Great game. The story and management gameplay kept me interested, and I finished it in about 20 hours or so. You are a lord who gets his lands and titles stolen from him and then spends the rest of the game, as the title suggests, going from rags to riches. Tons of sex in the game, but other than some great AI and still pictures for sex scenes, it's nothing to write home about visually. The writing and story are pretty good. I did see a few grammatical errors, but overall, you understand what is going on, and the sex scenes are pretty hot in the text, if not a bit short sometimes. To be honest, there are almost too many sex scenes in the game so you won't be craving for content. The management is well-designed once you start buying and owning buildings. Once you figure the game out, it is pretty simple. There were some things I could never really figure out, though. The game kind of throws you into the deep end of these management-based activities and doesn't explain what your goal is or how to achieve it. Thank god for saves. I had to experiment several times to figure out how to start earning money. But once I did, thankfully, the game wasn't super grindy and had a good reward system of progress for each management-based activity. The biggest thing I can recommend is once you start owning buildings, make sure you hire and assign your girls in those buildings. If you miss one day of this at the beginning of the management, you can seriously slow down your progress or, worse go bankrupt in just a few days. The game tells you that you own a building but doesn't explain anything further, so assign those girls immediately. Don't be like me and start interacting with random things and go bankrupt in 3 days. The ending was pretty good, too, but I think there are different endings based on how well you prepare for the endgame using money and influence.
Now for the bad aspects of the game and why I am only giving it 4 stars. One, I ran into several bugs, one even stopped my progression during the first chapter that made me reload to earlier on int he chapter to get past it. Fortunately, there is a skip button, so it didn't take too much time to get back to where I was, but I almost quit when I ran across it. Secondly is the skills and dialog-based decisions. I do like how the game incorporates skills into dialogue options, and it gives you the illusion of free will, but that's just it. It's all an illusion. Most of the time when you fail at something, you succeed anyways, but are either saved by someone else or succeed differently. Never is this more apparent than in the end. One try at the ending, I was failing every check, and somehow, I still won. It had me scratching my head and wondering why skills were here in the first place if they were this difficult to pass with maxed out skills, and yet you still succeed even when it tells you that you failed. The only times when skills seemed to matter were in the middle of sex scenes and the occasional side quest where, if you succeeded, you would get a better ending or reward for succeeding. There were many times I failed a sex skill with someone and had to come back the next day and try again until I succeeded. But mostly, as far as the main story goes, fail or pass the skill checks, it's all an Illusion, and you end up at the same place in the end. My last and final complaint is the achievements and it kind of ties into my first complaint. I completed several achievements in game that did not register under the achievements tab as completed. So naturally, this bug was irritating as well when I got to the end of the game and saw that many of my achievements were not complete.
In summary, I found the game very enjoyable and worth a one time play through if you do not mind AI art and No animations. There is Audio, though, with most of the main girls you have a scene with. Moans and such. If not for the bugs and minor issues with the skill system, it would be a great game. I am giving this one 4 out of 5 stars and hope the developer keeps putting out new games and improving his skills. He is already talented, blending management, story, and AI into one entertaining game. I look forward to seeing what he can do once AI gets more advanced and his skills improve all the more.
