Not much more to say. As a game MQ:P just about holds up, mainly on the strengths of the characters, story and the wide variety of weird, wonderful and mostly sexy monster girl designs. The JRPG elements are still too grindy IMHO, and not the best fit for the femdom-esque Bad Ends, although the series does have a harem element not present in the original series. Overall, I think TTR's baby, while still very good, is in danger of being dethroned by other up-and-coming whippersnappers. Tokinokogiri's Succubus Prison is probably the benchmark for hot succubus/monster girl Bad Ends now and even Dieselmine managed to raise their game with Monmusu Labyrinth.
She really likes to give you a good squeeze (Succubus Prison) |
The main thing MQ:P lacks now is animation for the Bad End scenes and I'm not sure how easy that would be to add given that the Monster Girl Quest series' greatest strength has been the sheer number and variety of monster girls. That's a lot of dicking around with puppeting tools to get all those boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner. Used selectively, maybe... One of MQ:P [part 2]'s biggest weaknesses is that all the monster girl queens fought later in the game are repeat encounters from the original series. A little bit of sneaky puppeting/animation might have given those old sex scenes a fresh twist.
Anyway, that's enough on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] for now.
I suspect you're more interested in the moving on part.
I definitely want to get back to some original fiction. The odd blip aside, the thrice-weekly posting schedule I used for the MQ:P series worked pretty well for me. I'd like to apply that same discipline to my original fiction and see where it takes me (ideally the raw material for a new book I can submit to my publisher every 4-6 months).
What is something I haven't yet decided. I'm still in the middle of some upheaval as I have another trip (this time for work) scheduled to knock out most of next week. Getting back to and finishing off "The Heart Squad" seems like a decent interim project before I decide whether to launch into Succubus Summoning 301 or something completely different.
If work on "The Heart Squad" starts flowing again, expect that to resume Friday (or Monday). If it's still stuck, expect a bit of wibbly-wobbly inconsistency while I pick something else to work on.
There is something else I've been tinkering with recently, an old project dragged off hiatus. That does appear to be going somewhere, but I'll hold off on posting more about it until I have something a little more presentable.
Does this mean you're done with Japanese monster girl games?
I think I'll lay off the extended "Let's Play" series for a while. It's been too long since I last submitted a book to my publishers and I need to concentrate on my own fiction for a bit.
Ideally, I would like to keep reviewing the good ones as they come out, but there is an issue here unrelated to clashes with my other work. Windows 10 appears to be in some kind of weird arms race with the tools I use for text-hooking and machine translation. Every Windows 10 update broke my tools. I was able to keep going by reverting the Windows updates, but in the end I was in a race against time to actually finish MQ:P before a deadline where I'd have to either accept those updates or leave my machine unsupported. So, as of now, I'm back to having no means of hooking and auto-translating Japanese games. This currently makes playing and reviewing them rather difficult.
Assuming I can fix this, I'd have to have a long think before doing another big series on MQ:P [part 3] when it comes out. It would be nice to do it to complete the series, but I'd have to think carefully about how to do it in a way that doesn't swallow up all of my time. Running two series alongside each other doesn't work for me (as you may have noticed when my schedule went to hell right after starting posting "The Heart Squad"), so I might look at some kind of one month on, one month off schedule to prevent my blog being completely swamped by MQ:P stuff.
I suspect that will be a long way off though. I imagine TTR still has plenty to do before unleashing the final chapter of Paradox on the world.
Lest we forget MQ:P also has some very nice succubi (Monmusu Quest: Paradox) |
Anyway, I hope those of you that enjoyed the series, enjoyed it, and apologies to those who felt it ran on for way too long.
Friday (or Monday) I think it's time we found out what happened to that software engineer on his very special Valentine's Night...