Showing posts with label hentai game. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hentai game. Show all posts

Friday, February 23, 2024

Hentai Game Review - Succubus Duel (サキュバスデュエル前編)

This was a pleasant surprise.




The developer is Irojikake Matome.  They were also responsible for Succubus Senki, a hentai monster girl version of Advance WarsSuccubus Duel (or Succubus Card Battle, I'm not sure of exact translation of サキュバスデュエル前編) is a card game, similar to Yugioh (I think), and is a rare hentai game where the game mechanics are also as good as the H-content.

The player takes on the role of a rookie Card master, who's training up to find a sister that was abducted by succubi some years previously.  As part of his training he heads off to the nearest city to improve his rank by battling other Card Masters.


The city where everyone has big boobs


So far, so typical fantasy RPG.  The main difference is the battles are done through card games where the players summon heroes and monsters to fight on their behalf.  The players can also get stuck in themselves (and both the player's attack power and LP (life points?) will level up over the course of the adventure).

Male Card Masters have the generic wolves, goblins and knights, and those fights take place without any H-content (there are two during the course of the game).  Female Card Masters have monster girls and succubi, and they fight... dirty.

With succubi influencing the world, the current 'meta' is all about pleasure attacks and the women have a distinct advantage.


I think the lamia wins this round...


Most of the H-content comes from the card battles.  Summoned monsters and even the opposing player will attempt to win through induced ejaculation.  Pleasure attacks can impart hidden weaknesses on the player (and his units) such as weakness to boobs, and subsequent attacks of that type do more damage as well as opening up the target to sexy grapple moves.  The dirty tricks don't end there.  If a sexy unit is 'defeated', her last action will be to tempt the opposing unit/player, often with a time limit.

The card game itself is surprisingly good.  I think it has some similarities to Yugioh, but I'm not familiar enough with that game to know if this is its own game with some similar mechanics/cards, or a straight rip.  The player can summon a single creature a turn, which can attack the moment it comes out.  Advanced summons require the sacrifice of one or two creatures in play depending on the advanced summon's power.  There are trap cards (red) that trigger under certain circumstances and magic spells (green) which can be set or cast right away.  Players cannot be attacked as long as they have summoned units to defend them.  The individual games are fast-paced, which is fortunate, as you'll need to grind quite a few battles in the city to unlock content.


The deck editor


There are also a surprising number of cards and archetypes to build.  New cards are unlocked by using in-game gold to buy packs.  I haven't played around with different builds too much.  The default starting deck is pretty good as it is.  The player has a Black Knight card, which is very powerful and likely has some plot significance.  All I needed to do was replace some of the weaker units and that was enough to get through the game, so don't fret if you're not too hot at card games.  The only real difficulty spike is the bunny girl, and she can be overcome by adding cards to blow up the opposing player's permanent magic cards.  The cannoneers are useful for this.


I don't think I'm going to be able to put up resistance against that...


The campaign sees the player battling through a series of checkpoint opponents, either as part of quests or to rank up within the guild.  In between the checkpoints you'll be grinding up ranking points by battling a selection of opponents in open challenges within the city.  It's not too grindy.  You won't need to fight anyone more than a couple of times, and will often want to anyway in order to experience all the various... ahem... delights their decks have to offer.

Praise needs to be given to Irojikake Matome for the variety of opponents.  There are about 20-25 opponents in total.  Each has a deck themed around a mechanic and a type of monster girl, and there are 2-4 monster girls in each deck, each with their own scenes and Bad Ends.  Overall I think there are around 90 characters with H-scenes, which is an impressive amount.  Some are also quite inventive.  I liked the MILF tavern owner with her fleet of cocktail fairies.


Who wouldn't want a drunken party with these lovely fairies... 


Most of the H-content is animated, but it's fairly simple – if effective – distortions to give the impression of movement.  As with their previous game, Succubus Senki, there is a heavy emphasis on boobs.  About 80% of the scenes feature big bouncing boobs, either in the face or on the cock.  I like big bouncing boobs, so this wasn't a problem for me, but I think the game could have maybe done with a bit more variety.  To only have two regular vaginal intercourse scenes out of 90 (Jellyfish Girl and Aegis Angel) is a little strange, but it's what the circle is known for, so manage your expectations accordingly.


It's not all boobs...

While the game doesn't have a gallery as such, it gives you plenty of tools to experience all the available content.  The Reminisce option allows you to refight anybody and gives you the option to look at the opponent's deck and force them to summon any sexy succubus from it.  The player also has the standard surrender options if they want to let the sexy succubus have her way with him.

The other thing to be aware of is this is Part 1.  The first part is the ranking up arc, and then it ends with a cliffhanger as the naughty succubi show up to take over the city.

(There's actually some nice foreshadowing of what their plan is and how it's put into operation before it happens.  Why does that Card Master with the mermaid deck randomly have a completely unrelated succubus in it?  A nice touch.)

I don't think this is much of a negative.  The game already has plenty of content and there are a lot of cards to experiment building new decks with.


Energy drain paizuri - the ultimate finisher


I really hope the game gets a proper English translation and maybe even a Steam release for more people to play it.  It's a really good game.  I look forward to seeing what Part 2 has to offer!

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Hentai Game Re-Review: Domination Quest 1


Technically, I reviewed this one a while back.  I was in the mood to play a naughty JRPG-type game and remembered the sequel, Domination Quest 2, had come out a month or so ago.  Similar to Monmusu Quest, you can port the old save across, but as that save was many years and a few laptops ago, I decided to play through again rather than try to excavate it from a forgotten hard drive.

Turns out I needed to anyway, as it was only on rereading my original review that I remembered I never completed the first game.  Despite this, and after completing it this time, I don't think I was too far off with what I originally wrote.


I did reach the final boss this time.

The major change is that whatever bugs blighted it before, don't appear to be present now.  I didn't encounter any crashes during my second playthrough.  The other sticking point, and what caused me to abandon my original playthrough in the misty forest area, was the frequency of combat encounters.  That felt like it had been dialled back.  They're still reasonably frequent, but not so frequent that you can barely move without triggering another combat encounter.

Onto the game itself.  Mechanically, it's a turn-based JRPG.  It has the look of a RPGMaker game, but reverse-engineered into Unity.  While this is a little odd, the game does make use of the 3D environments to do some things you wouldn't see in a regular RPGMaker game.

You play as Kuro, who as a dominator has the ability to shrink monster girls down, gobble them up and then recruit them as allies.  Like Pokémon, but weirder and pervier.


Probably best not to ask...

Kuro doesn't have much in the way of fighting power, so you have to rely on a party of monster girls to do it for you.  You have a party of four and a bench of four you can sub in and out.  Along with health bars, the monster girls have stamina bars that are constantly decreasing every turn.  When they run low, they have to 'snack' on Kuro to get their energy back up or get knocked out.  This is where the bulk of the in-combat H-content comes from, as Kuro's allies take a break to blowjob or do some other sex act on him to get their energy levels back up again.

Most of the combat is regular turn-based JRPG, where if you lose you just get a regular GAME OVER scene rather than a sexy Bad End.  There are some elites and boss encounters that are an exception to this.  At some point they'll try and grab Kuro and drain his energy directly, and you have to rely on your allies to hit the opponent enough times to force them to let him go.  As I said in my original review, it's a shame this mechanic isn't used more.

The other areas of H-content are scenes that are unlocked after increasing affection with your allies, and a skinship mechanic where you get carried around by one of your allies in a lewd manner.  That's fun, but the animation does block a good portion of the side of the screen, so might get in the way while exploring a new area.


It feels quite pleasant until your feet start to dissolve...

The story doesn't have too much to it.  It's a standard fantasy setting with humans coexisting with horny monster girls.  Kuro is just about to start his adventuring career when his powerful succubus (dragon?) partner is mind-controlled and snatched by a nefarious group looking to stoke tensions between humans and monsters.  The game is about trying to get her back and breaking the control the enemy demon lord wannabe has over her.

The mechanics are fine.  It's JRPG light with lots of vore themes.  Kuro can't carry weapons and neither does his monster girls, but there's a crafting system where you combine weapons with crystals to boost your party's abilities.  Mostly it's just stat boosts, but some weapons can either defend against or inflict status effects.  It's a nice system, but a little limited.  Adding a chance of instant death to multi-hit attacks was about the most exciting 'combo' I could find.  It would have been nice to have a little more variety here.  I like a bit of greed in my RPGs, so I missed having the usual options to manipulate XP gain, Gold gain, item drop frequency, etc.

As for the themes, it's a Kokage no Izumi game.  This circle likes giantesses, vore, and crude humour.  As I said in the original review, if you like your monster girls on the giant side and with heapings of vore, this is perfect for you.  If those elements leave you cold, there is enough 'regular' monster girl content to make it worth a glance, but it is a little deeper into its chosen fetish zone than something like Monmusu Quest.


Giant farting fairies are pretty much a staple of this circle's work.

In all, it's about 10 hours of reasonable JRPG, with 28 or so sexy(ish) monster girls to have fun with.

As I said in the original review, one of the monster girls (the carnivorous plant girl) gave me inspiration for a short story ("The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"), and if I can get a short story out of a hentai game, I consider it a win.  Hopefully, I'll find something that gets the creative juices flowing in the sequel.


Thursday, February 23, 2023

Hentai Game Review: Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest

I've reviewed a fair few Dieselmine H-games over the years, most prominently the Violated Hero series.  They were always light on gameplay and usually pretty good on art.  Nowadays they seem to be in a really weird place.  They probably have one of the most gifted smut artists/animators around, L Buffer, working for them, but don't really seem to know what to do with him.



Unlike its predecessor, A Lose Hero in the Castle of the Succubi, which was pretty much a glorified gallery where you walked from H-scene to H-scene, Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest is technically a game, just about.  You have an attack button, a dodge button, and have to navigate fights and timed puzzles.

I'm not into futa, so originally didn't have much interest in this.  Then I saw some clips floating around on porn sites and was lured in.  What can I say, I have a weakness for sexy squishy slime girls.


They got me.  They knew my weakness...


The one area I'm sort of okay with futa is futa protagonists having their 'weak point' targeted by sexy (and importantly, non-futa) succubi and monster girls.  And in this, the protagonist is pretty much functionally a dude with how the various monster girls treat them.  I suspect the only reason they made the protagonist a futa is to double up on the ryona audience by showing a sexy chick with big tits getting slimed.

That's one of the features of the game.  There is a large panel on the right that shows the negative statuses currently affecting the protagonist.

I played this untranslated, so I'm not 100% on the plot.  A sexy female wizard chases a succubus to some ruins.  After entering she gets tricked and hit by some magic that gives her a cock.  Then she has to navigate her way past various erotic traps and monster girls that are bent on wanking her into a stupor.


Not the boooooobs!

The game is quite inventive on that, to be fair.  The first level has you trying to avoid gas and boob traps while fighting off disembodied wank hands and paizuri tits.  The second is full of lascivious slime.  The game gets across the theme of an erotic trap dungeon fairly well and the boss fights are pretty good.  By the 4th level it starts to become obvious the devs are running out of steam.  The traps and timed puzzles go away and are replaced with lazy battles versus hordes of horny bunny girls.  The 5th is a replay of the boss fights, but with the 'lead' succubus of the level involved directly.

As with a lot of Dieselmine games, there is a lack of ambition.  The early levels and boss fights are pretty good, but it's very short and feels more like a demo or proof of concept.

Art is variable.  The L Buffer animations are excellent as always.  I was less impressed with Bad End H-scenes.  The art on those was a little too cartoony and the proportions on some of the succubi ended up looking weirdly grotesque rather than sexy.


Sorry luv, you're just not my type.

As with most of the recent Dieselmine succubus and monster girl games, it's pretty much a showcase gallery for L Buffer's talents.  Those are good as always, but the whole thing is probably a little on the pricy side for what you get.  It's a shame Dieselmine can't seem to put those talents to better use.  Other devs would salivate at the prospect of having this sprite work in their games.

(If I could get a artist/animator as good as this to provide some graphics for The House of Hellish Harlots...)

The erotic traps are interesting, at least for the early levels.  I'm currently brainstorming a SexDungeon project for #Dungeon23 over on Patreon (and SubscribeStar).  This has given me a few ideas for things to work in, like the Boob "Wall of Death".  Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest is maybe a little expensive for what it is, but it's fun and given me a few ideas, so checking it out was not a complete waste.


Beware the "Wall of Boob"...

Milking Farm is probably still the peak of the L Buffer/Dieselmine era, even if that also only had rudimentary run 'n' hide gameplay.

Friday, November 20, 2020

Another Look At: Monster Girl Dreams

I blogged about this game last year, then forgot about it for a while.  It was while checking out some other H-games I remembered it and decided to take a look at how it has been developing.

Very promising, I'm delighted to say.

Monster Girl Dreams is an RPG battlefucker.  It's currently being developed by Threshold and you can find both the game and their Patreon here.


You play a hero that sails off to a land to fight the demon queen, only to find out when he gets there that the land is covered with an enchantment that prevents regular combat and 'fighting' is about fucking sexy monster girls and succubi into submission (or the other way around, if you just wanna have sexy fun times).

It's fairly light-hearted.  Even if you lose, the monster girls and succubi get to have fun with you for a little bit in a pseudo Bad End before you're yanked back to the church in town.

It's still mostly text-based, but what's changed since I last looked is that nearly all the characters have artwork now.  Even though it's just character sprites rather than CGI h-scenes, it does add a lot and they complement the writing well.

Currently the game is unfinished, but has plenty of content.  There are five locations to explore, plenty of side quests and sexy encounters galore.

"Your fetish for hot ninja succubi has intensified"

What makes it stand out to me is the battlefuck combat, and I think this is largely down to the stances system.  Similar to Monster Girl Quest, each of your succubi/monster girl opponents will try to wear down your resistance with a battery of pleasure attacks, but it expands on that with a variety of sex stances that either the player or succubus can lock their opponent into.  This then opens up further sexy moves while in that stance.  It's similar to Succubus Rhapsodia, but without the nuisance cursor-pressing mini-game.  As with Shrift, the most enjoyable 'fights' are those where the monster girl/succubus gradually gets more and more control over the player until they finally succumb to bliss.

Of the encounters, the ninja succubus Shizu is still a favourite.  She's supposedly a masochist, but that probably won't be apparent while she's busily fucking you into submission with a whole smorgasbord of erotic moves designed to drain both will and energy.  In her boss fight she creates two clones to triple the sexy fun.

Another one I really liked was the blue oni, Mizuko, which surprised me as oni are usually a meh monster girl for me.  She's all about hypnotising you with her gorgeous booty and I found that fight pretty sexy as she uses her ass and then anal sex to melt the player's will away.

Defeated by dat booty

Now onto the criticisms and suggestions.

One obvious area of improvement would be to add Bad End H-scene artwork and change the character sprites to give a visual representation of the various stances.  I also think this might be too resource-intensive to be practical.  Similar to Succubus Rhapsodia, there are fights with multiple succubi that usually end up with a variety of stance combos (face sit + sex, boob smother + paizuri, etc).  Representing all that visually would require commissioning a shit-ton of different art, so I wouldn't really expect it in this case.  The text descriptions plus character sprites are already fine.  Anything on top of that would be a bonus.

Other things I wouldn't mind seeing are various quality of life improvements to the interface.  Inventory management is a little fiddly at the moment.  Area exploration uses a 'string of beads' system in that the player travels through a series of encounters and events in sequence (fixed at first and the pre-selected by the player and randomised for subsequent runs after defeating the boss).  It would be nice to see this represented visually (something like Slay the Spire's map or even as simple as what some of the later Violated Hero games did).  Whether it would be practical to do these things I don't know.  I'm guessing the game is being developed on a visual novel creator (Ren'py?) and there are probably limitations as to what can be done with the engine.

Overall, seems pretty damn promising at the moment.  I look forward to catching up with the game again further down the line as more content is added.

(I also need to get off my ass and get my own game project, House of Hellish Harlots, moving again!)

Friday, March 08, 2019

Recent Monster Girl Hentai Games

Yesterday (Today?) seemed pretty good on dlsite.com for new releases.  I thought I'd check some of them out.

The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 3

This is up to a 3rd volume!!!  We only got 1 of the monster girl one.  And where is Monmusu Quest: Paradox Pt.3?  Goddammit, Japan.

Not much to be said on this that I didn't say before.  The West is pretty fucked up with outrage culture at the moment, making it a risky purchase even for the people solely interested in the femdom aspects of being sucked off by various weird and wonderful things while a sexy, sadistic shop owner watches on.  Outrage is everything.  Context is nothing.  That's how it is nowadays, unfortunately.

(I doubt anyone is going to play this and then go on to throw kids into the giant octopus tank of their local aquarium in the hope of getting a good show if the octopus is feeling particularly frisky that morning.)

Even without the stupid outrage culture fears, it still falls a little outside my own personal turn-ons.  I like monstrous semen suckers, but I also like them to have tits and a pretty face.

Lost Fragments - An Otoko-no-ko is Given Status Effects, Reverse R*ped, and Defeated


I liked the demo enough to pick up the full game.  I've played a couple of games by this circle before.  They like having their monster girls bury the player in various sexy binds and negative status effects.  Fortunately, I was able to get machine translation back up and running for this one, as trying to navigate the combat blind is a little tricky.

Fighting is turn-based RPG-style with a heavy focus on binds and negative status effects.  So much so the player has separate buttons depending on whether the adverse status effect is physical (binds) or mental (increased sensitivity) in nature, and can use either as an additional free action every turn.  The status changes are also visible on the player's sprite on the left of the screen, which is a nice visual cue to show just how much an arachne or slime girl has slimed you up.

(The player character's odd appearance is explained in-game.  You play a male gamer transported to a game world with only female character models (for both the NPCs and monsters), hence the feminine appearance.  (The main character is quite relieved to find all his other... ahem... faculties are fully intact.  The monster girls he encounters are arguably even more delighted about it!))

During combat, the monster girls also have an additional 'absorption' move they can use when the player is naked.  This switches the display to a H-scene and a sub-game where the player has to mouse-over various pink hearts to break out.

Without machine translation, this would be a hard pass, but now I have something that appears to work (more on that in a future post), the game seems like good sexy fun.  Mind you, I am a sucker for being tied up by an amorous arachne, or slimed by a sexy slime girl, so this is hitting all the right spots for me.  I'll try and get around to posting a full review at some point in the future.

Daydreamer - Memories of a Succubus & Angel & Hero/Bunny


This looks like another of those strange games that looks like an RPGMaker type RPG, then ditches all the stats for simple action.  In this case you run around firing magic bolts at succubi.

The plot seems to be set just after the hero has defeated the main demon king.  Somehow this has opened the way for succubi to invade and they steal power by attacking people through dream states created from their memories.

There's not much revealed in the demo apart from a tutorial section with an angel assigned as a guide.  The guide angel seems far too lewd in how eager she is to give the hero a big sloppy blowjob, so I imagine there's some kind of plot twist lurking there.

The demo doesn't show much more than the angel scene.  Which is a pretty good scene.  The other art on the store page also looks okay.  I suspect this might be one of those games that consists of nice H-scenes strung together by some very rudimentary and forgettable action game mechanics.

I'm on the fence on this one, but I wouldn't be surprised if I pick it up at some point.  The promotional artwork teases some nice slime girl scenes and I do love being erotically glooped by a sexy slime girl.

Succubus Battles


This one came out a couple of days earlier.  The thread on ULMF calls it Succubus Senki, which I'm guessing is a more literal translation of the title.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  It looks a more tactical-style RPG.  I saw it described as being like Advance Wars, but I never played that series.  Which is unfortunate, as some knowledge of this type of game might have helped me try to work out what the hell was going on in the demo.

You have a hero and two support guys.  You move them to attack a skeleton dude with a couple of (regular) slimes in tow.  Then a bunch of succubi show up, and your dudes... uh... lose.  Then there's a reasonably pleasant animated paizuri scene of you being drained by a succubus afterwards.  Given how easily the succubi wiped my party, I figured this was the typical auto-loss scenario to kick off a campaign.

Wrong.  The succubus dry-fishes the hero with her big bouncing boobs and it's Game Over.

Turns out you can't attack the succubi directly.  That causes your dude to suicide masturbate instead.  Instead, you have to stand next to them and rely on your character's counter attacks to win the battle.

I saw enough to be interested, but also enough to scared by the complexity.  I think this might be fun to play, but probably needs some basic translation of the interface beforehand.  I'll probably wait to see if one of the lovely volunteer translation teams out there thinks the game is good enough to work on before diving in.

Monday, March 04, 2019

Hentai Game Look: Monster Girl Dreams

I've definitely been off reservation, so to speak, if it's taken me this long to find out about this one:




This is Monster Girl Dreams.  It's a (mostly) text-based battlefucker with sexy succubi and monster girls.  It's still in development.  Some of the characters have art sprites, but for the later encounters you currently have to make do with text descriptions only.

I like it because it's very close to what I'd do if organised and focused enough to make a monster girl hentai game.  The combat is reminiscent of the original Monster Girl Quest, but with the restraint status expanded into a number of sex stances the player needs to struggle out of before their arousal hits max (or not, if you just want to enjoy yourself).

And those monster girls have a lot of sexy tricks.  My favourite is probably the succubus kunoichi encountered in the mountain stage.  She has a lot of different ways to erotically drain your energy and different Bad Ends depending on whether she depletes your final point of spirit (which she will) with her mouth, tits or pussy.  A fun encounter and well-written as well.




This optional alraune boss at the end of the first stage also has a lot of different moves and is rather enjoyable to fight lose to.




The game is fairly lighthearted in comparison to Monster Girl Quest.  You don't need to worry about some of the nastier Bad End consequences as the main character is equipped with a magic teleport stone to yoink them out of danger before the shrivelled-up mummy stage of succubus draining.

It's still very early in development, but I've liked what I've seen so far.  The free demo can be obtained from the developer's (Threshold?) Patreon and they update their progress on their blog here.

Fairly promising.  I look forward to seeing how this one progresses.

(I also need to pull my thumb out of my ass and get back to working on my own text-based hentai game stuff!)

Friday, March 01, 2019

Hentai Game Review: Domination Quest

Bit later than intended on this one.  Chez Hydra is still fairly chaotic at the moment, unfortunately.

First, a disclosure.  I didn't make it all the way through this one, although I think I played enough (all but maybe the last one or two sections) to give a fair(ish) review.

With that out of the way, let's get onto the game.




Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls is the new hentai game from Kokage no Izumi.  This is the circle responsible for the Demon Angel Sakura series, and Domination Quest has similar themes and humour.  The main difference is the switch in genres from action platformer to JRPG.  Weirdly, rather than use RPGMaker like everyone else, they chose to build something resembling a RPGMaker game in Unity.  This might just be the most Japanese indie dev thing ever, but to be fair, later in the game they do make use of the 3D backdrop to do things not easily done in your typical RPGMaker game.

RPGMaker, in Unity...?

You play Kuro, an incubus-type creature with the ability to shrink opponents down and swallow them into his butt with his tail.

Yeah... um...
(Just roll with it.)

This doesn't consume the swallowees, but instead transports them to a mystical playground where you form contracts with them to add them to your team.  It might sound weird, but mechanically it's a pervier take on pokéballs.

The story has Kuro hitting adulthood and then heading off adventures with his succubus(?) companion, Shiro.  She gets abducted early on by another mysterious dominator and the quest is on to both get her back and stop this rogue group from stirring up tensions between monsters and humans.

Domination Quest is not really a battlefuck game.  Most monsters use regular attacks and you get a regular Game Over if the party wipes.  There are a few encounters where the monster girl grabs Kuro and the rest of the party has to break him free before the monster girl sexually slurps up all his energy.  I did enjoy those fights and wished the game had more of them.

Kuro getting slurped.  It's a shame more of the fights aren't like this.

The H-content is mostly gated behind an affection system.  As with Monmusu Quest: Paradox, scenes are unlocked by raising affection with your chosen waifu.  Also, as with MQ:P, not all of those scenes are good for Kuro…

Kuro's first date with Julie the goblin girl did not go well...

One of the ways to raise affection is through the game's skinship system.  This is sort of the equivalent of walking hand-in-hand with your waifu (where hand-in-cleavage might be the mildest version of it) and is shown as a little animation on the right of the screen while you're exploring dungeons.

Hand-in-...Boobies?

The H-content is pretty good and animated, but not quite to my taste.  As with Demon Angel Sakura, the themes lean heavily on vore, giantess and gross-out humour.

(the reveal of where the delicious pink slime comes from is both very funny and unspeakably unspeakably euwwww!)

As with the Demon Angel Sakura series, I found the various scenes funny rather than erotic, but I guess this is a YMMV thing.  They were still entertaining.

What killed the game for me were the bugs and too-frequent combat encounters.  The game was very unstable on release.  So much so that one of the paths in the first area was completely inaccessible because the entry and exit points were set to the same point, looping the player back to the screen they'd come from.  After that I didn't seem to have many problems until I hit the later forest area, and the game got very crash-happy.  The frequent combat encounters exacerbated this and made later exploration extremely tedious.  They trigger randomly as you walk through an area (like the old Final Fantasy games) and occur very very frequently.  Like, every few pixels frequently.  While this is a feature of this type of game, I really think the developers dialled the frequency too high.  The foggy area with the fox was the finisher for me.  Trying to explore a shifting maze with a combat encounter going off every couple of steps.  No thanks.

Hopefully this will be something the devs patch or fix in future versions.

Overall, despite the shift in genre, I think my recommendations are the same as for the Demon Angel Sakura series.  If you like Giantesses and Vore, this is worth checking out for the H-content (even if you have to grab a 100% save to avoid struggling through the later dungeons).  For general monster girl lovers, a maybe.  The H-content is nicely done, the humour is entertaining, but the game itself is wretchedly unfun to play, unfortunately.

A Shikibus plant girl?  Looks a similar style.

Despite the problems, there were a few monster girl designs I liked.  My favourite was probably the Carnivorous Plant Girl and she did give me inspiration for a new short story.  Even with all the other problems, if I can get a story idea out of a H-game I normally consider it a win.

Looking forward to getting erotically glooped by you, Mio.
Okay, second favourite design.  I really wanted to have some fun with this aphrodisiac goop flinging slime girl, but it looks like we're going to have to wait for a future Chapter 2 to get erotically glooped by her.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Closing thoughts on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - Plot & Characters

I’m off on other things for about half a week and as I was unable to prepare a week’s worth of new material in time to post here, I thought I’d have a quiet week wrapping up the Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] series with some thoughts on the game.

Yes, I know some of you are probably sick of this by now.  Don’t worry.  It’s done and I’ll be onto new stuff next week (hopefully back to some original fiction).

First up, we might as well take a gander at the story and characters.

Plot and story still seem pretty strong.  You could probably make an anime out of the game plot and it not be terrible.  This has always given the Monster Girl Quest series an edge over similar games featuring hapless (lucky?) heroes and nymphomaniac monster girls.

Part 2 threw up some answers for the weirdness in Luka’s paradox world.

The tartarus regions were caused by an experiment going wrong in Remina.  In the canon world, Ilias blew it up.  In this world their experiment summoned a Black Alice from the future.  This is the Black Alice from the original series right after her defeat at the hands of Luka.  Before that fight she’d devoured Ilias, but been unable to balance the forces of light and dark within her.  The version summoned to Remina does and ascends to godhood.

To be fought in part 3

The reason this is able to happen is because the Ilias of the original series stressed the laws of her universe by constantly rewinding time to pull Luka out of demonic vagina (all those Bad Ends were canon after all).  Then, when she was slain by Luka and friends, this poked holes all over the place and caused a bunch of bunch of alternate realities to bud off the main world, including the one where Black Alice was dragged back through time.

Paradox!Luka’s world was the first to bud off.  Black Alice ascending to godhood blew up Remina and spread the tartarus regions through the world (I think).  She also knocked a chunk of heaven out of the sky, which is how the snow continent came to be.

I think this is the Black Alice we saw in the mysterious tower back in part 1.  I would expect her to be one of the major antagonists if not the overall Big Bad of part 3.

We also got Lilith, Astaroth and Morrigan’s motivations.  Unsurprisingly they are sort of on our side.  Morrigan was recruited at the end of the part 2, and I’m guessing we’ll probably pick up Astaroth and Lilith at some point.  On the Alice route, anyway.  Those on the Ilias route will get their own exclusive angels.

The succubi are representative of a world where the monster girls came out on top.  Of those we’ve only seen an alternate version of Tamamo.  I expect we’ll see the other five legendary ancestors in part 3, as well as the other angel representatives from the world where Ilias reigns unimpeded.  These will likely be side factions we have to deal with about two thirds of the way through the final chapter.  (Not going to lie, looking forward to the monster girl ancestor scenes).

Also to be fought in part 3.  Who are you most looking forward to?

Sonya was revealed to be apoptosis, but is now back to normal (or a copy of normal if on the Ilias route).  I’m still not sure of the overall role of chaos.  They appear to be trying to fix causality by deleting all the deviating worlds.  Adramalech was better fleshed out as a world-ending abomination.  I expect we’ll see her again.  At this point I don’t know whether we’ll end up allying with this faction or fighting it as the over-arching enemy (over even Black Alice).  I could see it going either way.

Also, I’m not totally sure on this (machine translation etc etc), but I think paradox!Ilias might have been the source of the chaotization in paradox world.  There is some sense to this.  Black Alice arrived back in time with Ilias digesting in her stomach, creating a paradox of two Ilias’s being present at the same time in the same reality.  It’s a theory anyway.

Likely not appearing in part 3, this version anyway

That Ilias fell apart at the end of part 2.  We still have loli Ilias running around.  I’m not sure what part she’ll play in part 3 (or Alice if you picked Ilias at the start of the game).  She did sort of vanish from the plot after Grangold.  A more wayward prediction is you have to fight her (or Alice) at the end of part 3.

Nero and Neris’s role is still unclear.  Nero was keen to chase down the white rabbit and they did appear to oppose Tamamo.  I’m guessing most of these various factions will set aside their differences and unite versus either chaos or Black Alice in part 3.

Speaking of the White Rabbit, I wonder if we’ll see her again.  It was a little bit of a letdown that she turned out be nothing more than a creation of Ilias, and with paradox!Ilias gone, I wonder if that’s it for our annoyingly cryptic bunny girl.

Looking in doubt for part 3 unless she's something more than Ilias's tool

The one weakness I think the ending of part 2 had in comparison to other MGQ chapter endings is that it left the objectives rather muddy (unless I missed some nuance in translation).  Part 1 had us returning from a dying reality with the knowledge we had to do something awesome to save the universe.  The ending of part 2 feels a little aimless.  We were going to confront Alice 15th to prevent a war, but she’s dead, killed by Marcellus, and we find out the only reason she wanted that war in the first place was to try and save all worlds from being eroded away by chaos.

In the original series, chapter 2 ended with the twist of psycho Ilias and made it clear part 3 would be about stopping her.  As for the end of part 2 of MQ:P, we still appear to be heading to Helgondo, but at this point I don’t see a clear reason why.  Also, I really hope part 3 avoids the mistakes of MGQ and takes us off somewhere new.  I don’t want to be retreading the same path to pick up the elemental spirits again.

Going off in a new direction would also avoid what was the low point of part 2 for me—the repetition from the original series.  The monster girl queens were definitely less interesting because we’d already seen them before, including their Bad End scenes, in the original Monster Girl Quest games.

The high point was probably the tartarus version of Remina castle.  It’s hard to make RPGmaker creepy and skinned-alive people stuck in walls spouting random gibberish was definitely creepy (and again would make great scenes in an anime or more advanced game).

Creepier even than one of Delphinus's angel girls

Of the new characters, I liked Mephisto and Alicetroemeria.  Mephisto taking “to the letter” to extremes in order to aid us against Alice 15th while still being fanatically loyal to Alice 15th was nicely drawn.  Alicetroemeria, the past version of Black Alice, was also amusingly loopy.  She also seemed mischievous rather than malicious and I hope the plot makes use of her as we close in on her alternate reality counterpart.

For sexy smexy—Lilith.

More Lilith boobs for part 3 plz!

Oh yes, Lilith.  Yup.  I’m a sucker for big boobs.  Can’t wait for more Lilith in part 3.

Friday, April 20, 2018

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 63: Final Side Quests and Recruiting Alma Elma

Beginning

<- Previous: The Final Boss

Wotcha doing Hydra?  Isn’t the game done?  Haven’t the final credits rolled?

Well yes.  But there are a couple of side quests that open up after the final credits.  Yes, I know side quests aren’t normally that interesting or important, but these add some juicy background info, so I thought I should cover them.

La Croix

La Croix’s circus of zombie monster girl queens has various pictures in the graphics folder, so I knew they’d show up at some point.  As we got further and further into the game I was wondering if they’d be the final boss to mirror alt!La Croix being the last NPC encountered in part 1.  Then with the snow continent and all the angels it became clear that the plot had moved past that point.

La Croix can be found in the mysterious ruins southeast of the Bird God Shrine.

Here, again

The first time we came here, Alice warned us that the monsters were too powerful for our current level and advised leaving well alone.  Return here after the credits and she’s happy for us to explore as we’ve already encountered and defeated plenty of the same chimera monster girls in the Ilias Temple Ruins.

We also now have a way of opening the door to the old research lab.  It uses the same keycard that we picked up while being sent back in time to the catastrophe at Remina.

(I suspect it also opens the locked door in the Remina castle tartarus region as well, but I didn’t get around to trying as I still haven’t levelled up enough to open the tier III chests.)

There are a few chests and plenty of gravestones in the ruins.  La Croix can be found on the top floor.  You walk in on her while she’s in the middle of an argument with the doll master girl from the mysterious tower in part 1.

Professional disagreements

La Croix is trying to persuade the doll master, unsuccessfully, to not follow Black Alice as she intends to destroy everything.  The argument being “you create, why follow someone hellbent on destroying everything?”

The doll master remains unpersuaded and teleports away, leaving us with La Croix.

Who immediately sics her zombie circus on us, despite Chrome’s best efforts to get through to her sister.

First wave of zombie monster girl queens

The circus attacks in two groups of three.

Second wave.  We also have too many Queen Harpy entries in the database.

There is the same group Bad End as the original series.  Each member also has their own separate scene that can be requested after they’re recruited.  I can’t remember if these are new or not.  Also, while checking the graphics folder of one of the more recent patches, I noticed TTR has added artwork of the circus members in their original non-zombified forms.

Former Queen Harpy when she was looking a little... fresher

I’m not sure what they’re doing there, but it’s cool to see the old monster girl queens in their original forms.  Maybe we’ll encounter them in part 3.

After we beat her zombies, La Croix acknowledges Chrome has found some strong companions.  She still possesses the same doomed fatalism her original series version had, but Chrome is able to knock her out of this by telling her about her alternate reality counterpart - the one that held on to document the end of a doomed world in the hope that one day her research could be used by someone wanting to prevent the same thing happening to their world.  The only one that could understand these notes is another La Croix, so this La Croix takes them on and leaves to research their contents.  She bequeaths her circus to us in order to continue the fight.  Six more new recruits to Luka’s harem army.

Another top-level job unlock item can be found on the table to the right.  At this point I think I have them all apart from the one (or more) that need to be won off Lazarus in the pocket castle casino.

Funnily enough, if you talk to Titania (the zombie fairy queen) back in the castle with Alicetroemeria, she’s the only one that recognises and dares to acknowledge Black Alice for who she really is.  She even asks her why she’s disguised herself as a wizard.

“Mischief,” Alicetroemeria replies.

I do like this incarnation of Black Alice.  I’m really curious to see how she features in the plot of part 3.

Overall, I thought the La Croix side quest felt a little tacked on.  As if TTR knew he needed to include it, but couldn’t quite fit it in cleanly.

Morrigan’s Side Quest

Morrigan’s side quest is worth doing as it gives a lot of interesting background info, an extremely powerful new party member, and leaves us with a nice post-credits stinger for the next part.

Her side quest pops up on the main notice board after she joins the party.  She wants to go to the underground research lab in Luddite Village.  Promestein also wants to come along.

The quest objective is again the machinery at the back of the lab where we first picked up Hild.

Back again.  The 3rd time now?

Once you get there Morrigan will go into more detail about the shikibi’s plan, and why they didn’t run when the world looked utterly destroyed.

The simple reason is they couldn’t.  They cannot travel between realities.  Only Luka, Marcellus and gods can do that.  They got here through the same method they’re using to transfer all the souls back to their world.  When the soul is transferred, it merges with its counterpart on the monster girl world and they sort of amalgamate back into a shared personality.  This is what Morrigan and sisters did.  They merged with their counterparts here and broke them out of whatever was sealing them away.

And yes, that does mean what you think it means.  Morrigan confirms it right after.  In order to do this, they had to kill themselves in the other world.  This becomes especially poignant when you realise that even if their plan succeeds, they themselves would be unable to go back.  That is some unexpected insight into their character and motives.

This does leave a slight plot hole around alt!Tamamo’s appearance in Grangold Castle, but the game even thinks of that, although with machine translation I found the explanation a little hard to parse.  I think it’s a projection, or related to how Tamamo can break her seal to manifest in her weaker loli-fox form.

Oh, and that new recruit?  She comes along right after.

There's our gal

This answers something I was wondering about.  I’d heard Alma Elma could be recruited post-credits, but didn’t know how.

Unsurprisingly, she’s not going to let us do this without a fight.  She feels Morrigan is owed a good kicking and will not be persuaded otherwise.  Yes, she is technically on our side, but she’s also the Queen Succubus and feels strongly that she should not allow other succubi to behave with such brutality.  Morrigan tries to explain they had “reasons” (and fuck those assholes in the Luddite Village anyway), but Alma Elma is not going to be swayed.  So, fight.

This is a proper fight as well.  Alma Elma isn’t going to hold anything back, so you’re probably going to need the same party you fought Sonya Chaos with, otherwise Alma Elma will seduce everyone and trigger a mass orgy pile-on for lucky poor Luka.

After you beat her, Alma Elma will join the party for good.

There is also a nice stinger to prep us for part 2.  Promestein copies the files and as she does so she mentions they're called the “the Laplace Protocols.”  Interesting...

And that seems an appropriate place to leave it.

I hope you've enjoyed this series.  It took quite a bit longer and was a lot more work than I anticipated, but was still fun to do.  I don’t use a Patreon or anything like that to fund this, but I do have various books available on Amazon (and other online bookstores - I write under the name M.E. Hydra).  If you’ve enjoyed this series and would like to show your appreciation, please feel free to pick up one (or more!) of my books.  They are also packed full of sexy Bad Ends given out by delectable succubi and other monster girls.  If you like the MGQ series, you’ll also enjoy my books.

Next week I’ll tag on a few lightweight posts with my overall thoughts on the series while I work out what to move onto next (I'm fully aware I've been neglecting my own fiction of late and want to take steps to correct this).

Before I go, the Alma Elma fight did finally answer one question I'd had since looking up her Bad End scene artwork in the graphics folder.  There was one picture that wasn't used in her request scenes and I did wonder whether it had been scratched out for being a little bit too far.

Nope, it's used here.

The nicest of gals... the worst of fates...

Yep, Luka buddy.  I’d highly recommend not losing this particular fight.

And that seems a perfect footnote to end things on.  Thanks for reading!

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 62: Final Boss

Beginning

<- Previous: Ilias Temple Ruins II

Hmm, probably isn’t going to be much time or space for recaps, so let’s forge on straight from where we left off (I played the game that way anyway, I had to split this section into two posts because there was too much damn exposition).

The bad Black Alice floating around is the bad Black Alice from the original MGQ reality.  She’s also a god.  This could cause problems.

A chaotized Ilias just about manages to tell us about the two worlds where the monster girls and angels won out convincingly when the monster girl delegation of Lilith, Morrigan and Astaroth show up.

Rather conveniently as it happens, as they are able to continue the exposition as this world’s Ilias finally succumbs to chaotization and falls apart.

(Again you’ll have to excuse my clumsy interpretations.  AI machine translation is not ideal for text-heavy games.)

Lilith and friends are from the world where the legendary ancestor monster girls won against Ilias and were not sealed.  It’s a monster girl paradise of complete freedom (where I’m guessing human lives are both awesome and very very short).  Unfortunately, they realised they need to unify the worlds to prevent chaos from destroying them all.  Their plan is to suck the souls of everyone over into their world and unify that way.  Unfortunately (again!), in order to pull the soul across into their world they have to kill the individual in this world.  However, the more a world deviates from the proper history of the original world, the faster it’s destroyed by chaotization.  Which is why they’ve been trying to prod Luka along a similar path to his canon counterpart.

This also explains the war-like behaviour of Alice’s mother.  She knew this plan would require a big slaughter, but she didn’t her daughter to have that blood on her hands, so she usurped the throne to be the bad guy the universe needed.

Then the angel faction from the other world crash the party.  They’re led by another Eden.

She's from an alternate reality.  You can tell because she's wearing clothes.

They come from the world where the angels crushed the forces of darkness and everyone lives happily in constant worship of Ilias.  Their masterplan is not revealed, but I imagine it involves something similar to the heaven version of Esta.

I’m also guessing that the Ilias route has the angels arrive first and explain their plan before Lilith and sisters show up.

The two trios exchange insults before getting ready to kick off an epic battle.

Uber catfight!

Sonya tries to get in the middle of them to play peacekeeper.

No, Sonya love, you don’t want to get involved in this.  You’re outclassed.  This is not the time to...

“Battle acts between people who come form parallel worlds are forbidden.”

Huh, that’s a very stiff way of... Oh.  Fuck.

I mean pint-size Ilias did warn us right at the beginning of MQ:P part 1 – “You should watch her.  I know everything in this world because I created it.  I do not know her.”

The angels and succubi spot something isn’t right as well.

And something isn’t right.  Really not right.

Uh oh

Sonya, Luka’s “childhood friend”, was really an apoptosis secret agent the whole time.

(okay, this is probably as big of a “twist” as Alice being the demon lord in the original series.)

She’s also very high level apoptosis.  She grabs Gnosis’s arm and the angel has to cut it off to escape before Sonya absorbs all her energy.

Yup, we have problems.  Luka tries to get through to her without any success.  Looks like the final boss of part 2 is Sonya.

The endboss is Sonya

She’s referred to as Sonya Mazda, which I think is also Sonya Heaven, although I’m not 100% on this.  In this form she’s absorbed light energy and taken on an angelic aspect.

Should you lose to her, she gives you a suitably angelic send-off.

Prepare to be ridden hard

She rides you to nirvana... literally.  MGQ angels aren’t that dissimilar to succubi.  They can suck the energy out of humans and the way they like to do it usually involves a lot of ejaculations and cum.  For an apoptosis monster girl it’s actually rather vanil—

Yeep!

Pass the vodka, please.

Her first incarnation isn’t all that hard to beat.  First time around I didn’t really pay attention to Alice’s warnings, wandered up with whatever party I had at the time and managed to just about muddle through Sonya’s first stage.

First stage?

Oh yes.  Did you think you were done after that?

Defeating Sonya does not result in the usual pledge of friendship.  Defeating her is only the prelude to worse things as Sonya starts to download Adramalek into this world.

Morrigan tries to stop her only to have half of her energy drained in the process, replenishing everything apoptosis Sonya used up in the fight and giving her snazzy new chaos powers on top of that.  She also doesn’t prevent Sonya from summoning Adramalek, who arrives in a much more buffed up form than the one we last saw.

Adramalek has been working out since we last saw her

This is a much better use of her character.  I always thought Adramalek came out of nowhere and was a weird choice for end boss in the first chapter.  This time around she fits much better.  She comes to worlds.  They die.  You should fucking fear her.

The angels and succubi obviously do.  Her arriving here is enough for them to temporarily set aside their differences and team together to fight her.

That leaves Sonya’s second form, Sonya Chaos, to us.

Okay, this is the real endboss of [part 2]

Should be fine.  Luka is level 60.  Most of my back row can’t fight at all, but my front row is probably still over-levelled.  We should be able to muddle through it like bef—

I'm not sure I want to know what's going on here...

Spoiler.  It was not fine.

Not fine at all.

Nope

Come back Delphinus.  All is forgiven.  I’m not really sure what’s going on in this Bad End.  Sonya sort of brings Luka into her body.  Then has a second body to hug him from behind while something (probably best not to think too hard on what) starts sucking away on the dangly bits.  Finally, it ends with two becoming one... the bad way.

Sonya’s second incarnation is considerably tougher than her first form.  She hits like a truck.  I came back with a proper party of level 60s—in the back line as well—and it was still a pretty tough fight.  As always, Alicetroemeria is handy to have around.

Beating Sonya doesn’t seem to improve things much.  The combined team of succubi and angels are able to take down Adramalek, but as Lilith points out, it doesn’t matter.  They’ve already beaten her twice before.  She just comes back stronger.

It looks like curtains for the world anyway.  The angels, being MGQ angels, decide this is a lost cause and run back to their world.  Lilith says this world is too important and her and the other succubi opt to stay.  To be honest, I think we’re at world past tense at this point.  We appear to be standing in void.

Then Nuruko pops up.  She’s the other “mysterious being”.  What, another hidden apoptosis?

Not quite.  She appears to still be on our side.  She sucks up all the chaos, reversing the chaotization of the world, and mutates into a much bustier form.

Nuruko?

Then the elemental spirits realise she’s another spirit, just like them.  Of chaos?  I’m not sure.  She dismisses Adramalek from this world and restores Sonya before returning to her original loveable (sort of) Nuruko form.  She’s also managed to revert the chaotization and return the world back to how it was before.

Afterwards the succubi are of a much friendlier disposition.  Morrigan is offered as a new party member.  Luka is hesitant at first, remembering how they slaughtered the Luddite village.  Lilith points out they did it to save the world (and to be honest, those Luddite assholes had it coming anyway).

I suspect this is also route-dependent.  I imagine if you have Ilias it’s the three succubi that run straight after the battle and one of the angelic trio joins the party, although I’d need someone on the Ilias route to confirm that in the comments.

Sonya wakes up with no knowledge she’s really a world-ending apoptosis.  Morrigan is keen to kill her, but Luka refuses to let that happen.

So what do we do now?  Do we continue to the demon castle to stop Alice 15th... who’s only taking on the role of a mass-murdering monster because she feels that’s the only way to save the universe?

Stopping Alice 15th becomes moot anyway.  As soon as Lilith and Astaroth get back to the castle they send a message that Alice 15th is dead—killed by a hero.

History repeats, or rather, snaps back to the initial path

Realities may diverge, but some events are constant.  Remina blows up.  Marcellus kills Alice 15th. Luka slays Ilias?

And that’s the note the game leaves us on.  Not sure where [part 3] is going at this point.  There is a lot going on!

Time to roll credits.

But we’re not quite done yet.  There are some post-credits quests, including the permanent recruitment of Alma Elma, which I’ll cover in the next post.

-> Next: Post-Credits Side Quests (Alma Elma!)