Tokyo Clanpool review: Dungeon-crawling for national security

2024 has been amazing for first-person dungeon-crawlers. I’ve probably said this exact thing already, but it continues being true. From the OG in Wizardry to intriguing and creative new indies, and everything in-between, first-person dungeon sickos have been eating well. This genre has become a pet project of sorts for me, so it only makes sense to jump on one for my final review of the year. Sadly we won’t be closing 2024 out with a bang or even a whimper; it’s more of a weird kind of throaty noise you can’t tell is the sign of someone suffering or having the kind of good time you don’t want to be a part of. Or maybe you do, I’m not here to judge. I am here to talk about Tokyo Clanpool, a relic from the PlayStation Vita era of DRPGs that, if you know what that means, says everything you need to know.

Don't ask me what "Clanpool" means

Tokyo Clanpool is from Idea Factory and Compile Heart, and shares creative DNA with the Hyperdimension Neptunia series. It follows a similar playbook, that being a bunch of tongue in cheek anime tropes, pseudo-ironic perversion, and a wealth of systems all banging into each other like a trunk filled with trash, forgotten groceries, practical tools, and one or two cool things attached to a car desperately looking for a spot in a crowded Wal-Mart parking lot. These games often get dismissed for… probably understandable reasons, but over the years I’ve come to respect their incorrigible attitudes and legitimately admire how their creativity in combat systems often comes together. Sometimes games like Fairy Fencer or Mary Skelter show up, which not only are fun to dig into, but are also written well in surprising ways.

Sadly, Tokyo Clanpool isn’t written well, but its premise is bizarre enough for a chuckle. It’s a fairly standard Magical Girl scenario, but with a bureaucratic twist. Japan has been decimated by monsters, but a group of young girls with special powers have emerged to keep humanity afloat. But rather than work independently as a group of superheroes or whatever, they’ve instead literally taken over the Japanese government, brushing aside the remains of the SDF (who are not handling it well) and assumed full control of the Diet. Each departmental Minister is either a powerful hero in combat or in some kind of magical support role (they run the item shops and gimmick features), and collectively call themselves the Diet Dolls. I’m surprised this game doesn’t lean harder on comedy like the Neptunia series, but sadly all this stuff is mostly background noise while the phoned-in anime-style plot covers boilerplate beats. It’s a shame, because the premise kind of rules on paper.

Watch your step!

The bulk of Tokyo Clanpool is very old school, Wizardry-inspired, first-person dungeon crawling in a very pure and surprisingly hardcore sense. The actual difficulty is fairly low, but you’ll be spending lots of time dealing with hazards and obstacles. You’ll be using different tools to dig into walls, avoid damaging floors, float over gaps, and more. The tools are battery-powered, forcing you to seek out (and plan around) battery stations, or make tough decisions with limited resources to try and reach the next floor before heading back. Many DRPGs have traps and floor hazards, but making them their own system with a dedicated mechanic that’s required to progress is a cool idea. And that’s just one cool idea of many!

While the zany premise isn’t held up by the writing, it does come back to life during the dungeons. The Diet Dolls are in charge of the government, but it’s a small, scrappy outfit that doesn’t seem to take taxes? Instead, they broadcast their adventures to the remnants of humanity and take in donations like politicians running a subscription drive marathon on Twitch instead of an election. Your approval rating goes up through exploring and combat, and reaching thresholds comes with significant, temporary bonuses to stats, healing, or other boons. When you leave, the different parliamentary bodies vote for the party member who contributes the most, awarding them with extra XP and boosts for the next outing. This part is very silly, and I wish the whole game had vibes like that, but alas.

Other standouts include a goofy Pokemon-like system that has you building, fusing, evolving, and equipping digital elves (Gadgettia) for various stat boosts and elemental abilities. If you take care of these creatures, they may even make a rousing speech on your behalf during post-run votes. It’s a small system that reeks of low budget (lots of palette swapping that dulls the impact of evolving), but adds dimensions to character-building I appreciate. This system pairs with equipment, which is also where skills live (your characters don’t learn many themselves). These two ability pools then feed into another certified cool idea, which is that characters will combo with themselves and each other based on various compatibility factors, such as combo percentage stats and special move formulas. So everything tends to bounce off or into everything else like a chain reaction that can happen in the foreground (combat) or background (stats). See what I mean? Compile Heart simply cooks in ways that often go unappreciated. Again, for understandable reasons we’ll get into in a sec. When I’ve fully prepared myself for the kinds of waters I haven’t waded into in years.

The dark side of the PS Vita

Okay, so, “pseudo-ironic perversion.” If you know anime and anime-style games, you know what fanservice is. Compile Heart loves fanservice, and with games like Neptunia it often seems to be lampooning it. But Compile Heart is also responsible for crimes against humanity like Record of Agarest War, which I implore you not to look up if you don’t know what that is. During the Vita era, there was a particularly dark run of niche RPGs in niche subgenres (like DRPGs!) that saw several developers and publishers collectively decide that touch-screens were the ultimate gateway to a level of gooning previously unseen in video games. With the flimsiest possible in-game justification (to allow uncomfortable players to skip without missing much), these games included minigames that were literally about fondling and groping characters (of dubious age). Mainstream publishers were just cool with this. It was a time, being into JRPGs and an upstart in games media ten years ago, lemme tell ya.

I didn’t know this before I started playing it, but Tokyo Clanpool, originally released on the Vita in 2017, was one of those games. “Was” being a key word, in an interesting twist of fate. Tokyo Clanpool also wasn’t actually localized, presumably because by that time it wasn’t worth the effort. In the years since, content standards from platform holders have changed a lot and are still changing. Idea Factory and Compile Heart are currently dealing with a situation at Nintendo, which up until now hasn’t been a problem, while Sony was taking the much more aggressive “censorship” positions in recent years. At the same time, Steam has been making strange decisions to not host games like this, while still allowing literal pornography from non-Japanese developers. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it’s been an odd, quietly-developing story pretty much since the PS4 launched. It’s also the apparent reason Tokyo Clanpool is launching on GOG, and publisher eastasiasoft is only offering an Asia-region Switch version.

Wait, what?

Here’s the twist, though. Even with all the platform evasion and anti-censorship vibes from the publisher, and the apparent cracking down on sexually-charged content in certain games from platform-holders, the offending part of Tokyo Clanpool… isn’t in this release at all? The system was introduced, vaguely tutorialized, and then, just as I started to realize what I had accidentally gotten myself into, just as I started panicking about revisiting game review territory I thought I’d never see again, just as the proverbial sweat started to pour since none of this was externally happening (I am a consummate professional), the minigame just didn’t happen. The game immediately skipped to the result and gave me a worthless, miniscule stat boost gimmick. The kind I was glad to get back in the day as a sign I’d never have to see whatever I just saw again until the next game. I tried again, just to be sure. Then, figuring perhaps I just needed to progress before the door to true darkness opened, left and came back several hours later. Same result. So, for better or worse, Tokyo Clanpool did not escape modern censorship. I was relieved, but some folks who’ve been looking forward to this may be upset.

Wild, right? Anyway, there are still some wacky, potentially off-putting sexual vibes that come up on occasion in Tokyo Clanpool, but it’s ultimately much tamer than the last couple paragraphs may have indicated. The whole deal is like an edgier Sailor Moon made for teenagers, but not by much. And like I said before, the storytelling is fairly dull and mostly lives in the background, so there really isn’t much happening. So we’re not laughing at the gooners like Neptunia does, but we aren’t being dishonest about it either. We exist instead in a strange between space, due to the problematic bits simply being severed off in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Fate/Stay Night, except that game was phenomenally written even when it was smut.

But hey, dungeon-crawling! I liked most of the systems Tokyo Clanpool offers, especially how they all revolve around each other. Synergy in RPGs is great! The only problem here is that combat proceeds at a ludicrously slow pace, and doesn’t have much in the way of flourish. It’s mostly slowly-scrolling text in front of wobbling enemy art, with chibi character portraits occasionally appearing when something cool happens. But they just kind of appear and vanish without doing anything, once again giving off a low budget vibe regardless of what the budget may have actually been. I ended up holding down the fast-forward button for most combat encounters, which is a bad sign for a game that’s mostly combat encounters.

That was a lot, I admit. But a review like Tokyo Clanpool requires context to get the full picture for what makes this game interesting. Otherwise it would just be an odd dungeon-crawler that feels out of place in time and space. That’s not nearly as fun to talk about, and if I had to re-live trauma from the PS Vita years, I may as well share with the whole class. Tragic backstories aside, Tokyo Clanpool seems like the kind of quirky, yet intense DRPG I’d be all the way into, like a Class of Heroes or even Witch and Lilies. Instead of being rough around the edges it’s mostly just boring, with some interesting systems that are fun to think about and watch come together, but don’t result in a spark that makes the gameplay fun. Luckily for the DRPG fans out there, 2024 has seen several alternatives that are much more worth their time.

Tokyo Clanpool is available on December 19, 2024 for PC (GOG-exclusive) and Nintendo Switch (Asia region-coded). A code for the PC version was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.