Thursday, May 14, 2015

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 50

Closing Thoughts (Yes, this is just an excuse to take it up to 50 posts)

This is the last post in my Monmusu Quest: Paradox: Chapter 1 playthrough.  Yep, I was crazy to do it, but people asked for it and it was fun if probably not the most efficient way to promote my own books.  The first part can be found back here and the series runs almost daily until we get to here, the end (until chapter 2 comes out).  At some point I'm considering migrating the blog over to a WordPress site, which will hopefully organise these posts in an easier way to navigate and ideally preserve all the original comments as well.  Thanks to the people that commented and more importantly provided corrections and clarifications.

I'll do a full review at some point.  This will serve as a point of reference for people that don't want to plough through 40,000 words or so of raw playthrough observations.  For here I'll finish up with some thoughts on the story.

The story is nicely poised.  Something went wrong in the past of one of the alternate worlds and now that's seeping out to devour other existences.  In the Paradox world multiple factions seem to be trying to get Luka (and Alice, although I don't know how depowered Ilias fits into it) to follow the same path as the MGQ series, even as far as going behind the scenes to change a world with friendlier relations between humans and monster girls to match the encounters the other Luka had in the first series.  It will be interesting to learn why this is happening in the forthcoming chapters.

I think once again the creators have achieved in their aim to produce something that isn't just a random sex game.  Just because the primary focus of the series is to shove in as many weird and wonderful explicit sex scenes with hawt monster girls doesn't mean the basics of storytelling such as plot and character should be ignored.  Paradox achieves this with a storyline that resembles the complicated plots of previous JRPGs such as the Final Fantasy series.

It's not been perfect.  Some of the re-visited locations seemed like they were only there because they were in the original.  A major plot point seems to be making Paradox!Luka follow in the footsteps of MGQ!Luka despite the differences between the worlds.  I'd have liked to have seen the story play around with those differences a little more.  Some of the re-visited sections felt like flat retreads of the original series only present because the creators wanted to include everything from the original game regardless of whether it fits or not.

The final boss for the chapter, Adramelech, also came out of nowhere.  Normally the presence of a powerful endboss is teased before they're actually fought.  I suppose this might be a function of this being chapter one rather than the whole game.

These are only minor niggles to be honest.  The rest of the game is suitably epic.  RPGmaker isn't the best at conveying atmospheric locations such as the haunted labs of Tartarus or a world crumbling under the onslaught of chaos.  That's what an imagination is for – after all, books don't come with Hollywood-style special effects either.  Overall Paradox is way more than most would expect from a mere 'sex' game.  Good work as usual, TTR and crew.

Now for some thoughts on doing this playthrough series.  I knew there would be a lot more content than the usual Violated Hero-type games I've done this for in the past.  For that reason I decided on a daily schedule otherwise it would take forever to get through the whole game.  Sticking to that schedule was fairly brutal and my other writing projects took a hit in the process.  I'll still be doing this for the future MQ: Paradox games, but probably not for every monster girl game.  It's too time-consuming and to be honest, the other games rarely turn out to be as creative or as interesting as this one.

What now.  One thing the daily posting schedule was good at was fostering discipline.  I think I'll see if I can stick to it for some of my original fiction series.  Knowing you have to put out 800 words or so a day is good for focusing the mind and keeping a story moving. (although please accept the quality – typos, etc – won't be as high as the ebooks I've put out.  I intend to be writing fast).  I know readers would love it if I did this for the Succubus Summoning series.  Maybe for a 301 arc.  201 is still being dug out of a pit.  Ironically, that one I did try to plan out in advance and probably made more mistakes than the more chaotically written 101 arc.

I think the first serial to get going again will be Jackson's adventures in HRPG-World.  They can be read here (1, 2, 3, 4) to get a flavour of what they're about.  So don't run away just because I'm done with TTR's Monmusu Quest: Paradox game.  Plenty of sexy monster girl action still to come.

The other thing I want to get restarted is the game design stuff I was fiddling around with at the start of the year.  That ended up going on the backburner with all the other chaos going on.

Also, if you've enjoyed what you've read over the last month or so, please support me by checking out my ebooks on Amazon, Smashwords or even directly from my publisher.  A stable income means I can continue doing series like this.  (and I guarantee you'll enjoy the books ;) )

Oh, and we can't sign off without at least some sexy stuff.

In Paradox Luka can challenge Death to a fight.


Yep it's a very bad idea (assuming you can even get past the full-grown Alice Death throws at you to prove you're even good enough to challenge her).


At least, like most of MGQ's denizens, she gives Luka a pleasurable send off to oblivion.


Oh well.  That looks like the last from Luka until Monmusu Quest: Paradox: Chapter 2 comes out.

17 comments:

  1. How can you challange Death in Paradox? I tried with quite a few things but couldn't do it nor i found anything about it elsewhere and highly doubt it but is it possible to actually win against her? Same question about Sphinx please if you can answer my questions.

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    1. Talk to her in Boss Fight replay room on the second floor of Ilias temple. 1st option is change difficulty. 2nd option is challenge her with a follow-up confirmation you want to challenge her (although you have to beat an alt-reality Alice first). People have beaten her apparently. I watched my party members get hit for 3,000+ damage a pop and thought, nope!

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    2. Thanks a lot for the help.

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    3. The common strategy is to have the endurance-ability (If you're above 20% HP, a killing blow only reduces you to 1 HP) on every character, and have a very good mass healer. As well as immunity to insta-death, because Death kinda likes that trick.

      Problem is that Endurance, apparently, is only meant to work once per fight - that it kept working after being triggered was, apparently, a bug. Not sure if they fixed that yet, though.


      How to beat her without that? No idea. But Nero, for example, has an "I move for four turns while the world (including enemies and allies) is frozen"-skill, so I guess in later games, she'll be a bit easier...

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    4. CivilDeviation15/05/2015, 04:22

      An alternative strategy is maxing evasion on toons, Pihar the unfortunate harpy combined with an evasion boosting (song-iirc) and toons with items that boost evasion by 10-20% along with master thief job evasion boost can really turn the table. Shadow, Mirage, Amara all have at least +10% evasion, which make it more workable. Make two healers, one a summoner (carbunkle), and a battle master. Stack anti-death skills and whala. Should be doable post-patch unless ya run out of mp and mp-potions....

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    5. I defeated Death easily but a long one my strategy is simple have low hp Sylph in your party then voila death will never hit her although just o make sure i always use summoning spell carbunacle to reflect magic attack to counter that insta-death spam of DEATH

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  2. Desert Eagle14/05/2015, 17:28

    I really hope Adramelech will become recruitable. She's very cute.

    Death doesn't seem to like having Adramelech at her place. Maybe she'll tell us to take her with us. Or maybe we'll find her broken body somewhere and... Uh, heal her? Anything to get a new teammate. :P

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    1. Eh. If you get Adramelek, then I want my Black Alice =P
      Chances for either are about the same, I guess. They're both incredibly crazy villains...

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    2. I want black alice too T_T but to be honest i supose that if she will ever be recruitable that would be only after beating the third part of paradox(or hopefully she will join the party as the plot advance on chapter 2 or 3)

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    3. Hottitude is also important, of course.
      If this game is ANYTHING like FFIV TAY, then there's going to be multiple versions of Adramalek, including the standard variety, if they're anything like the Maenads. So there's probably going to be ample opportunity to recruit her(s).
      I wonder what it'd be like if someone made a made where Luka has to survive an onslaught of yandere characters. I can just imagine him barely surviving Kurumi Tokisaki, before he gets double-teamed by Saionji Sekai and Katsura Kotonoha... That hypothetical lucky punk.

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  3. I get that tentacles are a thing in MG games, but.. Death has tentacles? Really?

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    1. I'm not sure if it's she has tentacles so much as she is summoning them or something... at least in the picture, the tentacles don't really look attached to her body.

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    2. Desert Eagle15/05/2015, 14:56

      They're in the form of tentacles but... Well, this is what I got from machine translation: The stuff she uses on Luka isn't some random black goo but the chaotic form of life. It's possible that that cape she's wearing is made of it.

      Something like that. The substance is supposed to be something where life came from. It feels good for Luka because it feels good for any living being to be in contact with the origin of life.

      And like that, Luka was being returned to it.

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    3. ... Why can't a girl rape a guy just 'cause she's horny? Any time some higher power rapes someone, it's to seal/unbirth/destroy/restructure/punish/resurrect/pass-on someone's soul! NORMAL monster girls have the right idea!

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  4. Great work getting to the end and staying on your post-a-day schedule (close enough!). It was great fun to read along with

    Hope you can transfer your productivity over to fiction successfully

    Also look forward to seeing where you get to with your game project too. Sounds like you've got your initial versions well scoped but I'd be more than willing to help out with any dev work you find a need for down the road

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  5. What do you use for a translation program?

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  6. I read your Let's Play, and might do my own playthrough with Dargoth's translation at a decent enough spot.

    But going from what you wrote, if I'm reading things right, my theory is it's essentially Luka's fault when he kills off Ilias in the original timeline.

    Storyline wise the reason Ilias couldn't get rid of the Monsters was that the world needed balance with both light and dark. Ilias looked for a way around that by absorbing dark and then just managing it all herself.

    But instead Luka defeats her, Luka probably would have become that Holy existence to balance it out, but instead Ilias uses the last of her power to save him from that and just fades away.

    Therefore Dark has no balance and starts consuming everything else, and apparently starts bleeding into other worlds. You can call it chaos but they use dark and chaos interchangeably to describe the monsters in general.

    Letting the monsters roam free, especially the ancestors, seems to mean humans can't survive. Ilias herself indicates they can't get rid of all the dark force so she's not even looking to do that, but ostensibly too much light/holy would also lead to issues.

    The solution is probably to keep Ilias from dying, and that probably also means preventing that long chain in the initial storyline. Black Alice and Promestein seemed to cause the most trouble for that, and Black Alice's back story was always left open for whatever reason. But that might be too far back to leap in time.

    There's also why Heinreich turned against Ilias as well as the 2 angel generals. Some hints are that Ilias tried to absorb chaos earlier or something, or just kill off all humans, I'm not sure.

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