Video Game / Warship Girls

China's response to Kancolle.

Once upon a time, Kadokawa Games released on DMM.com a free-to-play browser Collectible Card Game featuring moe anthropomorphisms of World War II naval warships from the Axis powers. Due to the complete lack of playable Allied ship girls in that game, and its developers having no plans to add such ship girls until the debut of Iowa in Kancolle Kai, Chinese developer Huanmeng (currently rebranded to moeFantasy) took it upon themselves and released what could ''initially'' be seen as a clone. The result? Warship Girls (战舰少女; Zhàn Jiàn Shào Nǚ).

Unlike Kantai Collection, this game is on the iOS and Android platforms, and features ship girls from both the Allied and Axis powers.

Have you ever dreamt of teaming Lady Lex up with the Crane sisters? Now you can.

How about having HMS ''Hood'' and DKM ''Bismarck'' fight side-by-side against the Abyssals? No problem.

What about a big-gun battleship meetup with participants from both Allied and Axis powers? Now we're talking.

There used to be two versions of the game, developed by different companies due to legal problems between them. The official one developed by moeFantasy and another one developed by Patch Games (the former game's distributor). The Patch version has since been shut down.

The Japanese version was released October 24th, 2017. The English global version came out on December 18th 2018, but ended service on August 31st, 2021. Similarly, a Thai version was released in 2015, but shut down in 2016 after serious mismanagement.

For specific character-related tropes, please refer to the Character Sheet.

---

Warship Girls features the following tropes:

• Ace Custom: The game includes both named squadron variants and named ace-flown variants of aircraft, both of which are better than the garden variety counterparts.
  • Examples of the former are the two named SBD Dauntless dive-bomber squadrons that come with USS Enterprise, the McClusky and Best squadrons. ^note It was Mc Clusky's squadron that spotted Arashi and shadowed her back to the fleet. Best's squadron, or more specifically Best and two of his wingmen, led the attack on Akagi while everyone else, due to confusion, was dog-piling on Kaga, with Best himself scoring the bomb hit that effectively crippled the Akagi.
  • A mild example of the latter would be a named F2A Buffalo fighter squadron led by John S. Thatch, which is part of the stock equipment for USS Saratoga. Thatch's Ace Custom Buffalo is used to represent the squadron.
  • The December 7th, 2015 update introduced an event that rewarded all-new aircraft flown by Allied aces during WWII. They are the I-16 flown by Chinese Nationalist Air Force ace Liu Zhesheng, the Hawk-3 flown by ace Gao Zhihang of the same, and the Yak-1B flown by Soviet ace Lydia Litvyak.
• All There in the Manual: The official WeChat account is slowly releasing the backstories of various ship girls. Currently, it's the only source of official settings outside the game itself.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • The "Operation Swimsuit Heist" time-limited quest that unlocks Helena's swimsuit costume. Which requires going to a specific spot on a stage and defeating the unique enemy "Holiday Fleet".
  • Several costumes can be exchanged for "war spoils" gained from the monthly event.
  • The Second Anniversary Event has two extra costumes as reward, including one that turns Nelson into HMS Victory.
• Animation Bump: A lot of the later ship girls' battle sprites are a lot more than just "jerk forward a little when firing". Such as Queen Elizabeth, North Carolina, Baltimore, and U-505.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The original creators of the game are fans of Kantai Collection, therefore, they were intent on fixing a lot of the more frustrating aspects of Kancolle, such as"
  • Removing Permadeath. Ship girls merely retreat when sunk.
  • Originally, Damage Control is an item that occupies an equipment slot, just like in Kantai Collection. However, the damage control mechanism was later completely changed. It no longer needs to be equipped, and automatically activates whenever a ship girl's health reaches zero.
  • Expeditions and Drills do not cost resources at all, and the first fleet can go on expeditions as well.
  • All the branching rules and expedition requirements are spelled out, instead of forcing players to rely on trial-and-error.
• Anyone Can Die: Averted, unlike in Kantai Collection. Sinking ships is still heavily discouraged, though. However, the game's source files contain unused sinking dialogue for multiple ship girls, implying that this was originally going to be the case.
• Artistic License – Ships: We do have a few issues here.
  • The Atlanta-class light cruisers are depicted without their torpedo armament, and also have their torpedo stat permanently set at zero, preventing them from accepting launchers or launching torpedo salvos. This includes the two members of the class that were sunk during the war while still carrying their torpedo armament (The remaining ships of the class, including those of the Oakland-subclass, had their launchers removed AFTER the war.)
  • Likewise, both Nelson-class battleships are depicted without their torpedo armament, despite the fact the HMS Rodney was recorded as the only torpedo-armed battleship to land a hit with them, against the Bismarck.
  • USS Omaha, the sole member of the Omaha-class light scout cruiser in-game as of the end of 2015, does not have her assortment of single and twin 6-inch guns. Instead she uses the single and twin 5-inchers that are shared with other USN ship classes (eg. The twin dual-purpose 5-inchers are shared with the Atlanta-class CLs, and the Allen M. Sumner, and Gearing-class DDs, and single 5-inchers with the Fletcher-class DDs). USS Milwaukee (Appearing under her Lend-Lease form Murmansk) sidesteps the issue entirely by not having any equipment with her upon acquisition, but it ultimately came down to the fact that single and twin 6-inchers already exist in-game......British ones, that is, and it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to put in American models of these guns/
  • While the art USS Fletcher depicts her with one single 5-incher, her stock equipment includes a twin 5-incher. The historical ship only received the twin 5-inchers to replace her single 5-inchers when she was remodeled, in 1949, and re-designated as a DDE (Escort Destroyer).
  • The main defining feature for the Colorado-class battleships are their hexagonal turrets. Their artwork in-game however, does not show that, though this was due to a mistake on the part of the artist. He has since produced corrected artwork for the 3 ships of the class featured in-game, but due to the legal disputes between Patch and MoeFantasy, the artwork has only been corrected on the MoeFantasy server.
  • HMS Amethyst is classified as a destroyer in-game, has a torpedo stat, and thus can launch torpedoes, even though...
    • 1. She isn't a destroyer. The Black Swan-class are sloops.
    • 2. Neither she or any of her sister ships have torpedo launchers in reality.
  • In a similar vein, the sole representative of the John C. Butler-class destroyer escort, USS Samuel B. Roberts, is also mis-classified as a destroyer.
• Beehive Barrier: All of the various blocking abilities (Nevada and Oklahoma's All Or Nothing, Prinz Eugen's Frontline Defense, etc.) are depicted as this.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • One of the fastest ways to level up ships is to equip your ships with anti-sub equipment and grind at point A of 6-1 again and again and again and again and again... Sure, instantly sending the enemy subs back to where they came from feels satisfying at first, but it becomes a chore really fast. And to top it off, the enemies on that point sometimes include two carriers, so you'll have to exit the game and go back to avoid either damaging your ships and wasting time to repair or losing too much bauxite to enemy aircraft.
  • Destroyer Campaign Hard is available early on, and can provide a ton of steel everyday as long as you have a team of high-level destroyers. Though farming the same campaign stage over and over is extremely dull.
• Born Unlucky: William D. Porter, not only does she have the lowest luck value in the whole game, her special skill actually decreases the luck value of the entire team and provides no benefits at all! Upgrading her skill decreases the luck debuff until it reaches zero.
• Bowdlerise: The download link from the official site leads to a version where some of the more Stripperific ship girls are redrawn to look◊ more◊ conservative◊, and the Clothing Damage system is removed altogether. The uncensored version can be downloaded elsewhere.
  • Since 2.7.0, all Chinese versions of the client are censored, though the censorship can be removed using a version of the Konami Code.
• Cast of Personifications: The game is about personified World War II warships, shown in the form of attractive girls.
• Clothing Damage: Most ship girls get this after getting heavily damaged.
• Cool Plane: We've the usual fare of carrier-launched aircraft, along with a few oddballs, such as the Vought XF5U "Flying Flapjack" heavy fighter, and the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. Notably, the latter aircraft can only be launched from one specific carrier, the Yorktown-class carrier USS Hornet.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Zig-Zagged. Ship girls can't die, but having one retreat due to their HP pool being depleted results in a major penalty to the affection value. Not only that, ALL ship girls you have above level 10 take a hit to their affection value. Since raising the affection value is a very long and hard process, retreating is extremely inadvisable.
• Decapitated Army: Taking out the enemy flagship guarantees at least "tactical victory" (B rating).
• Derivative Differentiation: Completely new mechanics are being introduced over time, to differentiate themselves from KanColle and mitigate some of the prejudice that many other Chinese-developed games get.
• Excuse Plot: The old plot given by Patch at E3 goes something like this: a nuclear test in 1945 gone wrong somehow messed up the space-time continuum and sent the entire Solar System into the future, in a galaxy far, far away. An alien race called the Precursors, the dominant species of that time, is running out of resources and wants the Earth. They created the Abyssals because a full scale invasion would likely blow up the planet. Back on Earth, the Allied Nations and the Axis Powers banded together to fight the aliens, creating the ship girls. moeFantasy has since stated that Warship Girls "has no official background settings".
• Historical In-Joke: Pretty much EVERY ship has at least one.
• Infinity +1 Sword: B-25 Doolittle Squadron, it's the single most powerful bomber in the game and the only bomber with a 6 stars rarity rating. It has a +20 bombing stats, twice as much as the second most powerful bomber, the BTD-1 Destroyer (see below). Though it is incredibly hard to obtain, since it cannot be crafted and only comes pre-equipped on the Hornet, who only drops on 5-3.
  • The cannon equivalent is the Japanese 46 cm cannon, the main cannon of the legendary Yamato. It is the strongest naval gun in the game, and is only available as a reward for the 2015 winter event.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The BTD-1 Destroyer is much easier to obtain than the B-25, since it can be crafted. It is also much less bauxite-intensive, costing only a third of the bauxite that the B-25 costs.
• Joke Character: Sükhbaatar, the only ship of the Mongolian Navy. Being an old tugboat, she is predictably horrible at fighting. Though she does have the "Fishing" skill^note Named after phishing and the Chinese application of the term to general trolling, which makes acquiring high rarity ships easier.
• Lethal Joke Character: If you challenge Sükhbaatar more than three times in a single day, she turns into a ridiculously powerful aircraft cruiser with 999 hp, capable of sinking pretty much any ship with a single hit. This form is nicknamed Star Destroyer by fans.
  • Óðinn received the same treatment in the Second Anniversary Event.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: A ship girl with a high affection value has higher hit rate, dodge rate, and critical rate. If the affection value reaches zero, however, the ship girl suffers reduced hit, dodge, and critical rates.
• Lightning Bruiser: Heavy Cruisers, Battle-cruisers, and Fast Battleships feature superb firepower, great armor, and decent speed. A great mix when dealing with surface vessels.
• Mighty Glacier: Monitors and slow Battleships. While both have the guns to take on practically any surface vessel, they aren't particularly fast (more so with Monitors), and the former ship type doesn't exactly have the survivability against those that can over-power them.
• Multinational Team: As the game features ships from Allied and Axis powers, this is now possible.
• National Stereotypes: Each Ship girl has a Stereotype look based on the country they're from. (eg. Most of the Chinese Ship girls wears a Qipao and the German Ship Girls wear German military uniforms.)
• No Name Given: Enforced with the IJN ship girls in the Chinese server. Starting in 2019, moeFantasy did away with giving IJN ship girls fake names, and in promotional material for new IJN ship girls or new outfits for existing ones, they simply appear with NO NAME. In former case, it is entirely up to the player to figure out who the new girl is based solely on the details of their rigging and gear.
• No Plot? No Problem!: An interesting case, even though the game has no official plot (see Excuse Plot above), the artists who designed the various ship girls often provide snippets of the ship girls' backstories, which may or may not be canon. This is usually reflected in the quotes of the girls, which are written by the game developers.
• No-Sell: The final boss fleet for 2015's summer are completely immune to torpedoes, since they represent land-based fortresses and air bases.
• No Swastikas: Enforced, in more ways than one.
  • For direct examples, the swastikas on all the German ship girls are replaced with what appear to be the Rebel Army emblem from Metal Slug.
  • See this package of hot sausages? This is a piece of equipment that gave a slight boost to firepower and was rewarded for those who participated in the beta test. But that's not all it was used for. Until a certain date, all Japanese aircraft featured in the game were given THIS pack of sausages as their art, as to not display the Rising Sun. Even after their aircraft got actual art, the Rising Sun logo was replaced with the Takeda Clan logo. The artist for USS Essex, however, managed to sneak in the Rising Sun logo in her damaged illustration. The Japanese aircraft being shot down by her AA guns have the Rising Sun logo on them.
  • In the Patch Games' version, the company decided to rename and edit all the Japanese ships, arguably due to pressure from the Ministry of Culture of China. This can be removed using a secret code, however.
• Relationship Values: The more the Admiral relationships with their ships improve, the better their stats.
• Rock Beats Laser: The ship girls are perfectly capable of taking on the futuristic enemy fleet using World War II era equipment.
  • Justified in the case of Javelin and the North Carolina class, whose equipment are stated to be reverse-engineered technology.
• Scenery Censor: Almost half of the ship girls' damaged artwork.
• Shout-Out: The damaged art for Yorktown has her covering her left eye, which is emitting a blue haze, very similar to a certain Wo-class standing in for Yorktown in the KanColle anime.
  • In the music room, there are three Revenge-class fairies standing in a box and playing music. The box has "Tactical Musical Fairies REVENGIRLS" on it.
  • Hibiki's alternate outfit comes with a Mister Handy robot.
  • The gold chest's description mentions that each chest weighs 38 tons, "just enough to cast a Type 59". Referencing the gold Type 59 tank from World of Tanks.
  • Scharnhorst's Qipao costume is named "I Came to Hebei Province", which is a common mishearing of "Und doch habe ich allein", one of Hitler's lines from Hitler Rants.
  • The E6 special operation of the 2016 winter event is just one big reference to the Metal Gear series, from the Codec conversation to the boss (no pun intended) to the completion reward. Even the name of the mission ("Small Island Evacuation Operation") is a reference to Kojima leaving Konami.
• Start My Own: Due to the Executive Meddling and further legal problems between Patch Games and moeFantasy, Patch decided to ban moeFantasy from further updates of the game and started his own version, called the Simplified Chinese version.
• Starter Equipment: Each Admiral starts with one of four destroyers of their choosing: HMS Glowworm, USS Gearing, KM Z16, or IJN Fubuki.
• Stealth-Based Mission: Well... Sort of. E6 of the 2016 winter event is a special mission where one of your ship girls needs to infiltrate an enemy base to extract the special forces team who had been sent in to steal classified documents. The ship girl cannot attack, and must dodge all enemy fire, or she'll be "discovered", which instantly fails the mission. Due to the mechanism of the game, however, dodging is completely luck based. Even with dodge boosting skills and equipment, it can still take dozens of try to finish the mission. Thankfully, the "no attacking" restriction no longer applies on the boss point, and the boss herself is a ridiculously weak Paper Tiger. On top of that, this mission is completely optional and its reward is purely cosmetic.
• The Dog Bites Back: The lost supply transports from the monthly mission return in E6 of the Second Anniversary Event, only this time they all got the Sükhbaatar treatment, turning them from the single weakest mook type in the game to elite battlecarriers.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: The submarines, though U81 wears a coat outside her swimsuit for some reason.