Apparently, there is a way to totally mess up a game featuring a 100ft tall woman…
I am sure there is a really good way to textualize a long-protracted sigh, though I suppose this long sigh really needs to be vocalised to indicate the level of disappointment present here. I feel that sums up my final thoughts on Demolition Girl absolutely perfectly. Demolition Girl is a budget PS2 game and part of the Simple2000 Series. The Simple series is a budget line of games published by the company D3 Publisher, part of Bandai Namco, and consisted of games developed by a bunch of Japanese studios, such as Sandlot of Earth Defense Force fame, and Tamsoft known for Oneechanbara and Senran Kagura. It comes as little to know surprise that Demolition Girl came from the folks at Tamsoft. That’s unfair to say about Tamsoft, they have also worked on numerous Simple2000 games such as Party Girls, The Catfight: Joneko Densetsu, Love*Upper (Also known as Heartbeat Boxing in Europe), but they also have some full price retail games, such as Dream Club and a couple of Ikki Tousen Games. Okay, so dragging the company and pretending they only have a portfolio of softcore ecchi games is actually unfair. Their library of games aren’t all suspect, they worked on the Choro Q games, also known as Penny Racers outside of Japan, a rather charming looking series of racing games that utilised Takara’s line of miniature car toys as vehicles. They also developed the Battle Arena Toshinden games, a true 3D fighting game series released in 1995.
So, the Simple2000 Series got its name for being the retail price of the games in the series, Simple2000 games were sold for 2000 yen, which when I converted that price today (23rd February 2026) it was about £10 and right now the jury is currently out on whether or not the entire series line is a scam of sorts. I’m being incredibly mean today, and I apologise for that. There is no shame in being able to provide budgets title into a market, for some this might be the only affordable vector for them to play video games, and as long as the games are playable and are able to provide a level of enjoyment I say there is no harm to it. It should also be said that just because something is a budget title, it doesn’t mean it is, by default, a bad game. The Earth Defense Force series started in the Simple2000 line with Monster Attack and Global Defence Force and is, quite frankly, one of my favourite series of games. Alongside the Simple2000 games, there were a couple of other lines, like Simple1500 which has over 100 games under the name, some of them being basic board game or sports simulators, whilst others were more ambitious and absurd, such as Power Shovel, a game about driving a digger and using it to complete numerous challenges, like crushing a car, or rescuing turtles. Power Shovel is, in fact, an absolutely fantastically quirky game that I really need to get back to.
I can probably talk about the Simple Series for days, but alas, I do not have that kind of time. So, let’s get our focus back on Demolition Girl for now. Demolition Girl is the Western release of Simple2000 Vol: 50 THE Daibijin. Demolition Girl features Riho Futaba, a fictional model and reoccurring character in the Simple2000 series, being turned into a giant by some unknown tentacled aliens for, what I can only assume are, destructive, world conquering reasons. Immediately, we have some fantastic levels of absurdity but sadly, this is where everything starts to fall apart. With a Western Title like Demolition Girl, featuring a 100ft tall woman standing near a city, you would think that this game would allow you to play as said Girl and go on a bit of a destruction tour of various locations. Alas, no, we play as the Japanese military’s response to the appearance of the enlarged Riho, a response that seems quite well equipped for dealing with oversized bikini clad ladies. The game features a short story of 6 missions and, some credit where it is due, they are all different.
The first mission is primarily a recon mission, and I feel this is the mission that the majority of in-game screenshots are taken from when doing a cursory search online. Piloting a helicopter, you are tasked with scanning the newly made giantess Riho, gathering measurement details of her breasts, waist, buttocks and head. For science reasons, obviously. I should probably talk about the first thing you notice when you start playing this game. It controls terribly, it is hard to explain why it is terrible, it all just doesn’t feel good, everything feels stiff and sluggish making manoeuvring much harder than it needs to be. Perhaps this is what it is like to pilot a helicopter, I have no clue, perhaps my experience with helicopters in games like Grand Theft Auto, Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, and Jungle Strike have ruined helicopters for me forever. So, let’s elaborate on my comment about the well-equipped response. Besides the scanning device you get to acquire Giant Riho’s three sizes, you have the option to bring 3 additional support weapons into the first two stages. These include items to help temporarily stun Riho for a few seconds, these include a giant cake, a metal bowl to drop on her head, pepper, and an item confusingly called Pinc-nezGlasses, which is actually incense. All these items keep Riho in one spot for a few seconds, as she animates her way through her response to these items, providing you a decent window of opportunity to scan her.
Following the scanning, and confirmation this is in fact Riho Futaba, and not some giant monster who just so happens to look like her, your next mission is to sedate her which involves using giant syringe missiles to hit her in various locations indicated on the games HUD. Locations include front and back, from her head down to her knees, in fact there is a quest in the game to complete this mission having successfully hit both of her breasts. We’ll touch on quests later, as they are probably the best thing the game has going for it. But it was during this mission I learnt of terrible design choice relating to missile-based weapons. You have unlimited missiles, which after firing and hitting a target will rearm themselves. There was an important step there, “Hitting a target”, if you don’t understand how the missile lock-on system works, which I didn’t until I finished the game, if a missile flies off into the void, it won’t rearm until it hits the edge of the map, and this can take a while, meaning you will be stuck with no syringe missiles for, what feels like, forever. It took me a while to understand that this is what was going on, I mean, it certainly is one way to encourage you to be accurate. The other thing that is quite challenging, is knowing exactly where you are aiming, you have a reticle on screen but it never feels like your shots are going remotely near it, this is particularly frustrating during the final stage.
Anyway, we have sedated Riho, and she is now being airlifted away from Okinawa, towards mainland Japan, this is an idea that can only end well. During the airlift, the helicopters carrying her are attacked by jellyfish like aliens, lots of them, and we get to experience a new vehicle, a fighter jet, and this stage is a pretty miserable experience. Thinking on it, the controls make sense, and maybe if I was more familiar with flight combat sims, this might not be one of the more frustrating stages. In the jet, you constantly move forwards and pressing left or right on the analog stick causes you to roll in that respective direction. So to turn yourself around, you are having to roll in the direction you want and use up and down on the analog stick to turn yourself around, it all felt a little disorientating and made a mission about shooting down 50 aliens much more frustrating than it was worth. Again, on reflection, this was probably a skill issue on my part. So, shoot down 50 aliens successfully and the mission still ends with Riho being captured by Aliens, don’t you love it when you succeed in a mission in a game, but it still ends in a failure in the context of the story?
The only other mission I want to talk about in any real detail is Mission 5, as this is the only other mission that uses a different vehicle. In Mission 5, Riho is making her way to Shibuya, and you are following her in a tank on a highway that she is running parallel too. The aim is to distract her for long enough that remaining civilians can be evacuated, which takes about 400 seconds, and maybe it is just me, but when you have a visible clock counting down it feels like it takes significantly longer. In this stage you don’t really move the tank, it moves forward to keep pace with Riho, and either, the tank is superfast or she runs really slowly, because you are always a set distance away from her. You can strafe in your tank to avoid other cars on the highway, or you could just blow them up, which I am sure would be frowned upon by some, but maybe not all, authorities. To distract Riho, I guess the aim is to just shoot at her, her giant size seemingly makes her invulnerable to bullets and explosions, but I guess it would annoy her enough to make her stop running and find something to throw at you, like a car or building. Every time I have done this stage, I have never seen her get more than 50% of the way to Shibuya, considering there is a quest to beat the stage without her getting 75% of the way there, I was expecting something a bit more of a challenge, maybe?
Though, I think that is a good point to segue on to the Quests. Quests are challenges and are essentially baked in achievements for the game, which must have made the RetroAchievements set development much easier! The game has 25 quests in total and they range from things like, get A ranks on all missions, to beating the story mode 3 times, the aforementioned shooting syringes at both her breasts during mission 2. For a game released on the PS2, this was somewhat ahead of the curve and definitely provides additional challenge and some replay value. Completing all the quests also unlocks a bonus mission where you fight against Riho, but after that, there isn’t much to the game. There are unlockable costumes for Riho, but you would be forgiven if you didn’t realise this, as the game doesn’t tell you about them, or explain how to pick an outfit, some of the unlock conditions are also just a pain, requiring you to complete the whole of story mode using a different outfit to unlock the next one.
Ultimately, I think I am just disappointed by the whole experience. This game strikes me as perfect meme fodder these days, but there is such wasted potential that it hurts me deep down. Sandbox-y destruction simulators can be a lot of fun and that is all this game needed to be. Heck, I would settle for a game like Rampage but instead of giant monsters, it’s just a sleazy re-skin with a bunch of scantily clad ladies. If you want to have a little bit of a fun with some friends or a stream chat, this game is one that will bring about some laughs, but for the person playing it can be a really unenjoyable experience as you wrestle with the controls and flounder for a bit on each mission, before realising the bulk of them can be beaten in a few minutes. The absurdity of this game doesn’t carry it enough and I only mastered the game because the game dared me and I took it up on that challenge.
