DEAD OR SCHOOL

No matter what anybody else said, it is a pure shonen hack & slash action RPG. No mature content, but with some ecchi fanservice.
I loved it. The story just pulled me in, This was the first hack & slash RPG I mostly played for the story. Naive simple and still captivating. The game itself is fun, but with some bugs, and funny slope standings. It needs a NG+

Despite the community-placed tags, there is no sexual content. Instead, there are just some shots of fanservice, and the "uniform break" mechanic which plays a little animation where your character gets her clothes ripped. No actual seggs, no actual tentacle goodness. Even after clearing the game with 100% everything. No tiddy, no vagoo, no kinky time, just a lot of guns and suggestive shots.
The game kinda reminds me of Metal Slug, minus the theatrical bravado and "cool" factor, and a heavier focus on Japan and your character's weirdly-obsessive desire to go to school. Most of the game has you running, jumping, and dodging through waves of "mutants" while gathering money and "tokens" to purchase and upgrade your gear. You cycle through three weapon types throughout the game, and each type has enough variants to cater to different playstyles, which I appreciated.
There is not a lot of depth in this game. Most of the nuance of it is through the upgrading of weapons, as there is a "modification" system that is basically a gacha for passive abilities you can attach to a weapon. This then requires you to grind out enemies which might be the biggest turn-off for a lot of people, especially with how janky the combat may feel if you came from more polished platformers with a heavier focus on combat flow (e.g. Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, etc.).
A lot of the "endgame" is mostly just clearing the Steam achievements, with the hardest ones requiring you to reach a certain amount of a stat, as those require you to gacha for "modifications" a LOT of times. You can also freely opt to use a memory editor and just hack yourself 9999 tokens and save yourself the headache once you've reached that point, and just want the completion flex.
It's not a terribly challenging game. Most of the difficulty stems from minigames that are hampered by the weird camera not working with the 3D environments, and having to grind for better gear at the start, though once you reach mid-game you're more or less set with a specific playstyle that's suited for effective screen-clearing. The game does flip the script on you every couple of fights where it'll pit you in a situation where some weapon types are utterly useless (or at least terribly outmatched), forcing you to lose and swap out to a different loadout, and I found that quite fun (though they did not do this a lot).
The story, while not the biggest selling point, was mildly amusing. The main girl (Hisako) who has lived underground for years, now wants to go to school on the surface (which is now overrun by mutants) after hearing amazing stories about it from her grandma, so she decides to just go and fight her way to the top. Throughout the game there are insane leaps in logic and common sense, but for a game focusing on cool action with anime girls with swords and guns, it's definitely par for the course. Some lines of dialogue and plot points will definitely have you wondering how the world works, as most of the cast seem to think the entire world is set in Japan, and that weapons made during World War 2 were apparently "superior" to weapons made after it. Wild stuff. They also tease some stuff about the past which they never touch upon after mentioning it, making me wonder if those were setups for a prequel game.
The game's a decent 7/10. I wouldn't recommend it for people who hate repetitive grinding, but for those who just want a head-empty kinda game that focuses on big-number-get-bigger with the occasional puzzle-solving and weird boss fights, it's an easy sell. The devs clearly had fun making this, and I had fun playing it too.
*edit: typos

I have currently played through most of the Playstation version of this game (around 20 hours played) and bought the PC version because the PS version's juddering bothered me (and because I like this game enough, obviously).
The basic gameplay is about throwing you into enemy arenas, with enemies that have a variety of attacks which are melee-range, longer-ranged, or longer-ranged jumping attacks that home in on the player. There are some other types, but most of the enemies conform to these kinds of attacks. You can equip one melee weapon, one machine gun, and one launcher (typically high-powered, low ammo weapons). At its best, the encounters can feel faintly like Doom in 2D, with a combination of enemy prioritisation and quick reflexes required to avoid enemy attacks. At worst, it's a hectic mess, with some encounters pretty much requiring you to face-tank the enemies. Generally, it leans towards the middle or the positive side of this balance. The game is an unrelenting meat-grinder, but it rarely feels like a slog.
There's also an element of attrition, as you have a limited amount of ammo/durability to keep in mind. This is surprisingly well-balanced early on, with resources limited but only to the point where you can't waste ammo and might have to swap around to get through. Later on you don't have to worry so much, and it even becomes possible to mostly specialise in one weapon type.
At times the game feels like it wants you to grind, but I was never forced to while playing on normal difficulty. Often the enemies would be three or four levels higher, and I feel like damage (taken and received) scales heavily according to level difference, but outside of a couple of areas and boss fights it didn't really get in the way of progress,
Those bosses are awful, though. I liked exactly one of them so far, the third boss. The others all had some combination of tedious gimmicks and/or unfair attacks. The second and fourth bosses were particularly annoying, and I could see the former being a roadblock for people so early on.
Otherwise my issues with this game stem from the presentation. It's very clear that the artwork is lower-resolution than the 1080p resolution we are forced to run the game at. Stills contain some visible compression artefacts, but even worse are the videos which are extremely low-resolution and heavily macroblocked. And really, the game should be able to render its 3D elements at high resolutions, surely?
My personal solution is to use Magpie to upscale the game using Anime4K (not usually advised for a 3D game but this game is very light on the GPU) followed by a pass of RCAS and then FXAA. It's not the ideal solution and Anime4K will be too heavy for any GPU that isn't fairly powerful, but it's working for me.
Anyway, this game is solid and Hisako is sweet.

Tried due to an unexpected recommendation on a "hidden gems" list, and quite surprised.
It very much scratches the "get moar loot" and "make numbers go up" itches, which I wasn't expecting. Combat's simple, but quite fun and fast.
If you like a grind that's all about making numbers bigger and doing more damage? Yeah, that's here. It's not vanillaware levels of good when it comes to the combat (They kinda set the standard for good 2D combat, let's be honest) what's here is fun and serviceable.
Just don't come in expecting polish, there's a few bits of jank here and there. No deal breakers, but nothing game breaking that I've seen. Just times where I was stuck falling against a wall until I stopped pushing myself against it, that kinda thing.
Yeah, the art is overly suggestive at times, but it never goes into outright nudity/sex (Thank god, I'm not into the cute girl violated by monsters trope).
tl;dr? Kill monsters. Get loot. Make numbers go up. Brain likey.

Metro 2033 + japanese nonsense + metroidvania = Dead or School
The animations are cheap, characters looks like they're made of cardboard but the gameplay works and it's challenging enough to push you into grinding & training to get better gear and skill up yourself along with the protagonist.
Anyway for the overall quality of the game and the lenght if you like metroidvania and anime this will be a good purchase.

The game doesn't take itself that seriously given the premise and the way the characters behave, and it's fun metrodivania-esque experience about a girl living underground 80 years after a zombie apocalypse and her quest to reach the surface and find the mythical "school" her grandmother told her about, a place where you can hang out with friends, eat good food and have fun. The gameplay is fun, even if simplistic and often janky. My only compaint is that the dfficulty spikes were too pronounced and you go from killing enemies in one blow and losing negligible amounts of HP on a level to having to grind a lot the next one because enemies can take a lot of damage and they deal massive damage too.

the game was pretty fun I finished it on normal difficulty with 100% which required a bit of min/maxing and some grind. Collecting all the souvenirs had a nice touch of puzzle-solving that I could appreciate. Even the music was tasty and set the mood nicely.