Hentai Girl Division is a Shmup mixed with some RPG elements. We play as a nameless general of the Romia people who will soon find their planet engulfed in war. Under our command are five female pilots, each containing their own stats and personalities to fuel this story. Our first choice to make is to choose whether we want to play under either the Arcade or Hardcore difficulty. The only difference is that you get a single life to get through a stage on Hardcore, while in Arcade, you can respawn back into the action an unlimited amount of times. Let me give you a tip. Choose Arcade mode. This title may seem promising, but it will quickly let you down, and there is no changing your decision later on.
Going through the first level, everything seems decent enough. Your ship auto fires and movement is handled with your mouse. Each character also contains a shielding ability to briefly become invulnerable when things get too chaotic to handle. As you level a girl up, you can equip up to two other abilities, be it healing yourself or stopping time to give you an edge. Even the story, in the beginning, has a hint that it may be kind of interesting. That is until you hit the second stage, and the enemies start taking too many hits to be fun. By the third level, gameplay becomes a complete joke. Your paltry firepower does next to nothing against the bullet spongy enemies. These are not even the bosses I am talking about, these are your standard grunt enemies that you simply watch fly off after some time as they shrug off your projectiles.
The first stage is exclusive to a single character, so that means you then have to grind out in the bullet spongy second level for the other four. Sure, you can technically get past a stage without doing so, but you will need the patience of a saint as you slowly whittle down a boss’s health and go by the rest of the stage without destroying much of anything due to your low damage. It only gets worse in later levels. Gods help you if you chose Hardcore and have to get through all of it in one go. After trying to grind out all five of the characters, I just eventually couldn’t be bothered to dodge and keep staring at the barely moving enemy health bar anymore. I simply got on my phone to do literally anything else and mashed a random key to respawn when I heard that I’ve died as to keep auto-firing.
Every time you replay a level, you will have to hear all the dialogue again. They continuously interrupt the gameplay, and while you can skip it, they occur multiple times throughout. This gets old very fast when replaying the same stage over. To add insult to injury, after you level up enough to get past the third stage within a human lifetime, it turns out the story is entirely pointless. It goes absolutely nowhere and is poorly written. All of the voice acting is in English, and hearing them trying to make some sense of their poorly translated script is amusing. The problem is the plot itself. It takes itself way too seriously, and despite all the talking, it’s all empty air. Nothing ever happens. At one point, it compares itself to a Saturday morning cartoon once they let a villain get away for the dozenth time. No. Even Saturday mornings cartoons have more depth and contain some charm to keep their perpetually unchanging cycle worth watching.
Your stats are divided into Health, Attack, and Fire-rate. If not on hardcore mode, you should focus on the latter two. Each girl can go up to level five by gaining experience, either via completing a level or solely by talking to you in between missions. As bad as all the dialogue is, that alone makes it very worthwhile to go out of your way and talk with them whenever you get the chance. It gives you the same XP as you would get from finishing a stage. Leveling up is not your primary way of getting stronger, however. You also have elemental badges that are specific to each girl. Gathering enough of these will let you convert them into a stat point, and the more you do so, the higher the amount of badges you’ll need. You get them every time you defeat a “new” boss, yet what elemental type they drop is random, meaning it may drop for a girl you don’t need to make stronger at the moment. Buying them with stars fallen off of defeated enemies is the intended method, and the only thing you can use the currency for.
There are 16 levels overall, and it won’t be long at all before you see the same bosses recycled time & time again. Yep, even with this title extending its playtime with unwarranted grinding for stats, the stages are also mostly filler. I’m going to stop myself short from further bashing and say, yes, I’m aware it costs only two dollars. Hentai Girl Division just doesn’t hand out an iota of fun outside of the first level. Shmups live and die primarily by two things. Their controls and their balance. I have zero issues with how the game handles, it functions just fine. It’s balancing, on the other hand, is horrid. You either spend half of your adult life waiting for a boss’s health meter to go down or you grind enough to blow through the entire stage in no time. There is no in-between. You are either severely under or overpowered. Your skill, memorization of a level, or luck is all but irrelevant here.
When you get past the campaign, you can also head on over to the challenges. It is an interesting idea, featuring imposed objectives such as completing the stage in 25 seconds or collecting a certain amount of stars throughout. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the grind. There is no way you’ll pull them off out of the gate. You’ll need to upgrade and hope not to do so enough to make it an ironically challenge-less ordeal. The worst part of all of this is that it has no reason to be this terrible an experience. You have interesting enough projectile patterns to keep you on your toes, and the escalation of more enemies could have been awesome, if not for all of them being damage sponges. Not having balance in this type of game actively undermines all of its other positive aspects. What is supposed to be a long epic boss fight turns into a boring slog. What is supposed to be progression is a double-edged sword as you effortlessly pile-drive everything in your path.
Right, okay you salty hipster, now tell us about the hentai some are probably thinking by this point. Well, that has been patched out and will now require a free DLC to uncensor it. Make sure to download it, or there will be no lewd content to be found. Once you download that DLC, you will have the option of undressing each character on the main menu. To what extent depends on her level. At a certain point you can get her nude, but once you reach the max level of five, you unlock an animated, multi-phase sex scene with her. The good art really shines through here. As does the voice acting, though for different reasons. These have got to be some of the most unintentionally funny hentai scenes I’ve seen in a while. Thanks to the awkward translation and voice actors trying their damnedest to be sexy regardless, it is just comedic gold at times.
Once you unlock their sex scenes, you can experience them again at any time via the Gallery mode, where you can also view their sprites while there. It has a decent amount of content, especially given the low price of the game. With that said, back to being a Grinch. The sheer soul decaying boredom it takes to get to that point is not worth it. There is no lack of lewd shmups out there, and this is by far the worst I’ve ever played. Not due to any technical issues or the like. It has just been constructed in such a way that can best be described as a house with no foundation. Sure it has all the staples of what makes a Shmup, yet it lacks the core needed to be anything more than eye candy. Hentai Girl Division may have a chuckle-worthy name, but if you actually drop down the money to play it, that will be all the fun you’ll have before booting it up.
This title has at some point been renamed Super Girl Division.
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