Violated Hero 2, in English (+ other translation sites)

I spotted this question on an old post about Violated Hero 2:

TerraMastero: "Is this game in English?"

Actually...

I wonder what she has in mind...

It has been translated by Dargoth and the English translation can be found here:
http://dargothtranslations.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/vh2-english-1-01/

Checking out some scenes (which may or may not have involved a certain bouncy empress of slime) made me realise my poor little AutoTranslator had got a little confused first time around, which is pretty much to be expected with machine translation.

Fans of Japanese Monster Girl eroges are now fortunate to have a couple of people working on translations.

RogueTranslator is the person to thank for the English version of the Monster Girl Quest games.

Dargoth also has a website devoted to their translations.  They also post information about new and forthcoming monster girl games every so often, so well worth checking out.

Hero (Monster Girl Quest 3D) - It's the constraints and realistic expectations, stupid!

So after comprehensively stomping all over someone’s puppy I should try and say something positive about the whole 3D Monster Girl Quest (probable) trainwreck.

To be fair, the dude seems pretty good at modelling.  The new Alice model looks pretty good.

But again there’s the time and expectation issue.  How long did it take to make?  What are the range of facial expressions?  What movement animation does she have?  Is she just going to sit there and wag her tail a little, because if that’s the case what is the point of using 3D over Kenkou Cross’s already expressive artwork? 

And remember, there are another 150 monster girls to go after this...

It’s constraints and realistic expectations.  Small game companies and indie developers make very good games because they’re fully aware of their limitations and work within those constraints.

A good example of using 3D graphics to good effect is Pretty Warrior May Cry.  It’s an eroge Dungeon Keeper.  Obviously they didn’t have the budget or team to make full eroge Dungeon Keeper that wouldn’t suck to play, so they abstracted the gameplay to what they could do and stuffed the eroge elements into 3D H-scenes showing exactly how their minions slow down the marauding heroes.  (The lilith animation is available in the trial).

The original MGQ does the same thing.  It’s a RPG with exploration and branching paths replaced with a linear Visual Novel.  This frees them up to concentrate on other things like the story and puzzle(ish) battles (and of course the sexy bad ends).  Violated Hero constrains the player to a Dungeon Master-style Grid.  Desire Dungeon does the same but makes the map a straight line and throws in a chest/loot mechanic.  All the RPG-Maker clones already have most of the RPG mechanics provided by the game maker they’re using.

Hero, Monster Girl Quest 3D, has no constraints.  It’s trying to build everything from the ground up.  In the original MGQ the Succubus Village is abstracted away to a few background pics.  Hero built the town in 3D.  Cool.  But what are they going to do for the Plansect Village, the Harpy Town, the Slime Cave, the cities, the underwater segments, the Demon Lord Castle...?  We’re in George Broussard and Duke Nukem Forever territory here.

No abstraction = too much work = vapourware (or seriously shitty end product that leaves players feeling like someone took a dump in their mouth after eating a foul homemade vindaloo)

Where 3D could really shine is if combined with the combat and Bad Ends.  A Monster Girl Quest with the sex battles/Bad Ends depicted in a similar way to the animations in Pretty Warrior May Cry could work really well.  Aside from the obvious being-ridden-by-a-succubus scenes, various different struggle scenes as Luka is dragged deeper into a slime girl, plant girl or similar enemy would add a lot more to the game than the simple bound/unbound pictures that are used now.  I think a game like this would pick up a lot of interest and have no problems getting indie funding (although it might mean going through offbeatr and smaller dlsites).  It's the difference between going for a niche audience that will definitely come, or jumping for a mainstream audience and falling flat on your face when they don't show.

Again the marketing adage applies: Don't bother trying to appease people that aren't interested in your product anyway.

Hentai Game Review: Lv1勇者が女神・邪神と♀モンスター繁殖計画始めました! (Lv1 Yushe Breeding Program)

Okay, I’m not really sure what the best translated version of that title is.  I’ve gone with Lv1 Yushe Breeding Program, although the full title is something like Lv1 brave man began a ♀ monster breeding plan with a goddess and an evil deity!  I suspect someone will pin a snappy English fan name on it that will stick.  It’s a monster girl hentai game and it might be the most bonkers one I’ve played so far.

The trial (big yellow button) has to be played to be believed.

In generic fantasy-world-land the numbers of monster girls are declining.  They’re waiting for the hero fated to save them with his magic cum, or something like that.  The hero is born but his father really wanted a daughter and decides to raise him as one anyway.

Uh, okay.

The hero(ine?) leaves on some adventure or other and gets waylaid outside the first village by the head of the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ monster girls.  These are an angel/dragon thing and a succubus/centaur thing respectively.  They’ve teamed up to solve the declining monster girl population problem by finding the hero and forcing him to mate with monster girls all across the world.  The first H-scenes give a good indication of what the hero and player...

This isn't going to go well...

...are in for.

...ngn!!!!!

Ouch.

First stop is a forest inhabited by slime girls.  The hero and a cute slime girl are a bit clueless as to what to do next, so the succubus/centaur girl turns the hero into a raging sex bull monster with a two-foot penis to force the issue.

Uh, okay.

At this point I’m wondering what the main game mechanics are as sex combat has largely been on autopilot so far.  Then follows a sort of mini-game quest sequence where the hero picks a path and has to navigate traps, treasure chests and other monster encounters.  Then it’s off to the next location—some kind of shrine with a temple dog woman with enormous jugs, a girl with a giant mouth coming out of the back of her head and a talking cat.  There are also lots of cat girls.  Which sets up the next mini-game where the hero has to touch parts (guess which!) of a cat girl’s body in the right order.

One of the quest mini-games.

Then they all head off on a quest to find Yggdrasil, the world tree (and frequent canon immigrant from Norse mythology to JRPGs).  During this the hero manages to fall off a cliff.  The others throw the cat after him and both have to find their way through a forest maze while chased by a giant lusty minotaur woman.

And this is just in the trial.  The makers deserve a lot of credit for making so much of the game available to sample.  It’s worth downloading as there’s probably a couple of hours worth of material there.  I think in this case they had to in order to get an idea of what the game is about.

The game is part visual novel and part collection of varying mini-games.  Combat crops up regularly, but largely runs without any input from the player.  The quest locations, where the hero follows a branching route, also appear frequently.  Other main mechanics include the monster girl villages.  Once the player unlocks these the goal is increase the number of inhabitants.  To do this they have to replenish their... um... magical cum, which happens whenever they complete a quest branch or certain story events.  As the population of the village increases it unlocks H-scenes and further story paths for that village.

Oddly, it works.  The artwork and overall production is gorgeous.  It matches up well with the H-scenes of Violated Hero 2 in terms of quality.  They’re not shy of aiming for an epic feel and proper story either, despite being a sex game.  This is the moment you find Yggdrasil at the end of the trial.

The protagonist is down on the bottom-left.  They have a cat on top of their head.  Don't ask.

On top of that nearly everything features voice work.  The story and characters have plenty of humour as well, although I probably missed a lot of it through reliance on crude auto-translation.  I had to switch to ITH for the text-hooking on this one as AGTH was struggling, although I’ve been told this code fixes things for AGTH: /HA-C@FC4C8.

The one downside is I didn’t find the game that sexy.  It’s a little too weird.  More like a gross-out sex comedy than a hot porn film, if that makes any sense.  Quite a few of the Bad Ends are straight-up ‘bad’ Bad Ends such as being torn apart and eaten by harpies, or the hero being trapped in a wall of meat while someone shoves a cock down their throat, rather than the ‘good’ Bad Ends more typical to games like Violated Hero or Monster Girl Quest.  In the end it didn’t matter that much as I was having so much fun wondering what crazy shit the game was going to do next.

Worth a look and the trial is extensive enough to give players a good idea of whether the game is for them or not.

Hentai Game Review: Violated Hero 2

Yay, another monster girl hentai game came out. Yay, another opportunity to lure fresh readers here and pimp books to them under the guise of a game review. As this is a hentai game, if you’re under 18 or likely to be offended by such things, now is the time to steer the mouse cursor up to the top left and hit the back button.

I blogged about the original Violated Hero back here. It was a game with some nicely executed H-scenes, but some rather lacklustre gameplay and a few iffy quirks. Well, it has a sequel out now from Dieselmine and the good news is they’ve managed to iron out a lot of the annoying wrinkles of the original.

They're not kidding around when they say violated...

It’s pricey at $34, but it’s a really chunky file at 1.5GB, so you do get a lot of content. Gameplay-wise it’s similar to the first one—the player wanders around two Dungeon Master-esque mazes, defeating enemies with either sword or magic. Lose (or sometimes win!) to certain enemies and you get a gorgeously rendered Game Over hentai scene where the monster girl performs a variety of different sex acts on the lucky/luckless hero.

The first maze is set in a forest and the second is set in the demon queen’s castle, both with nicely drawn backgrounds. As with the first game there isn’t a lot of strategy other than hit either the sword attack or magic attack button. The player also has the option of a special strong sword/magic attack, but each has a limited number of usages and is best saved for the bosses.

In the original the player levelled up by picking up a stat boost for each monster they killed, which meant an awful lot of tedious grinding against boring silhouette monsters to be able to beat the monster girl ‘bosses’ in order to proceed. This is mostly gone apart from six special conventional monsters (this time with full artwork rather than plain black silhouettes) hidden in each maze that give a stat bonus when defeated. Aside from them, the player levels up each time they defeat one of the main monster girl characters.

Milfy. Cute, bouncy, adorable...and general of an army focused on exterminating humanity.

The mazes are divided into five regions, each containing one of the main monster girl characters locked off behind a mystical barrier. The random encounters in each region are smaller versions of the main monster girl with lower quality artwork. Yes, the idiosyncratic pixelated artwork is back, but at least the main characters are all drawn with detailed artwork. Defeat three random encounters and the barrier pops open. Most of the time the player will do this before they even get to the barrier, so it’s not really a chore.

There are five monster girls in each maze as well as four generals and the demon queen herself, making fifteen characters in total. Common types such as harpies, lamia, slime girls (Milfy is adorable), mermaids and succubi are all present, and even some more unusual creations as well. Each has their own Game Over H-scene, which is the real reason you’re here, let’s face it. In that respect VH2 doesn’t disappoint. As with the first game, the artwork is consistent and well-drawn, and each scene is fully voiced. There’s a reason for that huge file size. Most of the monster girls have at least two scenes and the generals also have a third bonus epilogue scene after defeating you as well. These range from the sexy to the…um…yeah…weird.

Insector. I'm not sure I want to unlock her H-scenes...

Dieselmine clearly had one eye on Monster Girl Quest while developing this, and there’s more of a story this time around rather than a straight dungeon crawl to the Big Bad at the bottom. In particular there are plenty of cutaway scenes building up the characters of the demon queen and her generals.

Overall it’s still a collection of sumptuously-rendered hentai scenes in search of a game, but at least the game elements are less annoying this time around. It can be bought from here and the Dieselmine website is here. If you don’t fancy all the mucking around with AGTH and locales in order to play the Japanese version, this fella is working on an English translation, so it might be worth bookmarking their site.

And finally the inevitable plug. If you like this sort of game may I also humbly suggest giving my books a try, as I’m sure you’ll enjoy them too. Sample stories can be found here.