High School Girl Zombie

[Paul]

SGZH School Girl/Zombie Hunter (SG/ZH スクールガール/ゾンビハンター) is a shooting video game. The game was released in Japan on 12 January 2017.[1] It has been described as a "Zombie Panic Shooting Action" ("ゾンビパニックシューティングアクション") title and it is considered to be within the Onechanbara video game series: the setting is, in fact, the same universe. However, unlike the Onechanbara games, the game is set in a private institute attacked by zombies while five young girl students have to fight for their survival.[2]

SG/ZH does a great job of constantly mixing up the action, both by regularly unleashing new types of zombies and challenging players with surprising obstacles. For example, there are key zombies that must be killed to unlock pathways, huge zombie-summoning gates to destroy, even hidden zombie birds that players can track down to unlock new hair colors and rocket launchers. It took me about ten hours to get through the entire campaign, and the pace never flagged, nor did I ever feel like I was playing the same level over and over. The total map size is quite modest, but the devs have done a stellar job of building levels out of logically restricted slices of the grounds, creating the impression that the school is a good deal larger than it actually is.

Anime Girls Highschool of Dead is a zombie wave shooter. You play as one of eight lovely anime women, rendered in realistic 3D, so they look odd. You start with out, and every 5 waves, you unlock another, who is the same model just with different clothes and hair, though they have different stats. The high school you are in looks like a standard anime high school, except all the rooms are completely devoid of furniture. You have a decent mix of weaponry, starting with a pistol, to a shotgun, assault rifle, machine gun and a grenade launcher. They are found at random in weapon boxes. Ammo is found at random in ammo boxes. There are also health boxes, which start to vanish as the waves progress.

In most missions, you can choose to play as one of five school girls, and outfit each one with weapons and clothes. Each girl has her own special skill. One can heal others without having to use med kits, another can detect hidden items, etc. One unique (and kind of creepy) thing you can do in the missions is make your girls undress themselves to their undies, which serves the purpose of having zombie attacks directed towards them. The game has a low budget feel to it and kind of reminds me of another Japanese zombie game series called Onechanbara (I wonder if the two games are related). Aside from the story missions, there are some online co-op missions for up to five players, and you can also play dress up with your school girls at any time. The game is certainly not high quality, and on the opposite end of series like Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead. But if you just want a simple zombie game to play in short bursts, you might want to check this one out anyway.

And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it.

Zombies are characters who can be spawned in the two graves or the abandoned Island in the middle of the sea by the player and will try to eat anybody in their path. They can infect others and can be a tactic of farming money. When they die, they drop money (sometimes their head too). You can double it by selling the dead zombie to Fumiko Nakamatu when she is in the school shop for 1$.

There are two variants of main Zombies in game. One is the Male Zombie, they are slow and their detecting takes a little time. The second variant is the Zombie Girl, they are faster than male zombies and their detecting is pretty fast too. These can get out of hand quickly as they can infect others faster than Males.

The female zombie will wear a ripped school uniform which the uniform is black and red, and the skirt is dark blue. The zombies will have neon light yellowish eyes. Their hair will be short, and the color is pale white, with some blood there as well. Their skin will be pale, with blood around their skin. They wear dark brown school shoes.

The male zombie will wear a formal suit, with blue glasses. If the player were to decapitate the male zombie and zoom in on it, it reveals that the male zombie has white eyes. Their skin will be pale while, with a little blood. They will wear normal formal black shoes. The zombies will have short black hair which is plain.

Readers can attest that I can be a sucker for fan-service-filled video games, despite having the opposite opinion regarding the anime genre. Maybe it's their tongue-in-cheek way of presenting it, but titles like Gal*Gun and Senran Kagura do a great job with mixing up pervy humor with solid gameplay. One of the first titles that got my attention that did that was the Wii title Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers, which had a good mix of fun motion controls and campy horror storytelling.

After the success of that franchise, developers Tamsoft have decided that it was time to expand on this world. Presenting another perspective as the main Onechanbara series happens from afar, School Girl/Zombie Hunter places five high schoolers smack dab in the midst of an undead uprising. After witnessing a main zombie controlling the others, protagonist Sayuri Akiba and her fellow classmates Risa, Mayaya, Enami, and Rei must team up to battle hoards of Walkers and other strange creatures in order to survive. As you progress, new weapons and costumes can be discovered to make the fight to live just a tad bit more easier to reach.

As you walk through the haunted grounds of Kirisaku High School, the undead with often pop up out of nowhere right in front of you or -- in an often cheap ploy -- somewhere from behind to give you a bit of a jump scare. As you try to survive a timed tower defense, get to a certain destination, or try to kill a certain number of creatures, you'll be judged via a grade concerning your aim, survival skills, and various other tidbits. The more zombies you have to deal with, the harder it'll be to mow them down, and not because of their AI system.

First off, I will say that School Girl/Zombie Hunter knows exactly what kind of game it is. Yes, it can be a tad perverted at times, but it tries its best to have fun with that situation. Hell, there's even a button that has you throw off your clothes to distract the zombies, having it so you can shoot and slash away in your undies for the rest of the level! (There have been a few movies out there with guys in their tighty-whities killing zombies, so fair is fair!) Naturally, with Tamsoft helming this like they do their other titles, there's a certain amount of silliness to enjoy while you bear witness to it.

Unfortunately, to engulf yourself with its b-movie story and goofier elements, you have to actually play the game. This is where the truth is hard to swallow, as I initially had fun for the first couple hours playing School Girl/Zombie Hunter. However it got to a point where enemies started really glitching out on me, which also caused the third-person angle to somehow switch to a messy first-person when too many were on screen at once. Because of this, I had a hard time hitting enemies, even when attempting to use the melee attack button that usually wipes out five of them in one hit.

Repeating levels over and over again was what I found myself having to do with gritted teeth and vein-popping angst, with almost the same thing killing me halfway through the chapter. It got frustrating, causing me to rage-quit countless times because the game kept messing with my visual perception when too many zombies were on the screen at once. Even switching to a sniper scope made it difficult to deal with the giant tank-like zombies that take more than a dozen shots to fully take down. To be blunt, while the story is a fun romp, the gameplay itself takes a nosedive with its enjoyability.

It's a shame, as past Onechanbara games were a lot better in the technical department. I even loved how they added a Monster Hunter-style to their boss battles, with your characters hacking and slashing away until the beasts fell dead with a triumphant thud. Here in School Girl/Zombie Hunter, practically everything feels broken, as if nothing that made those games fun was implemented into this spinoff. It stumbles on its path more than walks a straight line, resulting in a shooter that feels like an impossible chore than a good time.

Even its online multiplayer is riddled with bad bugs. During my time playing, many of the zombies and creatures I was supposed to kill were all glitchy, some of which were stuck in walls, floors, and even tables & benches that were scattered in some of the levels. And yet, even when it was like this, these zombies still found a way to knock me down out of the blue, resulting in probably the most frustrating time I've ever had playing an online co-op mode.

As much as I love the Onechanbara series, School Girl/Zombie Hunter is a very flawed spinoff. Buggy enemies, poor aim, and a viewpoint that breaks all too often keep the humorous and personality-filled shooter from being worthy of a must-play status. In laymen's terms: not even the likes of Kagura and Saaya would be able to do anything to save School Girl/Zombie Hunter from its own demise.

Contributing Editor at ESH since 2008, and host of the No Borders No Race podcast show, which began as a humble college radio program in 2006. My passion for discovering new bands, developers, and Japanese pop culture is what drives me to give you my all in every article published and every podcast recorded.

Long ago, there were two series of games born from the the Simple 2000 line of games made in Japan. One was Earth Defense Force, and the other was Onechanbara. While made by different development teams, they both were about killing hordes of enemies. Earth Defense Force focused on shooting giant alien monstrosities with firearms, and Onechanbara focused on killing zombies with melee attacks, where you needed to 'reload' your sword by cleaning the blood off, or face having your weapon get stuck, leaving you vulnerable. Now with several Onechanbara games under its belt, Tamsoft has decided to make another zombie killing game, while focusing on the firearm action seen in Earth Defense Force. The end result -- School Girl/Zombie Hunter -- is quite the hoot.

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