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

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Hentai Game Review: Shrift 2

The first Shrift was one of those games I always felt I should have reviewed, but never got around to it.  It's a good game and one I'd probably recommend, but I still haven't finished it, so I didn't feel qualified to write a proper review of it.  It's fairly hard, for a H-game, and the idiosyncratic approach to saving meant I kept getting stuck at various points and putting the game down.




Now to the sequel, Shrift 2, which is thankfully much easier and overall feels like a much more polished game.  This one I did complete... sort of.

First up, let's get some important things out of the way.


Shadow cowgirl


Okay, let's go right to the art style.  It's idiosyncratic.  Personally, I think it's improved from the previous game, but it will be a barrier for some people, especially if you prefer your porn games to have graphics similar to the lifelike 3D models of the many adult games on Steam.  Personally I think it's the animations and how the characters move with the sex combat that makes it work, but that won't hold for everyone.  I'd recommend giving the free demo a look to see if it works.  You'll know fairly quickly whether it hits the spot or not.

The next is how the game handles saving.  As with the first game, which (I think) was influenced by Undertale, there is meta-weirdness going on.  Unlike typical RPGs, you can't just rewind to a previous save point.  Whatever you put the player character through will be preserved between save states.  I found this out the hard way after letting the character get comprehensively sex-drained, loading a previous save and then finding out the character still had all the levels lost and a pile of negative status ailments from his 'fun times'.  At the time I didn't know how to recover from that and was forced to start again.  Thankfully, after getting more familiar with the game, this isn't that much of a problem.  Levels are easy to regain and most ailments go away with a good night's sleep.  The hotel the main monster girls end up in also gives you the opportunity to re-experience the sexy times without having to go back to a previous save, but I think the game could benefit from a similar monsterpedia re-fight option (at the relevant power level) the original Monmusu Quest has.  That's mainly because I like being legitimately surprised and beaten by the monster girls' sexy moves rather than taking the begging option to experience them.


She's about to give you a very big slurp


The last is that the game isn't complete yet.  You get part one, with parts two and three (and maybe more) coming later as free (I think) updates.  This was how it worked with the original Shrift and the dev did deliver on that, so they probably will again.  As it is, the game still has plenty of content for a H-game, so don't let that hold you back from diving in right away.  There's about 7-8 hours here, probably more if you want to grind up to unlocking all the H scenes.

With those caveats out of the way, let's get onto the game proper.

I played this one using Textractor for machine translation and was able to stumble to the 'end' after looking some things up on the ULMF forum.

The setup is you're an apprentice priest tasked with clearing out demons.  You pick up a sexy shadow girl companion early on and then find out you have a weird symbol on your hand that allows you pick up more demon girl companions after you defeat them.  There is also plenty of other glitchy weirdness going on that hints of larger revelations later.  I have a feeling this might be linked to the original Shrift as some sort of prequel, but bear in mind I'm going off machine translation, so my understanding is fairly sketchy at best.


Standard RPGmaker Church


The game world consists of a town hub with various locations to visit.  More are opened up later (including a hotel to house your growing harem of demon girl companions).  The locations are divided between your typical shops, dungeons (of which there are 3), and quest locations needing to be visited to advance the overall plot.  The plot is advanced through main quests (mostly) given out by the nun character in the church.  There are also various side quests which can be given out by the nun or NPCs in the game world.  Some are the typical recurring 'fetch X of thing' side quests while others unlock additional demon girl companions.  There is also a day/night cycle with the player character moving it along with each place they visit.


Town Hub


Rather than typical RPG-maker navigation, the dungeons are rendered in classic 'blobber' style as pseudo-3D mazes with wandering monsters (similar to the original Dungeon Master if you're really really old).  Unlike the previous game, the majority of these monsters are regular RPG combat encounters with no H-content.  Normally I don't like this in H-games, but it doesn't get in the way too much.  If you do get level-drained to 1, it's fairly easy to blast through one of the dungeons and get right back up to around 20 or so again.  There is a grind element, but it's not as bad as other games.


In a dungeon


Then there is the sexy H-content fights or 'temptation battles'.  The game solves the habitual realism problems of how to have sexy combat when one side is fighting with regular weapons by having your main offensive move be 'praying'.  This is based on a Faith stat, which also doubles up as HP.  You also (later) have access to magic attacks.  There's a nice balancing act going on here.  The regular faith attacks are based upon how much faith (or HP) you have.  In contrast, magic attacks do damage based on how low your faith is.  Because this is a sexy combat H-game, you also have a lust bar.  Let that get too high and you'll be rendered helpless while your opponent has 'fun' with you.


I don't think this is going to be a 'clean' fight


The mechanics deserve special mention as I think the Shrift 2 dev might have solved one of the main issues with this type of game, especially when the succubi and monster girls have level-drain moves.  Because it's a H-game, you want the monster girls to do sexy things to you.  But if you let the monster girls do sexy things to you, you end up losing progress to Game Overs and losing levels that have to be ground back up again.  With Shrift 2, getting drained is also a form of character progression.  The demon girls are slotted in as interchangeable companions and they aid you during fights with special moves.  They are levelled up by... ahem... sucking levels out of you.  Getting drained also generates SP (sacrifice points), which are then used to unlock skills and passive abilities on a separate skill tree.  It's an interesting approach.  The game is currently easy enough (after my experiences with the first game and knowing I was going to be fumbling with machine translation, I pussied out and picked EASY difficulty) that I found I didn't really have to use the skill tree much, but there are definitely some ideas there I've filed away for future reference.  I definitely wouldn't mind playing around with some of these concepts for a succubus H-game.


A lizard girl's best attempt to look human (while fucking your brains out)


Now for the all-important H-content.  I found 8 separate monster girls and 2 'squeezing' monsters (non-human monster monsters that have sex attacks).  Going back to that idiosyncratic word again, Shrift 2 is very idiosyncratic with the monster designs.  Maybe more so than games like Monmusu Quest, where the monster girls nearly always had recognisably human faces and tits no matter how weird and monstrous the rest of them was.  Shrift 2 has a broad range, probably too broad for most people.  As with the first game, I found the monsters to be a mix of ones I really liked and hit the spot, and others I noped away from as fast as possible.  There's a bit of furry in there.  Scaly too.  And whatever the moth girl counts as.  As long as you find a couple you like, they have such a range of H-scenes you'll probably find enough content to make the game enjoyable even if you find some of the others boner killers.

(Personally, I really liked the shadow girl and siren.)

The last fight with the siren also deserves special mention.  Up until then the fights are mostly typical HRPG battles.  The siren fight brings in more Undertale-style elements with mini-game segments where the player's soul has to dodge hearts thrown at it.  Very creative and well-implemented and I hope we see more like that in future instalments.


Right from the h... humongous boobs

The game also has compatibility support for a sex toy (Vorze A10 Piston SA, I think), where it will 'squeeze' you in time to the on-screen action.  I can't comment on that as I don't own that particular toy, but it sounds a fun idea.

(No Hydra, do not entertain ideas of letting one of your succubi have access to that.)

Overall, if you can handle the various idiosyncrasies, it's worth a look.

I'll post a rough guide on how to play sometime next week if there's interest.

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

Hentai Game Review - Succubus Puttel

I've always had a weird relationship with 62studio games.  I pick them up, bounce off them early, then come back and realise they weren't all that bad after all.  Lust Grimm was the first.  Sadly, I played that through at a time when I was concerned I was devoting too much time to writing blog posts over things that pay the bills, so I never wrote a review of it.  It's pretty good.


Succubus Puttel
is more of the same.  I think it's 62studios's 3rd full game.  It's a fairly standard RPGmaker battlefuck game.  It's another game featuring a young man protagonist in a fairy-tale world filled with cum-hungry succubi eager to jump his bones.

The game starts out with everyone being abducted from the starting village by succubi.  The hero sets out to rescue his 'sister' while being given 'help' from a pair of talking chickens.  It's not as it seems, as is revealed through the quest.  The quest itself is fairly straightforward.  Go to different areas, beat the deadly-sin-themed succubus boss of the area and then have a showdown in the final castle.  There are also a few optional quest items to pick up, and these will determine the ending.  Thankfully, they're not too guide-dang-it, mainly because I was playing an English translation and also because the NPCs aren't too overly cryptic in their instructions.

Towns hold many dangers for country bumpkins...

The English translation can be picked up off the ULMF forums here.  It's mostly managed machine translation.  It's good enough to follow the main plot, but some of the Bad End texts are a bit scuffed as you would expect from straight machine translations.  It's good enough to get the gist of what's going on.

One warning.  I found my version to be a little crash-happy.  I don't know if this is a problem with the original game or the modded translation.  Either way, save regularly and often (you don't need to do it at the designated save chickens).

The combat is reciprocal battle-fuck, i.e. both combatants are trying their best to get the other off rather than games like MGQ where the protagonist is trying to fend off the lascivious succubi's advances with regular weapons.  Unlike MGQ, it isn't game over if the succubus makes you pop.  The game generously gives you 3 pops before you become unresisting succubus fodder.  Although, as the succubus gets stronger each time she makes you pop, having two more 'lives' doesn't always help.

Attacks are split into two categories – mouth and hand – and target four different erogenous zones – mouth, tits, pussy, ass.  Each succubus has a weakness to be targeted for bonus damage.  Remove half of the succubus's HP and she'll take her clothes off.  Remove a little more and she'll try to tempt the player.  Accept the temptations and she'll do a special sexy move on you that will force an ejaculation and drain a level out of the player.  This works pretty well with the 3 'lives' system as it overcomes the central problem of most battlefucks in that the player has to lose to see the good stuff.

Hot enough that she can walk around in snow in her underwear

Personally, I'm iffy on 'press X to surrender' mechanics.  One thing I liked about Lust Grimm was some of the succubi had special level-drain moves they'd drop on the player during regular combat.  Gameplay-wise, constantly getting your levels drained might be frustrating, so I can see why they made it something the player has to choose to happen to them, but I think Lust Grimm balanced it fairly well with levelling up being cheap enough that replacing lost levels wasn't much of a grind.

The special holds are also very exploitable.  The player can learn various protective skills that reduce damage from specific areas (eg breasts or pussy) to about a tenth.  Normally, they're not too helpful, as you don't know what the succubus is going to 'attack' with, but once a succubus has you in a special hold, all subsequent attacks will be of the same type.  This means that rather than trying to break out, it's better to stay in the hold and alternate between 'Resist: X' and 'Attack: Weak Point' until the succubus comes.  There is one succubus that counters this – Boobs Yokai/Busty Phantom (one of my favs for the series).  If the player doesn't break out of her hold after a certain number of rounds, they pass out and lose no matter how many 'lives' they have left.  I would have liked to see more enemies do things like this to give more variety to the sex battles.  Once the player has figured out the holds are exploitable with the mid-level succubi, that would be a good time to spring the involuntary level-drain attacks on them from the high-level succubi if the player doesn't break out of their holds fast enough.  I think the game missed an opportunity there.

"So you can protect against breast attacks.  I'll make you pass out instead."

Overall, the battlefuck combat is fine without being amazing.

The art is pretty good in my opinion, although there is no animation.  You get the standard battle-sprite, naked battle-sprite and Bad End pic array of CGs.  I like the style of the main artist and it gives 62studios's games a consistent look.  The other artists are a little more variable, but overall it's pretty good.

The one caveat is that the devs unashamedly love big boobs.  While the Bad Ends cover a range of sex acts, boobs get the biggest share with titwanks, puff-puffs, breast-feeding and nursing handjobs galore.  There's one token flatty and everyone else has cup-sizes ranging from silicone-enhanced centrefold model to utterly gargantuan.  YMMV on which point it passes beyond attractive to grotesque.

If you like boobs and believe there's no such thing as 'too big', these are the succubi for you.

Okay, that might be 'too big'

Overall, I liked it.  Compared to similar games, it falls somewhere in the middle of the pack.  The art is fine and the gameplay is fine.  There were enough succubi designs that hit the right spot for me (smother me, busty phantom).  Story, art and gameplay are all competently executed, but maybe needs an extra spark in something to truly excel.


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, February 19, 2018

Hentai Game Review: Monster Girl Labyrinth

Dieselmine have a new Monster Girl H-game out, Monster Girl Labyrinth:


I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by this one.  (So much so, I felt motivated to write a review on it.)

I know, I know.  It's Dieselmine.  So many times their games have looked to have promise, only for them to half-ass it with some questionable design choices.

So it's a surprise to see them make a straightforward monster girl battle-fuck game that gets the basics right.

Yep, they put the animations in the right place this time.  Previous game Monmusu Conquered World had some nicely-drawn succubus/monster girl sex animations, but the actual fights were standard RPG battles and the Bad Ends were static CGIs.

Monster Girl Labyrinth is more like ROBF.  The "fights" are more accurately described as fucks, and the monster girl is animated as she... ahem... battles to reduce your CP (or whatever the HP equivalent is) to zero.  The animations are fairly standard Photoshop-style puppeting, but it's effective and I've said many times before how much even a little bit of animation improves the H-scenes of these games.

The scenes are pretty good.  For most of the girls there appear to be two variants depending on whether your TP (gauge on lower right of screen) is positive or negative, and a third linking them together if you click yes when the monster girl offers to do nice things to you.

Taking the harpy as an example.  Her standard move is to rub your cock between her rather lovely butt cheeks.

Harpy foreplay (I think we can win this one)

Once she gets your TP below zero it's time for full intercourse.

Getting hot and heavy (We're losing...)

Sometimes she'll give you a yes/no option.  Selecting yes allows her to use a more extravagant "attack" that adds an additional cute little butt wriggle while she has you balls-deep inside her.

Oh fuck yes! (We lost)
(I may have conceded at this point).

Thankfully, there is very little stupid filler this time around.  All the girls get animated (and voiced) battle scenes, regardless of whether they're standard mooks or bosses.  Overall there are thirty separate encounters, which, while nothing compared to MGQ's massive monsterpedia, is still a decent amount for this type of game.

A delightful menu of depravity

The encounters vary in weirdness from more vanilla elves and wolf girls (kobolds) to... well...

Based on KC's Gazer, in turn based on D&D's Beholder (I think!)

If you liked Aradia from Monmusu Quest: Paradox, MGL also has it's own booby monster:

Falling into an actual literal booby trap

The other game art is pretty good as well.  Each of the regions you pass through looks fairly distinctive and I love the pixel art of the fast travel screen.  It gives me a real nostalgia vibe of old pixel platformers like Ghouls'n'Ghosts.

Fucking your way to the top, fantasy-RPG-style

Now for the not-so-good stuff.

The gameplay is, as typical for Dieselmine, fairly shallow.  I was unable to hook and translate the game, but was still able to breeze through it in around 4-5 hours.  Selecting basic attack and drinking a healing potion whenever your CP gets low will get you through 90% of the game.  It's also not always clear what's going on in the battles.  I get that I'm doing "damage" to them through numbers on the screen and their CP bar decreasing, but I don't have the faintest clue how it is happening.

At one point this review was going to be a lot different as for most of my playthrough the animations didn't work.  Then the game crashed and when I started it up again I realised what I was missing (as the giant slime girl inserted me headfirst into her pussy).

I can't comment too much on the story as I had to play through this one without machine translation.  I think the plot is you investigate some disappearances in your village, fall into a pit and then have to fight fuck your way through various monster girl territories to return home.  Along the way you bump into a cute witch and cute bunny girl and the main boss is some kind of fairy.

Also, the ending is not quite the ending.  Two of the monster girls (including the booby-trap girl) and a boss are post-credits content that can be found by selecting the 4th option on the menu after completing the game.

Overall, this is much better output from Dieselmine and close to what I want to see in a battle-fuck game.  I would put the animated scenes/battles as slightly above ROBF, but not quite up to the gorgeous shikibus in Succubus Prison.  It's a shame Dieselmine's recent track record has been fairly mediocre, as I suspect the game would have generated more excitement had it been made by anyone else.  I was very close to skipping this one altogether (as I did with Cornelica).  Don't be put off by it being from Dieselmine.  I think this one is pretty good.

Of course, if the reason you don't like Dieselmine is because you prefer more meat (i.e. a massive story like Monster Girl Quest, or fairly intricate RPG mechanics like ROBF and MQ: Paradox) on your hentai RPGs, this is not going to change your opinion.  It's still a shallow experience, but an enjoyable one.

I wouldn't mind seeing Dieselmine go back to the better Violated Hero games and revamping them with these newer animated battle-fucks.  Animated Milfy, ooh yes please.



Quick aside on other things.  Unfortunately I appear to still be in a state of complete disorganisation.  Expect things to be a little spotty here while I sort my shit out.