This games great so far, bit shallow, but not bad.
I reached the end of content pretty fast as it's a very recent remake. I got the OG version running off newgrounds but i can't enter dungeons in it for some reason? Very annoying.
But i can do everything outside of that, so i feel like we can cover some ground here for those interested in what the differences are!
Also i'll go over what i'd like to see in the future of the game.
Firstly i want to cover the good changes(imo).
The minigame in the OG is insane, it has the minigame of v2 in a corner of the screen while you dodge out of and into different hearts in three lanes and collect all of the hearts with space, all quite fast, some are variable speeds, if you miss a heart and let it go past you then you take damage, if you touch a bad heart then damage, you cannot move left or right on the track you are always seconds from failure which basically means you wasted a day in game, after beating it once i was just frustrated, there is an option to have it autoplay but that locks you out of mid-grade rewards and higher, so either get gud or get fukt. Needless to say i *much* prefer the new system, though it does get boring quickly, at least im not playing guitar hero at 3x speed with land mines while i juggle fuck bars in the top right.
The art is *much* improved, if you go to the tavern in V2 and gamble you'll see the art quality before hand in the patrons.
The new assets look worlds better, though i do believe some of the new art assets for items and backgrounds are AI generated which will lock this game from being a steam sale. This could be temporary, idk.
The UI/UX is improved, yes, i know it's still not good, it's better, hopefully Ellebelle will add more tooltips when we hover over stuff, maybe text telling us which submenu goes where? It's present in the home menu's inventory and skill options but is weirdly missing from what any of the stats mean, and just not present at all in the dungeon.
They just added the ability to unequip items as of the last update(0.14), this was not present in V1 somehow.
There are resolution options now! The old game is locked to a tiny screen, i will say the new version doesn't seem to do 1920x1080(the most common resolution iirc) if you change it even once, no idea why, but that's easily fixed if you are comfortable editing your registry and never touch the button again.
The animations are very nice in the new version, i dont know if that was dungeon content but i didn't see them in the old version.
Now onto the Neutral changes
Food system isn't present, and doesn't appear to be coming back as the parts of the house that were used for that have different purposes now. The good is that's one less thing to keep track of, though originally this was supposed to be a difficult high preparation dungeon crawler and will likely follow that theme here which also means we lose on a buff mechanic in the game which is bad for the complexity of the game, there's a billion coomer games that have no complexity, i would much prefer if this one had more to do laterally like the old version does. We also don't need to worry about starvation or hiring cooks, so we do lose game depth here.
You no longer have rent payment to worry about.
The farm doesn't get weeds, which also means you dont need to hire gardeners and we lose complexity to the management part of the game.
Now we come to the bad, though much of this i suspect we will see return as this project comes together.
You cannot level up base stats in the new version, there's a leveling/XP mechanic in V1, and you can directly pump your vital stats without equipment, not so in V2 as of now.
There are so many more items in V1, it's actually crazy, likely this just needs assets and implementation though.
The town is half the size, we lost the Herbalist, Mining Company, and Church in V2, these were all places to hire specialist companions/workers and had unique benefits such as the mining company being an investment system to grow wealth, the church offering buffs and benefits to playing pure, and the herbalist had the plants which helped de-clutter the general goods store
Reasonably i understand downsizing as there was a drastic change to how companions work and workers were scrapped or are not added yet, but this means our only shop which has RNG sales daily now does the work of all shops combined which makes the Sales table really cramped, we could use more diverse shops to have random drop tables more spread out so you dont have days of no reagents or have to wait 20 in game days to see equipment you can use, which i have run into, and it's a problem if you're save scumming the wells drop table to get items since the stores unreliable. Also i will say i like the management section and it really sucks to see the game turning away from it.
What i'd like to see here is a return of some game depth in management and construction, but i understand if the scope of the game has changed, and i would love to see different stores in town so the drop tables on the RNG daily sales isn't so brutal.
The Sex move acquisition, it's too easy, you can get tons of goblin cum with one good run in under day 5, go gambling, and if the well/store don't fuck you then you can get all the skills almost immediately, it would be phenomenal if the skill system was expanded and we could use the excess cum power elsewhere, maybe for XP or to learn regular skills as the premise of the game is that through cum magic we learn wizardry extremely quickly, all i'm seeing is daily buffs and sex skills, my wizard doesn't know a single spell unless she slurps teacher dry, this doesn't make sense in the games story, though it does make the elixirs more potent game design wise. I would prefer if the skills were learnable but the elixirs empowered them if we did learn them.
V1 has you learn the skills in direct order with the brothel training by doing the minigame, you eventually have to do it yourself, it's more difficult/rewarding but also i do prefer v2's ease of use, it's just too easy.
The Economy is terribly unbalanced in V2, everything is more expensive, and you make less money per day in the brothel, i spent like 2 irl hours gambling to get a companion and some equipment, which i then could not wear because it was too heavy and i didn't have strength buffing reagents.
The dungeons even worse, literally you make tens of gold per fight in the first one, and the cheapest item is like 50 gold, I'm hopeful this will be addressed with later changes.
Way less companions, there are like 1/8th as many companions, this has to do with the change from having a management system to just using them for daily cum. Less isn't always bad if it allows you to add more depth, this is not the case here.
Scope is much reduced but with little pay off, managements cut, half the RPG elements are missing, the brutal prep for the crawl has like 1/3rd the options. It is very early in Development though so we can hope to see a come back here. We did get like 3 animations and some looped sounds in the trade off, definitely not worth if that's the extent of it.
Now i'd like to discuss how i would want to see this game go forward.
Add more tool-tips please, let me hover over things for information, half the stuff is guesswork and trial, especially the dungeon, do you know when i figured out the red/blue arrows were initiative order? Just now while i was looking over things.
Nerf that fucking drummer, kills my runs more than anything else, corruption makes buffing allies suck, and he can full restore willpower in one turn, also he hits like a truck, what the fuck. Literally more of an issue than the troll.
The Minigame could use more options, i'm not saying i want hyper train omega heart rush back, i am saying it gets old fast, also the finish button doesn't let me see them creampie wizard which is sad, just because i'm not trying to get more than 100 goblin cum doesn't mean i want to not get my reward for winning the fight. as the animations/art are probably the most time consuming part of the conversion i hesitate to request more diversity here, but it could use something, maybe let me use the sex skills with a cooldown for more cum or higher multiplier, idk, it's just a little barren.
I'd like to see more diversity of preparation options before entering the dungeon like in V1, it gives me much more to work towards refining and upgrading which helps with the longevity of the game and would add more money sinks besides items/companions, which could then be more reasonably priced.
But if you are decided on the move away from the management style of V1 then i would very much like to see deeper RPG mechanics such as more town events/quests, it's so barren, you can haggle, black out, gamble, or work in the brothel. Thats all.
There's no quests except the main story, basically the only RPG elements are the combat/items, you can only define your character as more or less slutty, you can barely interact with the world, and the systems are very shallow. I would like to see more here.
Back to art/animations, it's fine as is, i would like to see more variety, at least a new three for different creatures such as in the next dungeon. Obviously more hot artwork is appreciated.
The economy is awful as i touched on early, it takes waaay too much to buy stuff for what we're getting from working at the brothel and dungeon delving, a full run of the first dungeon nets you about as much as a perfect day at the brothel, just under in gold, and depending on RNG another 700+/-300 in item sales. You will likely not be able to full run the dungeon without a more powerful companion, and equipment.
What this means is you scrounge for gold at first, you probably get about 100 gold a day from brothel and two levels of the gobbo dungeon, the well or gambling is the only way you make money at first, forget the dungeon until either you're kitted out or you have the third companion or higher, which will take you either a long ass time irl gambling, cheating, or spamming through days to get enough to afford the dude/stuff.
This sucks tbh, i would like it if the brothel payout scaled with charm, the dungeons will scale as more come out i assume, currently companions are crazy expensive one time purchases, but we can only wait to see how this goes as new content and therefore new money routes come to fruition.
I look forward to seeing the new story progress, but i would like to see side quests and other characters so it can feel more like an RPG rather than a bare bones porn game, but from their other work i'm positively optimistic.
