Saturday, December 24, 2011

Monster Girl Quest Ch.2 - A Review

Hurrah for とろとろレジスタンス (hope I pasted the right characters there) and Monster Girl Quest Ch.2. Mention of that always triples the number of hits to my blog. :D

Now if only I could persuade all those people lured here like victims to the alluring, pulsing, moist sack of a pitcher plant girl to check out my stories...

Now that the shameless book-whoring is out of the way, let's get on with the review.

Monster Girl Quest is a hentai RPG game. You play Luka, a young man on a quest to bring peace and harmony to his world by slaying the evil Demon Monster Lord. His companion on this quest is Alice…the Demon Monster Lord.

The majority of the hentai comes from the combat encounters. Luka’s world is filled with monster girls, and all of them want to rape and do unmentionable sex things to the poor lad. Have Luka lose a fight (conveniently, the game makes this very easy with various assorted commands that exist purely to suicide poor Luka) and you’ll be treated to an ending scene where the monster girl gets to have her wicked way with the hapless hero. The game also features an unlockable encyclopedia of monsters encountered so far and gives the player the option to…erm…“battle” them again at different difficulty settings.

There are 85 encounters in the second chapter, each with one or more Game Over scenes. That’s a lot of choice and variety. As with the first chapter the creators have tried to cover just about every fetish imaginable (and a few you might never have known previously existed). The monsters vary from the traditional sexy humanoid types such as succubi, elves, fairies, cat girls…

Oh Alma Elma, we'd have such a future together if you didn't keep killing me...

…to some truly WTF! creations.

We strongly recommend your next action be "Guard".

The only true constant is they’re all female and have a pair (or more!) of boobies. As with the first chapter, the artwork is of varying quality, but some scenes, especially in the succubus village, have a lot more artwork per encounter than before.

While the number and variety of hentai scenes is impressive, the creators have also taken the time to make it a proper game with a decent storyline to stitch the fights together. This isn’t a visual novel where the only interactivity is clicking “Next Page” over and over. In the first chapter a lot of the fights were puzzles where the player had to work out which sequence of attack options to use. The second chapter adds extra complexity through the addition of elemental spirits Luka acquires on his quest. Refreshingly, the game steers clear of the clichéd elemental Jankenpon mechanic and instead each spirit gives Luka new abilities.

When summoned, Sylph allows Luka to dodge status changes and some OHKO attacks, while Gnome boosts defence and allows Luka to break restraints faster. Undine gives a kind of temporary invulnerability to most attacks and Salamander boosts attack and resets special points to full, but prevents Meditating to restore Hit Points while she’s out. The game compensates by making the encounters much harder. In the later battles Luka will need to summon Sylph and Gnome just to be able to fight normally. Failure to do so will result in being hit by restraint attacks he can’t break out of and special attacks that will defeat him in one hit.

The storyline continues the humour and strong characters of the first chapter. Luka is a decent and likable protagonist. Alice continues to be sarky and make fun of him at every opportunity, but it’s clear her respect and affection for him grows during the game. (Tip: Pay attention during the last fight otherwise you’ll need that box of tissues sitting next to you...and not in the way you thought!)

I played the game using AGTH and auto-translation software. It was enough to follow the action, but I suspect I missed a lot of the jokes and swipes at mainstream RPGs. Thankfully, RogueTranslator is working on putting together a full English translation. Progress on that can be followed at his blog here.

I love this game. Obviously I’m biased through my own predilections, but it’s great to see a piece of entertainment with porn as its raison d'être not take the lazy way out and actually aspire to have playability, plot and decent characterization as well as the obligatory Tits’n’Ass (or rather Tits’n’Orifices-of-questionable-function).

With around 9,000 downloads in the first week (9,000! Why am I wasting my time writing dusty old books!?), it’s also great to see the creators have been rewarded for their time and effort. Hopefully, its success will pave the way for other similar games in the future. It would be interesting to see the concept expanded to incorporate random battles or branching paths through the story.

I always did like those old game books… ;)

5 comments:

  1. This game is amazing, but your stories are amazing too mostly (succubus summoning) is my favorite story of all stories of succubi that I have read, and believe me I've read a lot about succubi, why not search for a team of artists, and make visual novels game mode? just an idea but I think many people would like.

    Greetings!

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  2. My problems is actually with the story. Sure, I like Luka and Alice, but, well... I liked Ilias too, and I don't hold with the game designers' crude attempts to ape the inferior SMT game series for good ideas. That wasn't necessary, to me.

    Also, I hate Alma Elma, but, well... I guess I can see how you'd like her, given your... proclivities.

    In short, for all its clever writing and likable main characters, I feel that the basic plot is just too insultingly simplistic, nonsensical, and badly-implemented for me to get into.

    Of course, all that's pure hearsay, since I haven't actually gotten to play it yet, and don't plan to till RT finishes.

    Hope this wasn't... too bad an opinion comment.

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  3. @narhak. I'm thinking about it, but I've got some writing projects to clear first

    @SpectralTime. That it has a plot at all is an achievement for a porn game :). It's not hyper complex, but there's more to the story than kill stuff, level up, kill the big bad. Try it out when RT finishes the translation (there are plenty of succubi to curbstomp for starters)

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  4. Well, yeah, but I don't hate ALL succubi, just the MGU model. Common misconception.

    I suppose you're right, though it still makes me feel unhappy. I'd almost rather it have NO plot than try to have one and do it badly, ya know? A simple plot that makes sense is better than an ambitious one full of holes.

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  5. "It would be interesting to see the concept expanded to incorporate random battles or branching paths through the story." You just predicted the Paradox.

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