Valentine's Special: Xynnia and Rayokarna Play Galgun ぎゃる☆がん

Xynnia: Hey guys, Xynnia and Rayokarna here with a special joint blog post!

Rayokarna: Yo yo.

Xynnia: Obviously we're putting it up a bit late, but officially this is a Valentine's Day special. On Valentine's Day we did what all normal couples do and sat down to play a game about girls having orgasms. That's right - none other than the Japanese rail shooter Galgun.

Rayo has been going on about this game for some time now, but I've never quite got my head around what it's all about. Well, today you can follow along with my confused attempts to make sense of the game as Rayokarna plays through it. The fact that it we're playing it in Japanese as there's no localised English version bodes especially well for my ability to understand what is going on. Are you ready?

Xynnia: We open on a cutscene of a pink-haired girl - who I'm told is a Cupid-in-training - taking aim at an unsuspecting young man with what looks like a crossbow of sorts. 

Xynnia: But in a totally unforeseen turn of events, she loses control of the ... laser crossbow ... and fires a ridiculous amount of arrows into the air, all of which land squarely on her target. So she can still aim perfectly even after losing control, or maybe the arrows are just locked on to the man's heat signature. 

Xynnia: Ohhhh dear. Now, you might be wondering why, if she's such a liability, this trainee Cupid is allowed out on her own unsupervised to make mistakes that could potentially fuck up someone's entire love life. If so, you would be right to wonder that. Unfortunately, we don't get to find out what the heck her supervisor was off doing unless we play the game in - what did you say it was called, Rayo?

Rayokarna: Doki-Doki Carnival Mode. To be fair, that's when the main story goes completely out of the window.

Xynnia: Yes, that. And don't worry, you'll find out all about what Doki-Doki mode is very shortly.

Xynnia: Trainee Cupid comes down to apologise in such a whiny, annoying voice that you would rather she hadn't said anything to begin with. Also, no amount of apologies will really make up for what she tells you: as a result of her idiot mistake, if you don't find your "true love" within twenty-four hours, you will be alone forever.

How does that even work?!

Well anyway, since our main character clearly has nothing pressing to do that day like attend the school he was walking towards, he is set loose into the grounds of the nearby all-girls' school, which statistically I guess gives him the best chance of finding his destined other half. Unless of course he's gay, which I must say would be a hilarious plot twist: every single woman within a five-mile radius is uncontrollably attracted to him, and he's not even into girls.

Oh right, I forgot to mention that part: the other side-effect of our hero's Arrow Overkill is that he emits a pheromone which makes him literally irresistible to the ladies. So to counteract that, he's given a pheromone gun with which to fend them off. Nothing like fighting fire with fire...?

Rayokarna: Sounds like a perfect solution to be honest.

Xynnia: Because this is a game, you don't actually have to go through the agonising process of trying to figure out which woman amongst the crazed multitudes is the Only One For You, and instead make your choice from four predetermined Objects of Affection.

Xynnia: The love interest that Rayokarna picked is a blonde girl with bunny ears growing organically out of her head, which says something about his tastes that I don't really want to analyse.

Rayokarna: Her route is the easiest to play!

Xynnia: As soon as our hero sets foot on the grounds of the school, he is spontaneously rushed by wave upon wave of giddy schoolgirls who need to be beaten back with pheromone-induced orgasms.

Xynnia: So what exactly are we trying to defend ourselves against here? I mean, what happens if the girls actually reach you?
Rayokarna: They'll confess their love to you, and that does damage.
Xynnia: To your masculinity?
Rayokarna: It hurts your chances with the one you love.
Xynnia: She must be bad at handling competition.
... Wait, so she'll be upset if any of the other girls confess their love to you, but she's fine with you giving them orgasms left, right and centre? That's like saying, "You can have sex with as many girls as you want, but don't you DARE engage in pillow-talk!"
Rayokarna: Yeah, basically.

Xynnia: And this is Doki-Doki mode. Just in case you felt like the regular method of giving out orgasms in this game was too impersonal, Doki-Doki mode lets you get right up close and personal with one girl at a time, effectively using different parts of their body for pheromone target practice until you tip them over the edge.
Rayokarna: It's funny, because now I can understand what she's saying: "Please, not my ass!"
Xynnia: ... I can't even comment on that, but I will say that the arrow on the left-hand side is extremely phallic.

Xynnia: First boss battle. Why are there fish-cat-things swimming around?
Rayokarna: They're like the guardians of her affections or something like that.

Xynnia: It might seem fair enough to use the pheromone gun on girls if you really need to defend yourself against them, but here's the thing: you get points for every girl you shoot, which means you also shoot a lot of girls who are just standing around minding their own business. They're not even a threat! They're just innocently going about their day, and suddenly BAM, CRIPPLING ORGASM. What if they were in the middle of something important?!

Also, I missed the screencap of it, but later in the game there was a moment where two girls were standing talking to each other, and Rayo shot one of them from a balcony. To the other girl, it must have looked like her friend came, out of the blue, in the middle of an ordinary conversation.

Xynnia: What is she asking you?
Rayokarna: I... don't know.
Xynnia: This seems like the beginning of a strong relationship.

Xynnia: At first I thought that Doki-Doki mode was something that appeared randomly with girls who were particularly tricky to please, but actually you can activate it whenever you like. You see, a Doki-Doki orgasm is so powerful that it makes every girl around the target orgasm by proxy. Yes, an orgasm so intense that you come just from being near it. So it works rather like grenades in House of the Dead 4 in that you can disable multiple targets at once. There's another bonus, though - it restores your health. That means that in sexual terms, it gives out mass orgasms and restores the guy's libido into the bargain so that he's instantly ready to go again.

...Where can I get one of those?

Xynnia: And in this scene, the love interest is standing in a room that's full of the fallen bodies of her classmates and fellow students, who are lying around a guy that doesn't even go to her school... and she notices nothing amiss.

Xynnia: The challenge for this boss battle seems pretty simple: you shoot the 'BOO's to turn them into 'YEAH's so that your love interest receives only positive feedback from the crowd. Things become more interesting, though, when you remember that you're using a pheromone gun. Also, if you accidentally shoot the 'YEAH's, they will turn into 'BOO's. In other words: the pheromone gun induces mood swings.

Xynnia: It's interesting to note that the game comes equipped with a 'panic mode' which looks like this, to be activated just in case someone you don't want to see you giving orgasms to short-skirted girls on a screen walks in and sees you giving orgasms to short-skirted girls on a screen.

Also, because this is a school, it means that there are teachers running around confessing their love to you as well as students. I couldn't really tell them apart from the students, but they're slightly taller and some also wear glasses.

Rayokarna: "When they said 'staff training', I didn't realise they meant THIS!"

Xynnia: The final boss battle is another one which involves shooting things as your love interest performs on stage, but you have to shoot nonsense letters instead of BOOs and YEAHs. Apparently pleasing the crowd isn't so important in this performance, because your love interest is very happy just to stop playing in the middle of a song and randomly throw herself off the stage, whereupon you have to shoot her some more.

Raykorna: It's an attack, but I cancel it before she makes it, and it gives me the chance to shoot her weak points.

Xynnia: Her spirit cat-fish is quite unhappy whenever you do this.

Xynnia: Finally, you have one last Doki-Doki challenge with your love interest in which you prove to her that the orgasms you gave to all those other girls were meaningless, literally knocking her over backwards with the most powerful climax she's ever experienced.

After that, what girl can do anything except pledge her undying love to a man?

Xynnia: Trainee Cupid gets all teary and sentimental over the happy ending like she didn't come within half an inch of completely ruining the guy's life forever. You do not get to take credit for anything, girly.

So, that was Galgun! If I had to sum it up in one word, I would probably say: nonsensical. But things don't have to make sense to be fun, and Galgun is a lot of fun. Even as ridiculous and sometimes cringe-worthy as it is, it's a fun play. There are bound to be people who take issue with a concept that revolves around women being dealt orgasms en masse by a man who doesn't even need to lay a finger on them, but those people probably aren't who Galgun was made for, so they would be better off just going and playing a different game. It doesn't present itself as a serious game, and so to take it seriously is really to miss the point.

Rayokarna: Considering what Galgun is and how it's been received, it's actually a very solid game. The mechanics are consistent, the story generally fits the narrative and it's quite balanced. The game rewards you for having higher precision but doesn't cripple you for playing it casually. Challenge mode in this game is still really hard and the challenges are varied to an extent. It was my 2012 game of the year and is probably the best Rail Shooter I've played outside of House of the Dead 4.

Now to finish Doki-Doki Carnival.