Super Waifu Ball Review – Insert Your Own Joke About Balls Here

That was fast. It’s only been a couple of weeks since we published our review of Waifu Impact 2, only for a quirky new Waifu game to hit our consoles. This time, we’re stepping away from bikini-clad beach shooters and into the realm of spin-off arcade-style obstacle courses, with the difficulty cranked up to eleven. Wish me luck.

Introduction – What is Super Waifu Ball?

Super Waifu Ball is once again developed by Mitsuki Game Studio and published by our friends over at the Spanish studio JanduSoft. The game released on 12th December, 2024, and is once again a PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 cross-buy title.

Like the Waifu Impact games which make a minimalist homage to games including Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash and Genshin Impact, Super Waifu Ball is a parody of Sega’s somewhat forgettable arcade-style franchise, Super Monkey Ball, hence the similar name and gameplay.

Super Waifu Ball’s Simple Arcade Story

The game sidesteps the story once again to focus on simpler arcade themes. The game is seemingly set in the distant ‘space age’ future, in a controlled area of space containing colonies and movable platforms with artificial gravity which perform various functions as components of interchangeable obstacle courses.

Five young women dressed in Japanese-style ‘idol’ outfits attempt to clear the many challenging courses set up for them while manoeuvring in air-filled capsules. The event is seemingly televised as entertainment, and the idols, or “Waifus”, are the contestants, each being immortalised as collectable figurines during their participation.

Super Waifu Ball’s Gameplay

Super Waifu Ball is a challenging arcade-style platform game where you roll through colourful, obstacle-filled levels while controlling a pretty waifu in a transparent sphere. Your objective is to complete levels as efficiently as possible which will earn you collectable stars which can be used to unlock new sets of levels, collectible waifu figurines from the gacha machine, and more playable waifus.

Character controls are mapped fully to the left thumbstick, allowing your character to move in the chosen direction. Your character will pick up speed, momentum and stability by maintaining their heading. Colliding with obstacles has a ricochet effect which drastically reduces your stability and momentum, forcing you to adjust your heading accordingly.

Moving the thumbstick slightly will slow your movement which makes turning much easier, while reversing the direction of the stick will result in a quicker deceleration and course direction change. Falling from platforms will restart the level, which can also be forced by tapping the Triangle button to reset.

Super Waifu Ball’s Recycled Graphics

Visually, the game is something of a mixed bag. The characters are essentially recycled anime-type models featuring different hairstyles and colour schemes. They tend to be devoid of much facial animation and general detail, resembling their figurine counterparts a bit too much. It’s hard to tell the characters and figurines apart when everyone looks like a low-budget doll.

Fortunately, the environments have an impressive sense of scope to them featuring a space exploration theme. Beginning on a series of platforms floating in space with twinkling stars and beautifully detailed planets in the distance, later stages will take you to those planets, each featuring different terrains and environmental themes in decent detail.

The girls are dubbed in Japanese and will occasionally fire out an untranslated line of situational banter during gameplay, while the music focuses on embracing the theme of the on-screen environment rather than providing a catchy tune to keep you replaying, making the soundtrack also rather hit-and-miss.

Replayability and Trophies

Replaying stages is the bread and butter of progression in Super Waifu Ball. There are 8 different ‘worlds’ to explore, each containing 12 stages. To unlock the next world, you’ll need to snag 20 or more performance-related stars from the current world’s stages. Stars are awarded based on collectables found in stages and the time taken to clear.

This means if you aren’t quick or thorough enough when clearing a stage then it’s entirely possible to finish it with no stars at all, and so, sooner or later, you’ll have to try again. Not only do stars unlock new worlds, they also act as a form of currency to purchase new characters to play as and figurines to collect, and you’ll need a full set to snag all the trophies.

And if the game isn’t annoyingly difficult enough already, you can always test your skills with ‘Challenge Mode’, a tougher set of levels that will push your abilities quite possibly above and beyond what is humanly possible. Only the most dedicated hardcore enthusiasts need apply.

Conclusion

While it’s a tad unfair to expect an arcade-style game to deliver a solid narrative, in this case we’re also dealing with a Waifu game, and so it’ll face similar criteria of critique to its predecessors. As always, we need to consider the 5 ‘P’s: Presentation, progression (also interchangeable with ‘pacing’), performance, plot, and passion.

So how did it do? Well it looks okay and delivers on its theme of a Monkey Ball parody, but while the physics engine works well in delivering realistic weight and momentum to the capsule girls (great name for a pop group, by the way) this is all for naught when you’re plummeting off a narrow platform for the dozenth time and wondering where the ‘easy mode’ is, and whether those rewards are representative of the effort required.

Aside from the first straightforward couple of levels which seem to be the best ‘training mode’ the game could come up with, Super Waifu Ball’s difficulty cranks up almost immediately, which was something of a kick in the teeth. Simply surviving to the end of each level often leaves you with little to no stars which you will need to progress with pretty much everything else in the game.

Snagging a single star in each level will likely be enough of an effort for most, yet with only twelve levels in each ‘world’ and twenty stars required to unlock the next world, you’ll often find yourself facing a hefty barrier blocking your way. Do you replay the old levels again and hope by some miracle that the game considers your rerun good enough to earn an extra star? Or do we admit that the game stopped being fun twenty minutes ago and isn’t worth the effort?

With increased effort should come increased reward, and yet that’s not what we’ve got here. Despite the ‘Waifu’ branding, there’s no fan service here, no flirty banter, and no character interactions whatsoever. What we’re left with is a basic yet challenging Super Monkey Ball clone, and I’m not sure anyone asked for that, especially from an ecchi game developer.