Crammed with scantily clad manga schoolgirls and dubbed with an embarrassingly loud chorus of shrieks and moans, this is the last game you’d want anyone to see or hear you playing. Not safe for work, not safe for the bus and definitely not safe for one of our editors, who was so disturbed by the original that he refused to go anywhere near this equally unsettling sequel.
In Shinpan Duo you’re once again an investigator into witchly schoolgirl phenomena. The majority of the game is an incredibly tedious point ’n’ click adventure where you talk to the girls and rummage through their belongings in search of paranormal paraphernalia. Stick with it and you get a battle scene where you smack balls of lightning at the suspect. Once she’s down, there’s a close-up view where you rub parts of her body to get her pulse racing. After a few minutes of this (now with extra ‘jiggle’ animations) the mark of the witch reveals itself on her person, and you move onto the next case, hopefully feeling slightly guilty.
It’s a one-handed game that’s the dodgiest there’s ever been on a Nintendo system. How this got certified is a mystery, but there’s clearly money to be made from this sort of joyless anime soft porn. Only in Japan, thank goodness.
Oct 13, 2008