Non-Hentai Game Look - Iratus: Lord of the Dead

Wait.  Non-Hentai?  What kind of heresy is this?

Iratus, a very angry necromancer

There is a point to it.  Honest.

Technically, Iratus has monster girls.  No succubi, as your forces are drawn from the necromantic section of the classic fantasy bestiary rather than the demonic, but you can recruit female monsters such as vampires, banshees (even ghouls) to your teams.  The developers are Russian, so they're still allowed to put boobs on their female characters.

The easiest way to describe it is – Darkest Dungeon, but where you get to play the monsters.

Combat might look familiar if you've played Darkest Dungeon, but does play a little differently

You play Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead.  After being released from long imprisonment, he embarks on a journey to conquer the surface world.  The basic economy is body parts.  You craft your minions out of body parts and get more by slaying the various hapless miners, dwarves and high-fantasy D&D parties stupid enough to stand in your way.

Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there is a clear fail state.  Body parts are limited.  Lose too many minions and you will run out of body parts to craft more and will have to restart.  It is also very easy to lose minions as – just like Darkest Dungeon – the combat is fairly brutal and unforgiving.  Your minions are very squishy and while you don't have to worry about sanity (this is a reverse Darkest Dungeon, so you get to drive your enemies insane instead, although this isn't always a good thing…), there isn't a Death's Door mechanic, so enemy crits have a nasty habit of killing minions out of nowhere.

As with Darkest Dungeon you have a home base to update and combat consists of 4 rows of your team battling 4 rows of their team, where position is important and dictates what attacks can and can't be used.  Despite the similarities, it plays differently enough to be its own thing.

Combat is interesting.  You can choose to either kill your enemies with direct damage or spook them hard enough until their hearts burst from stress.  The direct damage is split between melee and magical, with both having different resistances.  How the resistances work is also interesting.  Defence comes in either armour resistance, which reduces incoming damage, or blocks/wards, which completely nullifies a hit at the cost of losing a block/ward (unless it's a crit).  This brings an extra tactical component.  Big, single-hit attacks are good versus armour resistance, but bad against block/wards.  On the other hand, smaller multi-hit attacks are great for chewing through wards, but can be countered by decent armour resistance as each individual hit doesn't do a lot of damage.

Overall, despite looking a lot like Darkest Dungeon, combat plays a little differently.  Enemies are a lot tankier, so it's difficult to nuke out a single target on the first turn.  Also, because of the block/ward system, AoE attacks hitting multiple targets are viable, whereas in Darkest Dungeon they tended to be pretty bad.

Exploration is a little similar to Slay the Spire

Currently Iratus is still in Early Access, so it's incomplete and there are a few balance problems.  The devs do seem to be responding to feedback and making good updates.  I like the change to show the whole enemy group when next to it rather than just a single unit.  It's a game where you need to form teams to counter various different parties and that tactical element is missing if there's no real way to predict what you might face.

It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of the original Darkest Dungeon.  The devs seem to have taken that for inspiration and then iterated upon it to make a game that is different enough to stand on its own.  Which is pretty much the history of videogames in a nutshell.

Okay, so why are you talking about it, Hydra?

With Iratus and another game, Vambrace: Cold Soul, it looks like Darkest Dungeon was successful enough to spawn a new subtype of turn-based RPGs.  And that usually gets me thinking as to whether that blueprint could work for a sexy monster girl game.

This time I thought I might as well put some of the ideas I have in a more public place.  Rather than write them down in a notebook, forget them, lose the notebook, yadda yadda.

So, I'll make that a little mini-series this week (or next) - my thoughts on how to make a Darkest Dungeon-esque hentai game.  As with most of these ideas, I'm aware I don't have the technical chops to pull them off, but it might inspire someone that does, and we'd all love to see more sexy monster girl games made!

A Goblin Succubus...?

Wut?

Yup.  This little... um... beauty is from Age of Wonders 3.

Age of Wonders 3 is a 4X game with a fantasy theme.  Think Civilization, but where the top-end tech is dragons rather than nukes.  The game also has some RPG elements in that a lot of the game is roaming around the map and looting various treasure sites in order to level up heroes and their warbands (as well as finding cool loot for them).

The succubus is a unique unit for the Rogue class of leader.  Interestingly it's also treated as a pseudo-class.  Hence goblin succubus (the dwarf succubus has a beard...).  It's also a fun unit as the main special ability is to steal (seduce) opposing units.  Anything mind controlled and still alive at the end of the battle joins your side.  This opens up another fun part of the game - you can steal baby animals and then grow them up, Hagrid-from-Harry-Potter-style, into terrifying monsters.

While not as deep as either a pure 4X or RPG game, it's an entertaining mash-up of two genres.

As for inspiration for stories.  Hmm, sorry Miss Goblin, but I don't think you're my type...

The reason things have been so quiet around here:

I'm a massive fan of the original Dark Souls game.  From Software seem like a defiant holdout from the days when developers made classics like the original Tomb Raider, Resident Evil 2, and the early Silent Hill games.  The sequel isn't quite as perfect as the first Dark Souls (which was a masterpiece of level design), but is still a damn good game.

I might post some more stuff on it later.

But not a full walkthrough.  The game is too large for that.  And most of my deaths have been of the embarrassing, falling-off-a-ledge-to-my-doom kind (including multiple times in the tutorial area, much to my shame).

Hentai Game Review - DramaraQuest I

And now for a review of the other battle-fuck RPG-maker clone I played over the Xmas holidays (before I decided it would be a good/idiotic idea to blog a detailed walkthrough of Violated Hero 4).  Dramaraquest is another porn parody of a more famous JRPG – in this case Dragon Quest.  I know a little bit more about that franchise as I’ve played the 9th installment (and also ruthlessly porn-parodied it).

Dramaraquest takes various iconic monsters from the DQ franchise and boobifies them into sexy monster girls.  It’s another battle-fuck game, so combat is about getting stuck in with your willy and trying to make the girl come before you do.  The monster girl artwork is pretty good and like both ROBF and Tokyo Tenma (all the JRPG franchises are getting the full porn-parody treatment it seems) the game utilises simple CGI distortions (jiggedy jiggedy) to give the illusion of animation.

DQ monster, with added boobies...

Fellow strugglers with Japanese kanji will be glad to note it is nowhere near as complex as ROBF.  Levelling up is straightforward – your attack and defence improve, making you able to take on previously impossible-to-defeat monsters and enter new areas.  Combat is also straightforward.  You start as a hero sent on a quest to find a missing princess.  At the tomb of a former hero you find two spells – one takes monster girl’s clothes off, the other restores healthy/potency – and then set off to battle-fuck various boobified monsters into submission.

Monster girls appear on the map and in dungeons as black clouds (bosses are indicated with a crown).  After defeating them an icon appears over their head, so the player can avoid them if they don’t want to go through the same fight again.

Lost in the woods

There’s also a special area in the castle where the player can refight (read fuck) already defeated monster girls.

One harem. Management not responsible for loss of life through sexual exhaustion

Despite being another RPG-make clone requiring key items to be found to unlock areas, it’s mercifully simple.  The only area I really got stuck on was failing to spot one of the corridors in a locked area of the northwest town led off-screen to a dungeon.  Other than that the game is relatively straightforward.

Along with the various semi-naked monster girls there are a number of town NPCs to seduce/be seduced by.  Some of these supposedly correspond to characters in the DQ series.  A couple of these encounters even reference DQ’s legendary puff-puff attacks in a more . . . ahem . . . direct interpretation.

A more literal interpretation of DQ's classic "puff-puff" attack...

For a while I thought I was going to rate this even higher than ROBF.  The fight artwork is better and they make better use of the limited animation.  Unfortunately, as I went deeper into the game the lack of variety in the monster designs became more glaring.  Most of the monster girls have only two attacks and there is heavy use of palette swapping.  This might be fine if you like a particular girl but would rather her hair was blue, etc.  For me I like to push on into new areas to see what new monster girls are revealed.  Reaching the final castle and realising all the new enemies aside from the final boss are palette-swapped versions of girls already seen before is a little disappointing.

"Blue hair is so passé..."

Overall it’s not a bad game.  It’s not as frustrating to play as some RPG-maker clones, but it’s also a little short and lacking in variety compared to similar games.

Hentai Game Review - ROBF

Time to catch up on some reviews of games I played over the holiday period.  ROBF has been sitting on my hard drive for a while.  The title stands for Ragnarok Online Battle Fuck.  Ragnarok Online is a fantasy MMORG and I assume ROBF is a porn parody.  I say assume because I know absolutely fuck all about Ragnarok Online.

ROBF is another RPG-maker clone and – as it’s a battlefuck game – sex plays a heavy part in the combat rather than just being something that happens in the Bad End when you lose.  The objective is to get the monster girl to come before she does the same to you (as opposed to games like Violated Hero where you’re both fighting normally to knock the other out, or Monster Girl Quest where Luka is mostly trying to beat the horny monster girls off with his ludicrously impractical sword).

The sex battles are done well in ROBF.  The artwork is consistent and while it isn’t up to the high standards of games like Violated Hero they’ve added limited animations to represent the different attacks each monster girl uses.  It’s not particularly fancy, but it works well.  The Bad Ends vary according to which attack the girl defeats you with and are mostly repeats of the same animations from the battle drawn out for added sexiness.  It’s impressive how much even a limited bit of animation adds.  If you liked Erotical Night, but thought the monster girl designs were too bland, ROBF is a game you’ll want to check out.

I liked the Alraune girl (or Hydra as she’s referred to in the game).  Her boobs swell up and down when she’s pumping cum out of you with a tentacle.

Pumpity pumpity . . .

ROBF is also one of the most proper-ist RPG’s I’ve played.  Levelling up means more than just increases to strength, defence and hit points.  There are skill trees, new attacks to be learned, tons of different items, quests, even a collectible card system that provides different stats boosts when equipped.  It’s complex.

What shall we get from the random skill generator this level . . . ?

Unfortunately, when you don’t read Japanese and are relying on iffy machine translation, that complexity can be become a drawback.  There were a lot of times when I wanted to move onto the next area but couldn’t because I hadn’t found the right item or spoken to the right townsperson.  It feels harsh to criticise the game for my linguistic failings, especially as it was never intended to be played outside Japan, but it is a valid point.  If you like sexy monster girls, want more of a game with your smut and can read Japanese, you’re going to think ROBF is amazing.  If only the first two apply, then expect a lot of frustration and scanning of forum threads while you try to work out how the hell you’re supposed to enter that pyramid in the desert town (or even unlock the first sewer dungeon).

Trying to figure out how to get in some of these locations will drive you crazy.

Making the player jump through a few hoops to unlock new sexiness isn’t that bad of a thing.  While I liked the openness of games like Violated Quest and Violated Fantasy, it is easy to blast through all the content a little too quickly.  ROBF gives more value by rationing out the hawtness.  This can fall down, though, if the player enters a new area and finds none of the new monsters are their particular cup of tea.  For me the main evil castle was a little disappointing as the monster girls were mostly bland.  I was looking forward to see how the game represented a classic succubus and I didn’t find any.

Not a succubus, but she still wants to suck out your soul

Overall it has a good variety of different monster girl types.  There are also plenty of scenes with various NPC girls for fans of less monstery hentai.  There’s plenty of depth including extras such as being able to buy your own house and also catch certain monster girl types to fight for you (and hang out at your house to provide other . . . uh . . . services).  Definitely not for the fainthearted though.  Trying to battle through this with AGTH + Translation Aggregator was tough.

Hentai Game Review - Tokyo Tenma

Your blog hits have fallen through the floor.  Quick, give them a review of a mucky game.

Okay okay.  First off, the final part of Monster Girl Quest Chapter 3 has been translated to English.  You can find it here on RogueTranslator’s blog (and the actual game can be bought from here).  If you stumbled here by accident and are new to all this I highly recommend checking out Monster Girl Quest as it’s (still) the high benchmark for this type of game.

And so onto Tokyo Tenma.  I missed this first time around.  I like my monster girls to be bad and in control of the H-scenes and this looked more like a game where the hero shows the girls what for and builds up a harem through repeated use of his big “weapon” (Personally I have no ideological problems with that type of game – they just don’t stimulate my kinks).  Tokyo Tenma is a game where the hero does build up a willing harem of monster girls, but despite not featuring any Game-Over-Rape, the H-scenes are probably closer in tone to games like Monster Girl Quest and Violated Hero.

Fortunately, grabbing it later, after it was recommended on forums of Monster Girl Unlimited, meant I managed to miss all the game-breaking bugs that afflicted the game on release.  Most of that has been ironed out and it’s a pretty good game.

You'd be right to be concerned by those tails...

Plot- and mechanics-wise it’s very similar to the mainstream Shin Megami Tensei series.  A strange blackout hits Tokyo and both demons and angels show up for a ruckus.  You play a dude that posts the highest score in a mysterious game and gets a guardian angel or demon for a bodyguard as a prize (Either a Crow Tengu or Fenrir demon depending on how the player answers five initial questions).  The player can recruit other monster girls to their fighting team.  This is done through answering questions correctly, having the right inventory items to gift to them, or the right monster girl present in your fighting squad when attempting to recruit them.

There is no Game-Over-Rape (it’s not a sex battle game – let the girls beat you up and you get a simple “Game Over” screen to reward your uselessness).  The hentai elements are provided during the contract scenes when you recruit fresh monster girls to your team.  Meet the right conditions and you’re rewarded with two different H-scenes for each girl.  These can be skipped and viewed later (or re-viewed) at “Slave Rose” points on the map.  Oddly, given the method of recruitment and the “Slave Rose” facilities where recruits are “trained”, the H-scenes often have the monster girl in the dominant role (at least the ones I chose to view did).

Now who's the slave here again?

It’s also another hentai game with noble aspirations to be an actual game.  Each of the monster girls unlocks different skills as they level up.  As with most RPGs you’ll want to put together a balanced team (The sprite is quite useful for her healing magic).  At one point I thought the game might be a little too easy as it didn’t seem to matter how under-levelled the other girls on my team were.  Then in the later dungeons I ran into monsters with attacks (confusion, stun, sleep) that took my main (and highest-levelled) character out of combat.  Those fights didn’t go so well . . .

The artwork is fine.  One thing I liked is that the battle sprites aren’t completely static.  The animations are simple sprite transformations, but are very effective at giving the monster girl enemies a little extra – ahem! - jiggle and bounce.  Some girls will hit the spot, some won’t, and it will vary from person to person depending on their kinks.  There’s a good variety to choose from, so there should be something for everyone (although I was a little disappointed the pink slime girl in the tutorial fight doesn’t get a scene).

Sorry slime girl fans, she ain't available.

The game is a hybrid of top-down 2D RPG-maker type wandering about and pseudo-3D Dungeon Master-esque dungeon crawling.  As with most games like this you’ll have to struggle through some garbled machine translations to work out which quests unlock certain areas.  If you get stuck there is a helpful guide thread on the ULMF forums.

Overall the game isn’t up to the same standard as Monster Girl Quest and the artwork doesn’t match the lushness of the Violated Hero series, but if you’ve exhausted those games and want something new it might be worth a look.

And speaking of something new, I hope no one minds if I sneak in a plug for my brand new book, a tasty new collection featuring lots of delectably depraved succubus action.  If you like this type of game, you’ll also enjoy my books.

Hentai Game Review - Violated Fantasy (Okasare Fantasy)

I mentioned Violated Fantasy (Okasare Fantasy) back here in a little hentai game roundup.  It’s the follow-up to Violated Quest.  I finally got around to picking it up last weekend and was pleasantly surprised.

Like its predecessor, Violated Fantasy is one of those RPGMaker clones.  Also like its predecessor it does away with the whole tedious grindy random encounter stuff.  Unlike its predecessor it has more of a plot as well as winnable battles and levelling.

The plot has you kidnapped by the demon queen ruler of a fantasy world.  She wants to do the naughty with you but is worried her succubus powers will blast your brain out of your ears and bring the sex to a quick and messy end.  To toughen you up she sends you out into a world full of over-amorous monster girls in order to build up your sexual resistance.  To prevent the over-amorous monster girls from fucking you to death/slavery/etc., she equips you with a magical collar that yanks you out of the fight the moment you lose.

I don't think she's taking 'No' as an answer.

The collar is a nice touch.  I know some people like the sexy fights in games like Monster Girl Quest, but get turned off by the Bad Ends where Luka gets digested, sucked dry, etc.  This game might be more to their liking.  To people that like the Bad Ends, don’t worry, there’s a point near the end where the collar is removed and you’re free to send your protagonist off to any doomed end you desire.

I liked how they handled the fights.  Normally in these games, if you want to see the good stuff you have to throw the fight and lose.  Violated Fantasy is a little different.  Each monster girl has multiple attacks (each with their own CG).  You unlock them by knocking off more of their health/energy bar in the fight.  Want to see more – win the fight.  It’s a simple but effective little tweak from a game design perspective as it rewards the player for trying to win while still allowing the monster girl to be sexually dominant.  I wouldn’t be surprised if other games copy this – it allows the game to flow more naturally than: lose, watch Bad End, game over, reload.

Again they’ve been generous with the enemies with 52 encounters (although 7 of those are with the demon queen at different stages).  The artwork is variable, but mostly fine.  I liked the work of the artist who did the goblin, boar girl, nymph, etc....

Nymph - Yes

 ...while the crazed cartoon lolis didn’t really do anything for me.

Frog Girl-Thing - Um...no.

That’s standard for this type of game.  They’re aiming to hit a wide variety of kinks, some of which are a little weird.  I don’t think I’ve seen a Sea Urchin girl used before.

Sea Urchin Girl - Ouchies!

Her scene looks a little...uncomfortable.

The one big flaw with the game is the levelling up math.  It went a little haywire for me.  For a game with no random grinding (although you can fight the same monster girl multiple times for extra experience) I’d have expected it to be about fighting the girls in the right order with the difficulty spiking if you happen to miss one.  What actually happened was I found my fighting (technically resisting) ability vastly outstripping the power of the enemies.  By the third area I’d hit some kind of quasi-god status.  By the fourth area it was a struggle not to kill most enemies with one or two hits of the most basic attack (and miss some of their attack CGs in the process).  This meant that all the extra skills and items they’d added to the game seemed superfluous.  I never figured out what most of them did and didn’t need to.

Also, as with the first game, if you’re using AGTH you’ll want to add the H-code /HBN*0@470D5A to unscramble the text before translation.  (Oh, and as I sometimes neglect to mention this part – the game is in Japanese.  You’ll need to set your locale to Japanese and use a text hooker + machine translator to convert to – sometimes garbled! – English.  Back here I posted some links to helpful guides on how to set this up.)

Overall, it’s not as detailed as Monster Girl Quest, or as pretty as Violated Hero, but if you’ve exhausted the scenes in those and want to try something new, this is worth a look, if you’re willing to overlook the slightly shonky JRPG math.

And finally the obligatory plug.  If you like games like this, you’ll also like my books.

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 ;).

Hentai Game Review: The Paradise Fortress of RePure Aria

This is a game I hope to see translated.  Part of this is because it doesn’t play too nice with auto-translation software and it would be nice to know what’s going on!

The Paradise Fortress of RePure Aria (also known as Magic Castle RePure Aria Paradise in other places) is another sexy monster girl eroge, but unlike the many RPG clones out there it’s an action game in the Metroidvania vein.  Jumping off platforms and flinging fireballs at enemies is the order of the day rather than turn-based battling.  It’s similar to another hentai action game, Nightmare Sphere, but with a male protagonist (sort of), no futa, and a stronger emphasis on female monster girls.

The ‘sort of’ male protagonist is because there is a little bit of gender bending.  The lad strikes a deal with a demon princess to share his body while they explore a massive castle.  In female form the player is highly mobile and can fight enemies with magic.  She also has multiple forms which are hidden as crystals throughout the castle.  These different forms have different abilities which, like the old Castlevania games, serve to unlock previously inaccessible parts of the castle.  For example, the chaos form can slide under small gaps and the innocent form can freeze waterfalls, making them climbable.

If the demon princess form takes enough damage she reverts back to the male form and this is where the hentai elements come in.  When the player is in the male form, rather than attacking him most of the monster girl enemies will try to do...uh...other things instead.  (If you’re not 18 and found your way here by accident, you should not read any further).

A succubus, being a succubus

There are a lot of different enemy types, each with their own sex attack to perform on the player if they can.  The sprite graphics have a fairly simplistic style, but are well-animated.  There are a couple of more conventional hentai pics/scenes that can be unlocked later in the game.

As a game it’s another example of someone pouring in a lot of love and effort to make something more than just a selection of naughty pixels.  Even without the H content this would be a pretty good action game.  The protagonist handles well, the differing demon princess forms mechanic is interesting and there is a huge castle to explore with a good range of sexy monster girl enemies to run into.  Oh, and a few creative boss fights that require a little more thought than just hanging back and blasting away.

Bosses are in thrall to the creepy red eye thing at the centre - it doesn't have much interest in sex no matter what form the player is in.

Another good thing is that the H elements are actually integrated into the game.  Being caught and forced to have sex with the various monster girls will eventually result in the white ‘cum’ bar depleting and then running out of red hearts/lives.  However, sex does bring some benefits.  Occasionally a girl will leave a present in the form of a familiar that can be equipped and grant the player additional abilities. (e.g. Fire Sprites that float along with the player and fire bullets.)

Overall there are a lot of nice ideas and there’s plenty of value as the castle is so huge.  On the downside, the huge area means it’s easy to get lost and not have a clue where to go next.  Some might find it a little too frustrating, especially with the language barrier and not understanding what items/familiars/etc actually do.  Thankfully, quite a few people have been battling through the game and this thread is enormously helpful for players that get stuck.

If you like sexy monster girl eroges, but are a bit bored of the RPG-maker-type clones, you might want to give this a look.  And also, with a bit of luck, someone like RogueTranslator or Dargoth might put out an English translation while they’re waiting for Monster Girl Quest 3 to come along.

And you thought the sorceress in Dragon's Crown was ridiculously over-endowed... Boing!

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.

Some Monster Girl Roguelikes in Development: Seduction Quest and Noxico

By and large Western Audiences aren't well-served when it comes to sexy hentai games because depicting two adults graphically having sex in any form of a media is usually a one-way ticket to career suicide.  Unless you're insane (me), don't have a career to lose (me), don't give a fuck (again, me) or E.L. James (not me.  I'd be living the high-life in the Caribbean, knee-deep in hookers, if I had that much wonga.  Hmm, wait a moment...)  Anyway, with fenoxo's Corruption of Champions and also Fleshcult, things are getting a little better for English-speaking fans of sexy monster girls.  And here are a couple of roguelike's in development that might be of interest.

So, what's a roguelike?  Roguelikes are super-stripped down RPGs.  The GUIs are about as basic as you get, where your main character might be represented by a '@' and that 'O' running at you could be an Orc or Ogre depending on the colour.  This means some (a lot) of imagination is required.  There aren't going to be a lot of pretty (dirty) pictures, but it also means a small development team or even a single person can put a game together without bankrupting themselves on artist commissions, and they can also make the world huge and random.  If you've ever played NetHack or Dwarf Fortress you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

The first game is Seduction Quest.  The game's programmer, Codex, brought it to my attention a couple of days ago.  They're only at the alpha stage at the moment.  You can check out the demo at their site to get an idea of where they're going.  It's a roguelike in a large procedurally generated world with wandering succubi and other monster girls out for the player's...juices.  The demo is fairly rudimentary and the player can't die currently, but it gives a good impression of the game mechanics.  Their plan is to boost the battle strategy and obviously make the various attacks more descriptive and naughty.  They also have some interesting ideas to get around the 'Euww! What's that fetish doing there!?' problem by giving the player some choice in how the world is set up before starting a game (all female monsters, all male monsters, etc).

Seduction Quest - Yuki-Onna Alraune sandwich

Currently they're running an Offbeatr campaign to raise some funding for the game.  You can check out the details and maybe give them a vote here.  Also, if you have any suggestions or questions, you can get a hold of Codex at codex.seductionquest@gmail.com.

One of the links on their site pointed to another roguelike that's a little further along in development: Noxico.  This one is a little more like Corruption of Champions with both sexes present, furries, and possibly a whole load of weird sexual shit going on.

Noxico - Starting Village. All those letters are people.

I say possibly, because I haven't got that far into it.  Mainly because I'm quite possibly the worst player of roguelikes on the planet.  Each of my characters is born with YASD tattooed on their forehead and has a life expectancy of maybe five minutes if I happen to get lucky and find one of the less monster-infested regions of the map.

Actually, reconciling the Bad Ends of MGQ with the permadeath ethos of roguelikes will be an interesting design challenge for the developers.  The fun part of MGQ is deliberately making Luka lose to see what the monster girl does to him afterwards.  In a roguelike the penalties for dying are often brutal as it means you lose everything and have to start again.  Maybe a sexy Bad End scene is exactly what's needed to sweeten the pill.

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.