You know how relationships are? It’s a work in progress with the trust, the dates, the unfortunate kidnapping — WAIT! KIDNAPPING?! Welcome to Girlfriend Rescue.
Here’s how the story of Girlfriend Rescue goes: You are Dan, you’re gonna meet your girlfriend Laura for lunch, and BAM! She gets kidnapped all of a sudden and it’s up to you and a couple of your friends to get her back. Very simple, yes? That’s cause it is.
The game’s story lacked a bit. It wasn’t very entertaining and they kept on censoring curse words for no reason (except at the end where the word “bullshit” wasn’t censored). I felt the game could have been proofread a bit more since I kept on finding comma splices everywhere (the curse of being an English major). I needed something to keep me going. Maybe some witty banter between characters who I had in my party.
The game is your simple RPG Maker game. You can have a party up to four people who have their own specific talents. You can find other party members throughout the game and can possibly get them to join your party (I can only assume this since I saw those optional characters but my party was already filled). The world is fairly small as there are only eight different places that serves as “worlds” as the game calls them.
Enemies in the game are visible on the map. This gives you the option of either walking into them, having them walk into you to trigger the battle, or just avoiding them all together. Each world has their own enemy count and if you fight all the enemies in that world, you get a bonus when you complete the world. I wasn’t able to fully complete World 7 since I missed about two or three enemies. Enemies can either be easy or just wreck you. It is in your best interest to fight every enemy to level up enough to them and the bosses, and each world has their own end boss. Leveling is really needed.
Status effects are numerous in this game. Some just stay in battle and go away when the battle is done like bleeding, dizzy, stunned, etc. Others, like poison, stay after battle and need to be healed with an item or a skill. But there is one status that just pops up randomly and angered me the most: Hunger. This status was the bane of my existence simply because food items are so hard to get. Get rid of this status effect…
Items can be bought or found throughout the worlds but healing items are rare. Shopkeepers are randomly found as guys in hoodies but I wouldn’t trust them too much… They might steal your kidney. Each shopkeeper sells different items and they only have so many of what they are selling. At first when I saw Pizza x17, I thought I was getting seventeen pizzas each time I bought one. No, the shopkeeper is only holding seventeen pizzas to sell… Food, which are your healing items, are rare. You can buy them or find them in random places but you will use them up quickly. This made playing the game hard when I needed a healing item but I had so few foods to use.
Spread out through the game are policemen. There are three types of policemen: healing, saving, and information. The information policeman will be holding a sign with lines and he will give you random notes of information pertaining to battles. I didn’t talk to that guy much since some of the stuff he told me seems kind of useless. The healing policeman heals your party for $60 and the saving policeman allows you to save since you can’t save from the menu. The game also auto saves but the saves are so few and far inbetween that it makes taking a break rough.
Oh yeah, my biggest peeve of this game. The controls. The controls are the arrow keys, the X button, and the Enter button. The arrow keys are used to move your party, the X brings up the menu and is also your cancel button, and the Enter button is to confirm your actions. Why is the confirm button is far away? Every other RPG Maker game I have played puts the confirm and cancel buttons right next to each other as X and Z. Why is it in this game that the Enter button has to be confirm? It disrupts my flow in battle and how I use the menu.
Overall, Girlfriend Rescue is a game that you can play if you need to waste about 5-6 hours. You can replay the game again with different party members and on different difficulty level. But note that the game lacks a sufficient amount of healing items and the controls might just irritate you.
Girlfriend Rescue
3/5
Lack of healing items, controls, too short of a game, lackluster story, and the title screen music reminds me too much Lady Gaga’s Just Dance. What… It does!