Monday, February 19, 2018

Hentai Game Review: Monster Girl Labyrinth

Dieselmine have a new Monster Girl H-game out, Monster Girl Labyrinth:


I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by this one.  (So much so, I felt motivated to write a review on it.)

I know, I know.  It's Dieselmine.  So many times their games have looked to have promise, only for them to half-ass it with some questionable design choices.

So it's a surprise to see them make a straightforward monster girl battle-fuck game that gets the basics right.

Yep, they put the animations in the right place this time.  Previous game Monmusu Conquered World had some nicely-drawn succubus/monster girl sex animations, but the actual fights were standard RPG battles and the Bad Ends were static CGIs.

Monster Girl Labyrinth is more like ROBF.  The "fights" are more accurately described as fucks, and the monster girl is animated as she... ahem... battles to reduce your CP (or whatever the HP equivalent is) to zero.  The animations are fairly standard Photoshop-style puppeting, but it's effective and I've said many times before how much even a little bit of animation improves the H-scenes of these games.

The scenes are pretty good.  For most of the girls there appear to be two variants depending on whether your TP (gauge on lower right of screen) is positive or negative, and a third linking them together if you click yes when the monster girl offers to do nice things to you.

Taking the harpy as an example.  Her standard move is to rub your cock between her rather lovely butt cheeks.

Harpy foreplay (I think we can win this one)

Once she gets your TP below zero it's time for full intercourse.

Getting hot and heavy (We're losing...)

Sometimes she'll give you a yes/no option.  Selecting yes allows her to use a more extravagant "attack" that adds an additional cute little butt wriggle while she has you balls-deep inside her.

Oh fuck yes! (We lost)
(I may have conceded at this point).

Thankfully, there is very little stupid filler this time around.  All the girls get animated (and voiced) battle scenes, regardless of whether they're standard mooks or bosses.  Overall there are thirty separate encounters, which, while nothing compared to MGQ's massive monsterpedia, is still a decent amount for this type of game.

A delightful menu of depravity

The encounters vary in weirdness from more vanilla elves and wolf girls (kobolds) to... well...

Based on KC's Gazer, in turn based on D&D's Beholder (I think!)

If you liked Aradia from Monmusu Quest: Paradox, MGL also has it's own booby monster:

Falling into an actual literal booby trap

The other game art is pretty good as well.  Each of the regions you pass through looks fairly distinctive and I love the pixel art of the fast travel screen.  It gives me a real nostalgia vibe of old pixel platformers like Ghouls'n'Ghosts.

Fucking your way to the top, fantasy-RPG-style

Now for the not-so-good stuff.

The gameplay is, as typical for Dieselmine, fairly shallow.  I was unable to hook and translate the game, but was still able to breeze through it in around 4-5 hours.  Selecting basic attack and drinking a healing potion whenever your CP gets low will get you through 90% of the game.  It's also not always clear what's going on in the battles.  I get that I'm doing "damage" to them through numbers on the screen and their CP bar decreasing, but I don't have the faintest clue how it is happening.

At one point this review was going to be a lot different as for most of my playthrough the animations didn't work.  Then the game crashed and when I started it up again I realised what I was missing (as the giant slime girl inserted me headfirst into her pussy).

I can't comment too much on the story as I had to play through this one without machine translation.  I think the plot is you investigate some disappearances in your village, fall into a pit and then have to fight fuck your way through various monster girl territories to return home.  Along the way you bump into a cute witch and cute bunny girl and the main boss is some kind of fairy.

Also, the ending is not quite the ending.  Two of the monster girls (including the booby-trap girl) and a boss are post-credits content that can be found by selecting the 4th option on the menu after completing the game.

Overall, this is much better output from Dieselmine and close to what I want to see in a battle-fuck game.  I would put the animated scenes/battles as slightly above ROBF, but not quite up to the gorgeous shikibus in Succubus Prison.  It's a shame Dieselmine's recent track record has been fairly mediocre, as I suspect the game would have generated more excitement had it been made by anyone else.  I was very close to skipping this one altogether (as I did with Cornelica).  Don't be put off by it being from Dieselmine.  I think this one is pretty good.

Of course, if the reason you don't like Dieselmine is because you prefer more meat (i.e. a massive story like Monster Girl Quest, or fairly intricate RPG mechanics like ROBF and MQ: Paradox) on your hentai RPGs, this is not going to change your opinion.  It's still a shallow experience, but an enjoyable one.

I wouldn't mind seeing Dieselmine go back to the better Violated Hero games and revamping them with these newer animated battle-fucks.  Animated Milfy, ooh yes please.



Quick aside on other things.  Unfortunately I appear to still be in a state of complete disorganisation.  Expect things to be a little spotty here while I sort my shit out.

15 comments:

  1. Hope you sort out your state of disorganization to your satisfaction in a timeframe that suits you as best as possible.

    With SakuraGame apparently doing translations for Dieselmine, do you think there's any possibility of applying both a translation patch (to deal with SakuraGame's awful translations,) and an un-censor patch, or would it be better to just go with an un-censor patch and hope I can muddle through SakuraGame's translations? It sounds like SakuraGame's 'Otaku's Fantasy 2' will be my best chance to play 'Monmosu Conquered World.'

    I'm also looking at the other games they're apparently working on, and I saw at least one other that looks promising - 'Monstress Academy.' Here's hoping that they get better at game translations and ports as they go along... Though, admittedly, I'm not holding my breath.

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    1. Yeah, Steam + eroge just don't seem like a combo.

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  2. Too bad you weren't able to get the translation working, I was looking forward to you maybe doing a playthrough of this one as well. The idea of the scenes being fully animated is very intriguing...
    Usually I'm kind of indifferent to harpies in these games, but just quick pics of the hero being overpowered and buried in bird booty have me interested.
    And yes it seems that Aradia was popular enough to get a version of her in this, I imagine the animation must be crazy with the jiggle physics everywhere for her. Since you say booby trap I wonder if in this game she is lurking at the bottom of a pit and MC falls right into her. And since he seems to be starting off buried in her I wonder if the progression of that scene is him sinking/being stuffed deeper into her breasts as his TP goes down, before completely vanishing into bottomless boobies.

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    1. She is indeed a pit you fall into. I also think I'm going to shamelessly "borrow" her for one of my stories. ;)

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    2. Oooh, would love to see a version of "Boobie Ocean Monstergirl" from you. And I generally like the idea that everything in these worlds are monstergirl-ized. So instead of pits being filled with spikes you get pits filled with tits.

      And since she is more of an environmental hazard than your usual creature, it would be cool if this was played around with in terms of gameplay. MGQ had a few gimmick battles like that. So instead of the hero trying to defeat her, the MC's party has to find a rope or something to pull him out. And in the meanwhile, he has to hold out and keep from being pulled completely into her where they can't reach him.

      So from a gameplay perspective it is like a timed battle. The health bar becomes a depth bar which goes down constantly, but in larger chunks anytime she successfully gets an attack off. The hero attacks become defensive actions like 'Turn Away'(keeps from being gagged and force fed milk be oncoming nipple), and 'Rub'(massages a giant breast to distract her from rolling it on top of him). Of course he can try to attack her conventionally, but it just wastes a turn as the hit just sinks harmless into her breast...like him.

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  3. Mr.Hydra what your opinion on metroidvania say like The Castlevania series? Would you play a metroidvania full of Monster Girls?

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    1. Castle of Repure Aria is a pretty good monster girl metroidvania. Would have loved to have seen a translation of that as there seemed to be some interesting mechanics going on I couldn't quite figure out because of the language barrier. I'm surprised there haven't been more. I guess the JRPGs are easier with the game engine already built. Most of the caslevania games already have some nice monster girls and succubi, if I remember right. I heard the series went a bit shit when they tried to make it more 3D though.

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  4. The reason you couldn't hook this is because the game uses RPG Maker MV.
    There is a program which patches such games to be hookable.
    https://ulmf.org/forum/hentai/hentai-games/translations/12587-rpgmakermvgame-hook-patcher-how-to-hook-rpg-maker-mv-games
    I think the English is kind of poor because the guy who made it is French.

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  5. Oh, and in case you don't know all of Monster Labyrinth's animations are webm videos. You can find them in the game's folders titled www and movies.

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  6. Seeing the monster based on MGE's Gazer reminds me of another Dieselmine game, Monmusu! Reverse Ra*pe Academy [sic], where EVERY monster was obviously based on one from MGE: Demon, Shirohebi, Cyclops, Liliraune, Cu Sith, Shimera, Shoggoth.

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    1. That kind of thing is inevitable. It's fun to see which of the MGE creations go on to be stock monsters (In the way that Alraune was a German myth, then an old German film, then the distinctive girl-in-a-rose monster that appeared in Castlevania). I like tracking the evolution of these things. I'd also like to seed some of my own monster girl creations, but I need to find them better homes (the H-space stories were too short) and commission some good artists to get the ball rolling.

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  7. How is the Valentines Day story going? Any updates on that?

    Also a thought on the Patreon post you did some time ago:

    How about an "Encyclopedia" for Succubus Summoning? Some extra information regarding Phil, Rosa, Verde etc. and the world in general maybe. Which would be avaiable for Patreons that pay x amount of money and with "regular" updates over time.

    I think that would be quite nice, as SS appears to be your most liked work.

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    1. If I was going to do it again, the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary should really have been the Succubus Summoning Demon Girl Bestiary. There are connections (if very obtuse ones) so I might "rewrite" some of them as encyclopedia entries in Phil's worlds. At the moment I need to get back into the habit of writing proper 5-6K stories and then series again.

      As for the Valentine's Day story, I'm going to be posting it as a mini-serial here, about now as it happens...

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  8. For anyone who's interested, there's now a review of this game on Youtube as well, by EroGuySensei:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZHubxLE5Ss

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