Vanguard Princess - Kicks, punches and panties

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Hello everybody! How is everything going? Having fun with the adventures I introduced to you until now? Did you help the English to free Mars from the evil Spanish conquistadors and their alien allies? Did you already bring back justice the streets of Metro City? Did you help Bunny to purge the world from the presence of perverted vampires with fire-spitting ding dongs? No, please! Don´t you answer all at the same time, you might collapse the server of the blog... Anyway, here I am one more entry ready to bring you another of those games that deserves a little bit more recognition in the video game world due to its quality, even though this time it´s a game that could be somehow “morally and ethically” controverter depending on the point of view of the reader. The game I´m talking about is Vanguard Princess. Ready to see a few pantie... I mean, to deliver some punches...

Character selection screen

Vanguard Princess is 2D versus fighting doujin game wholly developed by a single game designer known as Tomoaki Sugeno, a.k.a. Suge9, who is rumored to be a former Capcom designer that worked in well know titles such as Resident Evil 3: Nemesis y The King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood. The game was fully developed using the Fighter Maker engine, an engine created by Enterbrain (creators also of the popular RPG Maker series) and one of the most popular fighting game developing tools in the indie scene together with the M.U.G.E.N and Beats of Rage engines. As it happens in a few other Japanese fighting games such as Dead or Alive, Arcana Heart o Phantom Breaker, just to name some, one of Vanguard Princess main identity points is that it´s whole fighters rooster is composed exclusively of female fighters, and as it happened also in the games I just mentioned, these fighters have a taste for sexy outfits. In fact, it seems in Vanguard Princess stages it must be really hot, because some of the young and beautiful fighters wear less clothes than the usual. Till here nothing new, at least not in Japan where it seems that women fighting in bikini in mud pools is too old-school, but far from just designing sexy outfits, our friend Tomoaki decided to design his whole female underwear collection that the beautiful fighters won´t doubt to happily show us whenever they have the chance, and there´s for all kind of tastes... panties, thongs, string thongs... but you will have to pay attention well to be able to see it, for these girls are not the “easy type” that will show you everything just right away. Said like this, it might sound indeed really dirty, but everything will make complete sense as soon as I explain to you the deep, mature and complex story of the game. The story of Vanguard Princess tells us that the (always) evil government (which one we don´t know, and who cares) performed a series of experiments on a girl that possessed magical powers, which had as a result a “magical explosion” that woken up the latent powers in several other girls all over the world, but the tests subject managed to escape and has sworn to the destroy the whole world as revenge, so cute girls dressed in sexy outfits from all over the world decide to beat the crap out of each other while they show they panties to avoid it. See? I told you, right? I knew once I explained to you the story all that panties showing would make perfect sense. Well then, if all is clear now, let´s continue onto the next point...


The first thing that calls you attention as soon as you start playing Vanguard Princess is it´s impressive and colorful graphics, boasting really elaborated sprites and stages full of detail that can easily rival those of other big productions, with fluid animations that (together with the panties collection) will make the game an instant eye-candy for all the pixel and classic arcade game (and female underwear) lovers. Here you can see the colorful stages where the combats of the game will take place:

But as versus game cannot live just of its graphics (and panties), Vanguard Princess also makes use of a solid and interesting (and rather conservative) system which I will try to explain. Far from the impossible zillions hit combos of games like Guilty Gear or BlazBlue, Vanguard Princess makes use of a more simple style closer to the one seen in games like Street Fighter. One of the main features of Vanguard Princess (other than the panties showing), is that just like it happened in other game such as Arcana Hearts, on top of selecting our main character, we will have to select a second character that will “assist” us during the combats, having like this “1.5 vs 1.5” combats, for the assist characters will participate in the combats quite often since it´s one of the features that helps Vanguard Princess to set itself apart from many other versus games. The 10 main characters we will be able to select will be:

And the assist characters will be: Kanae, Shiera, Eko, Juliet y Hilda Rize (this last one available only in the versus mode).

How effective an assist character will be will depend on the main character we selected, for each assist character will have it´s on skills. As for the controls, in Vanguard Princess we will have four main buttons: one for the fast and weak attacks, one for the medium attacks, one for the powerful but slow attacks, and one final button for the assist characters attacks, which will vary depending on the direction we indicate with the pad/joystick at the moment of pressing this button.

On top of these actions, we will be able to perform other typical actions seen in many versus games such as the throws, or run forward and hop backwards to quickly get closer of far from or rival. Vanguard Princess will make use of several bar/meters that will allow us to perform the actions mentioned above plus some others. The meters will be:

Special Meter



This meter will allow us to execute the “Liberty Arts” of our character, which is the equivalent to the super moves in other fighting games. Once this meter fills up, we will be able to perform the super move of our character. This meter will fill up a little bit every time we cause or take damage, and once we perform the Liberty Art, the meter will deplete and we will have to fill it up again.

Assist Meter



As it names says, this meter indicates the energy we have available to use our assist character. This meter will fill up little by little during the combats, and it will deplete a little bit every time we perform an attack with our assist character. The amount that this meter depletes will vary depending on the kind of attack we use with our assist character. The higher the level of this meter is, the stronger the attacks we will be able to perform with the assist character will be. If this meter depletes completely, we won´t be able to use our assist character. On top of that, if we receive and attack while we are attacking with our support character or our rival “breaks our defense”, the Assist Meter will “break”, stopping us from using our assist character at all for a certain period of time.

Grasp Indicator



Opposite to what we see in most versus games where we can “throw” our rivals as many times as we want, in Vanguard Princess we won´t be able to throw our rivals until this indicator is blinking, so if you are one of those who loves getting “close and personal”, don´t get all excited when you see some panties and keep the distance, ¡pervert!


Calcium & Break Indicators



The “Calcium Indicator” will fill up as we receive hit from our rivals. If this indicator starts to flash and we get hit at that moment, we will get stunned, becoming complete exposed to the enemy attacks (panties checking is now allowed). In a similar manner, the “Break Indicator” will fill up as we parry our rival attacks. If the indicator starts to flash and we parry an attack at that moment, it will “break” our defense (and Assist Indicator) and we won´t be able to parry any attacks for a certain period of time.


So, as you all can see Vanguard Princess follows the path of many great classics of the arcade versus games, offering a really interesting game, specially when you think that the whole game has been developed by a single panties lover and game designer. Although the game is not free from issues, such as the occasionally rather stiff controls, or the fact that there are “just” 10 characters and 2 game modes, being these the Story Mode and Versus Mode, and I say “just” because is a rather small amount taking in count today´s industry standards in this kind of games, or that the graphics get too pixilated in high resolution screens, which disturbs a little bit the other ways gorgeous graphics, but I guess that´s just a small price to pay for the big collection of panties displayed in the game, and for the game being FREE. Yeah, you read that well. The creator wanted to share his taste for female underwear with the whole word for free, so you can download the whole game from his blog for free, although the texts will be in Japanese. If you want to enjoy the deep and complex story of Vanguard Princess in all its glory in a less mystical language like English, you can buy the translated version of the game published by eigoMANGA on Steam and Amazon. This version has some censorship to protect the more conservative western minds from the panties invasion, but you can download a free official path to remove the censorship. Anyway, if you want to revive old times or want to try a new versus game, give a chance to Vanguard Princess, is not perfect game, but it has a more than solid combat system that will surely please the fans of the genre, and if not, oh well, it could be useful to be stay updated with the last tendencies in female underwear. Enjoy the panties! And the fights too, of course...


GAMEPLAY VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oydaz0X2-4I