Introducing Monmusu Quest: Paradox week

It’s been asked for, but before I leap headlong into Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] I thought I’d take a bit of time to get the hype train rolling (and by hype train, I mean one of those old steam trains that should really be in a museum).

Aside from promoting my own succubus/monster girl writing (which you can check out here if you’d like to give me some of your lovely cash, or here if you want a sample first), one of the things I like to cover on this here blog is succubus/monster girl sex games.  I love them, been playing them since back when this blog first started and they’re the sort of niche interest thing that rarely gets written about anywhere.  They also overlap quite nicely with my own work as I like to write about hot succubi/monster girls doing sexy things to their (un)lucky prey, and these games also feature lots of scenes of hot succubi/monster girls doing sexy things to their (un)lucky prey.

Last year I didn’t get to write much on monster girl hentai games.  This was mostly due to upgrading my laptop to Windows 10, and then finding out that Windows 10 did not get on with my translation software at all.  So, when Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] came out earlier this year, I was not able to leap straight into a continuation of my epic playthrough.  Instead the game sat rather forlornly, untouched, in a folder on my hard drive as I joined everyone else in waiting for Dargoth and crew to work through their translation.

Then I found some machine translation software that worked (more on that tomorrow) and thought I might as well start the madness again.

So, what is Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2], and why are you planning to devote an ungodly number of hours blogging your way through it?

Because it’s... fun?

As for the What is? question, here is a brief potted history of the Monster Girl Quest game series:

One of the key popularisers of monster girls on the internet is Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopaedia (I think this is the right link to their stuff).  Not long after that started to increase in popularity, screenshots and a short demo of a game featuring KC’s artwork appeared.  As far as I can tell, KC had little to do with the game aside from providing artwork of one of the main characters – Alice.  The person (people?) behind what would become Monster Girl Quest (or Monmusu Quest) was Toro Toro Resistance.  Previous to this, they’d written several sexy monster girl stories and a series of sexy voice dramas under the banner of Whispers of the Immoral Girl and the Female Pervert.

The first Monster Girl Quest told a story of a brave wannabe adventurer, Luka, setting off on a quest to defeat the Demon Lord with a sexy lamia, Alice, in tow (who also happened to be that same Demon Lord).

The game was essentially a Visual Novel with a series of RPG-style battles.  The main difference to a normal RPG was that all the enemies were monster girls and were more interested in fucking Luka’s brains out than killing him (although, most of the time they did end up killing, and sometimes eating, him in the Bad Ends, but that always seemed incidental to the fucking his brains out part).  The main difference to a normal sex game was the decent storyline and characters, as well a mind-boggling variety and inventiveness to the monster girl encounters.  Most similar games have maybe 15 distinct enemies; Monster Girl Quest had around 50.

The game quickly picked up a cult following and spawned a host of memes like “touch fluffy tail”and this:

It was also the first part of a trilogy.

Chapter two continued Luka and Alice’s adventures, where it became more obvious that Luka’s real quest was to fix the various divisions in the world and that Alice fancied the tits off him.

By chapter 3 it was fairly evident that most of the monster girls (including Demon Lord Alice and her four knights) weren’t the real threat here, so the game upended it all by having the angel Ilias turn genocidal and attempt to destroy the world because it had grown “impure”.

Make no mistake, Monster Girl Quest games are sex games, but they had a pretty decent story and the characters were engaging.

Toro Toro Resistance was able to squeeze a lot out of a visual novel engine to make Monster Girl Quest, but I suspect they were hankering to make a proper JRPG along the lines of classics like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series.  So, a couple of years later we got this:

Monmusu Quest: Paradox is an alternate universe version of the Monster Girl Quest series.  Luka is still off on his adventures, but things have gone wrong somewhere and it seems like chaos is threatening to eat that world and others.  While MGQ was a visual novel with battles, MQ:P is a much more traditional JRPG.  There is a lot more freedom of movement and the monster girl fights are your standard random encounters (with Luka having a party this time rather than fighting alone).  Like Pokemon, you can pretty much recruit all the monster girls you fight, building up a sizable harem for Luka (that will try to eat him if he’s not careful).  Toro Toro Resistance threw everything in there in terms of mechanics.  If you like old-school JRPGs, MQ:P might still be of interest even if you’re not into the freaky sex stuff.

And now we’re onto Part 2.

I decided to start up the Let’s Play series again because I enjoyed doing it the first time around, and it’s a fairly time-efficient way of keeping the blog running with new content while I try to sort out my tangled mess of writing projects behind the scenes.

A couple of things to be aware of and changes from the last series:

I won’t be running it daily this time around.  It was too brutal and I felt that it didn’t leave me enough time form my own writing.  The Mon-Wed-Fri schedule I used for Monmusu Conquered World seemed to work okay (aside from near the end when I was struggling to maintain my interest in the game).  This means the series will likely run for some time, but as I won’t be running it daily, that will leave gaps in the week for me to blog about other stuff/post new stories (more on that in a mo).

I’ll be making it more of a walkthrough, so there will be more screenshots of the less titillating RPG overworld maps to show which characters to interact with at which time in order to advance the story.  I got a fair few comments from people struggling with untranslated versions of the game that appreciated some form of guide, so it makes sense to focus on that.  It won’t be an exhaustive guide.  I don’t read Japanese either, so I’m inevitably going to miss stuff (I do in English videogame RPGs).  Feel free to point out when this happens in the comments.

Also, there is a chance the series might go on pause.  As I’ve mentioned before, Windows 10 and text hookers really don’t get along.  I have one that works, but the last Windows 10 update broke it and I was only able to get it working again by reverting the update.  Windows 10 being Windows 10, that update is going to get pushed through at some point, at which point I’m going to be boned until I can find a fix.  MQ:P is way too complex to play without some form of translation support.

Now for my own writing.  That’s currently in a bit of a mess.  On the plus side, I’ve thought up two new novel ideas that might be cool in the past month.

Actually, that's not a plus.

My main problem at the moment is staying focused long enough on the same project.  Too easily distracted by the shiny new ideas, sigh.  Once the MQ:P series is up and running that will give me plenty of time to try and sort my writing shit out (and playing through MQ:P will likely fire up some fresh inspiration in the process).  This is better than a very long gap between updates and concerned comments/emails asking if I’m still alive.

The two main items on the sorting shit out front are the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary and Succubus Summoning 301.  For SS 301 I have a pretty good idea of what the first couple of chapters are and intend working on that while the MQ:P playthrough is keeping things ticking over here.  The H-space MGB is a little more awkward as I’m struggling to manage word bloat.  Those pieces either need to be proper stories in their own right, or 1.5K sex scenes I rattle off in a couple of hours as a break from meatier projects.  Currently they’re falling into a middle ground of too-long-but-not-long-enough that isn’t working (for me).

Anyway, for the rest of the week I’ll be posting MQ:P recaps, part one hints, etc.  I'm planning to start posting the playthrough proper around this time next week.

I hope you enjoy!