If I had to sum up this game as succinctly as possible, I would describe it as “bizarrely excellent”.
At first it just seems like a run-of-the-mill dime-a-dozen HTML porn game, with the slightly unique twist of it being set in a high-fantasy setting, which is more the territory of your standard RPGM porn game. But if that doesn’t turn you off immediately and you choose to actually play the game rather than just open the HTML in Notepad+ you’ll find that the developer has put a lot more effort than most games made in this format, and indeed probably more effort than is warranted.
The music is what tipped me off first. While there is an issue of music not resetting after loading a save, the quality of the music and, more importantly, its placement was enough to wake me up and get me to pay attention to what I thought would be just a quick snacky bite of a porn game.
I won’t bother praising the story too much, suffice to say plenty of other reviewers do that and none of their praise is unwarranted. While it’s not exactly this generation’s Lord of the Rings it is miles above its contemporaries in the genre of high-fantasy porn game, and it’s very, very clear that the writer has put a lot of effort and care into making the narrative both consistent and satisfying to the reader.
What I wasn’t expecting was the gameplay to display a similar level of care. I picked the “soldier” class (which might more aptly be named “barbarian” but I digress) and it genuinely felt like the dev put actual thought and effort into designing the class’s skills to harmonize with one another to form an actual coherent identity. Which is absolutely baffling in what is, again, a bare-bones HTML porn game. Not only that, but certain core gameplay functions are woven seamlessly into the narrative itself, like how a character that lets you forget skills to learn new ones is unlocked an almost precisely the point your existing skill slots would fill up and you would need to forget the less useful ones. Not only that but there’s even actual class-specific gearing progression in the game as well, which is, again, baffling in how well thought out it is.
Despite all this praise, the game is still not 5 stars, and the reason for that ties into both the above paragraph and what I said at the end of the second paragraph. HTML text-based turn-based rpg is quite possibly the single most bare-bones and limited game format on the planet, and boy does it show in Battle Quest. To see a rich narrative, compelling game design and fascimating world-building being squeezed into that utterly limited framework reminds me of a cat squeezing into a tiny box and looking ridiculous whole doing so. It feels as though whoever is making this game has a brilliant idea for a game, but can’t use a more complex game engine that’s capable of letting that idea unfurl into its true potential. Heck, even the images aren’t original content made for this game, but vaguely-fitting pictures likely picked up from google image search (and I’d be shocked if the music wasn’t the same, although I didn’t recognize any of the tracks.)
That being said, “bizarrely excellent” is still excellent, and Battle Quest gives more than its bang for its buck. If you’re looking for a text-based html that is far, far above average, you needn't look any further. While I do wish there was as much attention given to the porn side of things as there was to damn near everything else, this is definitely a game that earns the 4 and 5 star reviews given to it.