Unity - Aikagura [v2023-06-29] [Unholy Creation]

The rating being 2.5 stars (at the time of writing this review) is criminal. This game may not be as good as the best of the best side scrollers, but is it still leagues ahead of the average H-game, thus my 5 star rating.

I'll first address some of the negatives that other reviewers addressed and then I will give my own summary.

Bugs:
I did not encounter a single bug during my entire playthrough. I also played the official version from DLSite, so that may be why. It at least seems that all bugs that other reviewers described have been fixed.

Difficulty:
I completed the game on Very Hard difficulty on my first playthrough without ever having to grind EXP. One boss took quite a few attempts, but everything else went pretty smoothly. The game becomes significantly easier when played on Easy or Normal. Everyone should be able to beat the game regardless of skill level.

If you die to a boss, you respawn right next to it. You can respec for free, so you can always attempt different builds if needed. Certain builds turn all bosses into complete jokes even on Very Hard.

Combat Jank:
This game's combat is inspired by Sekiro, but it ignored some of the core design choices of Sekiro, resulting in the combat being a bit weird at first. Like in Sekiro, you can deflect most attacks. But unlike Sekiro, your deflect has a wind up animation. This means you have to use your deflect right before you get hit. Also unlike Sekiro, you cannot animation cancel your basic attack by deflecting. This means the entire wind down of the attack animation must play out before you start deflecting.

These things combined make it feel as though you get hit even though you deflected. Once you get used to it, it is still a fun combat system though. But the combat is also significantly slower than Sekiro, as you can't just spam basic attacks and then react to the boss. You must instead always ensure that you have time to finish your attack animation and then complete your deflect wind up animation before you get hit.

As for enemy wind up animations, some of them are pretty bad. But due to the forgiving respawn points and short cuts, it never becomes frustrating before you learn their attacks.

You can also just jump over most attacks. I almost only deflected against bosses and a handful of enemies.

Level Design:
The areas are a bit too big for my liking, but it is still tolerable. They aren't quite as big as to commit the "giant empty levels" sin that often occurs in this genre.

If you find certain enemies frustrating, then you can just run past most enemies. Sometimes you are forced into combat, but if you just have a good build and you focus the annoying enemy, then this should never be a problem for you.

There are two or three cheekily placed traps, but other than that almost all traps are completely visible and are not frustrating. If you enter youkai form, then all traps get a red highlight, making them impossible to accidentally step into.

H-content:
All scenes are animated and high quality. Though some enemies' "H-attacks" are just grapple animations with no penetration.

The total enemy variety and scene amount is ok. Could be better, but it is by no means bad.

During defeat scenes, you control the pace of the scene by pressing M, or whatever the "cancel" keybind is for you.

There isn't really any corruption.

Summary:
A very solid game with some rough edges. Most problems that others have expressed have either been completely fixed (or least fixed in the official version) or can easily be circumvented by just playing on Easy difficulty. This game is definitely worth your time if things such as no-corruption isn't a deal breaker for you.

Really buggy. Stuck in walls, trapped in teleport menu routinely. Enemies have very frustrating slow attack animations with little to no windup combined with very few iframes from the dodge, no iframes after being hit, extremely long recovery times, and little to no poise or poise recovery. While the addition of enemy poise was an ambitious choice, it was too easily broken by leveling the kick ability early, and often poise recovery on enemies is incredibly fast. Fast enough that you may be better off fishing out an attack and hitting from behind rather than try to break poise. Almost every boss has a big attack that is just past your dodge distance no matter how you time it so you're constantly juggling to jump or dodge with very little cue which is which. Typically there's safety behind enemies but you have very little forward movement or iframes so it's quite a gamble.

Platforming and enemies/trap placement is outright malevolent. Lots of obscured traps right where you'd like to jump to. The flying skulls are as annoying as the ones in Doom. They like to float just out of reach and then rush and chain stun you. Long gauntlets just before the next save. A lot of zones have marked treasure that won't be accessible until later when a single movement ability is unlocked or you obtained a fetch quest for it which is very frustrating.

The leveling/xp system is fairly easy to grind out if desired, but vast majority of abilities are useless as they are slow, consume too much stamina, and leave you wide open to counter-attack. The equipable passive abilities are also very weak. One increases yoko form duration, one increases healing item effect, one gives a incremental recovery, and last a poison resist. Even at max level and fully stacked, the yoko form and regen barely improve survivability as it still only takes 1 or 2 hits to fall and because of how quickly you can be chain stunned. There are no ways to increase the stamina bar or recovery (except for one ability with a very minor stamina recovery buff to the blue orbs), so you're forced to only use the cheapest ability, the staff thrust.

While the game has a decent gallery system, trying to watch a scene while playing is a guaranteed death from the previous issues, how fast damage increments, and the extremely slow progression of the scenes. One of the more interesting mechanics of these linemarvel-like platformers is the status effects, but they're extremely underutilized here. They unfortunately get cleared whenever you save/heal no matter what, and in the case of arousal is almost a guaranteed death.

Story is as generic as it gets. You learn backstory as you absorb bosses power a la Megaman and shockingly they're motivated by revenge. Does Mitsuki empathize with them? Not really. She cries about being possessed and shunned for it, but there isn't even a learning to love/accept yourself resolution. There are 2 npcs that give you fetch quests to find keys to doors that block progress. They only offer a bare minimum of dialogue and I didn't get attached to either.

game as ok for a few level ... full of bug though. and most of the levels are useless filler with one mob every 2min.

and then ... red dragon boss, let's have a boss with 5pixel hitbox, that are halfway through the air, and is somehow immun to most of the skill even if they hit the right area ?

wouldn't be so bad if the game had not stolen half my skill point up to this point by using them but not unlocking the skill ... oh yeah did i mention the game offer you an easy mode (youko power) if you die to much on a boss ? easy mode that does NOTHING, and in fact make you WEAKER because it use some of your precious passive skill slot ...

i really hope this is not a final build ....

[v2023-06-29]

The combat is way too janky at times, and for an average game that's enough to make it not worth playing.
Now what made me quit:
It's not good, below acceptable, don't play it, it might seem fine, but it gets boring, tedious and -AT THE WORM BOSS- infuriating

finally the full version, I like the game, it's good, the story is about a half-fox human, but it's lacking in devices, I have to have a better one on my laptop, it's a bit laggy, the problem, thanks you

You can tell the dev trying to work on multiple projects at once has taken a toll on the game's overall quality. There were blatant corners cut, reuse of old mobs in later stages, one of the mobs introduced in the slums literally reusing a h-scene the spider game over scene feeling weirdly unfinished.

There's also an issue with how the game is balanced. Enemies both hit like a truck and are hit spongey by default and the easy mode passive you get overcorrects this because it makes YOU the hit sponge.

It also feels weird how lackluster the yuri content is. Save for the one boss' game over scene, they're mostly all Ryona grapples. Even Night of Revenge had more Yuri H-Scenes and that game felt like half of the female mobs in that had gore finishers instead of an actual sex scenes.

Overall a kind of mediocre game, but I'd still play this over 1000 Still CG visual novels that all look the same.

Kinda bad really, not a lot of enemy variety, not a lot of scenes. Enemies repeat over and over again. If you play it 100% legit, good luck with that, enemies are waaaaay tanky than they need to. Previous games were better personally. A shame really, was expecting more for this game. The gallery is kynda meh, some scenes are good, but other are nothing, spider bites you, a frog vores you, the enemy in the slum is just a soldier reskin scene. Enemies dont interact with each other.

Conclussion: Meeeh

It would be much more interesting if the developer focused on status effects, changes in the main character and other corruption stats, which in fact does not exist. But instead the developer focused on non hentai gameplay and regular combat. Why? It's a hentai, so please do a hentai design. If I want to play a 2D platformer it definitely will not be this game..
The only mechanics of "corruption" is breasts growth, that's all. Scenes & Endings just sucks

Don't waste your time and just look at the gallery, which is done poorly as well.

[v2022-08-30] Great atmosphere and beautiful looking game but has unnecessary gaps and lacks on the H content.

If you like simple side scrollers and grind this is for you.

It can be difficult if you don't grind even on normal difficulty.

Controls are not frustrating and are adjustable.

Currently, the game isn't fully translated so you'll miss on the tutorial and "lore" (still beatable).

The fighting system has a bit of depth though (Stun, parries, criticals...) which makes the fights interesting.

However, the h-scenes are the big problem of this game. They are underwhelming. You can not interact with them and some aren't even h-scenes.

Although, the thing that i like about this game is the soundtracks and its cultural vibe.

Aikagura has potential and there's still time to enhance it. I hope we'll see some improvements in the next update

Another Japanese erotic game where the main character is a girl
I have played many games of this genre, and I do not expect a direct wow effect. Everything is linear and simple. From point A to point B
This game, although it has graphics, does not lag, monsters are unique, but it's so boring, the locations are mostly empty. The heroine walks at a fast speed on standard. Everything happens so fast in the game that I can't fully experience it.
There are too many games in this genre. So far, for the efforts and graphics 3. But for now, it’s better to play the already legendary game NIGHT OF REVERENGE

There is a plot, graphics, a lot of settings, etc. I think it is from this game that many developers are inspired. But no matter how many games of this genre they would not make them as a legendary game.
In this game itself, there are reflections in the water, the animations are not very terrible, there is little 18+ content. We are waiting for a normal game through 2 year

Version reviewed: v2021-12-27

Summary
Just a "proof of concept demo" as it says in the overview. I found the gameplay to only be just better than the usual crap. I haven't played UnHolY DisAsTeR but this one doesn't feel as good as UnHolY SaNctuaRy nor UnHolY JaiL.

Presentation
The game looks good but some of the animations are pretty stiff such as jumping. The UI is simple and functional. Unfortunately, none of the dialog or help text is translated to English yet. There's a nice small touch in that rain or otherwise becoming wet will make her top transparent. By the way, i thought the music was good.

Gameplay
In its current state, the gameplay feels lacking. The platforming that i saw felt more annoying than challenging. The first few levels are just move to the right with minimal jumping while killing some stuff with one attack. I think they're easing the player into the game too much. The focus seems to be on fighting which is not something i'm good at but found to be too braindead on normal difficulty. Perhaps it's more enjoyable if you like fighting and you raise the difficulty from normal. But for me, it was just spam the one attack and move away or block when i saw the enemy would start an attack. Even with my slow reaction times, i had no trouble on normal difficulty. I wasn't expecting much anyway but again i found it more annoying than anything else.

Sexual Content
It's very disappointing that this game uses that old idea that sexual content should count as damage and lower your health. It does have a gallery but i'd rather enjoy the animation when it happens in-game. It's not worth losing all your health to view and endless loop. The animations i saw seemed to only have 2 phases: a warm-up phase of sorts and then the main phase. I didn't see too many animations though because i don't like losing on purpose just to fill the gallery. I was pretty disappointed that the giant leeches can't combo you when you're down. When i got knocked down, only one leech will suck one boob. Note that if you play with mouse + keyboard, you can scroll the mousewheel back and forth to quickly escape the sex attacks.

Rating
3/5 because it's better than the usual crap and the overview calls it a "proof of concept demo." If this were a full release, i'd lower it to 2/5.