Post by: Halbred on November 11, 2025, 04:21:26 PM
I miss Senran Kagura.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/73252/full-metal-schoolgirl-switch-2-eshop-review
I was excited when Jordan tossed me this review because I’d just trudged through a slogging roguelite (Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree) and was looking for something with a little more energy, a little more action, and a little more fanservice. What I was not necessarily looking for was another roguelite. However, as we know, 75% of all new games are roguelites now, so maybe it was inevitable. What I learned, after hours of slogging through this repetitious game, is that I really miss Senran Kagura.
Okay then, tell me about this Full Metal Schoolgirl game.
Oh hello, I didn’t see you there.
In the (near?) future, there’s a corporation called Meternal Jobz that has replaced their flesh-and-blood workforce with robots, then worked their autonomous workers to the bone, er, circuit boards. You choose one of two robotic schoolgirls who are out for revenge against Meternal Jobs and its CEO because he killed their father by overworking him.
Wait, they’re robots?
Yup.
How do they have a father?
The game actually does a great job of explaining that.
Really?
No.
You choose one of these robotic teenagers, Ryoko or Akemi, who are essentially the same character. You start on the ground floor of corporate HQ, killing your way up 100 floors to the CEO’s office. You’ll do this by wielding a variety of melee attacks and guns, drones, super attacks, shields, and various abilities learned after defeating bosses (not like in a cool way, like Mega Man). And when you eventually die, you’ll be sent all the way back to the bottom and use whatever loot your cybernetic corpse was carrying to upgrade yourself and try again.
Like any other roguelite!
Yes! The main problem is that Full Metal Schoolgirl lacks any kind of secret sauce whatsoever. Oh, they try some things: your chosen robot schoolgirl is livestreaming her performance and her “viewers” will give you challenges when you enter some combat areas, like “beat five enemies with melee attacks” or “don’t use a battery” and if you succeed–which usually isn’t hard–you’ll get bonus loot. Sometimes, though, the challenge won’t really match the scope of the combat area. It’s hard to "defeat all the enemies in 40 seconds" if it’s a huge room with lots of grunts and two minibosses, but that’s the secret downside to randomly-generated level design, ain't it?
Each time you clear a room, you’ll be offered a new piece of equipment. More often than not, it’s a lateral move or a downgrade. You’ll quickly learn which weapon and gun types you prefer, at which point you’ll become much choosier about swapping out parts and do it far less frequently.
But are there a lot of options?
Yes and no. A lot of it doesn’t seem terribly well-suited to the type of musou-calibur slaughter you’ll be engaged in for 90% of combat encounters. Let’s say there’s a sword, a chainsaw, and a giant axe. The sword is fast, but weak. The chainsaw is mid-range in every way. The giant axe is very powerful but slow-moving. And then there are variations on these three types in terms of stats. I just stuck with chainsaw type melee weapons because they were balanced.
How is the combat?
As bog-standard as mindless character action gets. You can shoot things from a distance, but once you get tired of manually aiming or run out of ammo (which refills on a cooldown), you'll start smacking enemies with melee attacks. You’ve also got your drone which, as in Nier: Automata, will attack once once and then starts a cooldown. Drones are also swappable. You’ll also quickly find a shield which is useful but only for avoiding enemy fire as it has no effect on melee attacks. Shields can also be swapped out.
So run into a room filled with robots, kill them all, repeat, ad nauseum.
Correct. Sometimes you’ll find Mod chips, which slightly remix your stats. Slightly more energy recharge for slightly less movement speed, that kind of thing. Nothing game-changing. We’re not talking about Boons in Hades here. And then you'll have to pay attention to your energy meter, because if you run out of energy, you can't do anything but run around for a few seconds.
And eventually you’ll die?
Yes, and then you can visit your creepy upgrade doctor, also a woman (and a robot?) who will let you buy upgrades for your body. The game positions her as super creepy, because she's virtually naked and straps yo' girl to a bed with chains while you're selecting from a menu of upgrades. It's weird! Anyway, all sorts of things can be upgraded like health, attack damage, battery (potion) reserves, what parts you start with, how much of your loot you actually keep when you die…
Wait, WHAT?
Oh yeah, you have to sink money into a line item that lets you keep more of the loot you find.
Come on, man. Are there multiple kinds of currencies to keep track of?
Yes, but you don’t really control tit. All currency is represented by little blue cubes, but once you get back to the body shop, you’ll find that it consists of one main currency and several minor currencies which are obviously much rarer. And you may have the “main” currency to buy an upgrade, but not the “minor” currency that it also requires. This honestly drove me crazy. It’s not like Hades or TMNT or even Towa in that you will see what the reward for beating a room is before entering it.
So it’s repetitive, shallow fights from room to room. How are the bosses?
Bosses are more interesting, but mostly they’re huge damage sponges with telegraphed attacks that you’ll quickly learn to avoid. However, boss fights tend to rely heavily on your guns because attacking at close range is dangerous. They go on awhile and then you’ll (usually) get a new ability for defeating them, but that ability must be purchased and upgraded to get any use out of it. This ain’t Metroid.
Sounds frustrating.
I guess I’d say this: once you’ve made it through a couple bosses, you’ve seen literally every trick Full Metal Schoolgirls throws at you. And if you’re not sold by then, you’re not missing anything by walking away. One thing the game could have done to improve the monotony is to give you permanent keys to higher floors. Once you beat a boss, you’re given an elevator key to the next set of floors, allowing you to bypass the first 10, 20, 30, floors (etc.). However, it is one-time-use, and you’ll need to defeat the boss of that bank of floors again on a future run to get it back.
Nope. Not cool.
I agree, because going up ten floors just to get to a boss takes a good amount of time. It would not be enjoyable or practical to ascend all 100 floors in a single playthrough, which means failure at higher floors is more punishing.
Why does this game make you miss Senran Kagura?
Senran Kagura’s gameplay operates in this weirdly perfect space where it’s musou but you never have to do very much of it, and you’re usually rewarded with a boss fight. The missions are short, the boss fights are pretty fun (once you get the hang of a particular girl’s attack patterns), and then it’s on to the next stage. In theory, you could take Full Metal Schoolgirl and give it a Senran-like level progression, but you’d wind up with a much shorter game. And I don’t know, maybe I’m just old, but I’d prefer a shorter game to 100 floors of rote nonsense.
How do Ryoko and Akemi hold up as Senran protagonists?
They certainly don’t have personalities. There are no story sequences. I had to look their names up online while writing this review because they're just never referred to by their names in the game. They are robots, plain and simple.
Anything else worth bringing up?
It’s just not very fun. One underappreciated aspect of Hades, TMNT, and even The Binding of Isaac is that any given playthrough is pretty quick. You will succeed or fail in Hades in about 45 minutes to an hour. But if you succeed, you've beaten the game. And then you try again. It takes 30-40 minutes to get through one tenth of the floors in Full Metal Schoolgirl if you're not skipping fights (which, to the fair, you can do, but then you miss out on zenni). And if you’re saving your elevator key or just don’t have a spare, it’s a grind, man. It’s a repetitious, secret sauce-free grind without a story to motivate you or quests to work towards.
I guess I'll go back to Silksong.
The weird thing about Silksong is that it is also a merciless grind but for entirely different reasons that you will read about someday when I beat the damn thing and write my review of it. Look forward to that, readers!
