Rose & Camellia Collection (Switch) review "Slapping fun for the ambitious woman in all of us."

Rose & Camellia Collection collects several mobile games you’ve probably never heard of, adds some presentational flourishes, and brings them to Switch with loads of style but very little substance. It’s fun while it lasts, but it doesn’t last long. There. That’s the review.

What? You could do with a little more information? In that case, I’d better start by telling you about Reiko.

The lovely Reiko is a woman introduced in the first game (here called a “scenario”). Recently widowed, she has been treated like dog dung by her “noble” sisters-in-law, who would very much like to see her leave the family estate now that their eldest brother is out of the picture. However, Reiko isn’t about to go quietly into that good night. She plans to stick around and assert her dominance, which she does by engaging in that oldest of family traditions: the slap fight.



In Rose & Camellia Collection, you will see quirky story sequences that set up a reason to slap the snot out of one woman or another. That’s true when you’re Reiko, and it’s true in the other scenarios where you assume the role of some other member of the household. There’s some clever parody sprinkled throughout, and the writers even try their hand at some light satire while poking fun at the upper class, but mostly none of the material is meant to be taken all that seriously.

Slap fights take place as a series of two rounds, stuck on repeat until one of the fighters loses all of her flowers. A flower—roses for you and camellias for your opponent—is lost when your opponent lands a solid slap. You also get the opportunity to launch into an extended series of slaps to eliminate a flower or two at once, if conditions are met. Not every slap you land counts. Weak ones don’t do anything to the meter. An outright miss also opens the slapper up to reprisal. So, it’s a delicate thing.

In broad terms, there’s not a lot more to the fights than what I’ve already described. The different ladies have their own ways of hiding when they are about to launch a slap. You just have to look for tells, such as a glint in their eye, or a shake of the hand. However, there are feints. Because the timing can get fairly tight, you have to treat these seriously. And if you immediately dodge when you see a tell, you might get smacked across the jaw. Timing differs by opponent and move. So, there’s some complexity there. Just not a lot of it.



If the game were a visual dud, the slap fights wouldn’t be especially engaging. However, the characters are animated quite well. As she takes abuse, your opponent starts to look like she has lost an argument with your palms. Which she has. One character even has a mask that breaks and falls off her face, like Vega in Street Fighter II.

Mostly, Rose & Camellia Collection reminds me of a shallower version of Punch-Out!, that old NES classic that introduced me to Mike Tyson before his personal life took a dark turn and an embarrassed Nintendo pulled him out of the game. There’s the trash talk for one thing, and every foe has a pattern you can exploit once you master the timing.

That timing doesn’t just come down to a button press, either, because you play with the Joycons. You hold a shoulder button during a defensive position, or the A button when on the attack, and then you swing to either dodge or slap. The controls are tighter than a lot of motion-based fare that I’ve played in the past, and there’s not a lot of precision required beyond picking the right time to make your move.



Helpfully, you can engage in an immediate rematch if things go poorly. This will reset the score you’ve put together in that scenario. However, the game doesn’t seem to keep a record of the score. That makes the score rather superfluous, in my opinion.

Navigation through the menus gets a bit spotty, but there are on-screen indicators to let you know which buttons do what in a particular moment. A bonus campaign, featuring characters from the La-Mulana franchise, is only unlocked if you check a box in the Settings menu, which felt a bit dumb to me. It’s a fun little bit of extra content, so I recommend running through it if you do snag the game.

In the end, I recommend picking up Rose & Camellia Collection if you want something unique for the Switch. However, I suggest that you wait and grab it while it’s on sale, as I did. Originally released with an MSRP of $19.99 USD, the game is a pretty good deal at around half that price. Five scenarios and a versus mode will keep experienced gamers busy for maybe a couple of enjoyable hours, but there’s not much to do after that. I’m glad I played the game and I’m glad it exists, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over my failure to snag the physical edition. The digital slaps I enjoyed were physical enough, all on their own…

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Staff review by Jason Venter (December 31, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.