Welcome back to Wankery Week! Today’s topic will be Not Safe for Work… uh… kinda. I mean, this one is a little tamer than some Wankery fare, but I still wouldn’t want my boss to be in the room. Anyway! We’ll get back to our regular programming regarding vaguely-non-sexual nerd stuff next post. But this week we are issuing a basic trigger warning for ambiguous sexual material. Also, I guess peculiar spoilers for Squid Game. Please be aware.
So Squid Game. You are familiar with it, yes? Even if you never watched it, one would assume you know the premise: a bunch of random dudes play children’s games, and victory means winning millions of dollars (won), while loss means death. Get into the details of the show, and you will find that these death games are justified from multiple angles. It is established that all the players are hideously in debt, so any opportunity to get their collective lives “back on track” is worth marble-related homicides. Partway through Season 1, the Frontman, ostensible middle manager of the games, claims that the “real world” is a place of trickery and inequality, so this competition is meant to be a completely even playing field for anyone to get ahead. This is obviously bullshit (gonna go ahead and state the woman in season 2 that is nine months pregnant has a disadvantage compared to other players), but it is a valid excuse for the proceedings. And then, during the finale of Season 1, the founder of the whole enterprise claims that it all got going because a bunch of old rich dudes realized they had been happiest when they were competing in playground games as children. In short, Squid Game is the story of a massive conspiracy that crosses generations with the distinct goal of getting people to play life-or-death tag.
And…. Well, have you heard of Mr. Beast? There does not need to be some grand conspiracy to get people to play whacky, life-threatening games for money. People will just do that. They will do that for practically nothing.
You watch Squid Game for one reason: the games. Everything else is justification for said games, and maybe a validation for why you should feel bad when the dude with the hair gets thrown off a bridge. The third season includes a game identified as “hide and seek”, but it could more appropriately be titled “Knife Fight Maze”. And you can work backwards from Knife Fight Maze to trace all the characters’ journeys, their myriad motivations, and their distinct relationships with each other to rationalize why they would participate in Knife Fight Maze, and then feel sad when Character X gets knifed (in maze). Knife Fight Maze would be an amazing event to witness on its own (assuming you are a sociopath), but everything else in Squid Game exists to heighten the tension and justify the involvement of the audience. Go ahead and watch Squid Game: The Challenge, the Netflix produced “reality show” that is just the gameshow elements of Squid Game. It is boring! And not just because nobody dies! It is because Squid Game: The Real Show is a carefully calibrated story about something! It just happens to showcase Knife Fight Maze.
And now we enter my own personal Knife Fight Maze: Let’s try to figure out the reasoning behind Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas.
I purchased Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas because it was cheap (I think there was a $2 sale), and its screenshots showed me a horizontal-staff rhythm game. And it is hard to get such a thing wrong! I love that kind of gameplay! Worse comes to worst in such a genre, at least you get to listen to a couple of songs you have never heard before. But, in a miraculous feat that seems impossible without actively trying to achieve such, Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas manages to get everything wrong.
So here is the “everything” of Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas:
- As one may expect in these dreadful times, the various “girls” appear to be AI-generated. Each girl has a 2-D portrait, and you can almost hear the “purple hair, shirt with a star on it, bunny ears” prompt behind their generation. It is difficult to tell with reused assets, but there are also maybe a total of ten girls.
- For the record, the game description advertises, “These exclusive images not only serve as tokens of your achievements but also deepen your connection with the characters, offering glimpses into their lives and dreams.” Unless “can stand up” is considered a glimpse into someone’s life and/or dreams, this is not a true statement.
- But, because there is the “rhythm game” aspect to this, each of the 2-D girls has a 3-D model for dancing. It is a chicken-egg situation with trying to determine if the 2-D art or 3-D model existed first, but there are obvious inconsistencies between the different depictions. Why, it is almost like there are apparent signifiers like “unusual eye color” or “bunny ears” to detract the viewer from noticing the finer details.
- And, whether thanks to adapting to the 2-D requirements or because no one involved gave a damn, the characters often clip through their own clothes and accessories during their dance moves.
But surely that is justified by their dance routines, right? Nope! The dances involved can best be described as “senior center warmup”. Human history has something like 5,000 years of recorded dances! Many of them overtly sexy! Best you can get here is randomized gyrating.- If you think the dances were adapted to the songs, you’re even further off the strip. The songs are practically random fart noises set to an erratic rhythm. This is what a seven-year-old “composes” on a Casio keyboard before putting that Christmas present in the attic forever (it’s still up there, mom!). This is not music anyone would willingly listen to for any reason. You are better off playing this rhythm game muted.
- So it should be no surprise that the “press buttons” part of this, the ostensible game in the game, has nothing to do with the music. In my playthrough, I found two songs where it really felt like the button presses corresponded to the song in some fashion. Every other level? These charts may as well be (and possibly are) randomly generated sequences of button prompts. Just something to do while “music” plays and a “girl” “dances”.
- Likely due to the previous fact, it is impossible to tell when you are doing well. The screen shakes when you distinctly miss a button, but the typical rhythm amusement of distinguishing from “perfect” or “just made it” is dreadful to discern. There is no combo/streak counter. It also appears that the scoring system is based on a possible 10,000 point maximum (with achieving 8,000 rewarding the coveted prizes), but in practice, it just looks like “more button presses = more points”.
- And, just for the hell of it, all the “Las Vegas” locations are generic “kinda looks like a casino” situations. If you really wanted to see The Sahara or Slots-A-Fun, please look elsewhere. The Sphere is absolutely not on the menu. I am moderately certain Sphere Entertainment Co. did not copyright the concept of giant balls, but no one wanted to chance it.
In case that was entirely too much reading, the quick and dirty of Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas is:
- The 2-D art sucks
- The 3-D art sucks
- The 3-D art’s dancing sucks
- The music sucks
- The gameplay sucks
- The Las Vegas factor is nonexistent.
So let’s go back to the Squid Game test: what is the reasoning behind Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas?
To review, Squid Game is, at its core, a show about watching people die in fun and exciting ways. It is justified on all sides by good storytelling, “reasoned” purposes for the games to exist at all, excellent acting, and characters displaying deep wells of empathy so you worry about them when they enter the Knife Fight Maze. But, if we are being honest, Squid Game is standing out by being 99% more likely to have a main character splatted on the cement than in Bridgerton. Squid Game is a carefully calibrated machine, and its ultimate output is entertaining mayhem. What is Anime Dance-Off- Lass Vegas attempting to output? Actually playing the game does not paint a pretty picture, but maybe we could examine its origins…
Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas was released in May of 2025, and is part of the prestigious Anime Dance-Off line of games. A quick search on the Nintendo Switch eShop reveals that there is also Anime Dance-Off – Dungeons and Dancers, Anime Dance-Off – Space Party, Anime Dance-Off – Around the World, Anime Dance-Off – Ghost Party, and Anime Dance-Off – Party Total. As you can likely guess, each of the Anime Dance-Off titles has a different theme that can be ascertained from the title (though, to be clear, “Dungeons and Dancers” is simply RPG-themed, and not the other use someone may have for a dungeon). These Dance-Off games were all produced by EpiXR Games, creators of a host of other titles including Zumba – Marble Candy Rush, Zumba World – The Lost Marble Island, Zumba – Marble Zombie Invasion, and Mist (not Myst). And, lest you think Anime Dance-Off is their only foray into the world of games that may be featured during Wankery Week, they are also responsible for titles like Beautiful Anime Puzzles Rainy Days, which borders on being one of those Hentai Girls-style experiences like last year’s offerings. I hate to judge a company simply by its number of five-dollar Switch titles, but it is reasonable to imagine that the EpiXR Games business model is to flood the marketplace with a hundred marginal game experiences, and bank on the fact that Nintendo has (at last count) 128,000,000 customers skulking around its shop. You do not want the profit numbers on the possibility of just 1% of that many users buying any of these games for five bucks.
And… is that it? Is this just supposed to entice a dumb customer into shelling out an amount of dough that does not reach the value of a McDonald’s McCrispy (ostensibly still something identified as a food item consumable by humans)? Videogames do not simply get picked off the gamin’ tree. Videogames are created by teams of people with resources from across the world. There are artists that make the 3-D models. There are composers that create music. There are teams of programmers that make it all work. Caterers are probably somewhere around, too. No videogame is an island, and it takes all sorts to create the simplest gaming experiences. Is the final product of hours of the work of men and women, possibly combined to equal years of peoples’ lives, just worth tricking someone into spending five bucks?
Could this be more than a deception? Is this validly supposed to be inexpensive porn? In competing with an entire internet where you can generate your own AI porn-slop inside of three seconds, here is a game where you can press buttons to random movements, and (somehow) masturbate along. Is the ultimate gestalt of everything here: the Vegas branding, the music that plays in the elevators of Hell, the button sequences that were produced by a squirrel attempting to play Sticky Balls on a Gizmondo, the scoring that can reward you with the least sexy pictures on Earth: was it all to help someone goon? Or was it all just an effort to shovel more slop into the Nintendo eShop?
Whatever the case, having played the final result, I know who I want to see entering the Knife Fight Maze next…
WW #18 Anime Dance-Off – Las Vegas
System: Really thought this was a Nintendo Switch exclusive (derogatory), but apparently it leaked onto the Playstation 5, too.- Number of players: The singlest player.
- Could you play this with someone else in the room? This is one of those that is just unsexy enough that someone would likely assume you are playing a game with some deep storyline to justify the terrible graphics. I mean, unless you had the sound on. Then this theoretical someone else would just assume you are broken inside.
- Tour the City of Sin: The available stages are the Club, the Rooftop Bar, the Circus (?), the Racing Track (sic), the Hideout (??), the Streets, and the Casino. About the only reason I would ever want to try the other games in the Anime Dance-Off series would be to see how many of those are recycled across everything. Rooftop bars are universal.
- Getting Wet: So “the Hideout” is mostly a parking lot, and a lot of the dances take place outside in the rain. When the festivities move into the nearby warehouse (hideout?), it is still raining. Inside. This does make sense, as Las Vegas is known for its famously prodigious and omnipresent rainfall.
- Pick Your Poison: There is an option menu. All you can do there is modify the volume settings. That is… uh… Something?
- Did you know? X always appears on the top of the staff, and B always appears on the bottom. This means that Y and A have to share the middle. I have no idea why they thought they had to use all four face buttons with only three lines, but it does mean that some patterns will spell out “YAY”. That is… pleasant.
- Would I play again: I am vaguely ashamed this is part of my play history at all. It will not happen again.
What’s next? I swear I am going to get to that Katamari article. Really! I mean it! Please look forward to it!
