Hentai Game Re-Review: Domination Quest 1

Technically, I reviewed this one a while back.  I was in the mood to play a naughty JRPG-type game and remembered the sequel, Domination Quest 2, had come out a month or so ago.  Similar to Monmusu Quest, you can port the old save across, but as that save was many years and a few laptops ago, I decided to play through again rather than try to excavate it from a forgotten hard drive.

Turns out I needed to anyway, as it was only on rereading my original review that I remembered I never completed the first game.  Despite this, and after completing it this time, I don't think I was too far off with what I originally wrote.

I did reach the final boss this time.

The major change is that whatever bugs blighted it before, don't appear to be present now.  I didn't encounter any crashes during my second playthrough.  The other sticking point, and what caused me to abandon my original playthrough in the misty forest area, was the frequency of combat encounters.  That felt like it had been dialled back.  They're still reasonably frequent, but not so frequent that you can barely move without triggering another combat encounter.

Onto the game itself.  Mechanically, it's a turn-based JRPG.  It has the look of a RPGMaker game, but reverse-engineered into Unity.  While this is a little odd, the game does make use of the 3D environments to do some things you wouldn't see in a regular RPGMaker game.

You play as Kuro, who as a dominator has the ability to shrink monster girls down, gobble them up and then recruit them as allies.  Like Pokémon, but weirder and pervier.

Probably best not to ask...

Kuro doesn't have much in the way of fighting power, so you have to rely on a party of monster girls to do it for you.  You have a party of four and a bench of four you can sub in and out.  Along with health bars, the monster girls have stamina bars that are constantly decreasing every turn.  When they run low, they have to 'snack' on Kuro to get their energy back up or get knocked out.  This is where the bulk of the in-combat H-content comes from, as Kuro's allies take a break to blowjob or do some other sex act on him to get their energy levels back up again.

Most of the combat is regular turn-based JRPG, where if you lose you just get a regular GAME OVER scene rather than a sexy Bad End.  There are some elites and boss encounters that are an exception to this.  At some point they'll try and grab Kuro and drain his energy directly, and you have to rely on your allies to hit the opponent enough times to force them to let him go.  As I said in my original review, it's a shame this mechanic isn't used more.

The other areas of H-content are scenes that are unlocked after increasing affection with your allies, and a skinship mechanic where you get carried around by one of your allies in a lewd manner.  That's fun, but the animation does block a good portion of the side of the screen, so might get in the way while exploring a new area.

It feels quite pleasant until your feet start to dissolve...

The story doesn't have too much to it.  It's a standard fantasy setting with humans coexisting with horny monster girls.  Kuro is just about to start his adventuring career when his powerful succubus (dragon?) partner is mind-controlled and snatched by a nefarious group looking to stoke tensions between humans and monsters.  The game is about trying to get her back and breaking the control the enemy demon lord wannabe has over her.

The mechanics are fine.  It's JRPG light with lots of vore themes.  Kuro can't carry weapons and neither does his monster girls, but there's a crafting system where you combine weapons with crystals to boost your party's abilities.  Mostly it's just stat boosts, but some weapons can either defend against or inflict status effects.  It's a nice system, but a little limited.  Adding a chance of instant death to multi-hit attacks was about the most exciting 'combo' I could find.  It would have been nice to have a little more variety here.  I like a bit of greed in my RPGs, so I missed having the usual options to manipulate XP gain, Gold gain, item drop frequency, etc.

As for the themes, it's a Kokage no Izumi game.  This circle likes giantesses, vore, and crude humour.  As I said in the original review, if you like your monster girls on the giant side and with heapings of vore, this is perfect for you.  If those elements leave you cold, there is enough 'regular' monster girl content to make it worth a glance, but it is a little deeper into its chosen fetish zone than something like Monmusu Quest.

Giant farting fairies are pretty much a staple of this circle's work.

In all, it's about 10 hours of reasonable JRPG, with 28 or so sexy(ish) monster girls to have fun with.

As I said in the original review, one of the monster girls (the carnivorous plant girl) gave me inspiration for a short story ("The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"), and if I can get a short story out of a hentai game, I consider it a win.  Hopefully, I'll find something that gets the creative juices flowing in the sequel.