VN - Others - Completed - Arterial of Origins [v2.0 + Append 1-3] [Eushully]

I give 4 stars to Soukoku no Arterial, but it could easily be 3 because although the game can be very entertaining, it is very difficult at the beginning, which can discourage many new players early in the game. This, coupled with the enormous amount of dialogues, and the fact that often the hours invested are not reflected in rewards in the form of artwork, really makes it necessary to approach this game as a challenging one rather than a straightforward hentai game.

This game is enjoyed more in the new game+ once you have enough strong cards to breeze through it. Unfortunately, you have to play the game, over and over again to obtain all the art for each of the 7 girls available as heroines. The battle system can be very tedious until you have good enough cards to use the automatic command.

Finally, my advice, if you are going to play the game, is to lose the important battle in chapter 3. This will lead you to the demon route and choose Sina Sayane as the heroine. This route provides you with the best cards that can be used over and over again until you get the best ones, copy many cards, obtain several mirrors for level 1 cards, and have a lot of patience.

Eushully games are one of the rare varieties of Hentai games that actually invests heavily in an interesting, challenging gameplay experience in addition to multiple romance options. For me, this is hella fun. But the game still does have some workarounds for your type anyway: not only is there an auto-battle button (there's a lot of trash mob decks wandering around, so most players will make use of this anyway), but there's also a dungeon (part of the first 'append disk') available starting at chapter one, Hetares Dungeon, that gives you a bunch of cheaty items if you run it. The game kinda scolds you for using it, but it only makes the combat easier without changing the story/available scenes.

Gameplay-wise, it's part a strategy game and part an RPG-inflected card battle game. Strategy I can generally get behind, but while I usually don't get into card games, I think this particular card game style is actually quite fun to play. Your hero card is one of your party members as the 'leader,' with a larger health pool, generally more attack points and special abilities, who stands in for the player's overall health pool. You also summon other monsters/items/party member representative cards to fight for you, as your deck and playing field allows. You try to deplete your opponent's leader's health to defeat them (usually; sometimes other gameplay conditions apply), and they try to do the same to you to defeat you. You level up your party through combat, collect cards, apply equip cards to get RPG-like bonuses, etc. I have really been enjoying it, but it definitely requires the concentration of an actual game rather than the mindless clicking of your usual hentai fare. Expect to build decks, make strategic choices, and get your ass handed to you sometimes even if you ARE paying attention. Also, not all monsters are beatable the first time around. If you want to see all the content, expect SEVERAL replays.

Story-wise, Eushully games tend to be fairly boilerplate stuff. Usually it's a monster-filled swords n' sorcery fantasy world of some kind, but in this case it's more of a supernatural otherworld high school story. It feels super dumb to write that that's ordinary, but I'm not generally an anime guy so I just know that's a very common setting for Japanese fiction. Expect a whole bunch of quirky high school ladies all in love with the main character, including his little sister (yup, it's an incest game! Again, I love that Eushully does incest stuff, YMMV), there's corporate intrigue, and a devils-vs-angels-vs-humans storyline that's kinda Shin Megami Tensei-style. Still, it's generally well-written and interesting enough.

Art-wise, this game looks great. Not just the hentai (yes, it's got mosaic censorship), which is of course a major emphasis of the game; but also the regular characters, items, and story graphics. There isn't a huge variety to the female characters (do you like your white teens in busty or non-busty form? What's your favorite anime hair color?), but again: lots of choices Eushully makes are traditional hentai stuff, albeit with much more depth and care than most companies put in.

All told, this is a great game and we're lucky it finally got a full translation. Considering how cumbersome this is to play with a text hooker, this version is SO much more user-friendly in English now. I'd say that, if you enjoy hentai at all and wished there was just more gameplay in your hentai games, this should be an instant download. Five stars, no question.

Man what a load of crap to unpack here. First off this game is a little old. But not that old. So why is it annoying as fuck to install? Good question. Either way I can't fault the game for that, but if you can get it installed and playing you're in for a very mid-shitty time. This "card game" (if you can really call it that) is very unfair, annoying, and just overall a slog to get through. It doesn't feel fair nor does it feel very tactical.

Art: 4/5 - Probably one of the few saving graces of this game. But of course it's an Eushully game so the art should be at least somewhat decent and it is. There's a good amount of H Scenes and the characters are unique and cute. Got some lolis, got some tig ol bitties, and you got some average waifus. But it's censored. So that sucks.

Gameplay: 1/5 - When I first started this game, I thought the gameplay was fun and unique. That quickly changed by the time I got half way through the story. I'll break down the gameplay real quick if you're just wondering about that.

The game is played through cards as a MTG type game. You play a card and can battle the enemy's cards. You attack is higher than their hp? You kill it. It isn't? It lives but keeps its damaged hp. You have a leader card that is you and if it dies you lose. Your goal is to kill the other enemy leader. Simple. Only issue is that while they're are a lot of interesting and cool effects they all fucking suck. The best effects are to just simply raise your attack so you can beat down stronger monsters. The developers seemingly knew this and to make the game harder just makes the enemy AI shit down your throat through power creep. On top of that most of them have insanely OP Finish Arts (global powers that slowly build up that you can activate for board effects) that refill their whole hand. So towards the later stages of the game, an average battle looks like this.

The enemy leader is a 10/120. 10 atk and 120hp. You are a 10/100. Ok fine the enemy leader needs help thats fine. He starts the board with 3 10/12's that are all super high cost monsters. You start with your opening hand and in order to get anything that will kill those guys fast you have to play your whole hand. Sadly because of the way "mana" works in this game you have to build up your board over time and can't just slam what he can. You trade back and forth and thing seem even, but his leader card innately allows him to just player better cards. So even when the board somehow gets even. He uses his ability to draw 6 cards and you lose the fight. You could maybe bum rush him but his cards do more damage and focus killing your cards usually so you lose the battle anyway. Most of the time I had to cheese battles by playing low cost cards to fuck with the AI in to attacking them.


I love card games and I hate the fact that towards the end of the game the seemingly only viable strategy is to just bum rush the leader or get lucky. There's no skill involved outside of stuffing your deck with the stronger beat sticks you can find and hope you can out RNG the enemy or fuck with the AI so you can win. You can't even grind your way out of the hole either because you don't get better cards by grinding usually, only through story events and character side stories. It's just a very unfair and unbalanced card game that is just so fucking unfun.

Story: 3/5 - The story is pretty mid as fuck. The characters are interesting for sure, and it has a pretty cool premise imo. Basically the world is converging with another and the angels and demons have decided they want to fight each other in that world. So you and your friends decide in order to stay alive in this other world you gotta make some choices. Side with the angels, devils or be neutral. You side with the angels, I'd imagine some gay shit happens where you save the world and fuck the hot angel titty lady. You side with the devils, you obviously turn evil or something and rape everyone for power. You side with the humans (route I did) and you try to survive the war while uncovering the mysteries of what happened. Spoiler alert:
That being said it has a super interesting premise. Unfortunately it's wasted on this dumb fuck card game that is super annoying and unfun past the first few chapters. I got to the end of the human route at the start of the 2nd to last battle of the game before I decided fuck this dumb fuck game and just grabbed a 100% save to beat my dick. Perhaps this game is better on a 2nd playthrough since it's very obviously designed to be played multiple times, but if they couldn't make the game fun the first play through I have no fucking idea why they thought you'd play a second.

Overall: 2/5 - H scenes make my dick hard, but the gameplay makes me want to blow my brains out. Characters are unique enough and have good dialogue, but the thought of having to go back to the stupid ass card game to see more of them doesn't make them worth it.

Kind of a disappointiment after playing some of Eushully's other games.
The writing of this game is very subpar compared to even some of the publisher's poorer titles

The characters are fun and I generally like how they play out in the storyline, but route specific events just feel really stiff and artificial.

The gameplay is what it is. It starts off pretty fun and becomes really boring once fights start being trivial but still long. An attempt was clearly made to make power scalling very non linear and I don't think it worked out too well.

The pacing of the game doesn't help either, doing a bad job at mixing in their different types of events. The whole journey to MHI in the angels route is a very egregious exemple. There are lots of places that could have benefitted from a break in the combat, maybe just a brief camp to catch up with the party. It felt realy dry with only the short cutscenes serving as intermission

All in all, not a bad game, just does not live up to what I expected from Eushully