Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 2)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


The Spiders of Thomisoidus

I’m not entirely sure where this came from.  Spiders and silk work well with bondage fantasies and a planet full of sexy babes is a classic sci-fi fantasy.  Also the intro allowed me to have fun with a character bemoaning his lot after being suckered into taking a contract on a pleasure world that doesn’t really live up to expectations.  The teasing, stop-start nature of the sex scene was also highly pleasurable to write.


Delivery Special Soap

This is another story to indulge my fetish for soapland-style mat play.  It’s heavily influenced by Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City (anyone who’s seen the anime will know the scene).  I was starting to think about how my story universe worked and how the various monster girl demons interacted with each other.  As the demons are operating under a kind of masquerade, it made sense for them to have rules to prevent the sort of overt conflict that would attract the attention of the human authorities.  It also made sense that Inari would know how to work these rules to her advantage and by including a reference to her I could also hint at a larger story taking place beneath these short stories.


Knight vs. Succubus

This story has an interesting tale behind it.  I was asked by a developer working on a succubus game to write a story that would help publicise the finished game (sadly, I don’t think it was ever finished).  My first attempt was this story, which was rejected for being too dark.  I liked the story and then had an idea for another loosely connected series of “X vs Succubus”.  The connection is largely restricted to the title.  This is a much darker tale than the tongue-in-cheek “Slayer vs Succubus”.  It’s also one of the few times I’ve felt guilty about offing the protagonist.


Interrocution

I think the initial idea was a cocky criminal bound to a chair and at the mercy of a succubus.  I like blending gritty mob tropes with supernatural elements.  The story is also a fitting introduction to Koontz’s right hand “man” – Physalia.  She’s a much colder and fearsome succubus.  As Koontz’s enforcer she’s definitely not to be messed with.

The title is a mashup of interrogation and execution.


Crushed Between Her Breasts

This story came about through an impromptu challenge contest on the Literotica forums.  The theme was revenge stories if I remember correctly.  I had the idea of a chauvinistic IT manager annoying one of his female workers to the point where they seek external help to teach him a lesson.

Oddly, the double team of Eryx and Eunectis are also part of my recurring roster of characters, although readers wouldn’t know it as those stories are still waiting to be published.  Nancy’s debt is still outstanding . . .


I'll post the last part on the remaining stories tomorrow.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 1)

This is another post where I go over where some of my stories come from.  Last time up I went through my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.  This time I'll run through A Succubus for Valentine's Day.

There might be a few spoilers for people that haven't already read the stories.


A Succubus for Valentine’s Day

When it comes to Valentine’s Day I’m a bit of a black-hearted curmudgeon.  Most of the stories I’ve entered into Literotica’s Valentine’s Day contests have been anti-Valentine’s Day tales of some description.  It was while trying to think of an entrant I hit upon the idea of re-using the nameless succubus from “A Succubus for Christmas”.  This then became an idea for a (semi) regular series featuring her, the succubus tablet and various themed days.  In this story she’s playing a similar role to before – the evil genie that gives her poor victim what they think they want . . . until they actually get it.

I did get some comments misinterpreting Kurtzberg as a ‘nice guy’.  Admittedly, I did set the story up to present him in a sympathetic light, and maybe fool the reader into thinking this might be one of those romcoms where the unfortunate slob ends up with the pretty girl after all.  Then the story takes a turn into murkier territory until it culminates in what I hope is a gut punch of an ending (as every good anti-Valentine’s Day story should have).  Kurtzberg is unfortunate and deserves some sympathy, but his actions take him far beyond the realm of nice.

Observant readers will have noticed the version in the collection, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day, differs from the version online.  When I first started out I used to seek feedback on the Literotica forums.  For this story someone made the suggestion that the ending would be nastier if Kurtzberg was left alive to let the horror of what he’d done sink in.  It was such a good suggestion I rewrote the ending to incorporate it.


Initial Infiltration

Aside from the usual asshole victims, a regular target of mine is the naive.  GRRM has it right with A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for TV watchers).  When one of his characters makes a poor choice politically, he doesn’t step in to bail them out.

There has been cultural pressure to move Science Fiction away from blasting the Other on sight to presenting stories where the only correct response is to attempt to resolve conflicts through discussion and understanding.  Personally I don’t like simple black and white certitudes.  When the motives of the Other are completely unknown, which approach is correct can only be ascertained with the benefit of hindsight.  In another story, another universe, Donaldson would have been the perfect protagonist to prevent inter-dimensional war.  Sadly for him, this is not that story and hell-space is not that universe.


Succubus Summoning 101

This story eventually ended up being the first chapter of the novel of the same name.  It was originally meant to be a short story about student warlocks making incorrect (and fatal) assumptions about which bits of succubi are dangerous to stick your cock in.  On the surface there is a twisted sense to the logic.  Succubi pervert the role of sexual intercourse to create new life by using it to take life.  Anal sex can’t create new life; therefore under the same logic succubi can’t use it to drain life.  Of course it doesn’t work out that way.

I neglected to kill Phil at the end of the story and since then he’s stubbornly just about managed to stay alive despite my best efforts.

The main reason I put the story in the collection was to protect myself from plagiarism.  Someone had already tried to pass off the Succubus Summoning 101 series as their own on another website.  Amazon’s kindle store was rife with plagiarists mining story sites like Literotica for material to rip off.  Having the original Succubus Summoning 101 story in here would give me some protection against that kind of shit while I was working on the ebook version.


Puffed Up

This is another superhero deconstruction story in the vein of “Squeezed”.  Sexy villainesses have always been a feature of comics even if they rarely get to fully show their stuff (generally speaking, the hero has to survive otherwise that’s the end of the comic book).  This story is a none-too subtle dig at the counterproductive aspects of the war on drugs in our own universe.  Reading it years later I think I might have been a little too cynical with the ending.

I stopped included the superhero stories in later collections because they didn’t fit in with the shared universe elements that were starting to emerge in the series as a whole.  I do have some ideas for other sexy super-villainesses.  At some point I might assemble them into a themed collection.


I'll go through the remaining stories over the next couple of days.

Hentai Game Look - Succubus Nests

This is a Look rather than a Review because it’s for games I bought but didn’t get into for one reason or another.  This isn’t necessarily the game’s fault, which is why I don’t feel comfortable describing these as reviews for products I’ve only really skimmed the surface of.

Succubus Nests suckered me with the trial.  And the title.

Admittedly I probably suckered myself by making a hasty purchase without fully checking it out.  Either way it didn’t end up being the game I thought it would be.

The protagonists are three “magical” girls with specialities in gun, sword and magic cards respectively.  They’re trying to fight off the malign influence of a succubus and purify locations on an island.

When it comes to porn games my preference is for male player characters being sexually dominated by hot monster girls.  I’m also okay with the player character being female so long as the hot, sexy monster girls get plenty of opportunity to do their thang.  What doesn’t work for me is seeing hapless female player characters getting stripped and buggered by ugly male demons and non-anthro critters.

(As an aside, I should make it clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making their porn games follow these lines.  Fantasy is fantasy.  Be extremely wary of the people that try to argue otherwise, even if the target of their ire is something you personally find distasteful.  Give them that and they’ll come back for something you enjoy.  Sadly, given recent news, opposing these censorious, holier-than-thou types is more important than ever.)

Back to Succubus Nests.  The gameplay involves selecting a one- or two-person party and sending them off to purify an area.  There’s a screen focused on each party member where you can observe them walking, fighting, or having sexy snu-snu done to them without their consent.  The girls handle the encounters fairly autonomously.  The only player input is to order them to escape or fire off their special attacks.  At the start the girls flatten their opponents without much problem.  As they progress deeper into the area being purified their stamina drops and they become more susceptible to their opponents’ attacks.  At first it’s restraint, but if you don’t yank them out of there it becomes molestation followed by full-blown rape until the hapless lasses end up catatonic.

My guess is there is a strategy to figure out for when to hit certain “nests” and which of the three girls to bring on the mission (they have strengths and weaknesses vs. different monsters).  I never played long enough to figure it out and I found the fact that most of the game runs autonomously a little annoying.

Bondage in the woods with your friendly neighbourhood spider-woman

The most common encounter in the trial version are Arachne spider women that try and bind up the player in silk.  This, the title and the presence of a succubus in the cut scene made me think this was going to be a girl vs monster girl game.  Sadly, this isn’t the case.  In the full game the only monster girls I saw were the arachne and a futa succubus.  The other encounters consisted of ugly male demons and non-anthro critters such as maggots, slimes, scorpions, electric jellyfish and even dogs.  Standard ryona (female characters having their clothes ripped off before being abused) fare in other words.

This mission did not go well.

With the little windows onto the action, Succubus Nests reminded me of Pretty Warrior May Cry – another game featuring unmentionable things done to pretty female warriors.  That game had interesting enough mechanics and enough OTT humour to hold my attention even if most of the sexual content wasn’t to my taste.  Succubus Nests fell short for me.

I can’t really say if it’s a good or a bad game, only that it didn’t appeal to me personally.

(As I said with Pretty Warrior May Cry - would really love to see a sexy monster girl version with similar animated sex scenes.)

Hentai Geme Review: Pendulum

Blimmin’ ‘eck, this is ‘ard (Disclaimer: Hydra skipped the golden era of Mario and Sonic games and is consequentially not very good at 2D platformers).

Pendulum is a 2D monster girl hentai platformer with pixel sex scenes along the same lines as Eroico and Monsters ‘n Girls.  The gameplay is straightforward.  You start at the bottom of a themed tower and jump your way up to the top and next level.  Getting in your way is an assortment of monster girls that slow you down by performing sex acts on you.  Slow up too much and you both get a dunk in nice hot lava.

The towers are procedurally generated from what I can tell, in that the positions of the platforms and monster girls vary each time you play the game.  This makes some runs easier and some very difficult depending on where things are positioned.  The difficulty ramps up considerably as the checkpoints get further apart.  The first two levels seemed straightforward (there are five in total), the third had me pulling out my teeth, and - after just about crawling through the third - the fourth ruthlessly pummelled my battered body into the dirt.  Thankfully, the developer(s) included a full save with the game, so even if you’re as inept as me you can still see all the content.

Gameplay-wise it’s pretty good.  The main character handles well and it all feels very fluid – and retro in a good way – as you bounce your way to the top.  Where it falls short is the hentai part.  It does have sex bits, but the crudeness of the sprites and tone leans more towards saucy humour than actual hawtness.  This is a pretty bad failing for a sex game, which is unfortunate as I quite liked the idiosyncrasies of the art design.

Not a bad little game, but possibly a little too quirky for its own good.

Musings on the Let's Plays and Hentai Game Reviews

I’m going to make a few changes to the Let’s Plays and how I blog about monster girl games.  Initially the detailed playthroughs of monster girl hentai games seemed a good way to generate material for this blog.  While they’re fun and give me an incentive to actually play all the way through a game, they do take up time that might be better spent on writing my own original fiction.

Also, the entertainment of the playthrough is dependent on how interesting the game is.  To be honest, DramaraQuest V didn’t give me a lot to work with other than an excuse to post pictures of semi-naked anime monster girls (not that bad of a thing, admittedly!).  I suspect there was also a lack of interest out there judging by the tail off in hits and number of comments.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be doing any more Let’s Plays.  I’m just going to be a little choosy with the games I do.  The other thing I want to do is get the reviews out faster.  Currently I tack them onto the end of the playthroughs as a more permanent summary of my thoughts on the game.  What I’ll aim to do is to switch it around and put the review out first so they’ll be a better resource for readers wondering whether they should purchase the game or not.  If I find the game sufficiently interesting/sexy/batshit crazy, or you out there want to see more of it, I’ll start a Let’s Play and go through in more detail.

If I really like the game I’ll probably throw Jackson into it for the shits and giggles.  It’s about time I got his adventures restarted again.

And yes, I will give Mon-musu Quest: Paradox the full Let’s Play treatment when it comes out (Ilias help me!).  That one will almost certainly be interesting/sexy/batshit craxy enough to merit a more detailed look.

Hentai Game Review - DramaraQuest V

The confusingly named DramaraQuest V is actually the second entry in the DramaraQuest series of games.  The reason for V instead of II is because DramaraQuest is a hentai parody of Dragon Quest V.  It follows closely the plot of the first third of the latter game, replacing the normal monsters with sexy monster girl equivalents and switching the emphasis of the combat to sex rather than fighting.

DramaraQuest is a battlefuck game.  Battles are decided by the combatants attempting to fuck the other into submission.  If the player happens to be the one submitting (because their HP is reduced to 0), then the game will offer up an additional sexy Bad End.  Outside of the battlefucks it’s the standard JRPG skeleton – you, as the main protagonist, wander through dungeons, villages and the outside world map in search of the trigger events that will advance the story along.  If you want a more detailed look I blogged a full playthrough, starting here.

The artwork is good and has a consistent style across the whole game.  The monster girls are converted versions of classic monsters from the Dragon Quest series and it’s fun trying to guess what they were originally (with the hammerhood being the most creative transformation).  The encounters have some limited animation achieved through simple distortions of the base sprites.  This is reasonably effective in some places.

One of DramaraQuest's more imaginative conversions

There are a couple of positives over the previous DramaraQuest game.  Rather than abstract portraits/clouds of black smoke, the monster girls are represented on the map as little chibi sprites.  Also, while there is some palette swapping to bulk up the monsterpedia, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it was in the first game.  The game has about twenty-odd monster types, with some having variants in hair and skin colour.

On the negative side the battlefucks and Bad Ends are a little generic and bland.  There’s not much variety to the monster girls’ attacks and the strategy is very simple.  On the plus side, experience progression is fast enough that the player won’t need to resort to grinding to advance further into the game.

Yep, you did see it right.  It was a sex toy.

I mentioned above that DramaraQuest V is a porn parody of Dragon Quest V.  What I should add is that it is a weirdly accurate following of the Dragon Quest V game.  Personally I find it a little odd when named characters are “borrowed” and thrust into porn scenarios.  This didn’t trigger for DramaraQuest V as I’m not very familiar with the game it’s based on, but it might for some.  If you loved the game in the past it might be a little off to see the innkeeper’s daughter getting up to things the innkeeper definitely wouldn’t approve of.

Or very arousing.  Everyone is different in this regard.

Sticking so faithfully to the original also creates a jarring disconnect between the conventional JRPG bits, where a legendary hero is dragging his young son around from place to place, and the battlefuck bits, where the young son suddenly morphs into Casanova++ and bonks the whole countryside into submission.  I don’t think the makers needed to follow the plot of the original Dragon Quest V quite so slavishly.  Although there’s a possibility I might be missing the point of the whole project here.

Sadly, not many of DramaraQuest's monster girls have additional attacks as detailed as this.

Overall DramaraQuest V is an okay monster girl hentai game without being an exceptional one.  The game’s biggest problem is it doesn’t really excel at anything enough to distinguish it from its competitors.  The Violated Hero series has prettier art and more imaginative designs.  Monster Girl Quest has a much more involved story.  ROBF has more complex combat mechanics and handles the battlefucks much better.  If you’re on a tight budget, you’re better off checking out those games first.  If you already have and are twiddling your thumbs waiting for Mon-musu Quest: Paradox to come out, then DramaraQuest will at least give you some sexy distractions for a few nights.

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 13

This is the final part of my playthrough of the DramaraQuest V hentai parody JRPG of Dragon Quest 5.  The first part is here.

Last up we busted Prince Green-Haired Kid out of jail.  Now all we need to do is hightail it across the bridge and back to . . .

Who’s that?

It’s the End Boss.  Her name is Gema and I’m guessing she’s some kind of evil sorceress.  This being a battlefuck universe her elaborate red cloak is swiftly discarded and it’s onto business.

She has a nice special attack where she winks, hearts appear and Luka-clone is charmed.  In this state our attacks do damage to us instead of her.  Of course I make Luka-clone keep on attacking, for . . . um . . . reasons.

I found this battle a lot more hawt than most of the rest of the game.  Probably because that charm attack makes Gema appear more succubus-y while the other monster girls seemed a little too generic.

Oh, the fight is also unwinnable.  After reducing Gema’s health to zero she plonked a huge fireball on my ass for the grand total of this-will-definitely-defeat you 999 damage.  That’s how the game represents it visually.  In the description it sounds like a very special trick she does with her pussy and the fireball is really going off in Luka-clone’s blown brain.

In the Bad End scene she does a lot more special tricks with her pussy while taunting us we never had a chance of defeating her.  Give that she can propel fireballs out of her pussy I think she has a valid point.

This is so powerful it even defeats the rest of the party (who weren’t even involved in the fight) because . . . reasons.  Pops shows up to save the day and Gema summons two helpers – Jami and Gonzu – to take care of him.

That doesn’t work out too well as Pops spanks them right to the floor.  At this point Gema threatens to do the deadly dirty with the helpless Luka-clone.  This means that Pops has to stay quiet and let Jami and Gonzu do their special attack on him.  Obviously this is sexual in nature.

And . . . sex scene!

Pops gets double death paizuri from the stupendously well-endowed Jami and Gonzu.

(Hey, we’re the star of this game.  Why don’t we get to stick our dick between the giant boobies.)

The theme music is rather familiar here.  I think this is maybe the 3rd or 4th game I’ve heard it crop in.  Time to retire this piece of open source soundtrack methinks.  (That I’ve been around enough to hear this from multiple sources is better not dwelled upon.)

After much globular rubbing Pops spatters Jami and Gonzu’s faces and promptly expires.  Having your sprite fall over, flash a bit and then vanish is usually an indication you’ve just departed the JRPG world.  As I said – double death paizuri.  There are worse ways to go I suppose.  RIP Pops.

Hey wait.  Who’s going to save us now?

Maybe this is what propels our heroic Luka-clone to go all limit-breaky and trigger the real End Boss battle.

Nope.  We’re carted off into slavery to build a big temple somewhere.

The End.

What!?  That’s it.  That sucks.

Hmm.  Another check of the Dragon Quest V wikipedia page reveals DramaraQuest is continuing to slavishly follow the plot.  Apparently the hero is abducted into slavery after about a 3rd of the game and there’s a time skip of about 10 years followed by his continuing adventures after he escapes.  Ah, so DramaraQuest V is a fairly accurate (weirdly slavishly accurate as some of you have pointed out to me) porn parody of Dragon Quest V.  The downer ending makes sense in that context.  I wonder if that means there will be a DramaraQuest V: parts 2 & 3?

And where the hell were the puff-puff attacks?  Come on, this is Dragon Quest we’re talking about here.  No self-respecting porn parodist can miss that opportunity.

Overall not a bad little monster girl battlefuck game, but not an exceptional one either.

All that remains is to go over some extras.

The NPC I was missing was Baby Panther.  As someone kindly pointed out in the comments you get her scene by selecting the new option that pops up beneath the ‘masturbate’ option from the first menu option while wandering around.  This heals you back to full health.  Hey, sex is good for you.

A later version of the game (which can be downloaded from dlsite if you purchased the original) includes an additional 6 monster girls.  Or rather just girls in this case.  I think they’re supposed to represent various character classes from the game.  They can be found by returning to the fairy realm (the fairy is still in the inn basement) after the end credits play out.