• Price:
  • $19.99 USD: digital – currently on sale for $17.99 until April 30th
  • $34.99: physical via Limited Run Games until preorders close on Sunday, May 12th
• Developer: Nigoro
• Publisher: WayForward
• Release Date: April 16, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by WayForward on behalf of Nigoro. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

After its debut as an online Flash game series in the early 2000s, Rose & Camellia Collection has now arrived on Nintendo Switch. The collection includes all 5 games in the series: Rose & Camellia 1-4 and Rose & Camellia vs. La-Mulana. In each game, the player must participate in slapping duels to get to the top of high society. The concept looked so absurd yet entertaining, and I knew I needed to check this out.

Starting up the game, I was immediately impressed by its opening theme. Once that was over, I looked into the settings. You can play the game using Joy-Con motion controls or the touchscreen. The main game is single player, but there is a 2-player local versus mode in which one person controls a heroine and the other plays as an antagonist.

In the first Rose & Camellia, you play as Reiko Tsubakikoji, a commoner who married the eldest son of the Tsubakikoji family. He passed away, and now his family is arguing with her about inheritance rights. This will be settled with a series of “slap-downs,” as in this universe noblewomen slap each other to assert dominance after someone has been wronged.

I played exclusively in handheld mode using the touchscreen controls. You can choose to play through the tutorial to get used to the gameplay. In each battle, you and your opponent take turns slapping each other. The goal is to reduce their HP – represented by camellia flowers – to zero by landing hits on their faces.

Your opponents won’t make it easy for you, though; they can dodge your slaps and possibly even make counterattacks. Sometimes it might be better to fake them out before attacking them for real. Try to deal critical damage by hitting them in their weak spots! If you’re lucky, you may activate Slap Rush mode, which allows you to slap the heck out of your opponent many times in one go.

When it’s your opponent’s turn, you need to watch them for tells indicating their intent to attack. It took me a few losses to adjust to the timing between their tells and the speed with which they attack. Successfully dodging a slap gives you the opportunity to counterattack and damage the enemy. I thought it was a bit difficult to manage a counterattack, but I did get it done every once in a while.

I wouldn’t say that any of the fights were extremely difficult. I’m usually not great at games like these, but I was still able to (eventually) win each of the 25 fights across all 5 games. You play as a different character in each game, and there is a story for you to experience.

I liked how the dialogue was voice acted, and I also appreciated that they included alternate scenes after the fights you lose. If you fail to defeat an opponent, you get to retry that fight instead of starting the whole string of fights all over again. There were a few fights that took me multiple attempts to win, but I don’t think any game took longer than an hour to beat.

The entire collection is rather short, and there are a few aspects that could use some improvement. There’s an “equal health mode” option in settings, but it didn’t appear to work for me when I tried to apply it. It’s not a huge issue, but there are some opponents who have twice the HP you do, and it would have been nice to have equal HP.

That brings me to my main issue with the collection. While they tried to shake things up by adding fights with multiple opponents or a single opponent with some kind of weapon, ultimately the gameplay starts to feel too “samey” for each battle. You do earn points for your performance in the slap fights, but they don’t appear to mean anything. If they’d introduced a system that allowed players to exchange points for better stats (like HP) or new costumes, that could have made things more interesting.

In terms of what the game does well, I really liked the artistic direction. The character designs suited the setting and theme, as did the soundtrack. Although the stories are about the “serious” noble class, there are still some ridiculous, hysterical moments in the story scenes and the slap fights as well. They even went so far as to display the progressive damage on your opponents’ faces as their HP goes down.

Fans of the La-Mulana series will enjoy the fifth game in the collection, a crossover with Rose & Camellia. The entire collection doesn’t take very long to beat, and I think they could have done a little more with the concept, but it does have entertaining content. With its 2-player mode, it could be a… “hit” at parties! 😉