I said I was going to do a Let’s Play series of blog posts on the whole damn thing, Ilias help me, and here is the start of what will probably keep the blog busy for next few months.
First, a little background for any newcomers. Toro Toro Resistance’s Monster Girl Quest is pretty much the gold standard for monster girl hentai games. Other games might have better artwork, or more depth in gameplay, but Monster Girl Quest does the whole package better than anyone else. After three instalments the series had clocked up over 150 sexy Bad End encounters covering nearly every fetish imaginable.
Now it’s time to see what imaginative craziness is in store for us in the sequel, Monmusu Quest: Paradox. I say sequel, but this doesn’t follow on from the events of the original MGQ. Neither is it a remake either. From what I can gather it’s the same characters but there’s some alternate universe timey-wimey weirdness going on.
Paradox is a more complex game than its predecessor. The original was more of a visual novel with some RPG elements. Paradox is a full RPG created with one of the RPG makers (whichever one has a dragon’s head for an icon).
You’ll notice from the screenshots that some of the text is in English. I downloaded and applied the patch Dargoth’n’team provided to add English translations. I strongly recommend picking this up. Currently it’s only a partial patch covering what they were able to translate from the demo, but crucially it has translations for most of the common menu options and that makes playing the game a good deal easier (Don’t be a Jackson). They are planning to translate the whole game, which will likely be a mammoth undertaking. If you wish to check their progress or lend some support, go here.
The first option on starting a new game is selecting a difficulty level. Normally I’d go for Easy, not because I’m shit (unless it’s a platformer, where my gaming abilities have the pungent tang of week-old manure), but because I want to get to the next H-scene with the minimum of hassle and frustration. Then I remembered one of the hot things about the original game was when the monster girl surprised me with a new attack and legitimately beat me. Let’s go for Normal. No, let’s have some fun. This is a typical JRPG rather than the linear series of puzzle battles from the original MGQ. Let’s go straight to Hard.
(I might regret this)
I’m one of those players that tries to grab everything while playing an RPG, which usually ends up in me grinding to the point where most encounters become very easy. That doesn’t work so well with the femdom feel of the series. At hard it shouldn’t feel like we’re always topping from the bottom to get the lewd content.
(I’ll change this if I find the game is getting too grindy in order to get anywhere)
As with the original MGQ, Paradox starts with a dream of Ilias. In keeping with the alternate reality theme of Paradox, something is clearly wrong with this universe’s Ilias.
A diary in Luka’s room fills us in with the background on this world. Thankfully this is one of the bits that has already been translated. The big difference in this universe is that there was a catastrophe 30 years ago and Ilias hasn’t been seen since. As before Luka is sort of an orphan in that his mother died while he was a child and his dad went off to save the world and never came back. Luka was running the family inn on his own, but now he’s come of age he’s eager to go off adventuring and find his father.
Then we have the same commotion in the village that kicked off MGQ. In an interesting twist, it’s a friendly slime girl that announces one of the villagers has been kidnapped. And it’s not a single slime girl lurking on the edges of the village but a whole village of them in the hills to the north. Most of them seem friendly. And obsessed with boomerangs for some reason.
Not all. There are a few bad girl slimes. The first encounter is with a familiar face.
Fights are slightly different this time. The largely linear sequence of single encounters from MGQ has been replaced with the many random encounters typical to most JRPGs.
There are some new mechanics. There’s a new Friendship mechanic. One of Luka’s combat actions is to talk to his opponent. This raises Friendship. At lower levels it requires Luka to give them money and other gifts. At higher levels they start to give gifts back. Also, a high friendship level will be needed later on to recruit new monster girls to the party. Thankfully the friendship values carry over for all monster girls of the same type. This is a nice touch as it means you can let it build while travelling through an area rather than having to focus on a single fight.
The other new thing is a Temptation attack. Knock the monster girl’s HP down low enough and sometimes she’ll ask if she can do some nice things to you. From what I saw in the demo this sometimes involves seeing new H-scenes. Too much niceness and it’s game over, but getting these sexy Bad Ends is pretty much the whole point of the MGQ games anyway.
Later slime girls start using binding attacks. These aren’t as strong as in MGQ. Luka can still attack, but for reduced damage. But until he struggles out he can’t use items or special attacks and the enemy’s attacks do more damage (and lewdness). Slime Heaven isn’t the auto-win here it was in the original, but it does do a hefty amount of damage. Give in to enough temptation attacks and you get the same thing anyway.
Which Luka… uh… ‘accidentally’ did here.
The Bad End is the same as before I think. Much penis glooping until the blue slime girl turns white and then off we ooze to a life of slimy slavery.
As with the first series, Ilias (or some fragment of) gives us post-loss recap/scorn/advice. Then there’s a new bit as Luka shows up in a cave with a grim reaper girl. Stepping on the magical symbol returns us to the bottom of the hill.
There’s a wider range of items and weapons in Paradox. And also some crafting. I run into a slime shopkeeper (blacksmith?) who tells me to bring her a fish and boomerang. I’m glad for the English translation on this as I probably would have missed this aspect of the game from dodgy machine translation. I don’t have a fish, but I know where to buy one. Unfortunately it’s back at the bottom of the hill. Predictably the first encounter I run into after buying a fish and the slime girl drops a fish anyway. Oh well, it’s levelling Luka up.
Back at the blacksmith (slimesmith?) and fish + boomerang = the slightly better fish boomerang. Nope, I don’t understand it either.
After travelling over a bridge there’s an almighty thump that shakes the screen about.
Ah this must be the bit where Alice crashes to earth.
Oh wait, that’s not Alice.
Okay, so what’s going on here? This is a lolified Ilias, the goddess and central antagonist of the previous series. She’s still the same genocidal monster as before, but someone has stolen her powers so her attempts to carbonize Luka fizzle rather embarrassingly. She runs off in a huff.
At the top of the hill we run into one of the new monster girls – a bouncing (extremely bouncy) pink bunny slime. Normally I’d throw the fight in case she was a boss, but I remember from the demo she returns as a normal wandering mook fairly shortly afterwards. I save beforehand anyway. I’m not walking up this sodding hill again!
She nearly gloops me with a Slime Heaven type of attack, but I manage to chomp through a bunch of healing herbs to eventually win the fight. And that’s the first boss fight won.
I feel it would be rather remiss of me if I didn’t see what her Bad End looked like to satisfy… um… scientific curiosity. I pull the same saved game tricks I used in Violated Hero to throw alt!Luka into her slimy embrace. Actually I wanted to see what her temptation attacks did, but other than the first fight where I resisted, she seemed unwilling to get in the mood.
The Bad End is a bit of slimy paizuri that sees Luka’s cock absorbed completely by her rather substantial boobs and stimulated until he’s nearly dyed them white. Hop and hop and much slop indeed.
After the fight a lolified Alice shows up. She’s hopping mad and after the white bunny that lolified her. She beats up the bunny slime for a bit before realising she isn’t the rabbit she’s looking for and then storms off.
Nothing weird about this start at all. Uh oh.
And I’ll break here as it’s already three times the number of words I wanted to make each Let’s Play piece. This is going to be the start of a regular series. I’m not sure how to tackle this, given that the game is likely to be enormous, intricate and feature a ridiculous number of monster girl types and scenes. Most likely I’ll put in a couple of hours each night and post the progress the next morning. Part two should go up tomorrow morning.
