VN - Others - Completed - A Housewife’s Healing Touch [Final] [AliceSoft]

It's a tale of two games, and somehow both are disappointing. It's hard not to say what has already been stated, but I'll try my best to not.

Pure Love Route:
The title is inherently misleading, as it's not a "pure love" route. It's a netori route, what idiot decided to call it "pure love?"

There is minimal gameplay and what is included is more detrimental to the VN than beneficial. It's boring, tedious, and I believe was only put in the game in order to not have it listed as a kinetic novel. The overarching story is alright. There are walls of text at times and for a while the main story's progression is at a stand-still, feeling completely forgotten about by the devs, but overall it's fine. The main narrative issue is with the housewife. She is a horrible, controlling, selfish psychopath. "But isn't that every girl in a netori/ntr/netorase game?" you might be wondering. No, this is a different kind of psychopath. This is someone just genuinely terrible. She's horrible to her husband for cheating on him, but she is horrible to MC for using him as a sex toy without reciprocating his feelings while disallowing him to actively seek relations with other women. This continues on and on throughout the game, even into the ending. With netori, netorare, and even netorase; there's an inherent progression of corruption: You expect it to go left to right, uncorrupted to corrupted, from husband/boyfriend to new lover. She doesn't move an inch. How she feels towards her husband doesn't change thoughout the entire game and how she feels towards her new lover barely moves an inch. It's like she wants a harem, which would be fine if this was that kind of game. But it's not. It's an netori game. She needs to experience that change.


NTR Route:
Remarkably, the writing (for both the girl and overarching story) is worse. The housewife is somehow an even worse person than in the netori route and her leaps of logic are far beyond comprehension. At least in the netori route she had some small bit of reason to even show interest in another man. In this one, aside from the one guy who is blackmailing her in the beginning, there is no rhyme or reason to her actions. There is no logic. She's just a mindless cum dump. Part of the appeal of an NTR story is how it frames the cheater's corruption, her fall from grace. This doesn't have that, it just has a whore being a whore with a sorry excuse for being one. Something else to add, but holy shit the story boring. On two occasions I started to skip through the walls of text out of boredom, only to go back because I felt I couldn't write an honest review if I did that. My god, I want that time back. It's written to parallel the netori route to some degree, which is a neat idea but it fails on every front.

Also, they ditched the garbage gameplay and made it purely a kinetic novel. However, the story is so bad that now you have a bad game with no gameplay and a bad story.

Looking at Both Games at Once:
- The art is fantastic. If anything, it's worth downloading just to experience the art
- There is an impregnation bar, but since impregnation is inevitable and has a pre-planned time-of-occurrence it's irrelevant
- The voice acting is enjoyable
- The Pure Love route is better than the NTR route, but it's like comparing garbage to sludge

To Conclude:
The Pure Love route is a soft 3/5
The NTR route is a 2/5
Overall I'm giving it a 2/5

Like many I was drawn in by the beautiful art and premise, however, this game is so mediocre I almost felt compelled to give it 2 stars. I played both "pure love" and "NTR". To explain why I dont like this game, I have to spoil the game. So Ill just go ahead and do that.

Pure love:
First of all, I dont see why you would call netori (stealing the wife from the POV of the person stealing her) pure love. Sure, I think more people like it that netorare (the wive being stolen from the MC), but this is not exactly pure. But whatever, lets put that aside. The real problem is the female character. Shes an awful person. Extremely selfish, manipulative and remorseless. Who the fuck writes this, why is this called pure love. Its cold and exploitative.

NTR route:
Now, at this point, I had hoped the NTR route at least would work. Sui is an irredeemable woman, maybe her getting raped silly would work out better. Again, She manages to surprise me. Why have the impregnation bar.

The art is 11/10
Voice acting is 10/10
romance is 1/10, she doesnt even NTR is 2/10, she doesnt even the minimal gameplay is also stupid and just slows down the VN bits. Imagine having to play super mario 1-1 every 30 minutes before being able to go back to reading the story.

Fuck this, it gets a 2/5

A Houusewife's Healing Touch is a decent game I came to know about because they just did the animation. There are two versions of the game, the NTR one is basically a kinetic novel with a few choices to make at points (which is more than most japanese games); the non-NTR version is an idle battler with a more lineal progression. The story line in both cases is a tad absurd but does its job decently, especially due to a decent writing in english.

Art is beautiful, that is undeniable. But there are no animations and the drawings are often used more than once. So most of the sex scenes, as is common in japanese games, are a matter of reading. The character of Rui (the wife) is voice acted which is nice, and I didn't find any bugs on my playthrough.

All in all, it's a decent game, better than most japanese ones, but still lackluster when compared with other games available in the genre.

Incredible disappointing game, with very boring scenes without any kind of spice, kink or anything besides the most basic, pure, scenes, as if a priest wrote the scenes. With a heavy mosaic censorship the experience is further soured, and because of it half the scenes are in angles that avoid the censored areas, making them even worse and more boring that what they already are. I don't think it is worth the time to explore the other ntr route, nor any reason to keep it in your computer to see the scenes again. Only the slow build up in the beginning that got me hooked for some time, but after noticing the entirety of it had no interesting scenes, then it just feel off a cliff.

Another alicesoft game, not bad but nothing outstanding either. Good looking cgs but predictable plot and linear progression.

Both stories have completely unique renders so it is worth playing both if you want to extract the most out of the game. Start with the love route that at least has a minor gameplay element and builds up the base storyline better and only later move on to the ntr route that has no gameplay but depicts more sex and corruption elements.

You will have to play the game multiple times if you want to unlock every cg as well.

If you are thinking Alicesoft's game and homare's art this gonna be good, think again. This is a super short glorified vn with clicky time waster of a gameplay, if you can even call it gameplay (the ntr route doesn't even have the gameplay portion for better or worse). Technically both routes are ntr: in the main route you play the shota netori'ing a dude's wife, in the ntr route the dude's wife is banged by the whole village. There are flashes of erotism but overall very forgettable.

Voice acting is excellent.
Art is incredible.
Story is whatever. Linear as you'd expect, but I am grateful they provided option for NTR route and Pure love route at least (Pure Love route is actually Netori).

Characters are 2-dimensional and sometimes the dialogue between events seems to make no sense (as if what they said in the previous Event didn't happen). But all in all, the art and voice acting really makes up for it.

this game has quality regarding images, sounds, menu/interface.

but i played the NTR route and didn't get any NTR with the girl Riu just with the mc (who looks like a girl btw)
hoped for either a "true love" route where mc is the only guy with Riu and an NTR version where Riu has interactions with other guys like Goru.
for the lack of content and the lack of advertised NTR + too much mc content (who also looks like a girl) i can't vote this higher at the moment.

The art is top notch, however, it's very bad game. Simply because it doesn't have gameplay. It's just VN, and only 2-3 choice per route, and that's it. I won't need to mention this if it doesn't pretend to be a game at the beginning of the pure love route.

As a VN, the story is boring AF. I read for about an hour and the explanation of the concept is just so unclear and the voice acting is off the track. The emotion in the voice just doesn't quite match the text, it's sometime just too dramatic and overacting that it doesn't fit the situation(especially the gate fighting part). Then I lost the interests and just skip all the way to the end.

And the pure love route is actually not. it's still NTR because the Shion NTRed souya. And I just don't get why Rui become so obsessed with Shion from the beginning. Lack of foundation.

Beside the arts, I don't know what else I can praise about this game. (I change my mind to increase the rating from 2 to 3 because of overall quality)

This "game" is total garbage compared to other Alicesoft's games.
It has nice dialogues, that is why I rate it 2/5 not 1/5.
Except that:
- complete lack of gameplay. This is VN under disguise of a game. A lot effort put in graphics etc. which was not needed. REN'PY slideshow aka "kinetic novel" would be more efficient solution.
- boring, shallow, predictable, non-replayable content
- released for Western markets, yet still censored

If you want a clicker mobile "game" with ero drawings and nice text, then it is for you. Oh, wait. For mobiles it would not sell too. Only reason this garbage is selling is because it is Alicesoft and because it is English.

In case you seek sth like Sengoku Rance (game good enought to be playable w/o ero stuff), Tsumamigui, Oyakorankan or technical masterpiece Haha Ranman - it is waste of your time. Really.

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A Housewife’s Healing Touch - NTR Route Review
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Preface/Intro
I think the best place to start would be to address the format of this latest offering from Alicesoft. This game is clearly in the vein of their popular wife NTR series which I shouldn't have to mention and it's related titles, but it's actually available as two seperate downloads for each route. Prior to this title, it was possible in at least one other similar game to avoid NTR altogether by making a single choice at the very beginning. None of this is really going to stop anybody frothing at the mouth though and there is some speculation that this was done to somehow increase profit. In any case, nobody should make the mistake of thinking an NTR route was spontaneous decision. This is more or less a spinoff "wife eater" game, but there's some important differences that should be noted.

Art, CG and Sound (kinda)
On it's own merit, this is a beautifully illustrated game. However, it's very difficult not to see it in terms of Alicesoft's work as a whole. Fuurin (the director) is the fucking man, but Homare's (the artist) work is a fundamentally different style to the last game of this type. It's slightly more realistic in linework and proportion, though it's set in a fantasy world. I'm not artist, but I can see less shine and less volume than say, Kuroda Akimi's work. Ass and titties don't pop the same way, it's a more mature, less saturated style. That's not to say the main heroine isn't stacked as hell and she sure looks great, but your mileage (in taste) may vary. I've seen some discussion of the CG's as boring with less variation than prior works, but again, viewed on it's own; it's pretty good (more on that later). Perfectly jerkable. Just don't expect anything much crazier than obscured penis in vagina (for the most part). The VA is top notch but as for commenting on sound effects you could probably slap two herrings together and I wouldn't know the difference.

Story, "Gameplay" and Dialogue
The thing I'm really here wanting to discuss is the "gameplay system" and associated UI - that is with how this combines with the story. Alicesoft cheaped out on the main screen and has stripped away much of the scheduling complexity you may expect. There's no real RPG elements in this route: you spend time with Rui when you can, or you don't. You get a few choices when you do but it's mostly linear. Since you picked the NTR route, you're here to see defilement and since you picked Alicesoft, you're here to see impregnation. The cut-in's, bars and competing rivals are all here, but there's some wackass mana bullshit being used to orchestrate the plot. There's a twist I won't spoil but the games narrative is ultimately kind of at odds with the heart-breaking, baby-making race you might've come to expect. I'm still not really sure what compelled this choice but I suspect Fuurin said he wanted to make a wife-fucking NTR game again and a group of Alicesoft employees sliced his Achilles tendons. If this wasn't off-putting enough, Rui gets fucked by plenty of guys but gets most of her scenes with 1 or 2 guys. There's two pregnancy meters (usually representing the accumulated spunkshot deposited by two rivals), but in some cases random cumshots add to one meter together. Long story short, this game lacks some of the relationship development between characters that you might like in your emotionally masochistic fap material. There are relationships being subverted, there's certainly induced emotions via cock/bullshit and realistic reproductive biology sure gets slung out the nearest goddamn window but we're missing something. The lack of dialogue (in quantity as well as quality) and relative shortage of scenes saps the impact that could and should have existed. There's no time to flesh out the world or it's inhabitants, so the betrayal feels less powerful - impact lost somewhere in the budget and murk of an overstretched idea. The skeleton of a good title is here; but I never saw a scene that really captured the physical and emotional turning of Rui as these dudes pump a bun in her oven. In essence, the game begins to feel more like some other kind of Nukige, which leads me to my next point...

Addendum: Rui is down to do sexual shit with dudes from the beginning because magic; which isn't a horrible way to get people to suspend their disbelief on her fall but it is lazy. There has to be some give and take when writing a story about a married woman eventually coming to accept bearing another man's offspring. This issue in writing good NTR has a simple solution: take your time and establish the facts. If you don't have time to write something believable in it's own world and compelling in the sense it compels people to cum reading it, don't set it in a fantastical world - set it in a real one.

Direction and Intent
I'm trying to talk about the game objectively but also struggling not to directly compare it to another VN and the formula followed by that VN and others like it. In light of this, I'd like to bring up once again what I mentioned in the beginnning: the game is available as two downloads, for two routes (combined if you so please). I haven't made a direct count of the cgs/events and compared them when combined to any other VN, but what I can tell you is that by playing through and as I touched on before, it feels a little light. I can't shake the feeling there's less than two halves of game here, maybe more like two thirds or two quarters. I can't pretend to know what's going on behind the scenes but if this is a sign of the future then the NTRbros should temper their expectations. The setting is generic but such a bizzare choice - why would they go for this at all?

Summary, or How I Kind of Contradict Myself Because Shiiiet, It's Still Pretty Alicesoft NTR
So it's not a big game and it's not got the highs of some others. It still looks good and there's very little gameplay schenanigans to get in the way of the porn. It won't tickle your brain or anything but it's still got some of the best production values of any NTR game/VN in, well, probably ever. It's out of the question to recommend to anyone who doesn't like NTR and impregnation, but if you're reading this then you probably already know you're going to try it. This isn't an exciting new direction or expansion for Alicesoft, but it's certainly positive that this was in English on release (now if we could only uncensor the art...).

If you wanted the intensity of an NTR type B race to the egg with clashing rivals, a smoking-hot wife heroine and smutty, feverishy narrated breeding scenes - you will get *most* of what you want. To get the full experience - ask around for the right translating tools and dive deeper.

Game gets an objective 4 stars. Depending on how much of a degenerate you are, it could stand to lose half a star because you've been spoiled so bad before.