Hentai Game Review - Monster Girl Summoner

A tricky one to review, this one.

Back when I first mentioned it, I noticed Monster Girl Summoner seemed to be appealing to both sub (MGQ-style Bad Ends) and dom (Rance-style rapes) audiences.  It looked like you could either play as an effete-looking warlock and pick up the sexy Bad Ends or pork the monster girl dungeons into submission as a big fat orc.  In actuality you play as the monster girl summoner and the orc is your trusty ‘Pikachu’ that handles all your fights for you.  The hentai content is similar to Desire Dungeon in that there are both Victory and Bad End sex scenes.  The player can skip them according to their preferences, although that aspect seemed a little temperamental when I was playing.

You . . .

At the start your party consists of only the orc, but later on you can recruit other monster allies by defeating them in battle.  There are a wide variety of both normal monsters and sexy monster girls.  All are recruitable and each usually comes with a couple of skills.  Unfortunately they don’t appear to pick up new skills on levelling up, so don’t expect any Pokemon-type complexity here.

. . . and your big fat orc buddy.

It is an RPGMaker-type game, but as with a lot of hentai RPGs, some of the gameplay aspects have been trimmed out.  I didn’t see much resembling a story and there’s no exploration as the dungeons consist of a series of random encounters followed by a fight with the monster boss(es) of the level.  H-scenes are revealed by winning (the orc rapes them) or losing (the monster girl rapes the summoner) versus the end-of-level monster girl boss(es).

On hard it becomes end of level bosses.

The H-scenes are short with one static image.  The artwork is fine.  It’s not up to the standards of other monster girl hentai games, but it’s not terrible either.  One issue is that certain poses/templates are clearly being re-used across multiple scenes.  This is especially weird when you have a Bad End scene where the hero is supposedly being dominated, but the artwork shows them sitting on top with their dick between the monster girl’s tits and the monster girl looking most put out by the whole thing.  It makes me wonder if the decision to add some Bad End sexy material was made after they’d already commissioned and received the artwork.

This is supposed to be a player Bad End.  I'm not sure Lamia agrees.

There are also some odd quirks in the mechanics that feel like they might be bugs.  Money is irrelevant as there are a couple of points in the starting town where the hero can just keep picking up random sums of money.  The NPC handling recollections gives you the option to see the first ten encounters right at the start of the game and doesn’t appear to add the later ones.  Armour consists of charms for various parts of the body.  There are seven types—each corresponding to a sin—of varying numerical levels.  Each type affects different stats, I think.  For some reason the 4th type (I think it’s Arrogance) has a weird multiplicative effect on the defence stat.  Equip all level 1s (and only level 1s, equipping higher levels of the same charm breaks the bonus and actually reduces defence) and the character ends up with a value of defence that renders them virtually immune to anything other than magical attacks.  This warps the gameplay so much it feels like there's probably some kind of weird calculation bug somewhere.

With all this I thought I’d be panning Monster Girl Summoner with a negative review.  But to be fair to the game, it has provided a few hours distraction.  The ability to recruit anything leads to the classic “Gotta Get ‘em All” compulsion and there is some fun in playing around with both the party compositions and difficulty levels to find the most efficient ways of levelling up your harem.

Devil girls like to ride.

This makes it an awkward one to review.  Monster Girl Summoner is clearly flawed and much weaker than some of its competition, but there was something in the game mechanics that kept me interested enough to give it a second look.  The game also has a wide variety of different monster encounters.  I’ll put it down as a YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) and leave it at that.