RPGM - Axe Maiden Vana [v1.69p.4] [MaidenSoft]

The lewd events are fine, but the game and combat mechanics are terrible, and in the end the bad outweighs the good: it's not worth it going through the hassle of dealing with such poorly implemented mechanics just to see some 2-frame animations once in a while.

My review is of the Official English Release from Dlsite. I bought the game due to its promising visuals and because it appears when you search for NTR.

The NTR in this game is pretty much a side note, that each girl has a childhood friend who is their true love, but instead they hoe around.

The gameplay is side scroller button mashing, and not as engaging as it could have been.

The game switches between 20 minutes of grind and 20 minutes of infodumping often.

Many game systems are completely unexplained and nothing is intuitive. For example when you gather enough Fairy Wings, you are teleported back to the city but get no reward for the quest. I talked to everyone in town and I guess its a bug in the game, but I can't be sure.

That's a common thing in this game.
You're never sure if its a bug, or just poor game design.

This developer fumbled. Beautiful Art, Shitty Execution.

Battles, card game, dancing minigame, collecting mana orbs as spirit all of these are nearly impossible. The difficulty of this game from it's horrible controls makes souls like games seem like a cake walk.

A 2060 recommended? 8gb of VRAM? This is not an unreal 5 game, this is just a 2d texture swapping nightmare simulator.

Every image represents an animation frame. Which is... terribly implemented for your GPU and likely the engine just loads in all the textures (explaining the 8gb of VRAM recommendation) and swaps the textures in a extremely quick order.

The dev should have a look at 2d animation software such as spline. Otherwise the game becomes more and more terrible in terms of performance and just sheer space usage.

I do like the game, I would rate it 4 stars just for that.

From the Itch.io page. https://maidensoft.itch.io/axe-maiden-vana

This is the current Demo for the game, It is below please enjoy it!

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Note

(Also The Quality of the Audio and Image Files in these builds are not representative of the final build, these are due to compression due to size constraints! )

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It ain't gonna get better unless a engine swap is done.
Are there any other RPGM games that actually do animations like Axe Maiden but without the performance nightmare?

The game could be really great, but is ruined by the terrible engine and balancing issues. The character design is good, and I like to collect the panties as your main armour.

I can appreciate the effort they poured into the beat'n'up combat and dance minigame, but the RPGM engine fails to correctly detect the input every second press resulting only in you being depressed.

Even when the controls work, though, the fights and minigames still are really hard and unless you use the easiest difficulty you won't get anywhere.

PS: As of now the game has a lot of bugs (probably because of the translation), so safe often.

god this game is bad...the art is okay and its animated which is something. But the whole rest... First of all, why is this game 4gb? Then crashes all the time. Non logical event management. So many things are so weird and stupid. Nothing is like you would expect it to be. what are the devs smoking?

A game that is amazing for how well it is made, yet how poorly it is designed. I'd put it in at least top 10% ERPG on the site in terms of workmanship (art & animations, game mechanics, UI, etc), if not higher, and it's all for naught because the gameplay manages to be so obnoxious and contrived that you get an eye twitch and delete the game within 15 minutes despite appreciating its sheer quality.

Its not that bad, the problem comes around the main plot, the fetish for having a guy watching the sex scene outside of his body is so forced and unnecessary, is kinda like the game tries to compel a big audience but non of that feels good for everyone, either people who likes or hate netorare (I hate ntr but this is not the point).

This feels like could be an amazing game if the author just focus and tries to see what it wants for it without follow trendings. The gameplay is really good but the sexual content has no direction.

I think the author should drink less energy drinks, almost all gameplay mechanics about racing with ai, which one of you is faster. It could be better if there a two versions for battles, tactical and action

This seemed like a very cool game just from the screenshot alone. I was really looking forward to how combat would work considering its made in rpgm. Which was very unfortunate when I found out how jank it all is.

In a fight, your melee attack is very unreliable due to it having oddly small hitboxes that doesn't match the animations at all. Besides, all you need to do is run and spam projectiles because they have a more consistent hitbox. Once your hp goes to half, you can spend time just healing yourself and running away. A good way to just beat everyone is to use the electric move and then fire ball and wait it out since they will be inflicted by 2 DOT status (3 once you get the stronger fireball).

Enemies don't tend to approach much as they will stay in their corner and just spam their strongest moves which usually goes full screen, can't be reacted to, still hits you even if you jump over them slightly wrong, and still inflict status when you block it. They can also just spend meter on shooting 3 projectiles in a row so that even if you do jump over them, you can only dodge 2 and end up getting hit by the third one if they time it right.

Rushing in and attacking (As Vana) is incredibly awful since enemies either do not flinch at all or recovers way too fast where they can just block your next moves. You don't get that luxury though because you can get flinched when hit and it will cancel your attack. Being able to move while attacking is actually more helpful for the enemy. A really annoying one is the hob goblin which have a really fast melee attack with good range that beats yours so they can just run in and start attacking, forcing your to block until they're done. Enemies can also use skills instantly out of block as well which is very annoying. The non-existent start up on these skills makes it even worse.

Defense in this game is non-existent as all you can do is hold block and time your jumps. Characters don't get pushed back from blocking attacks or have any other option to get out. Not even any defensive meter options. All of these combined makes the core action part of this game very stale. I understand that it's an rpgm game but wow.

As the other characters you can just use your strongest move, buff yourself and then rush in. Their damage buff is strong enough to deal massive damage on block and also have good enough HP regen for you to ignore any damage done to you for that duration. Their attack hitboxes are smaller than the animations implies as well but the positives just outweighs this. Yes, playing Mira this way is more optimal than being a mage and spamming projectiles.

I do like the idea of stronger enemies approaching you and forcing battles. Makes your travel around the map more dangerous and you have to plan your route carefully. I managed to outrun them every time once I realize how they work so I don't really mind that. It is weird though that the stronger enemies dont give away as much money and bp compared to others. I might be wrong but I believe Camiella gives as much money and bp as Barod who is considered stronger. But Alex is the one who gives more money compared to others, yet his difficulty is yellow. In my opinion though, the strongest opponent has to be Caldan. Her normal attacks are fast, huge and fills more than half the screen. She's as strong as Barod. Also, enemies can rematch you almost instantly after you defeat them. So, that's something you really need to watch out for in case you don't want to get stabbed suddenly.

Also, I hope quests from the guild will become re-doable every day instead of being a one-off. Making money in this game is already strict, and it also doesn't help that the game's economy and its items are in a weird place where some items that seem good are cheap and some are just way too expensive for what they offer (The immunity equips are extremely pricey compared to how little money you earn in this game through normal means.) Vana's Guild Quests are also a good way to gather items and resources in the case you bring a pickaxes and shovels. But, you wouldn't know this on a first play through until you're already doing it. Which means you would need to reload a save just so you get access to it. The prices for the tools are oddly pricey as well compared to the little durability they have and some rock/holes needing stronger versions.

Some positives now though. I really like how the game approaches the characters. Since you can choose to run this game pure virgin, while having the choice to have the others get dirty if you need a different kind of action. The mechanic behind this is nice as well, being tied to DP and makes sense as to why they would go to that length. It really makes the experience a lot more proper (and possibly hotter depending on the person) with that feeling of slow corruption.

CGs and animations look pretty nice as well. Though, I have noticed some weird image jitters on some of them.

There's also underwear collections with an ass window on the pause screen which is very much welcomed.

There's also side games that you can play as well which is very neat. though, One of them is incredibly hard and feels unfair at times and the other is a Rhythm game where the controls aren't customize-able (Would love to use DFJK) but you can basically mash your way through even on harder difficulty.

Story has me hooked as well. Its nice and simple and has some set up to it that I hope pays off in the full version. I noticed you can actually win in the night match in night 4 which is pretty nice. At first I thought it was a force-lost match but I was wrong.

Making money through pure means is hard and even though I mentioned the economy being somewhat out of wack, I think it's fine for the type this type of game. It's supposed to be hard to make money this way and if you want an easier time getting through this then you would need to take part in other aspects of the game. The push is needed and very much welcomed.

The H-aspect of this game is great and covers quite a few things I like and the side game is very welcomed. I would love to give it 5 stars but the main gameplay portion is so janky and annoying, and stale that it takes it down to 3 stars. If the devs can just focus a bit more on that part to make it more tolerable (I'm not asking for polished fighting game levels here) then I would gladly change my review.

Aside from a few bugs and other annoying quirks the game has, this is all I can think of as of right now. I doubt I'll write anything else but I at least hope some of this stuff can help the dev make the game experience better. I'm oddly passionate about this (not sure why) if you didn't notice from how much I wrote up. (sorry) and thanks for reading? I guess?

I really like the game. The story seems interesting and I’m excited to see where it goes so I can’t wait for the full game to come out. When it comes to the hentai, I love the art (Elicia is best girl imo lol)! It’s even voiced and animated. I do wish there was a gallery, but according to the dev there’s going to be one in the full game so looking forward to that.

When it comes to gameplay I’m hooked. I usually play management sim games so in a way this game gives off those vibes with how you have to manage your stamina and equipment (pretty much found a way to min-max both), very cool. The fights are simple, but what can you expect from a game made in RPGMaker? They’re still fun though and keep me on my toes. I know it’s not everyone's cup of tea, but it sure is mine. Also, love the rhythm minigame and the card-matching game. I'm honestly addicted to Manic Magic, I keep buying card packs (I THINK I NEED HELP lol).

All in all, I just want this game to be done so I can enjoy all the story, hentai, and gameplay this game has to offer.

The art is amazing, which is unfortunate given that there is no dedicated gallery (at least that I could find). Animations look great and the style is on point. But, at least in the multi-stage animations like the slime animations there were long sequence breaks caused by the "fade to black" implemented. A small issue though.

The combat really needs to have a mode where people can just skip it. I don't play these games for invigorating action combat, porn games need to be easily playable with one hand (for obvious reasons), and shouldn't really require active input from the user (which is why most that have combat opt for turn based or make it possible to run by everything). It just doesn't seem like a great idea to require so much input from the users in a game that most people will want to play 15-30 minutes at a time and then not touch for a while.

Also, the mechanic where enemies just chase you down is not a good one if the highest level enemies are always present in the starting area. It adds another level of tedium that shouldn't be present in this genre of game. The locations of enemies should be static and they shouldn't rush you on day 1 if there's no chance of you winning. This isn't Dark Souls (a game I love btw), difficulty isn't something to be aspired to in this genre.

The writing was ok though, but I noticed several typos and the text failed to wrap around in some cases causing it to become obscured by the edge of the text box (tested on 4K and 1080p 16:9 screen if that helps).

TLDR: good art and animation, tedious/too involved gameplay that just doesn't suit itself to this genre. Add a "story mode" that just has an "I win" button and most complaints I could find with this game just go away.

Awesome demo, can't wait for the full game.

1.Art is great and on top of that it's animated 2.gameplay mechanics is an interesting one, coming from a RPGMaker platform.
3. Main characters are super cute (highly opinionated)

The not so good:
1. Leveling to fight higher lv fighters can take some grinding. Plus, the high lv enemies camp the spawn area and will aggressively follow you as soon as the freeplay starts.
2. Though this might subject to change in the future, number of actions per day is kinda short. If the full game has unlimited days, then this would not be a problem.