[Review] Strip Battle Days

Strip Battle Days is a short rock-paper-scissors strip nukige that lets you strip, grope, and H your favorite characters from the School Days universe.

Since JAST is taking a while with Shiny Days, I went ahead and played through Strip Battle Days (Getchu) in Japanese.  It's a rock-paper-scissors strip game that was bundled with the original release of Shiny Days.

Strip Battle Days is essentially a nukige with a little gameplay thrown in for spice.  You pick a partner, then following a short introduction you face off against a series of characters from the School Days universe in rock-paper-scissors matches.  Each victory causes a piece of clothing to be stripped from the opponent.  Win again once she's stripped naked and you get a groping scene.  The groping scene has several stages based on an arousal bar.  At first "touching" is the only action available, but kissing and genital rubbing unlock as the arousal bar fills.  Max out the arousal bar quickly by targeting the right actions at the right locations and you'll get a short H-scene with the character.

Opponent actions during the rock-paper-scissors matches aren't completely random, and tend to follow a pattern which is somewhat predictable based on their personality.  It was easy to guess that Setsuna would start with rock, for example, while Kotonoha would start with paper.  Some characters have more layers of clothing, including your partner, which essentially represents their HP.  You lose if your partner's HP runs out, but there's infinite continues so you can just keep trying til you win, and since the patterns are predictable it's easy to win even if your max HP is much lower than your opponent's.

The protagonist in this game is completely silent.  All you learn about him is that he's male and he's not Makoto.  He's literally and figuratively invisible.

Unlike the School Days series, the scenes aren't animated.  They're still images with mouth movement, although the variety of CG helps to make up for it.  Most of the characters are voiced, but a few of the minor characters aren't.

Though Strip Battle Days uses the KiriKiri engine, only a fraction of the text hooks correctly.  Nonetheless, the language was easy enough that I was able to read it without difficulty unassisted.  The final match against high schooler Kokoro reveals some backstory from her route in Shiny Days, including events that happen subsequently.  Ironically this is the text that gave me trouble, and I wasn't able to fully understand it (though I suppose if I'd manually looked up key words I could've managed).

Overall Strip Battle Days was an enjoyable little diversion that amused me for a couple hours.  You'll get the most out of it if you've played School Days, Cross Days, and Shiny Days, though if you've only played School Days you'll still recognize many of the characters.  There's some minor spoilers for Shiny Days included, notably Kokoro's route.  The 2000 yen asking price is pretty steep though.  At best, I'd say the game's worth $5 or maybe $10 if you're a huge fan of the series.

Whether JAST USA could release this in English is an open question.  The loli content is pretty extreme: there's three loli characters and a fairly brutal rape scene thrown in for good measure.  However, it's pretty light on text, so it can be enjoyed to some extent even if you don't know any Japanese.

If you're interested in this game, make sure you check out JAST's English release of School Days HQ and Shiny Days, which unlike this title are fully animated.