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Punishment Punch Girl: Japan’s latest ‘weird’ game is surprisingly good

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One of Japan’s hottest new mobile games over the past couple of weeks has been Punishment Punch Girl, a (strange) new fighter game from e-Dragon Power and Craft & Meister. I understand that well-known game designer Noritaka Funamizu (C&M), of Street Fighter II and Monster Hunter fame, worked on this title. The premise of the game, as noted already by a few Western publications, is an unusual one. The hero is a high school girl who is tasked with beating up perverts (often very strangely dressed ones) who lurk on the train. Looking beyond the unusual concept, Punch Girl is a really fun game. I’ve been playing it over the past few days, but I confess, it’s not something I really want to play when anyone is looking! In addition to the overall style of Punch Girl, the fun part of the gameplay is mastering the technique of, well, kicking ass. You have to keep your enemy airborne long enough to inflict the required amount of hits, and to do that you’ll need variety of directional attacks. Building a repertoire of attacks (they can be added in exchange for your collected experience points) really hooks you into the game. You…

One of Japan’s hottest new mobile games over the past couple of weeks has been Punishment Punch Girl, a (strange) new fighter game from e-Dragon Power and Craft & Meister. I understand that well-known game designer Noritaka Funamizu (C&M), of Street Fighter II and Monster Hunter fame, worked on this title.

The premise of the game, as noted already by a few Western publications, is an unusual one. The hero is a high school girl who is tasked with beating up perverts (often very strangely dressed ones) who lurk on the train. Looking beyond the unusual concept, Punch Girl is a really fun game. I’ve been playing it over the past few days, but I confess, it’s not something I really want to play when anyone is looking!

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In addition to the overall style of Punch Girl, the fun part of the gameplay is mastering the technique of, well, kicking ass. You have to keep your enemy airborne long enough to inflict the required amount of hits, and to do that you’ll need variety of directional attacks. Building a repertoire of attacks (they can be added in exchange for your collected experience points) really hooks you into the game. You can check out our video demo above to see how this works.

Putting cute girl characters in the role of a fighter always seems to prove popular in various media (see Lollipop Chainsaw, Machine Girl [1]), not surprisingly among male audiences. So far it is doing pretty good here in Japan, becoming the second ranked iOS app overall back on October 29, having initially launched back on October 16. Currently it is ranked 22nd overall, although it was still in the top ten just earlier today.

On one hand, I hope the game gets published in English as well because I think it could really do well with Western audiences. But at the same time, I think the sense of humor behind the game might just be passed off as Japan being weird, rather than Japan being creative and funny.

Overall I think it is a pretty interesting game. It’s very enjoyable, and hard to put down once you get going. If you’d like to give it a try, you can get it as a free download over on the Japanese App Store.

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  1. Or maybe it’s just chainsaws? What if Evil Dead 2 was remade with a school girl? Hmmm…  ↩