Saturday, December 17, 2016

Hentai Game Review: Drain Dungeon

I checked the demo of this out a week or so ago and it looked interesting.  The main sticking point was it was made using the Wolf RPG system and that doesn't usually play very nice with the AGTH + TranslationAggregator system I use for automated Japanese -> English translation.  What normally happens is a lot of characters get dropped from the text, making it impossible to translate.  After searching around I managed to find a fix.

If half of that paragraph was gobbledegook I recommend checking out this hongfire subforum.  There are plenty of helpful guides here to help you setup text hooking and machine translation for Japanese games.  It is fiddly and the results are highly variable, but in most cases you will be able to get the gist of what's going on.

Generally, after putting the relevant programs on your machine (and changing locale to Japanese), you create a shortcut to the game and in the top shortcut path add a link to AGTH before the address of the game.  (Some IT knowledge is required - I'd follow the guides I linked to rather than asking me.)

The fix for the Wolf RPG games is to use this path to AGTH in the shortcut path to the game (paste it into the dialogue box before the address of the game):

[your local path to AGTH]\agth.exe /c /v /x3 /kf /ks2

Then select the thread that hooks the right text from the AGTH dropdown box while the game is running.  The only problem is it tends to go berserk on menu/item screens and the game becomes a little unresponsive.

Right, now the fiddly stuff is out of the way, let's take a look at the game.




Drain Dungeon is a basic dungeon crawler RPG where the dungeon is abstracted into a series of left or right choices.  The choices lead to either no encounter, a fight, a chest, an event, or a kitsune shopkeeper, with all visible before taking that choice.  In this respect it's similar to the continuous corridor of Desire Dungeon.

(Game Design Tip: Abstraction like this is your friend if you are a small indie developer with limited resources.)

In this case, it doesn't matter whether you go left or right - a boss fight is imminent.

The central quirk of the game is that all adventurers have their levels mysteriously set back to 1 on leaving the dungeon.  With this in mind, a trio of enterprising succubus sisters offer to drain those levels out of you, sexily, before you return to the surface and lose them anyway.  A splendid deal for all concerned.

That's not the only quirk of the game.  For some reason the player is restricted in the number of items they can take back into the dungeon, although this number can be increased using the game's alternate levelling system.  Rather than XP and levels, which are fed to the hungry mouths and pussies of the succubi, the player gains another value (which I never managed to translate the name of correctly) which can be spent to change their class, improve their starting stats, and provide other benefits.  This is the key to beating the game as the player goes in as slightly stronger level 1 each time, enabling each run to go deeper than the last one.


The monster girl boss sprites are actually rather nice.

The fights are typical generic RPG affairs against what I'm guessing are stock monster sprites.  However, there are monster girl bosses at regular (every 80 paces) intervals and these provide additional hentai content.  Losing to a boss will see the player getting their levels sucked out by the monster girl in a sexy loss scene.  There are four bosses in total - a slime girl, a harpy, a dragon girl and a succubus.

The player can exit the dungeon at any time, which will take them to the boudoir of the succubus sisters for a spot of sexy draining.  Each sister has four scenes, each unlocked after experiencing the previous, and requiring the player to hand over 5, 10, 15, or 20 levels respectively.


Bad Ends aren't so bad when you know you're going to be reset to level 1 anyway...

The H-scenes are varied and there are plenty of them - 5 with each succubus sister, 4 from the bosses, 2 bonus ones (a random mimic encounter and an occasional offer of sex from the kitsune merchant), plus a big ole orgy at the end.  I thought the scenes were okay, but felt the H-scene art was weaker than the normal character art.

There are multiple ways to complete the game.  Defeating the last succubus boss unlocks a harem scene where all four get to have fun with the player.  The other way involves feeding a total of 200 levels to one of the succubi, at which point she'll be powerful enough to defeat the last succubus boss on her own.  It's a little fiddly to spot as it doesn't come up in the list of options - you have to keep selecting the top option to talk to her until the option to end the game that way comes up.  This also unlocks her final H-scene, which ended up being a disappointment to me.  I did it for the big-titted eldest sister and while the story was sweet, the H-scene was a re-run of her first scene with slightly tweaked artwork.

How would you like to be drained today, brave adventurer...?

While I loved the idea from a thematic perspective, it is flawed from a mechanical perspective.  Grinding through the same goblins and wolves over and over at the start does get tedious, although at least the player does level up quickly.  The grind is real, but at least the game is relatively merciful about it.  Once you figure out what's going on, it doesn't take many missions to reach the end and unlock everything.

I wonder if the drain-back-to-level-1 theme might work better with rogue-lite mechanics.  There is a hint of them in the item restrictions and constantly being reset to level 1, but the game could definitely do with a bit more RNG madness in the dungeons to liven things up a little.


A mutually beneficial transaction, I think!

Overall I liked the concept and wanted to like the game more, but it's a little too generic and the one sister's ending scene I unlocked was a bit of a disappointment considering the grind to unlock it.  If I gave out scores this would be the 5'est 5/10 ever (very very medium).

12 comments:

  1. The succubus level drain gimmick makes me think about Jackson in HRPG-World...
    I'll see myself out.
    -DD

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  2. Hey M.E, have you tried this game out yet? http://www.dlsite.com/maniax/announce/=/product_id/RJ174492, only the demo is out as of now but it's really well done and it fits your style of having sexy succbi drain men to dry husks theme. Plus it has Shiki as one of the artists.

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    1. Yup, posted a preview today (would have been up earlier, but I scheduled it for the wrong time). I'm really looking forward to this one. The demo is amazing.

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  3. Mr.Hydra if you don't mind can you give me a detail description of Nyte from Succubus Summoning. I decide to reread Succubus summoning,and other of your stories. It just that ever time read a story that features her. She has a slight different appearance,that it kind of hard to visualize her.

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    1. Is there a story that accurately describe her appearance that I can be point to?

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    2. Strange, I thought I was reasonably consistent with Nyte apart from maybe her height slipping around. Classic, pale-skinned vampish dominatrix in tight black leather is her look. Her first appearance in 101 (107 or 108 I think), Halloween Nyte and 203 should all have fairly detailed descriptions. If there are any contradictions, let me know and I'll try to clear them up.

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    3. Halloween Night had the best description in my opinion. I think I figure out one of the problem visualizing her. What kind of wings do nyte have? Do she have regular batwings coming out of her back? Or is it more like Morrigan from Darkstalker(www.deviantart.com/art/DSR-Morrigan-348938777)?

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    4. Regular bat/demon wings - higher up and more like a World of Warcraft succubus rather than Morrigan's waist-wings. She does have the head wings though (even though I sometimes forget and leave that off the later descriptions).

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    5. That has to be it! That why in some story I keep thinking she was a Bdsm Theme Morganna for some reason while and others she fit the classic yet Demonic succubi in the past. So if I;m getting things right. Nyte is a tall deathly pale Succubus who eyes is Pitch black and tongue is black. She has regular Black demon wings and tail like world of Warcraft. She has headWing with Horn(which kind?) that are black. Is that correct or am I missing something?

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    6. Not too tall. She has an extremely intimidating aura that makes her seem taller than she is (even confuses me! :) )

      Tail is closer to the typical devil tail, although she can use hers to sting like a scorpion. For her horns I'll have to check back. They're either typical devil horns but black, or the type that curls around behind the ears - whatever is in the earliest description (and hopefully I kept to it!)

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    7. Yep that enough for me to visualize her. Wait she doesn't have a second form does she? I know for Nurse Honey has two different forms. One that phil see everyday and the one that she appears deep in her domain.

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  4. Personally liked the game, cause of the same desire dungeon elements. Another nice game to add ( as always ) in my collection. Of course it can't be compared to other succubus/monster girl based titles, but still its a nice game although indeed it could use more material to balance the grinding aspect of the game.

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