Tokyo Tattoo Girls (PC) review "Perfecting the art of doing (almost) nothing."

Tokyo Tattoo Girls is the must have game for the current year, if you’ve been keeping up with the popular talking points presented by some of the lesser video gaming web sites out there. There’s been a lot of chatter about having the option to skip large segments of gameplay, so you can just enjoy the game without any of that pesky interactivity upon which the medium is firmly based. Cuphead’s ableist and racist because some guy can’t get past the tutorial; SOMA might be a standout horror game, but wouldn’t it be so much better if all those scary monsters were taken out and you could just stroll through it? For developers, the natural response to this brave new narrative must be to release games that just play themselves and remove player input completely.

Enter Tokyo Tattoo Girls, which is little more than an idle game gussied up in its Sunday best. It presents itself as a strategy game, but doesn’t want to burden you, the poor player, with anything as strenuous as actual strategy. Perfect, right? Now you can just sit back and enjoy this completely uninvolving thing and pretend really hard that television and movies haven’t existed for the last hundred years to much more competently scratch that particular itch. Except, the reality is that this sort of endeavor isn’t a very good idea; the thought of having little to do while a video game games itself isn’t actually embraced by anyone of worth. This, unfortunately, turns Tokyo Tattoo Girls into a vapid, shallow chore.

With little to actually do, you can’t even count on losing yourself in the plot, such as it is. Tokyo is in ruins, survived only by a series of anime girl tropes who are given magical powers thanks to their collection of magical tattoos. Except, these tattoos doesn’t actually seem to have any magical powers to speak of; none of the cute, inked girls display any remarkable characteristics besides their deep-rooted sense of cliché. For example, one really likes trains; another is really into computers and one of the others has a theatre addiction. Tokyo is split into 23 segments, each ruled by one of these unmagical magic girls, and it’s on you to pick an equally insipid protagonist to conquer all the territories and reunite the capital.



You do this by selecting an area to wage war on. Then you wait. Invasions take place automatically. Declaring war on neighbouring areas happens automatically. Winning an area over happens automatically. The actions you can undertake require using occasional special commands, investing in new tattoos and clicking through the uninteresting exchanges between bosses, just before the automatic boss battle you can’t lose starts up and you go back to just watching.

The supposed strategy aspect of the game comes in how you spend your protection money, which grows gradually from the areas either under your control or under siege. Or, in an attempt to give you something else to do occasionally, you can click briefcases full of money when they sometimes appear on the map for a quick cash boost. Special commands will allow you actions such as a quick recruiting burst (recruiting is usually done automatically in the background) or the chance to lower a section’s threat level and lessen the chance of a turf war.

Each area has a standing army of sorts, comprised of punks and clanswomen. The idea is to reduce that to zero, which then triggers a confrontation with the mob boss. But it’s very poorly explained how this is done; the tutorial skims over the invading premise, and it’s only through a mixture of trial and error and keyboard mashing that I managed to find that one of the keys (Spoiler: it’s 4. This review is now more useful than any in-game prompt.) allows you to bring up information for each individual area, letting you know how many converts you have inside and the remaining number of the enemy force.



Sometimes an area will not just roll over and let you invade it and start a turf war, which is signified by a siren popping up on that section of the map. If your forces are hardy enough, you can click on that affected area and start a street fight that’s completely automated, takes place entirely off-screen and uses no logical reason that I can ascertain to determine who the winner might be. I’ve undertaken numerous wars where the size of my army dwarfs that of the opposition five or six to one. But I’ve still lost. And those losses eat into your honour.

Reach zero honour and it’s game over. Considering overwhelming forces routinely lose to casual gatherings, honour can certainly plummet quickly. You often gain some back with the use of a special command and a fistful of cash, but the best way forward is to completely drain an area of soldiers and then beat up its boss. Pitting two girls loaded with magic-giving tattoos in an epic battle may sound exciting, and it should be. But each battle plays out exactly the same way. There’s a one-fits-all fight animation of two people brawling inside a cloud of dust and then you win. No matter what. The only choice you have is to pick one of three dialogue options, the best of which grants bonus resources and unlocks a picture of the girl you’re about to beat down to view in your gallery.

Tokyo Tattoo Girls feels more and more like an exercise in futility. If you win, it’s hard to feel victorious because your input in the undertaking has been so minimal. Likewise, losing big chunks of honour and sliding towards a loss feels unstoppable because you’ve so few options to correct the situation. You just plug more and more money into tattoos that increase your influence in certain areas and hope the RNG is kind to you. Completing campaigns in various difficulties gives you bonus items which grant you pre-emptive stat boosts and, really, this is the most effective way to clear the harder stages. That’s a lot of sitting around briefly clicking on damningly static screens. Even the most weaboo of you must be able to find better ways to spend your time.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (November 25, 2017) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.