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...

Hentai Game Review: Violated Quest - Lost in the Land of Mon Musu

Monster Girl Quest 3 looks like it’s finally coming out this weekend (or maybe slightly later on the English dlsite).

In the meantime here’s another imitator that’s pretty good: Violated Quest – Lost in the Land of Mon Musu.

Bursting at the seams with sexy monster girls

It’s another RPGMaker-type game.  Normally that would put me off as the sexy stuff is usually too far apart and buried beneath tons of aimless wandering and tedious level-grinding.  Violated Quest does away with all that.  There are no annoying villages where you have to run around trying to find out who has the hint for the next quest.  There is no levelling up.  Even the ‘fights’ are largely unwinnable progressions to a sexy Bad End.  I’d hesitate to describe it as a game, to be honest.

This isn’t a bad thing.  By doing this the makers have been able to focus purely on the sex, which is the important stuff in a hentai game, let’s face it.  And there’s a lot of sex.  The main character can barely take five steps before the next sexy monster girl is jumping his bones.  It’s comparable to MGQ in that regard, there’s very little downtime before a new sexy (mostly) creation shows up.  Like MGQ there are more than the usual number of girls, with 39 separate encounters, all with their own H-scenes.  Like MGQ the artwork is variable in quality, but mostly fine.  Also like MGQ they’re trying to cater to a wide range of fetishes, so expect the occasional scene to be more ‘Ewww’ than ‘Ahhh.’

Um... Yeah... Let's put this one down as a "Ewww"

Sadly, unlike MGQ, Violated Quest doesn’t have strong characters like Alice or the epic plot.  Instead the developers have kept it very simple.  The only game part is find all the 39 monster girls and they’re all fairly easy to find.  Even after the inevitable Game Over from each fight the character just carries on from exactly the same point.  Simple, but effective.

Personally, I think this is a better starting point for creating a RPGMaker H-game.  Too many RPGMaker clones consist of a few boss-fight sexy Bad End scenes tacked onto generic seen-it-all-before RPG waffle.  Any boners are well and truly bored into hiding during the grind to the next boss with a sex scene.  Violated Quest is a little too simple—being nothing more than a collection of CG scenes placed on a map rather than in a list—but I think add in some of the puzzle fight elements of MGQ, maybe also some keys, and an interesting plot/characters, and you’d have the beginnings of a RPGMaker game that wasn’t just another fucking annoying generic RPGMaker clone.

One of a handful of sexy succubi awaiting you in Mon Musu land

Of course, if you actually like the fights and level-grinding of RPGMaker-type games, you’re going to find Violated Quest to be severely lacking.  The same is true if you like to see a good story.  However, if you’re mainly interested in the sexy monster girl Bad Ends, then Violated Quest delivers that with the minimum of faffing around.

If you’re using a texthooker like AGTH, I’d recommend using this H-code: /HBN*0@470D5A.  Otherwise the hooker has a nasty habit of missing characters and mangling the translation.

Basilisk - Ve have vays of keeping you hard...

Next week should see long-anticipated arrival of the final chapter of Monster Girl Quest.

Oh, and I should probably sneak in a blatant plug of my own.  If you like this type of game, you'll also like my books.  I might not have the drawing chops, but I know how to write a hot succubus sex scene or thirteen ;).