Thanks to Wayforward for the review code

Title: Rose & Camellia Collection
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 04/16/2024

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Story

In this series of slapfights, you take control of a variety of characters as they all battle for control of a special household. Also, the La-Mulana girls decide to fight each other. The dialogue here is fully voiced which is cool, but even then none of the chapters offer much of an engrossing plot to get invested with here. You come for the comedy, really.

Presentation

Being that these titles originated as Flash games back in the day, you’d think at least the first two Rose and Camellia games would be pretty simple looking, but honestly, every game in this collection looks really nice, sporting a clean UI and a unified artstyle across each chapter. Visually, the game looks great, and the audio is solid too, with full English voice acting present, although you’ll be hearing character dialogue repeat during combat so frequently you might get sick of the same few phrases being spouted over and over again.

The character art generally looks good too; being from the same team behind La-Mulana, that isn’t much of a surprise, though I can’t help but admit a few of the characters in this game give me Code Lyoko vibes with how their foreheads are drawn, and looking at how the original games portrayed these characters, that vibe was present back in the original incarnations, too. Still, plenty of great characters here, and the game is visually pleasing and runs great as a whole on Switch, and the unified art style really does a good job at masking how old some of the earlier games are.

Gameplay

To do this as a typical compilation review would be very tricky. The original games were flash games back in the day, and they are Rose & Camellia Chapter 1 and 2 in this collection. The La Mulana Crossover came later, but it was also a free online game. But the others are new to this set, and follow in the footsteps of those earlier games while adding new or remixed characters to fight against.

The whole collection also won’t take you that long to beat if you’re just wanting to see the endings and unlock all the fighters for VS mode, so don’t worry about this being as difficult as the team’s other game. Thus, because of how brief every chapter is, and how most of em are pretty similar anyhow and all share a similar control scheme, I’m ditching my usual game by game breakdown, and will just cover this package as a whole. It doesn’t help that for better or worst, I lost interest in this one quickly despite my best efforts.

Starting with the original R&C, you take control of a commonwoman tasked with dueling each of the members of her house in slapfights to claim the head position of the family. These duels are against a variety of opponents, and immediately you’ll be forced into a different control setup based on which Switch mode you prefer; either touch controls for handheld, or motion controls while docked.

The game has a decent tutorial that teaches you the ropes, with optional ones available for more advanced techniques such as feinting, countering and targeting the weakpoints, and all of these are essential to learning the game. It may seem like this is just Punch-Out with slaps, and while on the surface it feels like it, the nature of combat in these games is vastly different. For starters, each move is turn based, with you taking a turn, then your opponent. You try to dodge during the opponent’s turn and vice versa, and if you miss, then you won’t be able to attack unless dodging the opponent leads to a counterattack opportunity. Likewise, certain CPU opponents will counterattack if you mess up, so sometimes it ends up being a smarter idea to not attack at all and wait out a turn.

Also, you can’t just slap them by aiming for their weak point over and over and win every time. The CPUs will dodge often. They will require careful reading of their animations and mastery of the feint mechanic for an opening to show up, and even then, doing the action isn’t as instantaneous as a Punch-Out game. You may see a lady pull her hand back to slap, but if you dodge the minute you see her do that, you’ll end up falling right into a slap timed with an instant dodge in mind. Likewise, you may see her dodge out of the way and assume timing it for when she’s finished moving is the key, but more often than not it’s best to hit a little bit early so she can’t keep dodging.

With the motion controls I found the timing to be a big pain to deal with, as being able to time feints and dodges was much more frustrating when playing docked, so I quickly switched to handheld on my Switch Lite and never looked back. The touch screen swipes are still a bit sluggish, but way more responsive and easier to get down consistently. Then, the Rose & Camellia games become a lot more fun! Rather short fun, at least. Each game is only a few stages long and each new game adds a silly twist on the story to change up the playable character or add new opponents, such as how the second game puts you in charge of one of the characters Reiko beat in the first title, and you must work your way up to claiming her title.

Even the newer games added here keep things short and simple, but my biggest gripe with all of the games is that once you reach a character, you can refight them any time you wish and continue the story from that point, but there’s next to no incentive to bother doing so; the game could have been a perfect time attack game, but you just can’t do that, there’s no time attack or best times saved in any capacity whatsoever. Likewise there’s a scoring system, but without a high score tracker, it ends up being useless and adds nothing to the game whatsoever.

Once you see all you want to or can see, your only replay value here comes in the form of a local VS mode, where one player controls the protagonists of the episodes, and the other controls an opponent you’ve reached. By default the opponents will retain their higher HP count from the story mode, giving one player a huge advantage, but luckily there’s a toggle to even out the HP bars so that both players have equal health. (That doesn’t stop some of the opponents from being incredibly overpowered due to the original nature of their fight, however) This is by far the silliest and most fun mode, and the one I can see pulling out during local multiplayer sessions for a quick laugh. Being able to mix and match characters from different chapters is a fun touch here as well, and really leads to this being a more charming multiplayer experience than an engaging single player one.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Rose & Camellia Collection is a fun set of slapfights that mainly lives or dies based off the core gimmick, and while I think it’s a hillarious time in local VS with both players fiddling around with the controls, I can’t say the game is all that fun or long-lasting as a solo experience. No matter how you try to play this, you’re gonna be stuck with gimmicky controls of some kind, and while the touch controls were the ones I got better at in the end, neither of them are what I’d call optimal, and I wish there was a button option of some kind.

I was also hoping at the very least, the chapters would include some sort of best time or high score for replay value purposes since the short chapters would make for great speedrunning, but there aren’t any options like that here. Once you win all the fights with the four chapters and the bonus crossover, you’ve totally run out of stuff to do besides play with a friend locally.

I liked going through the chapters, the La-Mulana crossover was easily my favorite with some hillarious dialogue, and I’m happy that Nigoro was able to get these back out again with extras, but there really should have been a bit more on the replay value side of things, especially for the asking price being a bit steep. Definitely a solid way to spend an afternoon or two, but you’ll probably get more desire to keep coming back with friends and family around, than playing versus the computer opponents over and over again. A title where the silly premise is a lot more appealing than the actual game.

I give Rose & Camellia Collection a 6 out of 10.