This is the latest thing that I pulled out of my never-ending backlog. The (in)Complete Edition... but more on that a bit later. It actually took me quite a while to finish this game... Part of it was because the game itself is pretty long, part of it was because the game has a certain mechanic that can force you to take more time playing it (depending on what you're willing to do), part of it was because work and illness all conspired together to leave me unwilling or unable to play anything for days... Regardless, I did finish it in the end.
Now, this is the sequel to the Mizuki game from the same dev, and while you don't absolutely need to play the 1st game to play this one, a lot of stuff is a lot clearer and in some cases makes more sense if you do play it. There's also the fact that you won't want to deal with that game's issues if you play that game first. For all that this game has its own issues, the Dev actually did improve it a lot. Well, the newer RPGM engine and higher resolution compared to the old game is a massive improvement all on its own, but the dev did learn from his 1st game and improved things on the second one.
Before getting into that, let's talk a bit about what the game is about. Honoka is all about the shrine maiden fighting by using "Shikigami", which are bound youkai that she summons in battle, and of which she can only use one at a time. Supposedly, this a Pokemon rip-off of a specific game, but I have not played a single Pokemon game in my life, so I can't comment on that bit, nor do I care. What does matter is that the game is supposed to be about collecting youkai and using them to fight. You can swap in battle freely between members of your team (four in total) and out of battle, you can swap members for your team in and out of storage. The Youkai can be permanently evolved once and they gain abilities based on their element and theme as they level up, however you don't know exactly what you're gonna get as they move forward (or why). All youkai have an element, fire, water and wood, and while secondary elements exist, those are only used in skills (and related resistances and weaknesses), and of course, the youkai tend to have strength and weaknesses.
All that to say that you basically want to build a str0nk team that covers each element with the 4th member likely bringing utility for your team in terms of special skills or debuffs or whatnot. In theory.
Basically, in terms of combat, the game plays out much like the 1st game. The "equipment" for the Shikigami is the same, two orbs slots which can be used to add 2 additional skills and 1 accessory slot which can either boost stats, provide debuff immunities, resistances, regen and boosts to XP, Gold and Item drop... though obviously not all at once. Overall, the system is very basic.
The improvements, compared to the Mizuki game, come in several aspects. First, the Shikigami you recruit as you move forward actually start with some sort of level, and aren't all at LvL 1, which means actually swapping them around if you find something you like more is much easier than it was in that game. On top of that, the management of the reserves is done via an item that Honoka caries, rather than a guy in the Inn, so you don't have to go random places just to swap team members. Even more, the evolution system was simplified so it costs just money and element gems, so you don't need to run around looking for special items to evolve your minions, and you're not going to be held back in terms of what you can use just because you don't have the right item on hand. On top of that, Orb Synthesis is a menu for Honoka, so you can just do it whenever you want as long as you have the right items for what you want to make. Costs for Orbs have been made more diverse, which means you don't need 10 of a specific something to make an orb.
There's also more Shikigame to recruit than in the 1st game. The 1st game had a total of 12. Honoka has a total of 18, buuuut, you can only get 16, because the other two starters will not be available. I personally played with the Fire starter, and from what I've seen, that one seems to be the most generally useful and overall strongest... but who knows for sure?
One thing to note is that out of all your Shikigami, the starter can evolve at lvl 20 and is the cheapest to evolve of them all, which means that, short of you removing it from your team entirely once you have more, it will be the 1st to BE evolved. This is the game giving you a hint, you would do well to listen to it, because in this game, the starter is very important. Given that pills are only useful after the minion is evolved, and that was the 1st one I evolved, I turned my starter into my core minion and fed it like I was trying to turn it into an addict... and it was tbh worth it in the end, because with the help of a non-element skills, it could obliterate just about everything.
Why is the starter important? Well... Later in the game, the starter gains the special ability to have a 3rd evolution just in battle. This 3rd evolution doesn't give them any new skills, but it does make them stronger in every way and makes them hit way harder. It increases MP costs for all skills by 50%, but that hardly matters at high levels. Basically, your starter in this form will always hit harder than any other Shikigami you can have if they have similar stats. What that means is that in the long-run, pills spent on the starter will be more effective than on any other Shikigami you get.
This is relevant because pills are a lot more accessible than in the Mizuki game. While in that game, you got access to them way late in the game, they were horribly expensive and grinding them was really hard... things are different here. While they're still quite expensive, you gain access to the store that sells them as part of the prologue flow (They're in the Nanba shops) and on top of that, the game has a mechanic that lets you earn a lot of money relatively easily without even needing to fight (it's still a tad tedious though). There's this mining thing in Nanba which, for 1000 money, lets you go "mine". This is automatic, and you receive a number of items. The number and quality of the items depends on the levels of the Shikigami in your team, and the items are mostly stuff you can sell for for money, with a smattering of elemental crystals every now and then, also "Chigusa Steel", which is an item used exclusively to upgrade stat boosting accessories... not that those matter much tbh...
Overall, while this game is notably longer than the Mizuki game in a lot of ways, I actually had to grind a lot less than in that game and still managed to get my starter to have 900-someting M.Attack... Which let it obliterate any common enemy in one shot, regardless of elemental weaknesses. Some even in 1 hit using its basic fire skill that costs 5 MP if they had a weakness to fire, and I mean this in the final dungeons and areas of the game. The only reason why bosses lasted more than 3-4 rounds was because of gimmicks by the end...
While the Honoka game has the same issue as the Mizuki game (aka the fact that the combat becomes boring pretty quickly), the fact that you can turn one of your minions into One Punch Man (or Woman, I suppose), does make it a lot more bearable. Unlike the 1st game, I didn't reach the point where I got so bored of it that I cheated the stats on a minions just to cut through the tedium. Doping my starter like it was going out of style was enough.
There is one thing where you will likely want to cheat though. What is it? The gambling thing. Much like the 1st game, Honoka has a gambling thing. It's boring as fuck. Just get some of those items, pop the save in a save editor, max them out, buy what prizes you want and move on with your life. Seriously. It's not worth it. Dunno what the fuck the dev was smoking with that thing... There's an arguably better gambling thing in the second half of the game (with better prizes too), but that's tbh also not worth the effort. So just cheat the things and spare yourself the time. This game will eat a lot of it even without you spending ages on the gambling things.
Speaking of things that take time. I mentioned at the start that there's a mechanic that's essentially designed to make you either spend more time with the game, or otherwise waste time in general. That's the "days of the week" mechanic, where certain things change depending on what day of the week it is. These things include vendors at the Black Market (the most important one is the ones that sell fish tbh, because it makes it way easier to get the pink photos...), then there's the prizes at the lottery in Nanba (which don't ever really matter)... and there's even a Shikigami that you can only get specifically on a Friday. (There was something else too, but I can't remember what it was...)
How does the game determine the day of the week? By using your computer's date. -_-" Yes. Your computer's date. This means that if you need something on a Friday in-game (like that one Shikigami I mentioned), then it either needs to be Friday IRL, or you need to mess with your computer's date...
I don't think I need to express how stupid this mechanic is... It is by far the Dev's worst decision when it comes to this game. Holy crap I have NO idea what they were smoking... It's so bad. Why would anyone think that this is in any way a good idea? Ugh... Luckily, he didn't use it too much, because if he had, I'd have probably dropped the game. The one Shikigami was bad enough...
Speaking of questionable decisions... The dev changed the way encounters work in this game from all symbol encounters to mostly random encounters, with symbol encounters being reserved only for especially strong enemies. The plus side to this is that if you need to grind in an area for whatever reason, you can just go back and forth repeatedly and it'll get done. The downside is that you can't just speed through areas as easily without using an item to suppress random encounters. Most of the time it's not that bad in my opinion, but there are some areas where it feels very tedious. Still playing it straight and just fighting the encounters as you travel tends to mean that you'll usually have all the souls you want without needing to explicitly grind. This is with the exception of the second half of the game, where the roads tend to be pretty short, so even with the random encounters, it's actually entirely possible to speed through and not gather much souls.
The dev also removed the in-combat rape stuff that the Mizuki game had. Considering how crappy the system was in the 1st game, and how difficult it'd have been to improve it in a way that actually made sense, I honestly consider that a good decision on their part. Better to spend the effort on regular H-events.
Lastly, when it comes to mechanics, I'll talk about Fishing and Cats. The game introduces the ability to fish, which is meh. By that I mean that it's the most boring fishing mechanic I've ever seen in an H-game. The dev was uber lazy with this. Fishing gets you fish and other such things, some of which are meant to be sold... and some of which are meant to be given to cats. There's cats in various areas of the game, which you can feed with fish you caught or bought from that one merchant in the Black Market. What the game doesn't tell you explicitly, is that feeding a cat enough times gives you a reward, and repeating that eventually causes the cat to give you a "Pink Photo", that is to say, an H-photo, which will belong to a side-character. The issue with this is that these Photos are required to unlock a number of H-events for those side-characters, so the fact that they're locked behind feeding the cats is a very weird decision...
Luckily, the game does draw attention to the cats, so people won't necessarily miss out on the content... but it's not an ideal system tbh.
All that said, when it comes to its mechanics and systems, I consider Honoka to be a massive improvement compared to the Mizuki game. Its main issues come from the limitations of the combat system itself, and the fact that the dev didn't create any in-game methods to allow you to predict which skills you'll get on which Shikigami, or that there's no way to permanently teach them new skills to really work on the training aspect. There's a reason why most games tend to have parties, and that's because it makes combat less tedious when done right. Games that have a singular combatant need to put more effort in, and the swapping mechanic is just not enough to compensate and prevent monotony imho.
How it rates compared to other RPGM games... well... that depends. In terms of pure mechanics, it's lower than say Lunaria Fantasia, or Naedoko's Demon's Grounds if you want an H-game specifically focused on using monsters to fight. Still better than a lot of other monotonous slop out there. The dev at least actually tried and had a vision (or copied Pokemon, but that's still better than what a lot of other H-game devs do)...
That said, a game is not just its gameplay. Especially H-games.
Much like the Mizuki game, Honoka is set in a fantasy version of the Warring States Era. Our protagonist starts off as an Apprentice Shrine Maiden, and between the stuff in the description and the fact that she needs to earn her qualifications, she has to go on an epic journey. Unlike the previous game, Honoka doesn't have a childhood friend or a LI from the start. Instead, she meets her LI on the road, and the game spends quite a bit of time with the two traveling together, talking, joking and whatnot. Unlike the Mizuki game, Honoka's relationship is shown to us from its starting point, and the story does quite a bit of effort to establish the couple, which I think it's great. While this means that there's a good long while before the H-stuff starts showing up, it does mean that this game, unlike the 1st one, has done a lot more to earn its "NTRRPG" tagline.
Because of course, once the two of them DO get together, stuff happens that leads Honoka to jumping on other men's dicks.
Aside from the H-stuff, the story isn't anything particularly impressive. You run around doing stuff, the Demon King shows up, you have to do more stuff to stop the Demon Lord... In and of itself, not particularly original, though the details and the characters are, in my opinion at least, amusing enough to make it worth it. Whether it's Honoka's reactions to various situations, silly stuff like Tanuki transformation tournaments, or the fact that the Demon Lord possesses Honoka's lover and this is helped by forcing him to witness her jumping on another guy's huge dick... The fact of the matter is that the end result is fun enough. The interactions between Yae, Honoka's sort of rival, are fun too. I'm generally not a huge fan of rival stuff in games, but the dev did a pretty good job with Yae and ensured that her gimmick is not obnoxious.
While I wouldn't recommend this game based on the story alone, I do think its good enough that, when combined with everything else, the game is worth playing.
This also because of the H-events. The game has a lot of H-events once it gets going. The majority of them are of course about Honoka, but there's a handful of events for the side-girls too, including Mizuki, the previous game's protagonist. Again, you don't strictly speaking, need to play the previous game, but a bunch of stuff will make a lot more sense if you do. The only side-girl that doesn't have much in the way of H-stuff is Sistina, which is a massive disappointment. That slut's design is hot. So ugh, why you do this to me dev?
The only problem with the H-events is that, much like the 1st game, the requirements to the events are poorly designed, and you don't have much in the way of repeatable stuff. What stuff IS repeatable, doesn't increase lewdness. Luckily, the game lets you find Lewdness increasing drugs if you're thorough in your exploration, and if you use those and jump through all the events that are available, you'll generally be able to progress in time with the story for most stuff. Unlike the 1st game, while there's still a number of events tied to losing various fights, there's nowhere near as many of them, and there's a lot more events that are just all over the place to find and engage with. Which is a massive improvement, but it does mean that you still have to lose in a number of places to efficiently go through all the smut. Much like the 1st game, you can unlock such events even after you pass them using money in the gallery, but honestly, in most of those cases, it's not that big of a hassle to lose, see the thing, then come back.
The main event I recommend not losing too is a certain battle against Chizuru, because it's at the end of several back to back boss fights, and it's a massive pain in the ass to get back to her if you lose. Better to just win that particular fight and unlock the related scene in the gallery...
It's worth noting that a virgin playthrough is not possible for this game. At the end of the prologue, there's an event where Honoka will lose her virginity, though unlike the Mizuki game, you can choose who she loses it too. You have 5 options for that, including the guy that will become her lover/boyfriend/whatever. There's also several other events that are mandatory for one reason or another, and quite frankly, the game seems designed to make more sense when you have Honoka jump on every possible dick in existence. Supposedly, the True Ending is tied to having 120 lewdness... I'm not sure if that's the case or not (based on the story, it shouldn't need that specific event... but hell if I know what the dev did with the triggers...).
The important thing is, you're better off just hunting all the H-events because the game does not have an unlock all button, nor does it have a NG+, so there's really no reason to avoid the smut.
Now, you might remember that at the start of this wall of text of mine, I called this the (in)Complete Edition, right? Well, there's a reason for that. More than one really. Checking out the Dev's ci-en shows that the dev wanted to do more with the game, specifically, the game was supposed to have some proper NTR-endings and a post-game with stuff in it after the True Ending. Right now, the game just ends after the True Ending and kicks you back to the title screen. The game only has 2 real endings and Lewdness or sex acts and stuff has no impact on anything except unlocking more events. Unlike the 1st game that had ending variations depending on Mizuki's lewdness. Though the canonical ending for that game is that she became a total slut, so...
It's unclear exactly why the dev gave up on completing the game (probably not enough sales), but to be fair, even in this incomplete state, the game has a huge amount of H-scenes, so it's not a bad situation. Plus, it's not like I was fond of the whole "need to buy two things to have a complete game" thing he did. The base game without the Append? Well, that end when Honoka becomes a full Battle Maiden and addresses fuck and all... So yeaaaah. Could've been worse I suppose.
This dev is definitely one that's more fixated on monetizing than most. Just look at all the exclusive stuff he has in his ci-en... Or the aggressive reaction he had when he heard of a fan TL existing. Can't say I'm their biggest fan...
Leaving dev asshole-ness aside...
At the end of it all, the question of "Is this game worth playing?" remains. The answer, in my opinion, is that even with all its faults, yes, it's a game worth playing. While none of the individual elements are stellar, the combination is pretty decent, especially if you like the art-style(s) involved. While putting a singular number on it would be difficult and I'll never bother with the review window, I guess I'd rate this at around 4 stars? Maybe? That's high for me btw, as I basically rate next to nothing at 5 stars. Quite frankly, unless there's some specific part of it that really triggers you, odds are that this game is worth picking up and playing through at least once.
