Showing posts with label Monmusu Quest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monmusu Quest. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Monstergirls nearly take over Kotaku's GOTY

Haha, this is brilliant:
http://kotaku.com/pranksters-almost-voted-an-erotic-game-as-our-readers-1491717281

Monster Girl Quest 3 pipped to first place by only 24 votes.  Might have been an interesting article if that had been the other way around.

"And our reader's choice game of the year is . . .mutter mutter . . . a hentai game."

The author of the article blames 4chan.  I did see a post mentioning the poll on 4chan, but it was buried deep in one of the (many) Monster Girl Quest threads.  Ironically, the overall Monster Girl Quest series probably has a better plot and writing than most of the other games on that list despite being an eroge (as I mentioned when I reviewed it back here).

Funny to think that when I wrote this about two years back it usually came up as one of the first hits for anyone googling "Monster Girl Quest."  Not anymore.  Monster girls are a little bit more popular now.

This can only be a good thing considering what I write books about . . .  ;)

And the monster girl eroges keep coming.  Dieselmine put out the 4th installment of their Violated Hero series today.

Time to welcome our new monster girl overlords.




 

Friday, December 27, 2013

Hentai Game Review - Monmusu Delicious -Lunch-

The epic Monster Girl Quest has concluded, but if you’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms a spin-off came out over the holiday season.  It’s a follow-up to Monmusu Delicious -Breakfast- (which I talked about here), this time called Monmusu Delicious -Lunch-.  Presumably there will be a Monmusu Delicious -Dinner/Dessert- at some point using characters from MGQ’s third chapter (where Black Alice probably vores everything).


Monmusu Delicious -Lunch- isn’t strictly speaking a hentai game.  It’s a collection of alternate Bad End scenarios featuring monster girls from the second chapter of MGQ.  As the title suggests, the emphasis is on vore and most of the protagonists end up in someone’s belly.  Most of the time that’s MGQ’s protagonist, Luka, although other characters are used such as Sylph, Camel’s Cecilia, the loli Vampire Girl, and ever odder choices such as the Slug Girl and Dullahan.  Pretty much every monster girl that had a vore Bad End in MGQ’s second chapter gets a scenario.  There are also vore scenarios for some of the non-vore monster girls such as Beelzebub and Lilith & Lilim.  Erubetie gets another opportunity to use her rather dubious de-aging power before slurping up a hapless Minotauress.  I expect it won’t be long before the paedoslime memes hit 4chan.

I'm not sure "It's okay, I'm eating them," is a valid defence, Erubetie.
This is vore, so if you thought that aspect of MGQ was icky and played the game with the vore endings switched off, this isn’t going to be your cup of tea.  If you like vore and enjoyed Delicious Monmusu -Breakfast-, Delicious Monmusu -Lunch- is more of the same.  It's currently in Japanese, but if you're patient and keep an eye on Dargoth's site, there might be an English translation at some point in the future.

Starfish Girl table manners leave a lot to be desired...
Last time round I pointed out they’d missed off the Sea Anemone Girl and wrote a little sex/vore tale to make up for it (a creature not unlike the Jellyfish girl also found its way into A Succubus for Freedom as well).  It was fun and I liked how the story turned out so I might do it again (and writing a simple ‘dude stumbles on monster girl – suck, fuck, slurp!’ story will be a good breather after the complex storylines of A Succubus for Remembrance).

Now which monster girl to have fun with.  Monmusu Delicious -Lunch- didn’t leave out any glaring omissions.  By my reckoning Alra Vore and two of the Canaan Sisters (the Venus Flytraps) didn’t get a scenario, but that section of the game is nicknamed the Forest of Nope! by fans for a reason.  The only other one, I think, was the Dragon Girl, but I always thought she was a little too much licky-licky and not enough fucky-fucky.

Anyway, at the moment I think I’ll be wandering into the Forest of Nope! to see what sexy plant girls are around.  This isn’t set in stone yet, so if there was a girl from MGQ2 you were disappointed didn’t show up in Monmusu Delicious -Lunch- let me know in the comments.  It's the holiday season so I might pick them instead.

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt1: Snared

A while back I covered this little appetizer to Monster Girl Quest 3.  I mentioned they’d missed off this...

Don't I get breakfast too...
...monster girl from MGQ1 and said I’d write my own short story to make up for it.  Then I wrote five pages in one of my notebooks and it stayed like that for a while until I decided it was blocking up other stories and finished it off to get it out of the road.

Here’s that story.  It’s not really a Monster Girl Quest fanfic.  I took inspiration from the Setouchi artwork and dropped a similar sea anemone monster girl into my hell-space series of loosely-connected stories.  It’s also a throwback to my earlier stories (I needed to write something simple again), so if the plot looks like it’s little more than a flimsy excuse to throw the protagonist into the sexy clutches of a weird monster girl, um yeah, guilty as charged.  Sometimes you think up a sweet monster and there’s no available story to slot her into.

Lengthwise it breaks nicely into three parts and I’ll be posting parts two and three over the next couple of weekends.

I wouldn’t get  too attached to Mr. Sommers...

Snared, Sucked and Slurped - Pt1: Snared

Rob Sommers was sailing around the point when his boat sank.  It was the last day he’d have expected an accident like this to happen.  A warm sun was rising up into the sky.  A gentle breeze carried the scent of sea from the east.  The blue waters were as flat as a piece of glass.  Seagulls flew overhead in search of early morning snacks.

Then his boat sank.  Just like that.

Weirdest thing Rob had seen.  There was no reason for it.  It was like an invisible pit had opened up before him in the sea and his little sailboat had plunged right into it like a Viking barge going over the waterfall at the end of the world.  Yet the sea here was just as flat as it was everywhere else in the bay.

Rob’s boat went down and he was pitched—coughing and spluttering—right into the cool waters.

Other than his struggles the sea was completely still.  It was one of those days where the water was so clear you could see right down to the bottom about twenty feet below.  He watched as his little sailboat, tipped vertical now with the prow facing downwards, sank beneath him like an anchor.  He couldn’t see any sign of damage to the hull.  His poor little Cali-Mari was sinking like she’d been torpedoed and he couldn’t see a mark on her.

And he was following her.

That couldn’t be right.  He was young, fit, healthy.  He’d been born on the coast and lived here his whole life.  The sea was like a second home to him.  He was a strong swimmer...

...and he was sinking just as surely as his boat.  No matter how powerfully he moved his arms and legs back and forth the bottom loomed closer and the surface rose further away.  He was sinking and he couldn’t understand why.  He was not caught in a whirlpool, there were no weights in his pocket.  Hell, the only clothes he had on were a frayed pair of cutoff shorts.  It was like the water had become unable to support his weight.  He moved his arms and legs back and forth in powerful strokes and still continued to sink.

He saw a silvery wall rising up to meet him and then he understood.

Gas.  The seabed had belched up a big ole bubble of gas.  He’d heard about this phenomenon.  Gas deposits were occasionally released from the bottom and bubbled up in such quantity the water became saturated.  It lost its buoyancy.  Things that should float stopped floating.  It was one of the theories to explain the Bermuda Triangle.  He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel.

And now he was caught in the same phenomenon.

The Cali-Mari settled on the bottom below him, kicking up a small cloud of silt.  Not far from it he saw the body of a naked girl lying on the seabed.  A real looker as well.  She sat amongst the coral with long red hair drifting out behind her like a fan.  Serene.  Like one of the mermaids of lore.  She must have gone out for an early morning nude swim and been caught in the same phenomenon.  Damn shame.

And he’d be joining her if he couldn’t kick out of this gas pocket.

He frowned.  Something wasn’t right.  That wasn’t coral she was sitting in.  It was moving—waving in the gentle current—like tentacles.  Like a sea anemone, he thought.  But that couldn’t be right.  Sea anemones were tiny blobs of tentacles kids poked at in rock pools.  This was the size of a man and with orange-pink tentacles a few feet long.

The girl’s eyes opened.

Rob’s mouth opened in shock and bubbles of precious oxygen escaped his lungs.

Her eyes were black like marbles made out of coal.  Shark-eye black.  Blacker.  She looked up and stared at him with naked hunger.  Full lips more suited to a swimwear model turned up in a smile that chilled Rob to the bone.

Wraith.  One of the drowned dead seeking out someone to join it on the sea bottom.

No, worse than that.

Fuck.  Bottin was right.  His crazy cousin was right.

As he drifted lower he saw it was impossible to tell where the girl ended and the giant sea anemone began.  She tipped her head back and she convulsed like a woman pleasuring herself to the point of climax.  Her pussy flared wide, wider, impossibly wide—a glistening pink maw opening up where a woman’s sex should be.  A huge silvery bubble expanded outwards and rushed up to meet him.

Rob wasn’t swimming now, he was falling.

Falling and drowning.  The worst of both worlds.

The girl put a hand to her mouth and her shoulders shook as if she was giggling.  The fleshy orifice between her legs contracted and pulled down, as if preparing to shoot another big bubble.

Rob knew what she was.  Bottin had told him, even though he wasn’t supposed to.

Stephen Bottin was Rob’s older cousin.  He was the cool kid that hit adulthood first and became the one all the other kids went to when they wanted alcohol or cigarettes.  He even used to sneak them into the T & A club, so long as they hid in the shadows at the back and didn’t stare too obviously at the naked girls like the wide-eyed virgins they were.

Bottin used to be the biggest hound dog going.  If he wasn’t chasing skirt he was down at the T & A club slipping dollar bills into the cleavage and butt cracks of sexy strippers.

Until he came back...then Bottin didn’t seem all that interested in naked flesh anymore.

Everyone said it was the PTSD.  While he’d been out in Eye-raq or some other hell-hole, one too many bangs had gone off too close and now Bottin’s nerves were scrambled for good.  Bottin didn’t contradict them.  It was only later, after a few drinks too many, he told Rob another story.

‘Wasn’t Iraq, or Afghanistan,’ he’d said.  ‘Wasn’t even Earth.  Fuck, I shouldn’t be telling you this.  Don’t be going on telling anyone else.  The ones that don’t know will think you’re crazy.  The ones that do will take you away and lock you in a box and you’ll never see the sun again.’

Bottin told a wide-eyed Rob the craziest shit he’d ever heard.  Inter-dimensional gates...hell-space...nightmare creatures that looked like sexy chicks crossed with unimaginable abominations and used sex as a weapon to kill men.

‘I saw one of them.  Had a rack you could put on the cover of Hustler.  Hot as hell, until you looked down and saw she had a body like a giant slug or grub.  I watched her slurp a guy right into a pussy that was as big as a door.  Her skin was transparent; I could see right through it as she sucked that dude up like a carton of juice...sucked until he was all crumpled up.  And he’d moaned in pleasure the whole time like a porn star getting all jiggy.  Moaned like he was getting blown by all of Charlie’s Angels at the same time.  Moaned right up until his skin stretched taut across his skull and his eyes fell in.

‘Haven’t been able to look at a pair of tits the same way since,’ Bottin had muttered morosely into his drink.

Rob had thought his cousin was fucking crazy.  PTSD...to the max.

Not now, not with one of the monsters Bottin had described waiting below him with arms and tentacles outstretched.  It wasn’t a story from a far-off dimension.  It was in the bay.  Men like Bottin had returned and brought their nightmares back with them.

Rob kept trying to swim.  He had a big pair of lungs and he’d filled them full of air, but it was running out.  He felt a tickling sensation in his chest and throat, one that would grow and grow until his pipes burst open and he gulped down a lungful of salt death.

His foot brushed up against something that felt soft and squishy.  Reflexively, he kicked out, but that unpleasantly pliant something had already wrapped around his ankle.  As he thrashed, another sinuous tentacle circled his waist.  Another curled around his wrist and more were unfurling hungrily to reach up and snare his limbs.  Lying at the center of the nest of writhing tentacles, arms outstretched as if to hug him, was the girl with eyes like black pebbles.

to be sucked...

Thursday, June 06, 2013

Hentai Game Review: Monster Girl Quest 3

It’s been a year and a half, but now the final chapter of Monster Girl Quest (Monmusu Quest) is out.  Was it worth the wait?


tl;dr: Yes.  Buy it now.

Here are my previous reviews of chapters one and two.  That should give newcomers an idea of what the game series is about.  The third chapter is a continuation of the same: a visual novel interspersed with RPG-style turn-based battles.  This is a hentai game, so the enemies are all female, use sex attacks and losing results in the main character, a hero named Luka, being subjected to various imaginative sex acts. (and then enslaved, eaten, dried up like salted fish...)

At the end of chapter two Luka had found the four elemental spirits and proved himself to his demon lord companion, Alice, by defeating the four heavenly kings and then Alice herself.  Unfortunately for them, the happy ending was interrupted by the previously benevolent deity, Ilias, going batshit insane and invading the world with an army of Angels and hideous artificial Chimera with the intent of wiping out all ‘unclean’ life and beginning anew.

Chapter three kicks off with a short intro showing the cities and towns Luka passed through under siege and then immediately pitches Luka into battles with angels (yeah, they’re just as sex-crazed and perverted as the other monster girls).  Then unfolds a truly epic story.

You know how people say “It’s not just porn, it has a great story,” and you think, yeah right, pervert.  Well...

It has a really great story.

Mermaid lovers, Torotoro Resistance has not forgotten about you

My first attempt at writing this had to be scrapped as it was too gushy.  I really enjoyed the plot, despite only being able to follow it through the vagaries of machine translation (AGTH + TranslationAggregator) as I can’t read Japanese.  Early on the game goes into a chunk of back story that explains who Luka really is and how the world ended up the way it is.  A mad god tricked and imprisoned all its rivals and then lied to the whole of humanity.  It’s weightier fare than normally would be expected for a porn game and the game is all the better for it.

Take Promenstein.   The name is clearly a portmanteau of Prometheus and Frankenstein.  Normally that would be that, a clever name for an evil scientist.  RPGs have been borrowing from classical mythology to populate their bestiaries right from the beginning.  Then Promenstein’s background is revealed and the name takes on much greater significance...

Porn is usually derided because most creators don’t give a shit about anything other than the fucking.  The creators of Monster Girl Quest clearly do give a shit about story and characterisation and it shows.  The game is packed full of strongly drawn characters, brilliant moments and clever little touches.  I think fantasy and manga lovers will enjoy this game just as much for the story as the sex.  Avoid the spoilers if you can.  The game has to be played through to be fully appreciated.

Okay, so it’s not going to win any literary awards, but plot-wise it matches up favourably with other mainstream RPGs and you could probably take all the sex out and still be left with a decent game and story.  If Torotoro Resistance’s aim was to create a hentai version of something like Berserk or Claymore, they succeeded admirably.

It’s not all perfect.  The end is maybe a gambit twist too far and some of the plot points are clearly there to add something cool to the game play.  Which is fine.  When making a game, what’s good for the game should always take precedence over the story behind the game.

Luka: From buttmonkey to badass

I was interested to see where they’d take the combat.  By the end of chapter two Luka has all the four elemental spirits under his control and is extremely powerful.  The story provides a solution to this and the game keeps combat from going stale by tweaking and changing the abilities available to Luka.  The main shift from the first two chapters is a greater prominence to the attacking skills.  In the previous chapters they weren’t really needed—Meditate to regain health and whichever spirit stopped the enemies one-hit-KO was usually all you needed to defeat most enemies.  That won’t work this time.  Luka’s basic attack doesn’t really do enough damage and most enemies hit so hard the long game plan will usually end up with Luka running out of SP and losing.  Some monsters can also use elemental spirits as well, which adds an extra dimension to the RPGesque battles.

Okay, Hydra, this is all well and good, but what about the sex?  You know, the whole purpose of a sex game.

To be honest I was a little less enthusiastic for this instalment.  From the spoilers on Torotoro’s website I knew angels were going to feature prominently and angels are kind of dull.  I like my girls sexy bad and angels are a little bland compared to some of the other creatures that have graced the monsterpedia.

Yeah, needn’t have worried about that.

Halo, check.  Fluffy white wings, check.  Definitely an angel.

The artists appear to have been in a competition to outdo each other in terms of weirdness and the end result is a monsterpedia that makes one of Chaosium’s monster manuals look like a petting zoo.  At one point I was fighting a zombie dragon with a sexy girl for a tongue.  Midway through the battle she vomited out a pair of stomachs shaped like naked girls and told me these were designed to digest a man while fucking him senseless.  Seriously, where else are you going to get this level of weirdness!

(and yeah, I think I will be ‘borrowing’ that concept for a future story ;) )

". . . . ."

As with the previous chapters, they’re trying to hit a wide variety of fetishes.  Some are going to hit the spot and others are going to call for a sick bag, but with around 90 separate encounters most monster girl enthusiasts should find something that nestles right in the sweet spot.

The art is again variable in quality, but mostly fine.  This time the work appears to be divided so that each artist is responsible for an area or a creature type, which overall makes for some good consistency.  New arrival Xelvy in particular appears to have been very productive.  While their various cyber/droid monster girls aren’t really my thing, the sheer number of CGIs they’ve provided is above and beyond expectations.

There are many many variations on this scene.  So many...

The game gets most things right, but there are a couple of disappointments.  One is the addition of scenes in each location where a chimera girl gets to do the naughty with some of the local civilians.  Just when you’re wondering what sexy moves the girl has in store for you, Luka shows up and one-hit-kills her and a potentially interesting fight doesn’t happen.  Given that these are some of the ickiest monsters, some might argue this is a good thing!  And these scenes are some of the voriest.  In one scene a chimera-succubus sucks dry three men and they’re graphically drawn as shrivelling up into grey husks.  While this is frequently described as happening to Luka in some of the Bad Ends, the artwork at least largely leaves him intact before the fade out to black.

The XX-7, for all your male milking needs. Comes with a 3 month warranty.

The other disappointment is the heavenly knights play a much reduced role.  Granberia and Alma Elma don’t even make an appearance until the final quarter of the game and you don’t get a sex scene with any of the four until right near the end.  It does make sense in the context of the plot but I suspect it might leave their respective fans disappointed there wasn’t more.

Overall, this is a very well put together hentai game.  Violated Hero 2 might just shade it on the quality of artwork, but other than that Monster Girl Quest is simply better at everything than all of its rivals.  Torotoro Resistance delivered and brought their epic to a satisfying close.

If fiddling around with text hookers and garbled machine translation doesn’t appeal, never fear, RogueTranslator is working on an English translation.  You can check their site for regular updates.

And, if you’ll excuse the sneaky plug, if you’ve finished the game and fancy some... ahem... further reading, please allow me to make a suggestion or five...