The entirety of Deep Crimson is about exploring new and inventive ways to look at monstrously animated breasts. During the game’s visual-novel narrative, boobs are repeatedly falling out of loose shirts. In combat, clothing disintegrates until girls, either the opposition or the player-character, are reduced to fighting in poorly fitted underwear. If you lose or win, you receive the option to view different angles of your scantily clad-heroine in accordance with the 3DS’ tilt sensors. The impetus behind whatever you’re doing is always trying to see every available surface of jiggle-friendly skin (except for the nipple).
This is uncomfortable. Partly because these girls aren’t presented as being over 18, but mostly because I have no idea why Deep Crimson is a videogame. The Internet’s proclivity for harboring an insane amount of pornography is well noted, which would seemingly rule out the demand for M-Rated interactive adventures where you’re trying to rip an army of girl’s clothes off. Maybe it’s agency? Maybe since it’s 100% illegal to publically rip children’s (or adult’s!) clothes off, it’s vicariously awesome to do it in a videogame. There could be a world of damaged voyeurism at play that makes this action attractive.
I recognize the surrogate appeal of both titillation and violence, but I don’t fundamentally understand crossing the streams in videogame form. Maybe this is an unfair point of view. Maybe (definitely) I’m not the intended audience. Perhaps some people feel this way about violent videogames, and can’t fathom the appeal of wanting to murder a thousand people in the latest Call of Duty sequel. Maybe it is problematic to want to bash a guy’s face with a brick in The Last of Us, or repeatedly shove knives into foreheads in Assassin’s Creed. I like a few of those games, and I’m not particularly sensitive toward visceral bloodlust. What’s different with Deep Crimson, and does it matter?
Every aspect of Deep Crimson feels compromised to in order to display maximum available lady skin. Objectively the game seems to be centered on third-person combat—Deep Crimson closely subscribes the beat ’em up school of arcade brawling—but every action is an excuse to remove clothing. Troupes of ninja school girls compose the hordes of basic fodder enemies and their clothes fly off almost instantly. Their actual purpose appears to be priming your meters before an inevitable end-of-level showdown with a boss, but their clothing has to come off before their inevitable demise.
Each level concludes with a boss fight, typically against another girl from a different academy. In these fights, it’s important burn your gauges and perform special moves that either rip your opponent’s top off, tear their pants off, or an all-around move that reduces all of their clothing to underwear. I think this weakens the boss too, but I honestly can’t tell because health bars seem to replenish in different colors forever. Of course, should they land a series of hits against you, your clothes start coming off too. By the end of the match, ideally, you’re both brawling in rags masquerading as under garments.
There isn’t much to Deep Crimson’s brand of combat. Light attacks and heavy attacks are assigned to two buttons, and can be spread into predefined combos easily visible on the bottom screen. Each girl wields a different weapon, which makes for a bit of variety in timing attacks and chaining them together, but every fight of importance felt like it boiled down to the same thing. I’d get stun-locked in the middle of a combo, then I’d perform an aerial-heavy attack, stomp them out of their combo, and unload special moves or mash buttons. This worked on every humanoid boss, and larger creatures (usually end-of-chapter bosses) were different game basic pattern recognition.
Deep Crimson gets some mileage out of the dash button, but there doesn’t appear to be much else to facilitate strategy. Attacking and canceling only gets you so far, and it all feels subservient to the almighty heavy-aerials. You’re mashing, and you’re beating the snot out of everything in your path without discrimination. Deep Crimson is almost a Musou game, but its aging hardware can’t pull of the throngs of opposition necessary to declare its intentions properly. Instead, it all feels like a bunch of busy work before a boss fight.
Extraneous depth is also largely absent. A roaming menu in-between missions is a neat way to relax, speak with everyone, and try on different costumes, but it doesn’t seem to have much of a function in the proper game. Each girl can be leveled-up individually, but all it appears to unlock are slight variations on combos, along with expected boosts to health, attack, and defense. Yoma’s Nest is Deep Crimson’s stab at a detached survival mode, but it’s subject to the same paralyzing pratfalls as the base game. When it comes to playing Deep Crimson, there just isn’t much to get excited about.
Most everything in Deep Crimson feels constructed with a deliberate lack of grace and care. Environments are incredibly simple and, other than getting lost in the camera’s vague sentience, do not make a great case for the entering the third dimension. Arenas and other assets are also subject to a heavy amount of recycling, like an entire series of missions that took place in the same places against the same enemies, but tinted everything red. Likewise, enabling 3D results in the framerate taking a significant hit, discouraging use of the hardware’s most attractive feature. Cooperative play is actually available if you have a friend with the game, but in these instances Deep Crimson assigns the AI to the other girl and lets you switch between them freely.
While I’m obviously at odds with the presentation, I at least have to recognize how committed Tamsoft is to their craft. Almost every joke, piece of dialogue, and bit of subtext refers directly to either breasts or suggestions of sex. There’s a particular sequence where a certain academy of girls has to shove a cylinder-thing between their breasts to activate their Shinobi powers, and the one (one) totally flat-chested girl, 15-year-old Mirai, can’t do this and hits herself in the chin with the cylinder. My respect for the game had emaciated at that point, but it was silly moment of levity in an otherwise dumb experience.
It’s worth mentioning that you can freely switch off stripping and jiggling. I don’t know why you would—you can make an argument for this being a passable third-person brawler given the dearth of the genre on the 3DS, but it’s still a simple and hastily-assembled game. The obsession with bouncing breasts is Deep Crimson’s thing. It’s the enduring focus. I think it’s irritating, creepy, and endemic of the more unfortunate side of Japanese game creation, but even I recognize it’s probably the reason you punched the Deep Crimson’s ticket. Still, the option to turn it all off is available should you be able to reconcile a different reason to enjoy this game.
If this is Tamsoft’s thing now—and after last July’s Onechanbara Z2: Chaos it certainly feels that way—cool. Great. Good on them for finding a niche and nailing it without the slightest bit of shame. Other than the part where some of these girls are underage, it’s probably harmless and there has to be an audience that earnestly enjoys what Deep Crimson has to offer.
I’ll keeping thinking every decision that lead to Deep Crimson’s creation was fueled by the compulsion of adding wobbly breasts to every means of interaction. And that every additional design decision was compromised by the same line of thought. This leaves Deep Crimson as an unambitious and weak game with an overzealous appreciation for making boobs move in different ways. It does nothing else.
