Sometimes I come across games that are rather mysterious. Pretty Girl Campaign is such a game. I found some screenshots on a Russian site. All the sites that mentioned it were either Russian or Chinese. Several Chinese sites offered it for download, but I never managed to download it. For the longest time I only knew that it was a native DOS game, developed and published by a Taiwanese company called Art.9 Entertainment, released in 1994, and once included on a Russian game CD.
But others were luckier than I was. The webmaster of PC98 Images was able to dig up a copy of the game and offered it as a bonus download, so I could finally take a closer look.
Starting
At first I thought this was a character selection screen, however, nothing I did here had any influence on the game at all, so I guess it's rather some sort of copy protection. Anyway it's a nice display of sprites.
Intro
Next you are treated to some sort of intro outlining the story, I suppose. There are a total of four screens to it.
Title Screen
Finally we get to the title screen. It's quite nicely done. Remember that what you see is distorted; on a real screen, the medaillon is actually round.
Character Selection
These are the four characters of the game. You can choose several; those that you do not choose will be controlled by the computer.
Gameplay
The gameplay is a weird cross between RPG and board game. The girls can only move along a path, how far they move is rolled. Some squares contain loot bags, some trigger combat. Combat is the usual turn-based kind, opponents are always cute females. There are a few more symbols where I don't know what they do. There are a couple of houses with more pretty girls standing before them, which are probably shops where you can upgrade your equipment. There does not seem to be any interaction between the characters. On the whole, I still don't know a lot about the game, but now you can try it yourself.
