TGS 06: The Maid Fuku to Kikanjuu Hands-On

TOKYO--One of the more amusingly titled games at this year's Tokyo Game Show is D3's The Maid Fuku to Kikanjuu, which roughly translates as The Maid Loaded with Machine Guns. The budget-priced game has been available in Japan since August, but with a title like that, we could hardly ignore it when we swung by the D3 booth again earlier today.

The Maid Fuku to Kikanjuu is a third-person action game in which you'll assume the titular role of an attractive and well-armed maid who may or may not, in fact, be a clone or a robot of some kind. She's probably just a regular maid, to be honest with you, but the first time that we saw her in the game's opening movie she was laid out on a metal table in some kind of laboratory, and since we couldn't understand any of the Japanese speech during the movie, we opted to let our imagination run amok.

Quite what your motivations are for killing in the game is a mystery, but we can tell you that as we navigated the first level, we did very little else. In addition to the machine gun mentioned in the title, our arsenal included a powerful rifle and a katana sword, and the maid was also able to punish enemies with some particularly unconvincing kicks. The majority of the enemies that we encountered, which we took care of quickly by locking onto them with the R1 button and then shooting them from range, appeared to be maids as well, though they were much shorter than the game's heroine and may or may not have been wind-up dolls (there goes that imagination of ours again). Actually, they might have been dolls powered by some kind of radiation, since many of them dropped strange glowing canisters when they died.

At the end of the level, we were confronted by a fairly large boss, in the form of a brightly colored helicopter. The fact that we'd run out of ammunition at this point was initially a cause for concern, until we realized that the enemy's predictable attack pattern included flying extremely low and stopping when it got close to us, at which point we were able to inflict a surprising amount of damage with our katana and aforementioned unconvincing kicks. With the helicopter downed, we contemplated checking out the second level for all of about a second, and then decided that we'd have more fun battling the TGS crowds en route to our next assignment.