Any of you remember Senran Kagura? I feel it’s been long enough that it’s one of those franchises you had to be there to be into it.
In October of 2022, the same team responsible for Senran Kagura (that is Kenichiro Takaki’s Honey Parade Games and Marvelous) released their newest IP… quite the gamble considering that the last time they tried the result was Valkyrie Drive and while I loved Valkyrie Drive because honestly Hiraku Kaneko deserves to be in more things, the point is that VD flew under the radar so hard that it was never heard from again.
This one, meanwhile, has lasted more than one year which is honestly more than you can claim about VD.
Dolphin Wave is a mobile game that takes place in the artificial island of Wadatsumi, where a new sport called Jet Battles takes place. To put simply, Jet Battles involves two pairs of contestants (one attacker pair and one defender pair) running laps around a pool while they shoot each other with futuristic non-lethal energy weapons until one of them falls.
The tale focuses on teams that participate in this sport. The story starts with Team Kirishima, a team that has existed since the inception of Jet Battles but that lost relevancy with time… that is until newcomer Iruka Sakimiya (the redhead in the picture above) decides to get team back into the spotlight.
This eventually attracts the attention of other teams like Kazami Sea Tec (big corporation that manufactures the vehicles used in Jet Battles), Himuka Hyogo (which produces guns for Jet Battles), Nereides (team composed of two rival fashion designer siblings), and Urami Steelworks (smaller independent manufacturer manned by child genius Kana Urami).
Eventually, the hostesses of FM Wadatsumi (a radio station) join the cast also, and recently as of this writing a new team was added to the cast: ISRW, a team composed of a research institute that has created two independent AIs to participate in Jet Battles.
Now, the images used in this post might give you an idea on the tone that you can expect for the game, and you’d be absolutely right in whatever you’re thinking. But thankfully the game has quite a bit more going on. And when I say “More” I thankfully don’t mean Senran Kagura’s trapping of “oh but they’re so deep and angsty also”.
For those that haven’t played those games, Senran Kagura is a franchise that’s very brazen about its fetishistic side with commendable passion… it’s also a franchise about young girls being thrown into faction rivalry that obfuscates the actual demonic threats they might need to face.
The problem has always been that while having both sides of that spectrum isn’t impossible, it becomes trickier when the writing internally sabotages itself constantly. However, Dolphin Wave lowers the stakes to a point where the tone becomes less schizophrenic since the worse you might have to deal with is strained family relationships.
Another fun detail is the fact that the age range of all characters isn’t limited to just middle and high schoolers. While those are still a thing, the plot actually makes sure to use that age group as a plot device, since the connections that Kirishima makes with other teams happen because Iruka (the main heroine in case you forgot, yes her name is literally “dolphin”) goes to school with the youngsters of other teams.
Similarly, a lot of the “veteran” girls clearly know each other from the past and even though the age range only goes up to 26 (aside from two girls with extremely unreliable ages) they feel “older” more in relation to the rest of the cast than just “old” as a character trait.
“But Fer, what is the gameplay?”
Think of it as a card battler, where you have a hand of 7 cards that refills at random (as in: with no deck) and you have to load three of them to attack.
Each girl has three possible “cards” that can show up in your hand, these are attacks with different properties and such. At the start of your turn, your hand gets refilled and if there’s any dupe cards they fuse into a higher level version. So if you have Iruka’s Skill 1 twice, they fuse into Skill 1*, if you get two more Skill 1s and end up with another Skill 1*, they both combine into Skill 1**, and so on until a cap of three stars.
This is where the first engaging part of the gameplay comes in. Do you use a card to make space? do you hope you get more of a single one?
Then you have to consider “Linking”. As I mentioned above, in Jet Battles you have two pairs. If you use a skill card from one girl in that pair, then the next two cards will level up as long as they’re from that same pair. This is important because some cards only show their extra properties after a certain level and also adds a dimension of “I wanted to wait, but if I don’t use this one card I won’t have all of them linked”. Also, if you link into a three star card, it actually becomes four stars.
And then you also have to consider the charge bar. Each girl has a bar that goes from 0 to 100% and when it’s full, the next turn you get guaranteed that girl’s special attack. If you use the special card as an opener that works as a link for that pair without the drawback of it now leveling up, but also, the charge bar goes up as girls attack, so you have the incentive to use as many cards from everyone in your team as possible.
It’s all shockingly engaging, though admittedly it only becomes so in higher difficulties when you have more pushback. It’s also more the type of game where you aim for a single good run that you can then skip in future grind instead of a game where facing the same challenge over and over again is part of the fun.
This arguably means it’s not a grindy game though.
So one question remains: Why am I even talking about this in this blog?
Simple: April Fool’s.
…but there’s actually a bit more than that.
You see, gambling is forbidden in Japan save for a handful of exceptions: Horse racing (duh), lottery tickets, sports (though in reality it’s ONLY men’s soccer), “Auto Racing” (motorcycle racing), bycicle racing, and boat racing.
And considering that DW released one year after Uma Musume made a huge splash in app stores in Japan it got me thinking, was DW an Uma Musume parody all along?
Nah.
I wouldn’t say Dolphin Wave is a parody of Uma Musume just because of that, because it’s too sincere for that and it’s just as much a synthesis of many other developing conventions in mobile games like Blue Archive’s Momotalk, but it IS interesting to think about. Similar to how Blue Lock (based on men’s soccer) came out the same month as Dolphin Wave.
Oh, DW does have a Coach instead of a Trainer I guess…