Technical Information

Developer: overgame studio
Publisher: overgame studio
Release Date: September 4, 2019

This game began development in 1998 by Yoshiro Takashi and his team for the Dreamcast. However, as the console was discontinued, the project was aborted. In 2017, Yosuke Takashi (Yoshiro’s son) decided to finish his father’s project together with overGame Studio.

Gaijin Charenji 1: Kiss or Kill is a super bizarre shmup in which you have the power to either kill or kiss the enemies that appear.
The story is about you and the game’s developer, and the ending will depend on your karma.

Final Thoughts – Analyzing the Game as a Whole

Graphics and UI

The entire game has a visual style that makes it look like it’s full of bugs and glitches. It has a kind of vaporwave aura, several screens with pixel art, and mixes some sections with FMV. In addition, the game uses scanline and CRT television filters (and you don’t have the option to remove them).
Each stage of the game has a specific style, and at various moments you’ll see, in the top-right corner, a video as if it were showing the game’s developer through a camera.

At certain moments, screen visibility is pretty bad. This was the only aesthetic aspect of the game that bothered me.

Because it has a visual style that constantly makes you think the game is bugged and glitching, everything feels kind of confusing. When pausing the game or reaching the game over screen, the game instructs the player on which button to press to return to the game or to the main menu.

In the main menu, the color of the menu options is very hard to read. I don’t know if this was intentional, but I really didn’t like it. It’s important for this kind of thing to be easy for the player to understand, and in this case it could have been solved simply by using a slightly lighter font color.

When I started playing, I didn’t understand which button I needed to press to select the character, so I just played with whatever was set as the default (to be honest, I couldn’t figure out if it’s possible to unlock other characters, because when I started a new game, this screen didn’t appear again).

Soundtrack and Sound Effects

The music changes depending on the action you choose: kisses or shots.
The kissing music is very cute, catchy, and danceable, while the shooting music is aggressive.
There is no other music besides these two tracks.

The sound effects match the game’s aesthetic well, they’re very electronic-sounding.

Gameplay

When starting a new game, a tutorial is shown explaining the game’s commands. They are quite simple: in addition to directional movement, you can shoot (or kiss, but this “kiss” is also a type of shot), speed up, and slow down time.

At no point does the game explain what is actually happening. In some sections, you see that the game’s developer is interacting with you, suggesting that with each stage you complete, he creates another one to mess with you (or simply to entertain himself with you… I don’t know, it wasn’t very clear).

Each stage follows its own pattern, and none of them make any sense. To finish them, you need to touch a white bar. You can die an infinite number of times in a stage, the game over only happens when time runs out. You’ll be taken back to the initial screen and can continue the adventure from the stage where you left off, but with your score reset.

At certain moments, some strange behaviors occurred, and I honestly can’t say whether they were intentional or bugs. One example is that when you pause the game, if the music ends while the game is paused, it won’t start playing again until you either advance to the next stage or die.
It also happened that I paused the game and the video that appears in the corner of the screen kept playing (and that was pretty creepy! hahaha).

Using kisses or shots will accumulate karma, and this will change the game’s ending. However, the ending itself explains nothing.
After finishing the game, the “survival” mode is unlocked, in which your goal is to accumulate points by staying alive for as many seconds as possible.

Replayability and Game Retention

After finishing the game with a certain karma, you’ll feel encouraged to see what the ending is like with a different karma.
But nothing in the game itself makes sense… nothing is explained, and that ended up dampening my experience a bit.

If you get tired of story mode, you can kill some time playing survival mode.