Pretty Soldier Wars A.D. 2048 Review
or "How the Japanese Made Me Do Terrible Things"
by Section8

Don't ask me how I discovered this game, and don't ask me what compelled me to forgo spending of bandwidth on a rip in favour of forking out actual money on this unholy rapechild of a game. Did I seriously believe there was twenty-odd dollars worth of humour value in it that couldn't be garnered from previews on the internets? Or was there a more sinister force at work? Whatever the case, Pretty Soldier Wars AD 2048 is fairly simple to describe. It's basically Final Fantasy Tactics... with tentacle rape. At last.

Now, I'm going to make admission that fills me with conflicted and confused emotions. Until this game descended upon my fragile psyche, I was a "H-Game" virgin, and in some ways I'm glad it was my first. In other ways I'm left feeling a little dirty and used, not unlike Harry Belafonte would have felt when "Mister Taliban" "tallied" his "banana". But unlike Harry, I'm in no hurry to drink from that particular well again. Put simply, this game makes me feel dirty. It makes me feel bad for the postal workers who had to handle it, and just didn't turn out to be the ironic laugh riot I'd anticipated for many months.

Here's how it works. You're appointed as the commander of a crack team of bio-engineered combat androids, all female, and you're called upon run them through a series of tactical missions against alien invaders called the "Yoju". All of whom are endowed with phallic tentacles and rely on human women to breed, which obviously makes an anatomically correct (at least in a hentai sense, which is to say not at all correct) facsimile of a human female the most logical way to fight this incursion.

Cue rather bland isometric tactical game. Think X-Com, but with no Geoscape, no procedurally generated missions, no equipping your troops, no fog of war, no drama, no tactics, and fill that gaping void with tentacles. But here's the kicker - the tentacle rape scenes in this game are about as rare as actual occurrences of tentacle rape in the real world. Not exactly common, but sadly, not as rare as you'd think. Basically in each mission there's one or two unique "boss" critters, and when you first attack it, it gives you some nonsense about sighting a victim and initiating rescue sequence, before giving you a faceload of rape, complete with audio. I wonder what went through the minds of the women sitting in an audio booth somewhere giving voice to these characters. Or maybe they're just stock sound effects from the thousands of other tentacle rape games that are but a torrent, or a shameful credit card transaction away.

Anyway, it doesn't take long to figure out that the best way to win at the game is to stand all your characters behind a bottleneck and dog each enemy as they come through, and that's likely to be enough to get you through all but the last couple of missions, where a new strategy becomes apparent. Run your near-invincible swordswoman around - she tends to have a 5 to 10 percent chance of being hit as long as she stays on the move - smacking tentacle beasts in the chops until they die. And before long, you've completed the tiny handful of missions and unlocked all the rape scenes in the frontend menu's "Extras" screen.

That's it, you ask? Pretty much. There is also a "dating" portion of the game, but it's hardly worth mentioning. Between missions, the android girls will ask you if you want to go out with them, and if you say yes, two panels later, you're "fucking" them - though the scenes are curiously devoid of cock. That's right. Strange, pendulous and prehensile tentacles forcibly penetrating women is a-okay, consensual sex is not. Oh those Russians Japanese.