Monster Girl/Succubus H-games on my Radar

As I've stated before, I haven't played many of late because of problems with getting Machine Translation to work on my computer.  (I could solve all this by actually learning to read Japanese, but unfortunately I'm English, and we're congenitally awful at picking up other languages).

Thankfully for us gaijin slobs, other solutions are starting to appear.  DLSite has been posting some products with English translation (of varying degrees of quality) and other talented folks have made or are making English translations of juicy succubus smut games.

Domination Quest ~ Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls

AKA the brand new one, as it came out yesterday (the day before?).

It's from the same people that created Demon Angel Sakura.  This time they've gone for traditional RPG rather than a platformer.  Bizarrely, rather than use something like RPG Maker, they appear to have tried to build something like RPG Maker in Unity, which might just be the most Japanese Game Dev thing ever.

Given that it's from Kokage no Izumi, the people that made Demon Angel Sakura, I'm guessing it's going to be weird and end up frequently crossing the line between erotic and WTF! a lot.  In theory it's your typical Gotta Get 'Em All monster girl harem game, but the way the main character picks up new waifus is by shrinking them down and gobbling them up with a tail mouth coming out of his butt.

So, basic Demon Angel Sakura weirdness then.

I would caution against picking it up just yet.  It looks like the creator rushed the game out a little too soon and it's extremely bug infested.  I hit a game-breaking bug within the first half hour where I couldn't continue down a path because the game kept putting the character sprite on the exit point of the new screen, promptly looping the player right back to where they'd just come from.  I've seen comments that this can be avoided if you hit the right spot on the screen, but I haven't found it yet.  The same people have also reported encountering lots of crashing problems later in the game.

I have it and it looks interesting enough that I will write about it once the current broken stuff is fixed.  For now I'd advise staying clear until a patch or two has dropped.


Drain Dungeon

While checking back to see if Domination Quest had been patched, I noticed the English version of Drain Dungeon sitting in my DLSite game library.  This surprised me as I don't remember buying it.  I think what might have happened is DLSite gave me the English translation as a freebie as I already owned the original.

This is an old one.  2016, I think.  You stomp down an abstracted dungeon and then spurt all your accumulated levels inside a trio of succubi on the way out.  I think I played it a little a while back.  Now, with the English version I can give the whole game a thorough...

Actually, scratch that.  I must be getting senile as well as old and fat.  I already wrote a full review of this back here, including delving all the way down the final (and hot!) succubus boss.  The fact I can't remember this is probably not a good endorsement for the game.

Oh well, it might be fun to have a playthrough where this time I actually know what all the items do.  (And have all that delicious draining done in English-text Bad Ends.)


Shrift

Ignore the art style.  A lot of people have been impressed with this game, and I think with good reason.  It might be the best implementation of femdom battle fuck mechanics around.  The creator has given a lot of attention to the various binds and status effects to make the player horny and helpless before the monster girls moves on to the snu snu.  The art style is... idiosyncratic... but they do make good use of puppeting to animate the scenes.  It ends up being a lot more sexier than I expected.

This level of detail on the battles combined with an artist like Setouchi or Shiki would be my dream monster girl H-game combo, I think.

There is a workable English translation patch for the game.  I haven't managed to delve too deep into it yet.  The game also has a bit of Undertale's quirk to it.  The obvious influence is in the separate genocide and pacifist routes, but it also seems to be doing similar funky meta stuff with saved games.  This makes going back to redo various "fights" difficult as the character isn't there anymore.  My last run sort of petered out because I managed to get myself trapped in a fight versus the doll girl that was virtually unwinnable with the equipment I had.

I'm tempted to run at this again and give it the full let's play treatment.


Lust Grimm

Another game that has been recommended to me multiple times in the comments.  I was iffy on the demo.  The art style looked delightful, but the Bad Ends seemed short.

A lot of this was because I was playing with no English.  Translation team =Together= are working on a full translation of this (They've already translated Succubus Prison).  I have played the translated demo and can definitely appreciate the game a little more.  As with Succubus Rhapsody, there's a lot of sexiness in the text of the battles.  Now I'm eager to play the full thing when the complete translation is done.


Because of my translation issues I haven't been keeping as close an eye on interesting H-games as I'd like. Domination Quest is new, but both Lust Grimm and Shrift have been out for a while (although Shrift is using a chapter release model, with the fourth and final chapter not out yet).  If you've spotted any other juicy succubus games, let me know in the comments.

I am tempted to run another let's play type thing again (but maybe not as detailed as the Paradox series).  I'm nervous of doing them because of time that could be spent writing, but I also don't like leaving the blog empty for too long when I'm working on longer projects.  Having something at the forefront that's quick and easy to put out might make for an appropriate screen for those times when I want to be working on larger-scale project in the background.  I don't like the regular update posts.  They're great when things are running smoothly, but end up doom-spiraling my mood pretty quickly when I fall behind.  I think I might have to learn the time-honoured corporate strategy of keeping shtum until I can properly wow people with a new thing.

(For instance, it would have been far better if I'd not told people about the boob monster story and just released it when it was done, rather than fucking up the time estimations, again!, and have people wondering where the fuck is this story and why is it so goddamned late?)

Hentai Game Review: Drain Dungeon

I checked the demo of this out a week or so ago and it looked interesting.  The main sticking point was it was made using the Wolf RPG system and that doesn't usually play very nice with the AGTH + TranslationAggregator system I use for automated Japanese -> English translation.  What normally happens is a lot of characters get dropped from the text, making it impossible to translate.  After searching around I managed to find a fix.

If half of that paragraph was gobbledegook I recommend checking out this hongfire subforum.  There are plenty of helpful guides here to help you setup text hooking and machine translation for Japanese games.  It is fiddly and the results are highly variable, but in most cases you will be able to get the gist of what's going on.

Generally, after putting the relevant programs on your machine (and changing locale to Japanese), you create a shortcut to the game and in the top shortcut path add a link to AGTH before the address of the game.  (Some IT knowledge is required - I'd follow the guides I linked to rather than asking me.)

The fix for the Wolf RPG games is to use this path to AGTH in the shortcut path to the game (paste it into the dialogue box before the address of the game):

[your local path to AGTH]\agth.exe /c /v /x3 /kf /ks2

Then select the thread that hooks the right text from the AGTH dropdown box while the game is running.  The only problem is it tends to go berserk on menu/item screens and the game becomes a little unresponsive.

Right, now the fiddly stuff is out of the way, let's take a look at the game.

Drain Dungeon is a basic dungeon crawler RPG where the dungeon is abstracted into a series of left or right choices.  The choices lead to either no encounter, a fight, a chest, an event, or a kitsune shopkeeper, with all visible before taking that choice.  In this respect it's similar to the continuous corridor of Desire Dungeon.

(Game Design Tip: Abstraction like this is your friend if you are a small indie developer with limited resources.)

In this case, it doesn't matter whether you go left or right - a boss fight is imminent.

The central quirk of the game is that all adventurers have their levels mysteriously set back to 1 on leaving the dungeon.  With this in mind, a trio of enterprising succubus sisters offer to drain those levels out of you, sexily, before you return to the surface and lose them anyway.  A splendid deal for all concerned.

That's not the only quirk of the game.  For some reason the player is restricted in the number of items they can take back into the dungeon, although this number can be increased using the game's alternate levelling system.  Rather than XP and levels, which are fed to the hungry mouths and pussies of the succubi, the player gains another value (which I never managed to translate the name of correctly) which can be spent to change their class, improve their starting stats, and provide other benefits.  This is the key to beating the game as the player goes in as slightly stronger level 1 each time, enabling each run to go deeper than the last one.

The monster girl boss sprites are actually rather nice.

The fights are typical generic RPG affairs against what I'm guessing are stock monster sprites.  However, there are monster girl bosses at regular (every 80 paces) intervals and these provide additional hentai content.  Losing to a boss will see the player getting their levels sucked out by the monster girl in a sexy loss scene.  There are four bosses in total - a slime girl, a harpy, a dragon girl and a succubus.

The player can exit the dungeon at any time, which will take them to the boudoir of the succubus sisters for a spot of sexy draining.  Each sister has four scenes, each unlocked after experiencing the previous, and requiring the player to hand over 5, 10, 15, or 20 levels respectively.

Bad Ends aren't so bad when you know you're going to be reset to level 1 anyway...

The H-scenes are varied and there are plenty of them - 5 with each succubus sister, 4 from the bosses, 2 bonus ones (a random mimic encounter and an occasional offer of sex from the kitsune merchant), plus a big ole orgy at the end.  I thought the scenes were okay, but felt the H-scene art was weaker than the normal character art.

There are multiple ways to complete the game.  Defeating the last succubus boss unlocks a harem scene where all four get to have fun with the player.  The other way involves feeding a total of 200 levels to one of the succubi, at which point she'll be powerful enough to defeat the last succubus boss on her own.  It's a little fiddly to spot as it doesn't come up in the list of options - you have to keep selecting the top option to talk to her until the option to end the game that way comes up.  This also unlocks her final H-scene, which ended up being a disappointment to me.  I did it for the big-titted eldest sister and while the story was sweet, the H-scene was a re-run of her first scene with slightly tweaked artwork.

How would you like to be drained today, brave adventurer...?

While I loved the idea from a thematic perspective, it is flawed from a mechanical perspective.  Grinding through the same goblins and wolves over and over at the start does get tedious, although at least the player does level up quickly.  The grind is real, but at least the game is relatively merciful about it.  Once you figure out what's going on, it doesn't take many missions to reach the end and unlock everything.

I wonder if the drain-back-to-level-1 theme might work better with rogue-lite mechanics.  There is a hint of them in the item restrictions and constantly being reset to level 1, but the game could definitely do with a bit more RNG madness in the dungeons to liven things up a little.

A mutually beneficial transaction, I think!

Overall I liked the concept and wanted to like the game more, but it's a little too generic and the one sister's ending scene I unlocked was a bit of a disappointment considering the grind to unlock it.  If I gave out scores this would be the 5'est 5/10 ever (very very medium).

New Monster Girl Games up on DLSite - Demon Angel Sakura vol.4, Drain Dungeon, Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono

Lorks o'Lordy.  You wait ages for a monster girl game and three come out on the same day.

First up we have Demon Angel Sakura vol.4.

Long time followers will be familiar with this series.  I've already reviewed vols 1, 2, and 3 on the blog.  This is the 4th and last entry in the series.

It's a 2D platform/action game where you control the diminutive Sakura as they fight off various hungry monster girls eager to eat him (her, them?).  The first two games were boss rushes.  The third added a lot of random mooks, each with their own animated Bad End scenes.  The fourth carries on the changes introduced in the third.

Oddly, it's not actually completed yet.  The creators fell behind schedule, but decided to release what they had with the final area (and 3 bosses) to follow early next year.  Despite this, there's still plenty of content with 3 bosses and 15 or so mooks.

I must admit Demon Angel Sakura never really turns me on that much.  Normally this would be a failing for an eroge, but I'm mostly playing to see what ridiculously over-the-top indignities are heaped on poor Sakura in the imaginative Bad End sequences.  The game rarely disappoints.

If you've ever fantasized about having a giant succubus fart in your face and then insert you headfirst into her pussy as a human dildo, this is the game for you.

What, did you think I was joking...?

I've already bought this one and will bring you all the vore-y details in a couple of days or so.

Next up we have Drain Dungeon.

I played this demo a few weeks back after seeing it mentioned on ulmf.org and it looked interesting.  It's a dungeon crawler, but with the dungeon abstracted to a linear sequence of left or right choices (similar to what Desire Dungeon did).

The main gimmick here is that the hero (i.e. you) is always reset to level one upon leaving the dungeon, so a trio of enterprising succubi strike up a deal to... um... "drain" those levels from you before leaving rather than letting them go to waste.

Yes, that kind of "draining".

The three succubi fit the usual range of body shapes, so you have the busty milf one, the slutty elder teen one, and the blatant loli one (who's probably the eldest of the three).  The loli is a bit too loli for my tastes, so that likely means a third of the game's H-content won't interest me.  The busty milf however...

Levels?  I'll get you levels.  All the levels you want...

The dungeon also has some additional H-content provided by various monster girl bosses.  I ran into and afoul of a slime girl in the demo.  The rest of the monsters were the standard stock RPG Maker sprites, so there is a danger the game might get too grindy and repetitive later on.

The biggest problem I found is that the game uses the Wolf RPG Maker system and that traditionally hasn't played very nice with text-hooking.  I like the premise and it looks interesting, but I'll hold off on getting it until I can find the h-code (or alternate text hooker) to make it translatable.


The third game out today is Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono.

This is a genre I don't look at too often - the brothel simulator.

The back story is that you've ended up in debt to the devil/some kind of succubus and have been whisked off to an alternate world to run a brothel in order to pay it off.  Unfortunately, AGTH failed to hook this one at all, so I wasn't really able to work out what was going on in the demo.

From what I saw the gameplay appears to be purchasing captured monster girls off slavers, breaking them in with various sex stuff and then pimping them out to clients to bring in the cash.

Aww, poor lickle Harpy.

Not my cup of tea to be honest, but it might be of interest to people who like their sexy monster girls to be served up without a side helping of femdom and potential death-by-snu-snu.  The art and UI looked fine from what I saw, although not being able to translate anything means I don't know how well the strategy/gameplay mechanics hold up.