Sometimes, we all need a little help. That aid might come from friends, from family, or from those stories that inspire us and drive us forward in life. And sometimes, it comes in the form of six-inch-tall anime girls from space.
If that last scenario doesn’t hold much interest to you, then I don’t know if we can be friends anymore. If it does, then Gun Gun Pixies, the newest game from developer Compile Heart and publisher PQube, has a lot of good things going for it. The third-person shooter/platformer brings a lot of style and fun to the party, and, if you’re able to overlook some of the shortcomings and issues in it, then it’s a solid addition to your lewd anime shooting game collection.
From the moment the story is introduced, it’s pretty easy to see where this is going. You play as a pair of soldiers from the planet Pandemo; Kame-pon, the serious one with a laser focus on the mission, and Bee-tan, the lecherous, girl-obsessed one that always gets sent on these sorts of missions for comedic reasons. The two are tasked with studying the women of Earth to understand the secret to developing interpersonal relationships, which their home world has sadly forgotten. Standing no bigger than the average anime figurine (and occasionally posing as one), the two easily infiltrate the college dorm room of three young Japanese women, living among them without being seen or noticed.
Though their mission is originally observational in nature, the two quickly get involved in helping their unwitting hosts to navigate some of the obstacles and difficulties that await them on the road to adulthood. Sometimes these issues are surprisingly deep and troubling, such as helping one character recognize the dangers of her obsessive exercise and dieting regime and convincing her roommate to intervene before any lasting damage is done. I mean, you do it by shooting various parts of her body with “Happy Bullets” while she does yoga in her underwear, but still. The issues might not be the deepest or the most subtly tackled, but its quite nice to see something more complex in my oppai games.
This, combined with the charming character designs, the thumping, upbeat soundtrack, and some clever and amusing dialogue at places, help Gun Gun Pixies reach higher levels than I expected before I picked it up.
Unfortunately, it’s the gameplay that lets the side down at times. During Gun Gun Pixies’s missions, you are sent into one of the girls’ rooms as either Bee-tan or Kame-pon, investigating the area and coaxing information from their giantess hosts to help understand human behavior. This is done by shooting them with the aforementioned Happy Bullets until they let slip some important piece of information. While avoiding the waves of negative emotions coming from the women and avoiding being seen, heard, or stepped on, you can climb various pieces of furniture and explore different areas.
The difficulty comes from a handful of small moments that can cause frustration. The unruly camera is prone to getting stuck on furniture and restricting your view in ways that make it difficult to progress. Jumping takes a lot of getting used to, particularly when climbing up to higher ledges. In a sign that I am, in fact, old now and bad at video games, it took me a solid ten minutes to climb up a ladder to the top bunk because I just kept falling to the floor. It’s tough to tell if this is a problem with the Switch port or if the Vita version had similar problems when it was released in 2017, but they caused me a bit of frustration as I played through the game.
These issues, combined with the occasional typo that cropped up in the dialogue, were my biggest issues with the game and certainly wasn’t enough to prevent me from recommending it. Gun Gun Pixies is a fun, if imperfect, shooter with a lot of charm and plenty of fanservice. If you’re looking for a game with a bit of humor and a lot of busty anime girls to charm, it is a solid addition to your collection. So long as the camera and platforming don’t slow you down too much.
