into a panty, forever. Being the warrior of love though, our hero can turn into one whenever she wants. But she’s not the only one since throughout her journey she’ll find more warriors that will help her.

The gameplay is quite simple. You shoot with X, Y, and A, you fly with B, avoid blasts from enemies with R and L and use your special move, passion, with ZL. Levels are contained areas where more panties, or occasionally bosses, will spawn. If you meet the right requirements, you will be able to unlock more characters, or should I say panties, to play with. Yes, that sounds terribly wrong. Surprisingly, each panty plays differently since they have different abilities, like upgraded defence, quicker reload times and different weapons, like katanas, laser beams or bullets. You will find Sailor Panty, Meteor Panty, Stripped Panty…if you can think of it, it will be there. And yes, if you know me, you’d know that my personal favourite is Sailor Panty.

The game is dived in 19 chapters, and before and after each battle there will be visual novel-like dialogues between characters. Those are actually pretty well done: the artworks are nice enough (even if they are not masterpieces), they are not long, fully voice-acted (in Japanese) and characters will change their facial expression to express their emotions. Battles aren’t very long too as they usually are about 3 to 5 minutes long.

To add to that, there are different modes as well: story mode, arcade mode and multiplayer, but don’t get your hopes up. Arcade Mode simply removed all the storyline and lets you play through the levels but with different enemies, and with multiplayer mode you can play with up to 3 more friends on the same screen, but there’s no online play.

The music is nice too, especially the intro music that is catchy as hell and I find myself humming the “Panty Party Pa-Pa-Panty Party” tone even as I am writing this review down. But this is where things start to go down.

The music is repetitive. The game features a very small soundtrack that, as I said, gets repetitive rather quickly. And, like the music, gameplay starts to get repetitive quick, since even if you’ll change the panties, the way you play will stay more or less the same. Graphics aren’t very nice too, they feel like a remastered version of a PlayStation 2 game, and, when in handheld mode, the game lags a bit, especially with levels with a lot of…trees. The humour in the cutscenes feels generic, (even if I did get a few laughs here and there)such as people being a bit way too obsessed with panties or butts.
Furthermore, the game isn’t very long, as it’s around 2 hours. Arcade mode feels barren, and the fact that there’s no online multiplayer hurts the game greatly. As the cherry on top, you can’t even customize your panties, and that would have been a no-brainer to me for a game like this one.

In conclusion, Panty Party is more surprising than anything and will provide a few hours of fun, but not much more because of its many flaws that hinder the experience a lot.

3/5