Here's the translated version of the rollspel.nu review by Krister Sundelin.Thanks Krister!
Panty Explosion
Text: 3 of 6
Layout: 3 of 6
Content: 5 of 6 (!)
Let’s start this review with the title: it’s not particularly telling of the game. There aren’t any panties at all in any illustrations, exploding or otherwise, and panties are only mentioned in an example. Despite its humoristic title, it’s a very dark and bothersome game. On the surface, Panty Explosion is a game of Japanese high school girls, with or without psychic powers, that are confronted by supernatural foes far above their
level.
Panty Explosion is not a simulating game. It’s a co-authoring game, where players and game master cooperates to a much greater extent than in ordinary games to create stories together. For instance, players are encouraged to participate in describing places and events, and it’s your co-players that describe the consequences of your actions rather than the game master.
The game itself is a 96 page book cut and shaped like a school note book with little doodles in the margin. After a short description of the game, you’re thrown headlong into character creation, where you select the game data needed: elements, blood type, traits, family, birth date, name, agendas, however you have psychic powers or not, who your best friend and rival is, and who is most and least popular. Some of these are “just”
character description, but others are game data used by the rules.
The elements measures how many dice you may spend in a conflict; between one and five per element. Your popularity tells you what die to roll. The most popular girl uses ten-siders, the least popular rolls sex-siders and everyone else uses eight-siders. You may spend any number of dice in a conflict, and you succeed if you get a 5 or more on any die. Since popularity is voted upon, you may bully someone to use worse dice. Not only
that, if you succeed, your character’s best friend may describe the consequences, and if you fail, your rival may describe how the action failed. If you manage to get a trait into the declaration of the action, you may upgrade the dice one level.
Girls with psychic powers work a bit differently. They’re dark and moody, so they can never be most popular. They use ten-siders when they use their psychic powers and the usual dice otherwise. When psychic powers are used, their rival may always tell the consequences even if the action succeeded.
We’re now about halfway through the book. The next chapter is about playing Panty Explosion. You use the Japanese five elements, Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void (these elements are also game data for characters), and their symbolism may be used as a template for creating adventures. They are also used for a fun technique called “scene building”. Each element symbolizes one aspect of the scene. Earth is for the physical, Water for the mood, Fire for people there, Wind for what happens, and Void for the supernatural. Each participant describes the scene from one of the aspects. This is a fun way to establish the scene that involves the players.
The next section is about the Demon, the obstacle of the adventure. Here you use the agendas of the characters: each agenda that is not resolved adds more dice to the Demon’s dice pool. If psychic powers are used, dice are also added to the pool. This mechanism is supposed to get the players more active in the game. The player that has “Getting a date with Keitaro” as agenda and does not resolve it will make it harder for the group as a whole when they encounter the Demon.
The rest of the book is more or less a fact section. There’s a list of monster from Japanese folk lore, a description of the Japanese school system, daily life for Japanese school girls, a short guide to Tokyo with surroundings, an introduction to Japanese religion, and a name list. There are also a few character sheets.
Except for the colour softcover of the book, the book is entirely black and white. The text is simple but a bit long at times, and poorly proof-read. There are incomplete sentences, sub clauses without main clauses and several misspellings. Even the character sheet is misspelled! With better proof-reading, the text would have gotten the grade of 4, but because of the Riotminds level, the text only gets grade 3.
The pictures, except for the margin doodles, are well-drawn computer rendered images of Japanese school girls. They generally don’t have anything to do with the text. The idea of the school notebook is lovely, but it’s a bit dull in the way it’s realized. The text is not handwritten, but ordinary printed text on the lined background. The layout is one column, wide margins, numerated headlines and a simple pagination at the bottom.
My opinion of the layout is about the same as the text. Better realization of the idea would have given it one more dot, and if the illustrations would have had anything to do with the context, there would have been one more dot. As they are both lacking, the layout grade is just a 3.
On the other hand, the content is marvellous! It’s a narrow game that only does one thing, but it does it gracefully and with many hidden layers. On the surface, it’s a game of psychic school girls battling terrible demons. But under that surface, you find that the demons are small game compared to what the girls subject each other and themselves to. I’m really close to setting grade 6 on the content, but the narrowness makes me hesitate.
Panty Explosion is not a game for everyone. It demands an open mind for new role playing paradigms, it demands that you may think of playing Japanese teenage girls, and it demands that you accept the condition that your co-players may bully you. But if you accept these demands, Panty Explosion is a blast!
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Thanks for the nice review! I’m glad to have it available for our English readers. I should mention that the newer editions of the book have been much more thoroughly proof read and have had most of the typos and spelling errors fixed. I can only hope you read one of the older books! As for the art, I decided to focus on the schoolgirl aspect of the game, so all the art featured typical schoolgirls like the ones the players might play. I should also point out that while I did use a computer to add grey tones to the illustrations, they are otherwise hand drawn using traditional pen and ink.
Did that sound defensive? Sorry. It was a nice review.
-Jake
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
