Welp, I normally don't jump on a TL this fast when it comes out, but in this specific case, I was curious about some things, so here I am after playing the game.
Before anything else, thank you
Daedroth for your efforts. Your TLs are always appreciated, no matter what various nay-sayers might comment. On my end personally, I also appreciate the TL notes. I always think that sort of thing should be included even in official TLs, because Japanese is a convoluted language that rarely translates 1 to 1 into English.
Moving on.
The Asuna game. The First project of FullSky Workshop.
My upcoming rant of questionable sanity will take into account the fact that this IS the Dev's 1st game, so regardless of what they did after, it's going to be judged all on its own, so to speak. Context matters and all that jazz.
Still, even with this being the Dev's 1st project (at least under this name, who knows if they're rebranded from something else? That sort of thing happens too...)... this is rather
obviously an intended cash grab. The biggest clue is in how the game is presented visually on dlsite.
What do I mean by that?
Well, you might notice that the game has 3 artists listed. Now, to my knowledge, the most well known of them is
You must be registered to see the links
, and unsurprisingly, the most art that's presented on the game's dlsite page is their art. You might think, based on the dlsite page, that the majority of the art in the game will be their art, and if you're a fan of the artist, you might be tempted to buy the game for that alone.
Tough luck boyo, Hanauna's art is maybe ~40% of the game, though the Append does raise the number somewhat, even if the events are very short. All the boss defeat events along with the University loser near Asuna's home, the bunny club, the otaku events, the beach massage events and about half of the slum events, are all covered by a different artist who I personally know nothing about and care little for. Dunno how other people see it, but their art is not great tbh. In some cases, barely tolerable. Standing H-events as they call them are covered by the 3rd artist, another unknown to me personally, but their art-style at least looks better and matches Hanauna's better. Bunches of generic events are also covered by that second artist.
Of course, you won't find this out until
after you buy the game, because the dlsite page doesn't give any actual numbers on CG splits between the three artists or whatnot.
Leaving that aside, the game reuses CGs
a lot. In fact, outside of the Append (and sometimes not even there), there's almost no CGs that are uniquely tied to an event, except for, I think, the handjob CG that's used in the Maid Caffe stuff. That one doesn't pop up anything else. However, for example, the CG used in the Bunny-girl event with Asuna riding dick is also used (with an outfit swap of course) in the cult event and I'm pretty sure there was a boss defeat event that used it, and probably some generic event or two too.
Basically, visually, the events aren't really as varied as one might expect from the number of entries in the gallery. I normally wouldn't criticize it that much... but the dev wasn't honest about it at all, and it
really feels like they used the supposed main artist's name to draw in buyers.
Text-wise, the events are... ok? They're nothing new or amazing tbh. Fairly generic stuff that's typical of FMC games of this ilk. You have the usual smattering of dubious people that want to fuck Asuna, and the usual fuck-talk. It goes from Asuna being reluctant to being a total turbo-slut on Lewd lvl 3. I will give them some points for how much of a turbo-slut she is at that level, the contrast between her reactions at L0-1 and L3 are pretty extreme, and it's really noticeable for the in-combat-fuck events, where Asuna goes from being raped to all but raping her opponents herself, or at least tempting them so hard that even some of them are a tad freaked out by how much of a horny bitch she is.
I found the writing decently fun, and I imagine most people that like MCs that become masochistic super-sluts will enjoy the stuff, especially at L3.
The other problem with the lewd stuff is that it's not really integrated in the rest of the game all that much. The main offender to this is the fact that the game only has ONE ending and Asuna's Lewdness or lack thereof doesn't affect it in any way whatsoever. There's some post-game pseudo-mini-ending things from the Append, but they're not direct consequences to what you did before the ending in any way, and you can
literally do all the H-events in the post-ending period if you want too. Sure, you can earn some money off of the lewd stuff, but you don't really have much use for money outside of initial gearing and paying that debt thing that you don't
need to actually pay off. (You do get the best sword in the game if you pay it all off, but that's not much...)
I suppose there's the lust crystal thing... but... uh... The game doesn't explain that at all, it has no connection to literally anything, it's just sort of an extra that allows you to grind something off of H-events. I dunno. It's nonsensical and weird.
I'll comment on the story here next. As mentioned above, the story isn't affected in any way by Asuna's Lewd level. It's also 100% linear without any kind of deviation or variation whatsoever, and because of that, replay-ability is literally zero. It doesn't help that from my perspective, it reads like someone added together a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool?" brainwaves and threw them at a 14-year-old to mix together. "So, let's have Yakuza, because Yakuza are cool! And a magic meteorite! And mechs! And a lawless underground city like in Taimanin! Also throw in this random slutty witch too, for contrast with Asuna, yeah!" Stir clockwise ten times, anticlockwise another ten times, make sure to sprinkle chuuni every 2 rotations, and voila!
You have this disjointed mess of a story that tries to be funny and cool and to me at least, it falls
very, very flat.
Maybe other people will enjoy it more than me, but quite frankly, the story was
not why I finished this game... I wouldn't recommend this game for its story either.
At this point, I'll talk about the gameplay and the game's design a tad.
The first thing that needs to be said is that this game doesn't do anything new whatsoever in its design. Randomly generated dungeons? The plug-ins for that have existed for a long time in MV and the concept exists since the previous RPGM engine. Mooks in various places that produce a random grope effect when the FMC interacts with them? Old news. Skill Trees? Also old news. Basic H-stats that are mostly just for numbers? Also old news. In-battle H? Also old news.
Now, I'm not saying that every H-game out there has to be some innovative miracle or anything. However, I do believe that there should be some level of effort involved to bring out the best out of those generic plug-ins... and there's none of that here. For the most part, the plug-ins have been used as they were right out of the box. The random dungeons are basic and boring. The monsters are generic. The combat is uninteresting even by RPGM standards. The skill-tree is utterly bizarre in organization and a lot of skills are pointless or you progress through the thing so fast that you quickly end up using just the best skills and nothing else. The Mana to TP and TP to Mana flow that the skills implied is never necessary.
The in-combat H is also utterly eh. First, it's tied to very specific monsters, and on top of that, those monsters give shit rewards, so the
only reason you have to fight them is because you want to see the smut tied to them. The pleasure mechanic is inconsequential too in relation to this, because Asuna doesn't take any damage or anything when she cums, she doesn't lose turns, nothing. Likewise, her being raped in any way in combat doesn't do anything to her, and the H-enemies are so weak that they have no hope whatsoever of ever defeating her outside of the player intentionally trying to lose. Quite frankly, it makes even Acerola and ONEONE1 in-combat smut look impressive by comparison.
Quite frankly, the whole system is terrible with extremely accelerated progression which has you have basically everything by ~Chapter 4 without trying too hard. This makes Chapters 5-7
and 8 feel like a completely pointless slog. But at least you can run away from most of the fights and just fight the mini-boss and boss. That's what I did from Chapter 6 and up for the most part. I suppose I could mention the Arena thing too, which is completely random and pointless. You can beat everything in it during Chapter 1...
It's also
really weird how the dev set-up the rewards. Like. The Chapter 3 boss gives you 100k money, and the chapter 4 boss gives you 200k money, but then the money reward drops drastically for following bosses for no damn reason.
Also, the final boss fight has 3 phases. Ugh. Seriously.
Why?! It's not like it has any mechanics or anything. You just do the exact same thing in every phase, which is keep your HP topped up, keep your buffs up, keep hitting it with the 100 TP skill until it dies.
I also had over 900 skill points by the time I was done, and that was only because I grinded a tad to pay off the full debt.
You don't
need to do that btw. When you beat the game and see the ending and stuff, you automatically get enough money to pay the debt... but it did land me that uber-sword, which made plowing through the bosses a tad faster, so I suppose it wasn't too bad.
All that said, the game isn't terribly grindy or anything. It's monotonous, but you can avoid a lot of the grind if you don't want too, and the abundant H-events does mean that you can spend plenty of time fapping/schlicking/whatever and then spending time with the combat sections and story while you cool off for the next session. At least it has full on mouse support.
Now.
For all that I criticize the game quite a bit. It's not some kind of terrible game or anything... It's just... uber generic. There's absolutely nothing special about it. Not even the art. It's not a terrible way to waste some time, but it's not particularly memorable either.
I guess you could call it a 3 star game, maybe 3.5 stars if you want to be generous given that it was the dev's 1st project and all that... but personally I wouldn't be, because later releases show quite clearly that he knew what he was doing here, setting up this specific frameworks. Not really worth spending money on unless you catch it at a 50% discount. Dev also still doesn't have a bundle set-up for the game+Append... not that the Append is worth much either. It's literally just 5 events and standing images for Asuna's mom along with Shiori. That's it.
