Monday, February 22, 2016

Hentai Game Review: Monster Musume Hyakuran vol.1

After a sort of drought in good monster girl eroge we get both a new Violated Hero and a new release from Toro Toro Resistance (the person/people behind Monster Girl Quest) in quick succession.  Violated Hero 6 is currently queued up on my hard drive and I'll be looking to give that the Let's Play treatment on the blog as soon as I get around to it.

In the meantime there's this new release from Toro Toro Resistance: Monster Musume Hyakuran vol. 1.


My Japanese is non-existent, so Monster Musume Hyakuran == Monster Daughter/Girl Tales/Collection?

Anyway, calling this a game is rather stretching the term.  Don't get your hopes up that this is a new Monster Girl Quest or Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  In music terms this release strikes me as being like one of those albums/EPs of B-sides and previously cut material bands put out to tide them over between albums.

Monster Musume Hyakuran vol.1 is a collection of Bad End scenes featuring femdom (and frequently carnivorous) monster girls.  If you remember the non-fight scenes in Monster Girl Quest Chapter 3, well MMH vol.1 is those x33 (as in 33 separate encounters, not 33 times more squick, because 33 times the squick of Catoblepas Girl is... a challenge beyond even my little black cells to visualise, maybe).  There are some branching points along of the lines of "Would you like to be digested to mush?" or "Would you like all your sperm/life sucked out?", but mostly these are short stories given the Visual Novel treatment with art and sound effects.

If a lamia asks you if you want to be her cuddle toy, the correct answer is "yes".
Some of the tales are connected.  There is a long story that will be very familiar to anyone that remembers Resident Evil (Biohazard) 1 & 2, with pornified, monster-girl-arized versions of monsters from those games (and some not quite so monster-girl-arized – Plant 42!).  This was a little confusing to me at first as the first link from the monster girl encyclopaedia entry would take me to the start of that story rather than to the individual scene for that girl.

WTF Toro Toro Resistance! I think you forgot the girl in monster girl for this one.
I should add at this point that everything is in Japanese on the off chance someone buys the product by mistake and ends up with something that doesn't make sense to them.  MMH vol.1 looks like it uses the same engine as the original Monster Girl Quest and plays reasonably nice with the standard auto-translation tools (If you're unfamiliar with how these work, I normally point people here for a full guide – although they are less effective nowadays given that some of the translation websites such as Google Translate blocks Translation Aggregator).  Toro Toro Resistance's work is fairly popular out in the West, so I wouldn't be surprised if some brave soul gets around to putting out an English translation at some point.  Maybe Dargoth, if the poor bloke isn't already destroyed by Monmusu Quest: Paradox.

Become a guinea pig at a sex toy testing facility!
The art and Bad End scenes are similar in quality to TTR's previous games – variable, but diverse and imaginative enough that you're likely to find something that hit's the spot.  Yes, vore is fairly ubiquitous, but can be avoided if that's not your thing.  As good as TTR is at producing this material at this point, I'd like to see them push on now and maybe see if they can work some animation into the scenes.  Currently the ROBF series* of monster girl battlefuck games does this to good effect, but are difficult to get and play outside of Japan because their creator has a serious hang-up (not entirely unjustified) with Westerners and piracy.

Even the small animation in this scene is quite effective... until you realise what she's doing with that strange orifice...
So, is Monster Musume Hyakuran vol.1 worth buying?  This depends on what you found enjoyable from the original Monster Girl Quest series.  If you liked that series for the epic storyline and the cute interactions with Alice and the other characters, but largely skipped the Bad End scenes because you found them squicky, then MMH vol.1 might not be for you.  However, if you ploughed through that series and relished every imaginative and (usually) sexy fate Luka suffered at the hands of the various amorous (and sometimes hungry!) monster girls, MMH vol.1 is 33 brand new Bad End scenarios that will likely keep you entertained for some time.


(*As an aside, I would love to do a Let's Play series on one of the ROBF games here, but there's virtually no chance of this happening as I'm a) unable to legally purchase them, b) would be unable to get through the Japanese 'gatekeeper' puzzles designed to keep out foreign players, and c) would likely get DMCA-ed to oblivion if I tried.  This is a real shame as the ROBF series is very very good from what I've seen of it.)

11 comments:

  1. Can't comment on the latest ROBF but it seems rather unimaginative since the artwork, gameplay, and abilities have undergone minimal change.

    As for the creator's anti-piracy and xenophobia, I loved the fake version he seeded, brilliant trolling of pirates. Though ironically, his refusal to sell may inspire the pirates all the more. Still, I want to punch him for his ethnocentric bigotry.

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    1. Seeding a fake version is excellent trolling - I didn't know about that. :)

      I can see where he's coming from on the piracy front. It must be massively annoying when the first search result returned from Google for your game is a forum with links to where the game can be pirated. That said, making the game difficult/impossible for people to buy is just giving them an excuse to get hold of it through other means. A shame, as I reckon the game would do very well on the English DLsite as in some respects it does BF better than MGQ. The argument I've heard against this is that the English-speaking market is tiny and the gains from there aren't worth the risk of exposing more pirated copies of the game to the bigger local market. Not sure how true that is, though.

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    2. Yeah, he seeded fake copies that were 1.2gig the day the game came out and would report legit versions. Rinse repeat so most of the torrents were using the fake version. :-) The fake allowed a pirate to play up a bit past the trial and would come up with an inexecutable error, no way out of it, plus he went so far as to make it so replacing files with the legitate game wouldn't salvage the game or save files. Brilliant.

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  2. What`s ROBF?

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    1. Ragnarok Online Battle Fuck. It's another monster girl hentai game in a similar vein to monster girl quest. I'll update the post with a link to a review I did of the original.

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  3. Someone mentioned the guy having "ethnocentric bigotry." Is he actually being racist about it or is it he just doesn't want it to be pirated?

    As for this Monster Mosume game, are all the bad end scenarios based off of those CYOAs in the Toro Toro website that involve various monster girls and such? I remember seeing a Resident Evil parody and an Aliens parody there as well.

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    1. Dunno about the creator of ROBF. Could be an anti-Western bigot, but it's more likely he's pissed off about the piracy. And to be fair, if I was a Japanese creator making Battlefuck games, I'd be a bit wary of attracting attention in the West given the current games journalism obsession of viciously dogpiling anything that outrages their moral sensibilities.

      As for MMHvol.1, I believe they are the same scenarios as were on the website. Both the Resident Evil parody and Facehugger scenarios are in the release.

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    2. CivilDeviation25/02/2016, 02:54

      Definitely an ethnocentric bigot; no one puts takes the time to build in multiple obtuse Japanese spelling games with a loop feature for wrong answers to simply spite pirates. In Japan "gaijin"(foreigners) are often viewed either as honored guests and/or with contempt. Thwarting non-japanese knowledgeable persons who bought the game illustrates an overt or at the very least covert gaijin animosity.

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  4. Desert Eagle04/04/2016, 17:18

    I bought Monster Musume Hyakuran when it came out(called Monster Girl Encyclopedia on DLSite. I protest against that name). It's really nice. I was thrilled to see one of my favourite artist Nijou^2's works in the game. They drew Akaname girl, Dress Anastasia and the "two-mouth" woman. Also, Resident Evil parody was great. :D

    Yes, it's a shame about ROBF (Kind of. I don't like the game myself). I wish he could meet us on Pixiv or some similar site and see that we aren't such bad people.

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  5. M.E.H. this entire VN is just a collection of the stories on their site many of them even predate the creation of the MGE.

    honestly when you bought this your really paying for the cg(I think it's worth it but some might disagree with me).

    basically all the stories can be read for free here http://mon110.sakura.ne.jp/ there are some really good ones not in it too

    that said I hope vol.2 uses their AVP story, one of my personal favorites it was like the RE story but bigger, though most of girls are xenomorphs and there a select your heroine(a Gynoid that I think is based on Bishop or A Predator)route-split near the end.(admittedly I prefer the gynoid route cause I'm a sucker for "AI that learned to love" stories)

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    1. quick clarification.
      Yes, I did mean MGE not MGQ many of those stories have been on the site(well a previous iteration of it since the domain has change a few times) since at least the 90s.

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