Screenshots will never be enough for this one - you gotta see it to believe it.
Stretch Panic was released by Treasure in 2001, but even after being out for so long, it would be easy to understand why most people have never heard of it, let alone played it. In the game, you play as Linda, the youngest of thirteen sisters. From what I could gather from the opening scenes, Linda is sort of a Cinderella like character, and is forced to buy gifts for her vain sisters. On her way home with a group of presents, she sees a strange delivery truck drop a box off on her front porch. Drawn in by their curiosity, the sisters open the box, which then releases winged demons that take over each sister individually. These demons are apparently demons of vanity, sent to punish the sisters for their shallow and conceited ways. Before she can escape, Linda is trapped as well, but instead of being possessed, she is transported to an alternate dimension and left to rescue her sisters from their various demonic forms.
Once you gain control, you find yourself in a circular hall with portraits of the 12 demons you must exorcize hanging above individual doors. Along with your siblings' rooms, there are also various EX realms, which allow you to earn points that unlock said rooms.
Since you have no points at the beginning of the game, you will be spending a lot of time in these EX worlds. To earn points you must use the game's only real weapon, Linda's scarf (which came to life after your journey to this new dimension), to literally stretch your enemies until they explode. There is a solitary enemy type in these EX rooms, a swimsuit clad vixen who apparently doesn't understand the phrase "too much of a good thing". These are the aforementioned women who have breasts that are each twice the size of their entire body. Since breasts of this size in the real world would obviously be fake, they are as well in the game. Since they are fake, they serve as a padding for your enemies, so the only way to defeat them is to stretch on any part of the body that isn't their breasts, a task that is easier said than done.
Luckily, your scarf comes with a lock-on feature that makes aiming at their backside a lot easier, but still not completely foolproof. If you stretch in the correct place, you earn a point, with five points needed for every "scarf bomb" attack you wish to employ.
Once you have earned up enough points, you can begin rescuing your sisters, one by one. Each sister has her own themed room, with most of the themes tying in to the girl's name. For instance, Siren, in ancient mythology, was a sea nymph that lured sailors to their deaths with her beautiful singing, and as such, her demon sings and draws in small moogle-esque drones that she then turns into weapons that attack Linda. After commencing battle with each demon, your first goal is to remove the entity within them, and you must do so using your “scarf bomb” attack. This attack finds your main scarf pinning down the enemy, while two new scarves come in and rapidly attack them. Afterwards, you can simply whittle away at their remaining health until the sister is finally freed from the possession.
While the sisters will attack Linda, most of their shots can be avoided, and in the end, the game doesn't offer much in the way of a challenge. Each boss battle, if you will, involves basically the same few steps, and the EX realms only add to the repetitiveness of the title. Luckily, the game is short enough to keep most players going until the end.
One of the interesting things about the game is the style of animation used. The enemies look like toned-down versions of Heartless from Kingdom Hearts, and the environments are brightly colored, even if not highly detailed. The main hall is the exception to this, as it seems to be channeling the music video for A-Ha's "Take On Me", which showed humans interacting with a black and white sketch. Since all parts of the environment are stretchable, and since the camera follows very closely to Linda when she's locked on to something, there is a lot of clipping throughout, which is of course a negative, but it isn’t bad enough to hinder gameplay.
The music and sound departments are just as basic as the rest of the game. A high-tempo dance beat plays throughout most of the levels, and apart from the sounds of explosions, the only sound effects worth taking note of are the sounds of rubber snapping back into place or the high-pitched squeals of your sisters as they attack you.
In the end, Stretch Panic offers gamers a distinctive and simplistic gameplay experience. Even if this isn't the type of game that most players are instantly drawn to, it is so absurd in its character design and graphical presentation that everyone should see it in action, at least once. Just like games such as Katamari Damacy, screenshots do not cut it here, and if you can get over the immediate illogicality of it all, a decent time can be had, even if only for the short time that it lasts.
Review part of GrrlGamer.com. Full review and screenshots at: http://grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=stretchpanic