Criminal Girls: Invite Only — Hell, Censorship, and a Dungeon RPG

Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a role-playing game developed by Imageepoch and published by Nippon Ichi Software. The story drops the player into hell with a job: rehabilitate seven female characters. That premise carries both the plot and the series’ signature “motivation” scenes, punishment and training fantasy wrapped in a party-based RPG. Play is standard dungeon crawling, combat, and a personal line for each character. Adult players who want a lewd Japanese RPG got a package that bolts explicit material onto ordinary systems.

The release split by region. The Japanese original, plainly explicit, came out on PlayStation Portable on November 18, 2010. An enhanced PlayStation Vita port launched in Japan on November 28, 2013, reached the rest of the world in February 2015, and hit Steam on January 11, 2017. The overseas versions were censored in ways players and critics argued about: sound was stripped, and the action in the erotic rehabilitation scenes was obscured. For BDSM-adjacent game coverage, it is a clear case of Nippon Ichi’s erotic dungeon-RPG branding running into foreign content rules.

Scores were mixed, not a clean split into love and hate. Metacritic lists mixed reviews for the PlayStation Vita and PC versions. GameSpot argued that tedious design and the perverse activities undercut the combat. In Japan, Famitsu gave the PSP original 28 out of 40 and the Vita version 29 out of 40. Reviewers who liked lewd JRPGs still found the erotic layer tedious once the novelty wore off. Invite Only is the entry that took Imageepoch’s hell-and-seven-girls formula from a Japanese PSP cult title to censored Vita and Steam releases, and left a sequel, Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors, out in Japan on November 26, 2015 and worldwide in 2016. Credits are still listed on MobyGames.