Wednesday, October 04, 2017

Stuff I missed the first time around in Monmusu Quest: Paradox and other Tips & Tricks

One of the inevitable things about JRPGs is you miss stuff, especially when you try to play them in the original Japanese.

After opening up Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] and being utterly confused as to where I was and where I was supposed to go next, I decided to play through part 1 again.  This time I had access to Dargoth's translated version.  This meant I could enjoy it more as a typical JRPG with the usual shiny side quests and distractions these games have.  It being in English also meant I could spot the things I missed first time around.

I didn't do too badly on the main plot in my original playthrough.  There were some minor things I mistranslated, but mostly it's all there.

There were a few extras I missed, some of which make the game a lot easier, so I thought I'd run through them here.

Amira gives useful advice

There's a reason that little goober is positioned right near the entrance to the pocket castle.


She's your information source.  Talk to her and she'll tell you what your current objective is as well as reeling off a list of available side quests.  If you ever get lost and don't know what you're supposed to be doing, go up to Amira and select "Ask for Information".

She also helps with:

You can recruit male members

If you played through part 1, you knew this already, as recruiting his Mecha-Popeness, the King of San Ilias, is one of the story events of the main plot.

What I didn't know, and only found out on a second playthrough, is he's not the only male character you can recruit.

The guard that gets trapped in the poison marsh in Iliasville can be recruited.  He can be found in the room with all the other NPCs giving out information on the various jobs.

You can also recruit the captains of the guards in San Ilias (John) and Sabasa (Samson) by talking to them after you've recruited Mecha-Pope and Sara.

Scat Captain can be recruited by going back to his house in Pornof to fulfill Kamuro's side quest (I think Sonya has to not be in the party as she won't let you in his house).

I'm guessing being able to recruit male characters gives people a little more variety for their ecchi.  If someone would rather the action was all monster girl on male, rather than monster girl on monster girl, they can set up their party that way.  You could even build up a reverse harem party with Alice or Sonya surrounded by a bunch of masculine dudes if you were so inclined.  I'm fine with the game having these options.

One of the male characters is actually very useful if you're trying to 100% all the monster item drops in the library.  The bottom class of items you can obtain from each monster girl is panties.  Get a character up to level 10 Gadabout and they learn a special skill "Steal Panties".

As to why you'd want to steal the panties off a monster girl... don't ask.  Compared to the rest of the stuff happening in the game, that's almost a vanilla fetish.

Anyway, Panty Sensei is rather good at this particular task.  He has a chance to steal at the beginning of combat, at the end of every combat round, and also with each normal attack.  This guy really seems to like women's underwear.  (His portrait also changes when he uses the transform skill of Hero of Justice).

If you want to go down the dark road of panty kleptomania, this dude will save you a fair bit of grinding.  You can also find him in Pornof.  Show him enough panties and he'll join the party.



And also on the subject of panties.

Boss panties can be stolen later in Hades

The bosses are one time encounters in the main story.  However, you can refight them later in the Hades room on the second floor of Ilias's temple.  This means, if you're a rabid 100% completionist, you don't have to grab their panties the first time around.  You can go back later with stronger party and steal them later.  It counts.

...assuming you have a pressing need to collect all the panties in the game.

Why am I offering tips on how to steal panties in a computer game?

Why even put this in the game in the first place, Toro Toro Resistance?

Ah, Japan.  Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks and all that.

(It's still way tamer than most of the other stuff in the game.)

Battle Fuckers can be recruited

This might have been added in a later patch.  The battle fuckers are women scattered across the world map that reward you with items should you have enough hit points to survive their... ahem... techniques.  If you talk to them after winning they will ask to join the party.

Most of them are human, so they're fairly limited in power and how they can be levelled up.  However, a couple have some useful traits if you're looking to 100% your library.

Louise has a +50% to item drop.  You'll want her around if you're grinding through encounters to try and get their rare drop.  She's the battle fucker in Happiness Village.



Bunny-chan has a +50% to recruit rate.  Useful if you're trying to recruit every monster girl to your waifu harem.  You can find her in the casino in Pornof.



New scenes for old monster girls

About half of the monster girls in the game are repeated from the original Monster Girl Quest, right down to their H-scenes.  This has been the source of some criticism of the Paradox series, and fairly so, I think.  Although, I can understand it's a way to throw in a massive amount of encounters while on a limited dev budget.

I knew Lime (the slime girl from the starting area) had a new scene you can request in the pocket castle if you get her happiness high enough.  She's not the only one.

The leech girl has new artwork.



As does the sea cucumber girl.



Pretty nice if you like the idea of being sucked up into a monster girl and wrapped up in her soft flesh.

I don't know how many have new scenes.  I don't think it's many, unfortunately.  You can scan through the art folder in the game directory to check.  That was how I found out these two existed.

Old-school Monster Girl Quest mode

This might also be something that was added in a later patch.  The Hades room has a book shelf where you can replay the normal encounter battles.



This is useful as some of the monster girls have temptation and Bad End scenes that can't be requested in the pocket castle.  It's easier to check them out here rather than chasing through the countryside after them.

It also allows you enable what I like to think of as "classic" Monster Girl Quest mode.  One of my original criticisms of MQ:P compared to MGQ was that the traditional JRPG party mechanic lost the focus of all the sexy stuff being aimed solely at Luka that the first game had.  Well, you can emulate that here.  Just remove everyone else from the party, select the monster girl you want, and then enjoy her throwing all her sexy attacks at Luka.

(which she will have no hesitation doing)

It's a pretty nice addition as far as I'm concerned.

There is also the option to go into the Labyrinth of Chaos for players wanting some post-game content.  I'm not there yet, so I haven't had a chance to try it out.

General Hints and Tips  

Monmusu Quest: Paradox does have a bewildering array of jobs, races and skills.  Unless you're playing on the really high difficulties, you probably don't need to worry about it that much as the game is fairly easy as long as you level up enough.  If you're trying to find everything, you'll likely have a bigger problem trying to prevent your main party from over-levelling to the point where they easily curbstomp everything.

As Luka always has to be present in the party, he's the one most likely to get out of hand.  I normally give him the "Job XP Full Focus" ability to stop him hitting level 40 while everyone else is only level 20.

(Assuming you want to try out the various different monster girls.  Keeping the same party of Luka, Alice, Sonya, and A N Other should allow you to breeze through the main story line without too much grinding.)

Skills and Gear

What determines damage varies on the skill.  Swords use Att, Black Magic uses Mag, White Magic uses Will, Unarmed/Rapiers use some combination of Agi and Att, Pleasure attacks use Dex, and so on.  Hats and Armour provide more than a boost to defense.  Your character might be able to equip heavy armour, but if they're mainly using Unarmed skills, you still want to equip them in the best Gi, as that class of Chest clothing boosts Agi, which also boosts the damage of Unarmed skills.  The same is true for Robes for Black Magic uses.

(You succubi will probably want Dresses or Skimpy as their bonus to Dex will make them better able to turn your foes into quivering masses of orgasming jelly.)

Efficient Levelling and 100%ing

There are a lot of monster girls to level up should you so desire.  Some jobs provide abilities that make this a little more efficient.

Gadabout is pretty useless apart from the later jobs it's needed to unlock, but at Level 9 you get the Playfulness ability.  This gives +50% XP at the cost of the character not following orders.  Which won't matter as positions 5-8 in the party still get XP even if they don't participate in the battle.  Bondage ropes are also useful for this reason despite their hefty drawback.

Noble and King jobs can be unlocked by trading in enough medals to the Medal Queen.  Noble has a +50% XP ability and King a +100% XP ability (although you'll need to max out both Warrior and Noble first).  These abilities can still be equipped even after the character has moved onto another job.

Giving them the Job Wrist or Hard Job Wrist accessories will also speed up unlocking those abilities.

If you want to be a greedy mcgreedyson and 100% everything, a few job combinations help.

Thief and Master Thief are self-explanatory.

Fortune Teller and Gambler give +50% and +100% bonus to item drops.  (Getting the rare item drops needs the most annoying grinding in my experience)

Hunter and Monster Tamer are what you need for those +50% and +100% recruitment bonuses.

Steal Ingredient is unlocked by Cook.

Steal Material initially confused me as I thought it might be an Engineer unlock at first.  It's actually a unique skill learnt by the Wing Harpy race (they can also steal food as well).

Harpies make the best thieves if you're really greedy in nabbing resources from enemies (ah, so many hours in the various Final Fantasy games).  Mini, the phoenix in a pot you fight right near the start of the game, is probably your best party thief.  One, she's a harpy and can unlock the Wing Harpy skills.  Two, she's immune to fire and gets a free auto-rez for the first time she's knocked out.  Although, with Monmusu Quest: Paradox, I'm guessing most players have other things in mind when assembling their best waifu party. ;)

Some tip and tricks anyway.  Feel free to post your own in the comments below.  



Tuesday, October 03, 2017

A brief guide to Text Hooking and Machine Translation for Monmusu Quest: Paradox

If you want to play a cool new Japanese hentai game, but can't read Japanese, you're probably going to want some form of machine translation.  For a long time I used an AGTH + Translation Aggregator combo.  Unfortunately, Windows 10 and text hookers don't seem to like each other.  Any game I tried to run with AGTH attached imploded without starting.

"Text hooker, what's that?" you might ask.

In basic terms, machine translation for Japanese visual novels and RPGs has two components.  The first is the text hooker.  This "hacks" into the game while it's running and outputs text to your computer's clipboard.  This is then picked up by the second component, the translator, and automatically translated into English, usually by running it through one of Google's or some other website's machine translation engine.  Results may vary - automated machine translation is not a precise science - but what you get should be enough to give you the gist of what's going on.

Currently, I'm running ITH with a fix for Windows 10.

Rather than copy'n'paste someone else's work, here is a link to the guide I used:


I don't know who you are, OriginalRen, but many thanks for writing this.

ITH (the text hooker) and Translation Aggregator (the translator) are the important components.  Dictionaries improve things, but the various internet translators are usually enough.

Here are links to the various bits of software (bear in mind they might be out of date).


Follow the above guide to install them.  Make sure Translation Aggregator is automatically picking up from your computer's clipboard.

Right, now to run it with Monmusu Quest: Paradox.

First off, let's get the first hurdle out of the way.  Your computer needs to have the locale set to Japanese otherwise the Japanese characters will come out as gibberish and translation won't work.  You do this by going into:

Settings -> Time & Language -> Additional date, time & regional settings -> Region -> Administrative -> Change System Locale -> Select: Japanese.


After you've done this, you'll be able to play Japanese games on your PC (usually they don't start if your PC is set to the wrong locale).

Now, a swift pictorial guide on how to get machine translation up and running (I'm assuming you've already downloaded the software as per the guide above).

1. Starting.

Start up your game, ITH (as administrator) and Translation Aggregator.  They will give you these screens:

Game

ITH

Translation Aggregator
2. Attach ITH to the game.

You need to click on Process (button on the top left) on the ITH window.  This will open a new dialog.


You need to select the game from the list of processes (for MQ:P it's Game.exe), and then click on Attach.  If it works you should see the following two windows:



(Note: the last big Windows 10 upgrade screwed this up for me and I got a "failed to attach" message.  I don't know if or when this will be fixed.  I managed to get around it by reverting the last Windows 10 update, which might not be possible for some people.  If that's you, I can't really help here as I don't know who's responsible for maintaining ITH and where the fixes can be found.  If someone does, please post the links in the comments.)

At this point ITH is waiting for you do something on the game.  Do something in the game (any button press for the next line of text should do it) and ITH will show these 3 lines:


Now, if you go up and click on the grey bar with "ConsoleOutput" on it you'll see a dropdown box with the some new selections.  Select one of the "GetGlyphOutlineW" options (I'm not sure it matters; I usually pick the bottom one).

3. Clipboard to Translation

Now, go back to playing the game.  You'll notice the text will start showing up in ITH window (as well as a lot of other junk if you happen to be in one of the options/stats menus).


The bottom line should match what Luka is currently saying on screen
This text should now be automatically copied to Translation Aggregator.  That sends the text off to various online translators and pastes the outputs to the relevant windows.  Having multiple translators makes it easier to cross-reference and get a better idea of what the best translation is (automated machine translation being an imprecise science and all that).


And that's pretty much what I did to get machine translation up and running again.  Unfortunately, setting this all up can be a little fiddly and I'm not an expert or very knowledgeable on either ITH or TA, so I won't be able to help too much if you run into problems.  For those, you might want to go and ask on the relevant forums.

(Bear in mind, about 90% of those problems are usually people not setting their Locale to Japanese.)

Bonus: An English Translation

Okay, a partial English translation.  I keep linking to Dargoth.com because these guys are doing great work, considering just how much work there is.

The current patch they have for part 1 and 2 has most of the skills, items, and other mechanics stuff translated.  These are the things that are usually the fiddliest to translate with text hooking & machine translation, so I highly recommend using their patch for the game as it makes things way easier to follow.  Also, if you didn't get around to playing part 1, most of the main story is translated for that.

They also have a link for getting the most up-to-date translations directly.  I will warn that patching and tinkering around with the new files is fiddly.  I was able to fudge it into working after some trial and error, but it did involve a fair bit of tearing my hair out.  Search through the comments, or even post requests of your own, if you have problems.  Someone there will be better able to help you than me.

Hope this helps, anyway. 

Monday, October 02, 2017

Introducing Monmusu Quest: Paradox week

It’s been asked for, but before I leap headlong into Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] I thought I’d take a bit of time to get the hype train rolling (and by hype train, I mean one of those old steam trains that should really be in a museum).

Aside from promoting my own succubus/monster girl writing (which you can check out here if you’d like to give me some of your lovely cash, or here if you want a sample first), one of the things I like to cover on this here blog is succubus/monster girl sex games.  I love them, been playing them since back when this blog first started and they’re the sort of niche interest thing that rarely gets written about anywhere.  They also overlap quite nicely with my own work as I like to write about hot succubi/monster girls doing sexy things to their (un)lucky prey, and these games also feature lots of scenes of hot succubi/monster girls doing sexy things to their (un)lucky prey.

Last year I didn’t get to write much on monster girl hentai games.  This was mostly due to upgrading my laptop to Windows 10, and then finding out that Windows 10 did not get on with my translation software at all.  So, when Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] came out earlier this year, I was not able to leap straight into a continuation of my epic playthrough.  Instead the game sat rather forlornly, untouched, in a folder on my hard drive as I joined everyone else in waiting for Dargoth and crew to work through their translation.

Then I found some machine translation software that worked (more on that tomorrow) and thought I might as well start the madness again.

So, what is Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2], and why are you planning to devote an ungodly number of hours blogging your way through it?

Because it’s... fun?

As for the What is? question, here is a brief potted history of the Monster Girl Quest game series:

One of the key popularisers of monster girls on the internet is Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopaedia (I think this is the right link to their stuff).  Not long after that started to increase in popularity, screenshots and a short demo of a game featuring KC’s artwork appeared.  As far as I can tell, KC had little to do with the game aside from providing artwork of one of the main characters – Alice.  The person (people?) behind what would become Monster Girl Quest (or Monmusu Quest) was Toro Toro Resistance.  Previous to this, they’d written several sexy monster girl stories and a series of sexy voice dramas under the banner of Whispers of the Immoral Girl and the Female Pervert.

The first Monster Girl Quest told a story of a brave wannabe adventurer, Luka, setting off on a quest to defeat the Demon Lord with a sexy lamia, Alice, in tow (who also happened to be that same Demon Lord).


The game was essentially a Visual Novel with a series of RPG-style battles.  The main difference to a normal RPG was that all the enemies were monster girls and were more interested in fucking Luka’s brains out than killing him (although, most of the time they did end up killing, and sometimes eating, him in the Bad Ends, but that always seemed incidental to the fucking his brains out part).  The main difference to a normal sex game was the decent storyline and characters, as well a mind-boggling variety and inventiveness to the monster girl encounters.  Most similar games have maybe 15 distinct enemies; Monster Girl Quest had around 50.

The game quickly picked up a cult following and spawned a host of memes like “touch fluffy tail”and this:


It was also the first part of a trilogy.


Chapter two continued Luka and Alice’s adventures, where it became more obvious that Luka’s real quest was to fix the various divisions in the world and that Alice fancied the tits off him.


By chapter 3 it was fairly evident that most of the monster girls (including Demon Lord Alice and her four knights) weren’t the real threat here, so the game upended it all by having the angel Ilias turn genocidal and attempt to destroy the world because it had grown “impure”.

Make no mistake, Monster Girl Quest games are sex games, but they had a pretty decent story and the characters were engaging.

Toro Toro Resistance was able to squeeze a lot out of a visual novel engine to make Monster Girl Quest, but I suspect they were hankering to make a proper JRPG along the lines of classics like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series.  So, a couple of years later we got this:


Monmusu Quest: Paradox is an alternate universe version of the Monster Girl Quest series.  Luka is still off on his adventures, but things have gone wrong somewhere and it seems like chaos is threatening to eat that world and others.  While MGQ was a visual novel with battles, MQ:P is a much more traditional JRPG.  There is a lot more freedom of movement and the monster girl fights are your standard random encounters (with Luka having a party this time rather than fighting alone).  Like Pokemon, you can pretty much recruit all the monster girls you fight, building up a sizable harem for Luka (that will try to eat him if he’s not careful).  Toro Toro Resistance threw everything in there in terms of mechanics.  If you like old-school JRPGs, MQ:P might still be of interest even if you’re not into the freaky sex stuff.

And now we’re onto Part 2.


I decided to start up the Let’s Play series again because I enjoyed doing it the first time around, and it’s a fairly time-efficient way of keeping the blog running with new content while I try to sort out my tangled mess of writing projects behind the scenes.

A couple of things to be aware of and changes from the last series:

I won’t be running it daily this time around.  It was too brutal and I felt that it didn’t leave me enough time form my own writing.  The Mon-Wed-Fri schedule I used for Monmusu Conquered World seemed to work okay (aside from near the end when I was struggling to maintain my interest in the game).  This means the series will likely run for some time, but as I won’t be running it daily, that will leave gaps in the week for me to blog about other stuff/post new stories (more on that in a mo).

I’ll be making it more of a walkthrough, so there will be more screenshots of the less titillating RPG overworld maps to show which characters to interact with at which time in order to advance the story.  I got a fair few comments from people struggling with untranslated versions of the game that appreciated some form of guide, so it makes sense to focus on that.  It won’t be an exhaustive guide.  I don’t read Japanese either, so I’m inevitably going to miss stuff (I do in English videogame RPGs).  Feel free to point out when this happens in the comments.

Also, there is a chance the series might go on pause.  As I’ve mentioned before, Windows 10 and text hookers really don’t get along.  I have one that works, but the last Windows 10 update broke it and I was only able to get it working again by reverting the update.  Windows 10 being Windows 10, that update is going to get pushed through at some point, at which point I’m going to be boned until I can find a fix.  MQ:P is way too complex to play without some form of translation support.

Now for my own writing.  That’s currently in a bit of a mess.  On the plus side, I’ve thought up two new novel ideas that might be cool in the past month.

Actually, that's not a plus.

My main problem at the moment is staying focused long enough on the same project.  Too easily distracted by the shiny new ideas, sigh.  Once the MQ:P series is up and running that will give me plenty of time to try and sort my writing shit out (and playing through MQ:P will likely fire up some fresh inspiration in the process).  This is better than a very long gap between updates and concerned comments/emails asking if I’m still alive.

The two main items on the sorting shit out front are the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary and Succubus Summoning 301.  For SS 301 I have a pretty good idea of what the first couple of chapters are and intend working on that while the MQ:P playthrough is keeping things ticking over here.  The H-space MGB is a little more awkward as I’m struggling to manage word bloat.  Those pieces either need to be proper stories in their own right, or 1.5K sex scenes I rattle off in a couple of hours as a break from meatier projects.  Currently they’re falling into a middle ground of too-long-but-not-long-enough that isn’t working (for me).

Anyway, for the rest of the week I’ll be posting MQ:P recaps, part one hints, etc.  I'm planning to start posting the playthrough proper around this time next week.

I hope you enjoy!

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Many-Eyed Hydra’s thoughts on how to make the perfect Monster Girl H-game

For the last few weeks I’ve been running a playthrough of Dieselmine’s Monmusu Conquered World, which seems to be a spiritual successor of sorts to their previous series: Violated Hero.  As is typical for Dieselmine’s releases, the game is a mix of nice, sexy stuff, and frustratingly bone-headed/lazy design choices.  Frustrating, because I think the pieces are there to make a really good game, if assembled correctly.

To deal with that frustration, I thought I’d follow-up with this: my thoughts on how to make a really good Violated Hero game.  I switched the title to “Monster Girl” rather than “Violated Hero” to hopefully attract more general interest.

(As for adding my own pseudonym to the title, yeah, that’s pure self-indulgence.  Feel free to mock.)

For convenience, I am going to restrict this to a Violated Hero-type game; i.e. a Visual Novel/JRPG with a male protagonist having sexy stuff done to him by sexually dominant monster girls.  This is not the only or best way to make a monster girl game (check out Eroico for a 2D platformer and any of camel’s stuff for games with female protagonists), just the one I decided to focus on after playing through Monmusu Conquered World.

To be honest, I think the basic Violated Hero formula is a good foundation to start with – create 15 or so sexy monster girl characters and have the player run through sexy encounters with them.  Once you have those in place, the next steps are to determine how to handle the encounters and what to use as “filler” between them.

(Historically, this is where games like Violated Hero have been weak and games like Monster Girl Quest have been strong.)

I’m not going to go too much into creation of the monster girls.  Generally, you’ll want to cover a variety of types and sex acts.  Monster Musume’s harem of lamia, harpy, slime girl, centaur, mermaid, arachne and dullahan is a fairly straightforward roster.  You can choose to lean more vanilla with only humanoid monsters (elves, succubi, cat girls) or go full Monster Girl Quest weirdness (anything drawn by Delphinus or Xelvy).  I prefer the latter because additional entertainment can be derived from seeing just how fucked up a sexy Bad End can go.

As for the protagonist, I’m not sure on this.  Jude Duval has some interesting comments on my last post.  My thinking is, if you make them a blank, it’s easier for the player to project themselves onto the character, but the character likely won’t be very memorable.  I don’t know what’s best here.  It probably depends on writing skill.  I’d love to create a Geralt or Conan, but it’s not exactly easy.  The only hard rule is your protagonist should be at least 18.  Japanese games tend to be a little more flexible on this, but it’s pretty much a big no-no to go younger in any kind of Western erotica.

The most basic implementation of the Violated Hero model is a Visual Novel where the protagonist is “on rails” and proceeds through each sexy H-scene one by one.  Each scene is represented by one or more static pieces of art backed up by a text description.  This can work if the quality of the writing and artwork is high enough, but the resulting product is unlikely to make any “best of” lists.

We want more of a game, so let’s look at the separate elements.

First we have the character.  I’m going to borrow Slime from Monmusu Conquered World as an example.

Say hi to Slime

The artwork is usually a single standing pose with variations in facial expression to indicate her mood.  While it might be cool to add animation here, improving the other sections of the game are a higher priority.

Those other sections can be divided into “H-scene”, “fight” and “filler”.  “H-scene” is the sex scene, and what most people will be initially buying the game for.  “Fight” is sort of self-explanatory.  “Filler” refers to the segments between each monster girl encounter.

H-Scene

The most basic implementation is a piece of sexy artwork with some text describing what’s going on.  Here’s Slime from MCW having her wicked way with the protagonist.

A typical sexy Bad End

These scenes usually have one main piece of artwork with several variations as the scene progresses.  With Slime it’s going to be show semen spurts inside her translucent body as well as her wrapping more of her amorphous body around the hero (usually a good time to start getting very concerned in MGQ-world).

Sexy Bad End scene art progression

This is your standard monster girl Bad End scene and how both the VH and MGQ series have implemented them in the past.  Nowadays, I think these games need to do more.  Animation adds so much to the scenes I think games should try to work it in where they can.  It doesn’t have to be fantastic animation either.  Even simple distortions/manipulations of a static piece of artwork add a ton to the scene.

This is where Monmusu Conquered World cocked up, in my opinion.  MCW has some nice animated snippets, but it doesn’t use them in any of the Bad End scenes, even though most of them are derived from the same base artwork.

The next step from a simple animated snippet is some variation.  A change of speed or change in the background squelchy sex fx is simple, but very effective.  Currently, I think the benchmark for sexy monster girl Bad End scenes might be the succubi in Succubus Prison.

Start with some gentle paizuri and then...

The animations, aren’t exactly complex, but there are enough variations and screen effects that by the end of it you really feel like a succubus has ridden the fuck out of you.

...time to give that cock a proper squeeze...

I think this is what monster girl H-games should be aiming for, at minimum, in their Bad End H-scenes.

Of course, if you want to go all out, there’s no reason not to take it further.  Play the demo for Monster Girl Island, lie back and watch as demon slime Eris fucks the absolute shit out of your player avatar.  It’s not exactly surprising that Redamz is making $30K a month on Patreon.

Now imagine 10-15 scenes just like that in your monster girl H-game…

(excuse me, just off for a quick… ahem… break)

Fight

This is the interactive portion of the monster girl encounter.  In your typical monster girl RPG, the hero has to beat the monster girl “boss” to continue.  Lose and they get the sexy Bad End.

Yes, it is kind of weird that the sexy stuff is only unlocked by losing, but it makes sense for games where the monster girls are sexually dominant/femdom-ish.  The incentive is still there for the player to “win” as they don’t get to see the next girl’s sexy content until they do.

The most basic “fight” is a dialogue option asking the player if they want to fuck the hawt succubus.

Most games do a little more than that.  I’m sticking with the VH/MGQ archetype, so we’re looking at turn-based RPG combat.  This usually takes the form of:

1) Normal vs Normal (the early Violated Hero games)
2) Normal vs Sex (Monster Girl Quest)
3) Sex vs Sex (“battlefuck”, e.g. ROBF)

Personally, I think the games that drag the sexy into the fight segment are hotter than the ones that follow the blueprint of “bog-standard RPG fight followed by non-interactive sex scene”.

The main reason is interactivity, and – stemming from that – unpredictability.  The Bad End scenes generally don’t have any interactivity aside from clicking enter for the next line of text.  The fights do and it’s way more fun to see exactly how the succubus or other monster girl overpowers the main character to get them to that Bad End in the first place.  Extra bonus hotness if it’s some kind of special sex move that leaves the protagonist empty of energy.

The Dieselmine games have been traditionally lacklustre here, although the recent Monmusu Conquered World gives each encounter a nice animated sex attack.

Slime's special attack - boobs

The original Monster Girl Quest did better, with various attacks that bind the hero and hold them helpless while the monster girl sexily sucks out their HP.  MGQ was also pretty good with the unpredictability.  Sometimes the game would change the rules and the player would find themselves fucked (literally) whether they were trying to win the fight or not – a simple and very effective way to reinforce the femdom theme of the game.

"What, you thought you were supposed to select struggle?  Fu fu fu."

The VH/MCW fights were always too predictable to get across that “lack of control” angle.

I don’t know what a perfect interactive battlefuck system would look like.  It’s something I’ve been tinkering with for years without ever landing on something I like.  I think it wants a variety of pics/animations to represent the various sex attacks.  The better fights in the original Monster Girl Quest series had multiple artworks depending on what was being done to Luka at the time (Sexy Automata Girl and most of the later Succubi being good examples).  Add a little tweak of animation to their scenes and hawtness intensifies.

The shame of it is that Monmusu Conquered World already had elements of this in place.

Along with the animated slime girl titjob scene, they also had the following scene kicking around in the random filler sections.

Do not ask a Slime girl to "get creative"

I think this would have been better used as an alternate sex attack in the battle with Slime.  Throw in a couple more snippets of similar quality and suddenly those turn-based RPG battles become less of a chore and more a portion of the game to look forward to.

How to work them in is a harder question.  I like MGQ’s bind attacks and think some kind of system where the player gradually gets enmeshed in deeper and more explicit sex attacks would be as hot as fuck, but how to implement that, and produce all the art assets to effectively depict it is not a trivial task.  ROBF probably gets it closest in art/animation and Succubus Rhapsodia in text description (If that game could more accurately depict what was happening in art form, it would be amazing.  Unfortunately, creating art assets for all the various combinations would likely be way too time consuming).

These sprites do not accurately convey what this trio is about to do to you...

The Filler

These are the segments that link each of the sexy monster girl encounters.  The game part of the game unless you want it to be just a boss rush of the various monster girls (which is also fine, but requires putting a lot more detail on those boss fights).

Personally, I think this is lower priority depending on how much gameplay you want to add to your sex game.  Most of the time it’s just padding anyway, and exists to stop players blasting through the game in under an hour and then thinking it’s too short.

Dieselmine, with both the Violated Hero series and Monmusu Conquered World, have traditionally been comedicly terrible on this.

VH1 and 2 sent the player through a Dungeon Master-type pseudo-3D maze (Lightning Warrior Raidy also does the same).  They switched that to a branching path abstraction for VHs 3 to 5.  MCW has the player playing a very simple game of JRPG “tag”.  None of these segments really added anything to the games.

To be honest, there’s nothing wrong with taking the Visual Novel approach and filling the gaps with an interesting story.  This is what the original Monster Girl Quest series did and most monster girl H-game fans love that game.

The standard expansion to that is to use RPGmaker software and spread the story out across an overworld map.  This a more interactive option to get the story across, but suffers in that there are a lot of cheap RPGMaker games out there already (but as the focus should really be on the monster girl characters, this is not a substantial handicap).

The RPGmaker approach also moves the game more into being an RPG rather than just a Visual Novel.  The temptation then is to fill the map with random encounters (either normal critters, or more sexy monster girls).  It does add padding, but can also be tedious and grindy (especially if using conventional RPG critters rather than sexy monster girls).

On the surface Succubus Prison looks like an RPGmaker game, but while those games are about having the player explore a large world, Succubus Prison subverts it by confining the player to a small house.  It’s really a puzzle game with an emphasis on finding and combining the right key items while avoiding the succubi.  It’s good as it adds a fresh twist to a well-worn genre (and it also helps that the Bad End scenes are gorgeous).

To be honest, there are a lot of approaches that can be taken here.  The bad ones are those that feel pointless, boring and tacked on.  The good ones advance an interesting plot or give the player interesting character advancement options (or add sex content in a way that avoids being repetitive).

Anyway, it goes without saying that these are my thoughts, and might not hold for the target audience overall.  So, I would like you, the people reading this, and likely target audience for this type of game, to add your thoughts and comments below.  I’d like this web page/post to be a useful resource for anyone considering developing a monster-girl-themed eroge.  Maybe it will.  Maybe it will sink without a trace.  The internet being a big ocean and all that.

Next week we are going deep into the world of Monmusu Quest: Paradox, and I mean deep.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Text Play Monmusu Conquered World! part 21

And (finally!) we’re on to the last part of my Monmusu Conquered World playthrough.  The first part was way back here.

We’re right at the end.  We just have Nia’s second form (mother, sister, daughter?) to defeat.

The absolutely, positively, final boss

The game does have an anti-frustration, come-back-stronger mechanic, which should make the third and subsequent battles a cakewalk.  Nia doesn’t seem to be having any of that nonsense.  On about the sixth or seventh attempt, her attacks are finally down to scratch damage and Luka-clone can finally become the hero he’s supposed to be.

After being beaten, Nia gathers the gang and some magic happens.  I’d like to be able to tell you what happened, but I’m running on pure guesswork without translation.  I guess the invasion is called off as attention switches back to a normal fantasy world.  We get happy music and the silhouettes without art privileges seem to be celebrating.

But what about the brave hero that made it all possible…

The brave "sacrifice" of a courageous hero...

Well, I suppose nymphomaniac demon monster girls have to keep themselves occupied in other ways.  Some “sacrifices” need to be made.

And that’s that.

Overall, this was harder work than I thought it would be. The lack of machine translation was a handicap, even for a game as straightforward as Monmusu Conquered World.  To be fair, I should have anticipated this.  The Violated Hero series always occupied the middle ground between a Visual Novel and a (very) rudimentary RPG.  Take out the VN part, and you’re losing a good chunk of what the “game” is.

Many thanks to the people leaving comments shedding light on what was happening in some of the scenes.

I think in future, if I’m going to do series like this, it will be for games where there is more public interest, and where I have some form of machine translation in place.

So, how did Monmusu Conquered World shape up to its spiritual predecessor series, Violated Hero?

To be honest, without translation, it’s a little hard for me to offer an opinion and still be fair.  I can’t exactly judge plot or character depth without knowing the text.  The JRPG mechanics seemed overly simplistic, but that could have been how Easy mode was designed.

What I can talk about is the artwork and some of the games mechanic choices.

The artwork seemed a step back.  The different art styles didn’t mesh together very well.  I did like the sex animations, though, and wished the game had made better use of them.

As for the characters, I thought the first half was stronger than the second half.  I liked the spider girl, steam girl, painting girl and slime girl, and thought both the goblins and mermaids were adorably cute, even if adorably cute isn’t really a sexual turn-on for me. On the other hand, I only really liked Nia out of the endgame bosses and I felt they could have done with something like Violated Hero 2’s additional post-loss scenes to better distinguish them as more important characters.

The auto-lose-the-first-fight gimmick felt like one of those ideas that must have sounded better on paper.  I can get where they’re coming from – it does integrate the H-content better than the player having to choose to lose to get it – but it ended up being more annoying.

The dodge-and-run filler was total shite, but Dieselmine have never really found a good way to gamify the segments between each boss, so that’s no real change.  The sex animations for when you got caught made them a little more entertaining, but that vanished fast when they ran out of original snippets and started recycling them near the end.

The main problem for Dieselmine is that the original Violated Hero games (most notably VH2) came out after Monster Girl Quest had just hit cult success and there was an audience wanting more of the same.  Since then Monster Girl Quest has evolved into an intricate and complex JRPG, other series like ROBF and Succubus Rhapsodia have come out and done the same, games like Tokinokogiri’s Succubus Prison have really raised the bar in sexy-as-fuck succubus/monster girl Bad Ends, and Dieselmine’s games… haven’t kept up from what I’ve seen.

It was one of my frustrations with the Violated Hero series and now with Monmusu Conquered World.  It always feels like all the elements are there to make a really great cult H-game, but something is always botched, or overlooked, or undercooked, or otherwise not assembled correctly.

I’m planning to post my own thoughts on what I think the perfect “Violated Hero” game should look like as a sort of post-series segment this weekend.  Feel free to drop your own thoughts in the comments on that (or this) as I’m hoping it will be a useful article for any devs looking to make similar games (and it is great that a number of Western devs are building games to cater to this niche).

I hope you enjoyed this little playthrough anyway.  As always, if you enjoyed what you read, please check out my novels, short story collections and novellas.  I love writing about sexy succubi and monster girls.

Next up – Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2]!

Monday, September 25, 2017

Text Play Monmusu Conquered World! part 20

We’re getting to the end of my Monmusu Conquered World playthrough.  At this point I think we have only the final boss to face.  To go back to where it all began, go here.  If you’re not 18, go to the back button on your internet browser (you can come back when you’re old enough).

In our last piece we took down the second-in-command.  By a process of elimination I think that means we have only have the final boss left, although with Violated Hero games (Monmusu Conquered World’s spiritual predecessor), that’s not always the case.  Also, I don’t have machine translation, so I don’t really know what’s going on anyway.

Before the final encounter we have another run-and-dodge section through a typical RPG-maker map.  The sex animations if you get caught were pretty neat the first few times, but by this point I think these filler sections have well and truly worn out their welcome.  I think the game knows as well.  The last segment is pretty much an open space with lots of identical succubus minions milling around.  It’s not hard to navigate.

And then, the big boss.

The final boss

Her name is given as Nia in the promo materials.  I’m guessing she’s supposed to be some kind of female Satan.  She does have a goaty sort of appearance.

If we weren’t sure she was the big boss, being sent off to fight against a wooshy metaphysical backdrop of stars and constellations clues us into her being the baddest of bads.

Generic JRPG final battle background

Despite this, she fails to do what 90% of all the other monster girls of Monmusu Conquered World have done—OHKO is in the first, unwinnable battle.

Time to accept our horny punishment.

Our final "punishment"

I’m fine with this.

She gets on top for a bout of vigorous fucking that doesn’t stop until she’s completely plastered in white stuff from the ambulatory bag of concentrated semen.  Losing has never felt so fun.

I suppose we should try to win, though, what with the fate of the world and all that riding on this.

And then she does this and…

A devastating special attack...

…whoops, we lose again.

Put it away, Luka-clone we have a world to save.  Think of all those unfortunate black silhouettes labouring away without any kind of art privileges.

After beating her there is a barrage of weird screen effects.

And your reward is…

The prize!

…tits.

Ah, that’s why she only had one Bad End scene.  Nia has gone all one-wing-angel on us.  Or rather, lots-of-hair-and-eyes-in-places-there-shouldn’t-be-eyes angel on us.

At least, I think she might have transformed.  The face differs so much I’m not sure if it’s her or a sister or mother.

This is what happens when you try to do this without machine translation (never never again).

As with the original Nia, she likes to be on top.  So we have to go through all that sexy, being ridden to exhaustion thing all over again.  Saving the world is hard job Luka-clone, someone’s got to be the one ridden by sexy Satan until their bollocks are empty.

The onerous costs of being a hero

The shaggy legs and weird hair eyes don’t detract.  My attention is somewhere else for some reason.

Every time it looks like the screen is fading out, the action jumps back to her on top.  I wonder if she’s taking a page out of Gorgon’s book and trying to avoid the sword’s magic by fuckity-ever-after for all eternity.

It fails (Luka-clone’s heart probably bursts at some point).

She definitely justifies her End Boss status.  For a while I was wondering if the game’s come-back-stronger mechanic has been switched off as she effortlessly swats us aside for about four “unlosable” fights in a row.  It isn’t until about the fifth or sixth attempt that she unveils her sex attack—an animated version of her cowgirl end, which is pretty sweet.

But prevail we must… but that will be for next time.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Text Play Monmusu Conquered World! part 19

Welcome back to the (hopefully!) back on schedule Text Play of Monmusu Conquered World.  Monmusu Conquered World is an adult monster girl sex game made by Dieselmine.  The first part of my playthrough can be found here.

Last up we got eaten up like candy by a succubus.  This was rather disappointing if you were expecting smutty sexy stuff, although the succubus did make up for it by riding our brains out in the h-battle later on.

Anyway, she’s out of the way and it’s time to press deeper into the demon lord castle.  The dodge-and-run section this time is that ever-annoying JRPG trope – the teleport maze.  At this point the game appears to be out of original sex animations, rendering the segment even more tedious.

Scrap metal + boobies

After navigating that it’s finally time to fight the second-in-command boss, Ms Scrap Metal Tits.  Number 2, Ms Scrap Metal Tits, appears prominently on the menu page and to be fair, her boobs are bulbously beautiful.

Poster Girl

Her name is given as The Orte, and I’m going to have to call defeat on the origins of that one.  Is it an anime/manga reference?  She’s surrounded by a dark essence, apparently.

Her first Bad End scene will be very familiar to anyone that played through the original Violated Hero series.  It’s the classic VH femdom footjob.

VH Femdom Footjob Scene #7

Every VH game had one of the major Big Bads do this to the protagonist at some point in the game.  The pictures all have virtually the same camera angle and pose.

As with the giantess scene last time, this is a kink that’s outside my wheelhouse.  I’m not a foot person.  I feel a footjob is something I should bucketlist at some point, if only to see what the fuss is about.  But having my balls actually trod on, hmm, I think I can miss that experience with no regrets.

The Orte is one of the “generals”.  That means she gets a second scene.  The footjob is just the appetizer.  Now it’s time for the main course as she climbs on top while getting Luka-clone to press his hand against her big soft titty.

The main course...
This, I think, I can get along with.

At least I could, until I noticed something with the artwork that threw me out of the scene.  What’s going on with her left leg?  It looks like it’s been detached from her hip and bolted on to her pussy.  I’m not sure what’s happening here.  Maybe the artist planned for one angle on the legs and then changed their mind when drawing her midriff.  Or there are perfectly sensible storyline reasons for it to look like that (which I can’t read, as I don’t have translation for this game).  Or it’s just me.

Is it just me?

Does how her leg joins to her body look weird to anyone else?

Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that once noticed, become impossible not to notice.

Which is a shame as the scene looks decent.  The Orte fucks our brains out and keeps fucking while the black stuff surrounding her starts to creep down over our skin.

...is us.  Welp.

Uh oh.

Too late.  Time to add being absorbed by darkness to the list of unusual ways for Luka-clone to die.

Does this mean we now get scrap metal nuts?

The resurrection scene starts off in darkness and for a moment I’m wondering whether we’re going to be hit by some plot-twist shenanigans, but no, we get resurrected and have the normal fight, just like every other encounter.

Her sex attack is an animated version of her second Bad End scene.  This means I can’t fully appreciate it as the wonky leg art is still bugging me.

Annoying really.  I like The Orte’s design and she does appear to be the quintessential femme fatale succubus-esque encounter.

Oh well, let’s see what the big boss has in store for us.