Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!

Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!
Developer(s)	SNK Playmore
Publisher(s)	SNK Playmore
Platforms	Nintendo DS
Release date(s)
Genre(s)	Adventure, fighting
Mode(s)	Single Player

Doki Doki Majo Shinpan! (どきどき魔女神判!, lit. "Thump-Thump Witch Judgement", or more accurately translated as "Heart-Pounding Magical Investigation") is a video game developed by SNK Playmore for Nintendo DS. The player assumes the role of a junior high school student who is asked by an angel to locate a witch that has sneaked into his school. In order to find the witch, he must search the suspects' bodies for a "witch mark." The preferred method is by using touch (using the stylus to guide his hands). A sequel titled Doki Doki Majo Shinpan 2 Duo was released 31 July 2008, and a third game titled Doki Majo Plus was released on July 30, 2009.

Characters

Akuji Nishimura (Voiced by: Miku Ozaki)

He is a junior high student hard at work on finding witches.

He is proud to be a bad boy and forced to cooperate by the threat of being changed into a good boy.

Angel LuLu (Voiced by: Hiroko Sonoda)

Apprentice angel. She follows the arch-angel's instruction about Akuji, and helps with the witch search.

Suspects

Maho Akai

14 years old. She has long sugar-pink pigtails and very big breasts. She is in the cheerleading club. Ability: Energy balls.

Maria Abe

14 years old. She is a meganekko. The crystal-ball fortune-telling is her unique skill. Ability: Potions and barriers.

Renge Oda

13 years old. She likes retro video games. Her most prized possession is Athena on the Nintendo Entertainment System (with cassette tape), which is a clear reference to SNK. Ability: Teleportation and 'power sneeze'.

Yuuma Mochizuki

13 years old. He takes everything too serious and gets injured all the time. Ability: Wolf transformation.

Ayame Midoh

15 years old. She is the only daughter of a Shinto shrine priest and also its maiden priestess. Ability: Summoning familiar spirit and talisman.

Merry Watabiki

12 years old. She is always wearing a rabbit costume. Ability: Meteors and explosive replicas.

Eve Seiya

23 years old. The school nurse. Ability: Energy balls.

Noel Seiya

The archangel. Sister of Eve Seiya. Ability: Energy balls, summoning holy slugs and holy sword.

Other characters

Cawasen Chiyo

She is on the cheerleading club. She has light blue hair made up of 2 small balls.

Reverse-Panda

The color of this type of panda is quite opposite to a usual panda. It hides itself in 100 places throughout the game. The number obtained at the end of the game reveals more episodes in the "Extra Episodes" mode.

Release

Kotaku asked an SNK spokesperson if the game would be released in the US, and the response was "...this title is only for Japanese market. We do not have any plan for localize to the other versions.", despite the game originally having official sites in English, Chinese, and Korean. These were taken offline when the Japanese language site was rewritten to focus on the upcoming sequel game.

A manga adaptation was published in Akita Shoten's "Champion Red" starting in September 2007. It was illustrated by Ken Yagami.

Reception

According to online retailer Amazon.com, the game is the best selling pre-order game in Japan, and is more popular than The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. However the actual numbers show that the game met with minimal sales and as of 2009 has only sold 50,000 units. Although the game has not been confirmed for a North American release, it has been the subject of a number of webcomics. These include:

• A Penny Arcade comic in April 2007.
• Two Dueling Analogs comics, one in March 2008. and another in December 2008
• Used as an example of "child molestation" games in a list of bad types of video games and also mentioned to highlight the cultural differences between the west and Japan in the popular videogame reviews, Zero Punctuation.

The import review in NGamer (like its predecessor NGC Magazine, famous for comical reviews of particularly bad games), was so disturbed by the game that it abandoned its normal percentage scoring system and awarded it a 'score' of simply "NO" in every category. In a later issue (18) it "awarded" it "The Superman 64 Award For Worst Game (of 2007)" (for years, the magazine considered Superman 64 to be the worst game ever made), remarking "There are bad games - technically flawed and conceptually lazy - and then there are bad games. Evil bad. Doki Doki a.k.a The Meh Witch Touching Project, is one such title." The sequel, however, received 40%, an actual score.

External links

• Official site (Japanese)