RPGM - Completed - Agent Karen ~ Undercover Investigation of the Dark Organization [v1.0] [yaminabedaiichikantai]

Took me 2 days to finish this. I am pretty happy gameplay wise. Hentai wise. Non-existent.

Pros

• I personally had fun with the gameplay. It feels like a minesweeper a bit where you move from title to title trying to find the stairs to the next floor while trying your best not to waste time with enemies and running into a trap.
• When you open the menu to heal, you do not waste time thus its more optimal to grab healing items instead of healing on the spot.
• The game is generous with the timer. It always resets to 50 turns every time you get to a new floor so you don’t have to worry about clearing an entire floor and having less time to finish the next one.
• The game urges you to be balanced with your power ups. On the surface, having a high attack is good, but if you can’t chip away the armor, you won’t be doing that much damage. The same applies to the AI.
• There is one spot on the map that will pinpoint the stairs if you haven’t done so already. The same applies with the trap.
• Grenades are busted early game (like the first two areas) due to ignoring the defense of the enemy. Last two areas? Not so much.
• Flashbangs are actually useful. They guarantee a 100% escape without having to press the escape option and potentially waste a turn failing to escape. This works even on bosses.
• On the boss floor, you can run away and continue gathering items and heal without wasting a turn before engaging in combat with the boss again.
• You can see the damage in the character sprite. The more armor you lose, the less clothes you have and the more damage you take.
• As long as your armor is at a high number, you don’t have to heal as often as you benefit the same way as the enemy does where high armor means low damage to your health.
• The edited MTL is great. No errors. Then again, there isn’t much dialogue to begin with but credit where credit is due.
• If you play the game correctly later on, it should only take 3-4 turns to kill each enemy.
• The boss's difficulty does increase and makes sure you actually know how to play the game correctly.

Cons:

• The game is either super easy or super hard. There is no inbetween.
• The game is only 3 hours at most since there are only four areas.
• The game only has 10 hentai scenes and don’t tell you the requirement after beating the game. However, it’s obvious what the requirements are. You only get scenes when you lose so one hentai scene is losing all your health in combat. The other is if you let the time run out and you get caught. The escape game also has its own hentai scene should you fail to escape. With how bad the minigame is, you will most likely get the scene.
• The escape minigame is really buggy. The problem is the game explains how you just need to pick one of the four arrow keys and the bar will go down. The problem is that it’s completely random and then it resets after you pick the correct one. I would have shown which one was on the screen so it wouldn’t be so clunky. The game also says if Karen runs out of HP, you fail the mission but you can’t open the menu during this so the only way to lose is to not escape in time. This was the lowest point of the game for me.
• The story forgot to deal with the mysterious person that knocks Karen out at the end of area 3. We just bypass them entirely and go straight to the final boss without trying to deal with that person. It’s just odd given how much we know about Karen is established that she doesn’t leave anyone alive.
• This is very minor but I wish the game had a calculator on how much damage you do based on the armor of the enemy. There were times I miscalculated and wasted an extra turn trying to kill the enemy because a higher armor reduces damage by a certain amount.
• I hate the most about this game is every time your armor takes a certain amount of damage, the game shows the damage sprite of Karen. This isn’t a problem in early game where the enemy doesn’t do that much damage to begin with but in the third and last area where two hits is enough to chip your armor away is annoying as hell. It wastes like three extra seconds when I’m trying to mash my way out of enemies.
• I think this is just me but in the last area, the RNG wasn’t really in my favor in terms of enemy placement. I got lucky with trap placement but the enemies showed up on every other tile and near the staircase. This will pertain to something else.
• You spend the later half of the game in the menu constantly healing yourself. The fact you can’t use multiple healing items at once and the menu kicks you out after each heal is a time waster.
• Another minor thing that is either due to the game or the translation is that sometimes, the HP/SP doesn’t match what is on the screen. I’ll go into the menu and it tells me that I am higher than what I actually am. I did a double-take one time and it almost cost me.
• Traps are the fucking worse. Nothing triggers me more than having a perfect 69-69 on my attack/pow and then landing on a trap that cuts the pow in half. -_- Traps go away over time if you stick on the floor too long or when you enter the next area. The worst traps are the ones that zap your health and armor health per step you take over the ones that cut your attack/pow status in half.