I guess, given the success of Azur Lane, Girls und Panzer, KanColle and whatever else, it would be inevitable that at some point someone saw warplanes and thought “yeah, you sexy thing, what if you were an anime girl?” And so we have Kamikaze Lassplanes, a visual novel/SHMUP combination by people who have a far too vivid imagination when looking at warbirds.
Though Kamikaze Lassplanes is slavishly indebted to all the aforementioned anime and game properties, it is worth noting that the development team for the game hail from Poland, not Japan. It’s by no means a problem, and the developers are clearly heavily invested in anime and anime-adjacent culture, it’s just worth noting that there is a subtly different edge to the aesthetics, storytelling, and all the rest. Anyone who has played western-written visual novels and anime aesthetics games knows what those differences are like.
One thing that is not different to the work that comes out of the homeland with this particular “genre” is the fanservice. Holy hand grenade in a handbasket does Kamikaze Lassplanes pile on the fanservice thick. Leotards and corsets galore. Obligatory hot springs scene. Bikinis. Innuendo. Incredible body stats. Kamikaze Lassplanes was designed by people who love ecchi, and they’ve done an objectively good job of it. Whether that’s for you or not is, of course, another question, but if you do enjoy it and kind of miss the days where games had this material just for the sheer pervy joy of it, then this game has you covered.
So to rewind a bit. In Kamikaze Lassplanes, you play as a pilot of a military aircraft, in a steampunk universe. You’ve been assigned to a giant floating fortress, and then partnered with a Lassplane: A woman that is also a fighter jet. You need to, uh, control her and, uh, press her buttons so you can fight back against some threat or another.
The visual novel side of things plays out like a typical romance visual novel where a guy is chasing after a harem of skirts. Except in this particular case there are just the two women/warplanes to chase after. Both get plenty of screentime and have distinct personalities, so chances are that you’ll be drawn to one of them. Or just their assets. Did I say this game has a lot of fan service in it.
As a visual novel, Kamikaze Lassplanes has it all. Eight possible endings based on choices you make as you play round out a pretty lengthy offering. Sure the narrative itself is pretty mundane, but it bubbles along well enough to get its point across. What really makes the game distinctive and quite possibly unique is its side-scrolling SHUMP features. I’ve played plenty of visual novels that blend JRPG or tactics mechanics, but this might be the first time I’ve had some R-Type mixed in with my VN.
This was an interesting challenge that the developers set themselves, for several reasons. Firstly, SHMUPs are famous for offering big, twitch energy action, while visual novels are more quiet and sedate. Asking people to jump from one to another is a big ask, thematically and in terms of general pacing. Secondly, SHMUPs are well known for being very difficult and I’m not sure people pick up a visual novel because they want to be put in a mood where they want to throw their console at the wall. Kamikaze Lassplanes’ SHMUP sections don’t hold back, either, especially with the bosses.
Both sides of this particular coin are developed well for their particular genres. The visual novel section is paced well and generally well-written, though it needed a good editor to come through to polish it for typos and grammatical issues. The SHMUP section has all the bullet hell dodging, power-ups, and enemy patterns to remember. I just personally don’t think these two genres are compatible with one another. JRPGs and tactics RPGs make sense as “gameplay partners” to VNs because those, too, are not action-based systems. Asking players to bounce between challenging action combat and sedate reading is, unfortunately, going to exclude large numbers of the potential audience that don’t care for one or the other of these very contrasting genres. Especially when the game has a habit of just throwing you into a SHMUP section with very little warning.
Still, it’s hard to criticise the game when, if you do fall into the middle bit of the Venn diagram (“Likes hardcore SHMUP” and “Likes fanservicey VN”) then the developers have basically delivered everything you could hope for. A 10-hour story mode, with a full arcade mode as a bonus. Gorgeous artwork, featuring two gorgeous women, ecchi and all. Even when you look past the women (if you can), the effort that has gone into the art, be that VN or action sequences, pushes well beyond what you’d expect from an indie project. This is a good, honest project, in other words, and the developers were fully committed to delivering to their vision.
I’m not the world’s biggest SHMUP fan, and I’m not great at the genre, so I struggled to get through Kamikaze Lassplanes. However, the entertaining visual novel side, along with some of the finest, most brazen fan service we’ve seen this side of Senran Kagura, kept me invested. This has been an interesting experiment. We probably won’t see another game quite like this for quite some time.
