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.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 46: Fairy's Isle

Beginning

<- Previous: The Open Open Seas

It’s time to take the battle to the monster girl queens.  We’re starting with the Elf Queen for the simple reason the elf and fairy monsters appear earlier in the library than the other three races.  At this point, I’m not sure difficulty matters a great deal.  My Luka hit the level cap many blog posts ago and has mastered nearly every job under the sun.  I only put him in the party now as bait for some of the bosses (which is Luka’s one role in life, to be fair).

The Fairy Isle is just off the coast of Magistea village.  Weirdly, the wandering monster girls out the location are the generic late game encounters of vampire girl and tiger girl.

The dungeon location is the tree in the centre of the forest.  It’s split into three sections – south, north and central.  We enter in the south.  Going either west or east will lead to opposite ends of the north region.  The central region is accessed via vines leading down at the midpoint of the north region.

The dungeon is pretty by JRPG standards, but it’s also mazy, long, and a little tedious.  Unless you’re using the various instant kill combos (which are not guaranteed against some enemies), the fights are way more of a slog than they need to be.

I’m glad I didn’t devote a blog post to the monster girl invasion of each city.  As expected the monster girls hanging around this dungeon are the same new monster girls we saw menacing Grand Noah.

So we get muscly Elf Amazonesses (not entirely sure the ‘ess’ is necessary, game):

Right proper amazons for yer

Gigantic-boobed gigantic girls:

As big as your... you

Extremely stretchy Trick Fairies (you’ll figure it out) and Carbuncle:

A fairy and a... I give up, your guess is as good as mine

I have no idea what carbuncle is.  She has green fur, that weird red eye thing and an extremely suspicious pink orifice in her fluffy tail.

Unsurprisingly, her Bad End move is to vacuum up all of Luka’s cum with her fluffy, sucky tail.

When the fluffy tail fetish goes too far

Gigantic Girl is technically of the elf race.  When I checked her request moves back at the castle after recruiting her, I thought she’d be catering to the giantess vore fetish.  This appears to be a bug in the game.  Her request options are the typical “Predation” and “Predation?” as used for most of the more vore-y girls, but don’t correspond to her actual scenes.

The first is a rerun of her temptation move to bounce Luka around between her ginormous boobs.

Boing boing

The second is to use Luka as a makeshift dildo.

Good sex toys are hard to find when you're this size

Luka does come from this, but then he’ll come from just about anything.

Her giantess scenes will come as a pleasant surprise or disappointment depending on your own personal fetishes (I’m easy—show me big boobs and I’m happy).

The various elf and fairy NPCs we run into do not approve of Queen Elf’s aggressive campaign against the humans.  A possible cause of it is hinted by the elf NPC who can be found next to the vines leading down to the central region.  She describes it as a cloud of malevolent energy hanging over the island.  Or rather, centred on the world tree located to the northwest.

Is this more interference from the shikibus sisters?

The central region is a big lake with green walkways looping around to a central region in the middle.  This is where Queen Elf can be found along with various NPCs.

The centre of Fairy Isle

Currently the NPCs are hostile and refuse to talk to scummy humans.  A couple of them appear to be the blacksmith and merchant, so I suspect they’ll turn friendly and this will become another warp location once we’ve beaten some sense into Queen Elf.  You can also find Queen Fairy here.  She’s getting treatment for the beating we dished out to her in Grand Noah and will stay out of any more fighty stuff.

First, it’s time to take down the boss – Queen Elf:

Queen Elf

Queen Elf is an elf and the elves of MGQ are vulnerable to pleasure attacks.

Or you could just have Alicetroemeria double cast prominence until Queen Elf is crispy-fried...

(I really hope we don’t have to fight her at some point.  She’s only level fortysomething and still way stronger than virtually all my level 60 characters).

After defeating Queen Elf, it’s time for the usual let’s-have-peace conversation.  Queen Elf claims she’s doing all this to protect her territory and race.  Alice calls her out for her isolationism—she never made any effort to sit at the table and talk to the other world powers.

Then there’s a twist.  Two emissaries of Queen Alraune—a walraune and dryad—teleport in.  Queen Alraune has gone over to Black Alice’s side, which shocks Queen Elf as Queen Alraune is supposed to be completely neutral on these matters.

“Black Alice is showing her hand.  How interesting,” says our Black Alice.

I’m really curious to see what happens when she and the other Black Alice finally meet.  What will we get—a grand loon off?

Anyway, it’s time for history to repeat itself.  In the original series we had to spring to Queen Elf’s defence right after beating her, and it’s the same here.  The plant girls think this is a good opportunity to take her—and us—out.

Walraune—“Ha.  You’ll be weak after that battle.”

Um Walraune.  You are a plant girl and plant girls are weak to fire, right?  So I have to ask: Did you not see the inferno mage double casting tier III fire magic?

This fight was not long and grindy.

Dryad watches the turn one incineration and decides she’d rather be elsewhere.

Afterwards Alice talks about the malign influence from the world tree that appears to be affecting everyone here.  Queen Elf casts some magic to purify the island and finally comes to her senses.  This renders all the NPCs friendly and they now serve up various bits of background information.

There is some talk about an elf princess in the mountain region in Yamatai.  She appears to be a bit of a shut-in and those elves don’t have anything to do with these elves.  I suspect we’ll not be seeing her until part 3, which is rather unfortunate as she’s the one holding the job change item to unlock the advanced hunter job.  Another elf tells us Queen Alraune is holding the job change items for Dancer and Minstrel.  Both the merchant and blacksmith are unlocked now, although the blacksmith needs raw prism material to unlock the next tier of equipment.  That can be found in the world tree.

Queen Elf and Queen Fairy will talk to us, but both are still bashed up to be recruited just now.  I think we have to go and deal with Queen Alraune first.

But before then, the game drops a few strong hints that we should go back to Grand Noah and collect a reward from Quuen Noah for pacifying the elves and fairies.  This is a good idea as Queen Noah gifts us the God Worker’s Soul.  This is the job change item required to unlock the advanced orator, doctor, chef and maid jobs.

This is also a surprise to me.  I didn’t think we’d unlocking the third tier of jobs until part 3.  I’m wondering what progression TTR is leaving himself for part 3—maybe the advanced monster girl race unlocks?

Anyway, that’s the Fairy Isle segment done.  Next up we’re off to the world tree to find out what’s up with Queen Alraune.

-> Next: World Tree

(Yes, I know my update schedule has gone a little haywire of late.  Please bear with me while I try to get my now very late Valentine’s Day succubus fuckfest story finished.)