This jRPG plays out as most dungeon crawlers would. You scour the entire floor looking for hopefully what is useful treasure or whatever it is you need to trigger before clearing the next obstacle. What’s different though, is the battle system, where you don’t have full control over your party. Your 4 active party members will suggest what to do next, and that’s what you get to pick from. It’s possible to ask them to think twice by switching active members but you don’t normally get much. This is an interesting system as it veers you away from creating a  monotonous algorithm for every encounter you get, however, it can get annoying. Yes, the choices that normally come up are well within the context of the situation. But you may soon find yourself knee-deep in frustration when nothing good comes up at a critical moment; especially with the bosses. Given this, you are indeed forced to grind.

For a NIS title, the grind is rather light and optimizing your characters is far from complex. There’s no equipment or stat allocation you have to think about. Stats are automatically allocated according to their pre-determined roles in battle, which is convenient enough. Finally, everybody gets experience for every battle. Most of the time, simply exploring the floor should be enough to get through. The only time that you might feel the need to actively grind is when you’re getting new skills for all the characters. And even that doesn’t seem too much of a chore, considering how you’re supposed to do it.

To attain skills for each character you’ll have to put them through ‘motivation’ time. You basically use some in-game currency to have some (very) suggestive playtime with each character. Just you, the character and the touch interface. You start feeling that this is where a good amount of the budget went given how well animated the characters are, compared to the rest of the production. On top of that, you also get some rather raunchy voice clips of the character in play.
By the way, if you liked any of what I just said, then I suggest you start learning Japanese. The US version has all voice clips for this mode muted. On top of that, they’ve added pink clouds to make everything fluffier, and hard to see.

And now we arrive at the part that I was talking about earlier. NISA tries to bring something from NIS to all of us. But for one reason or the other gets too embarrassed to go as far as NIS did and it just ends up being awkward for everyone. Sure, you did it to get a better rating. But others have done much more than this and did pretty well rating-wise.

For the story, it gives you a whole lot of stereotypes and cheese from the get-go. If you’re forgiving enough though, you may be rewarded with what I’d consider the ‘meat’ of each character’s story. As the story progresses, their bonds as friends intensify. They also get access to new skills which allow them to naturally work better together; a rather cute synergy between story and gameplay. The climax point of this story is when they finally reveal the crimes of each girl. Towards the end, you’ll be asked to pick your favorite who will get ‘knighted’ and acquire the super powers required to defeat the final boss. Which you’ll have to kill seven times, if you want to get the ending for each girl.

While most jRPGs will give you a New Game+ feature, Criminal Girls: Invite Only chooses to give you post-game content instead. This is where NIS asks you how hard you like your spanking. Normal encounters will have boss-class enemies in them, you’ll be required to turn everyone into knights, and even the map becomes useless. Clear, the floor, clear the boss, and then you get to the content is exclusively to the PSVita version; the post-game of the post-game. Unfortunately I haven’t reached this point supposedly you’ll be gaining two more girls and a whole new dungeon to conquer. Which means more hours down the drain to clear everything.