RPGM - Completed - Black Souls [Final] [Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?]

epic game. i'll skip the art and gameplay details, as it's such a bother to write. but it's pretty good, though the lore is definitely the smoking gun

The Lore is a gem, like a sweet lover greeting you in the arms after a long day of work. If I had a Soul for every time I think about the game's lore, I'd have maybe 200-ish souls by now.

Don't be fooled, however, thinking that the game is meant to be played with one run. I recommend at least 5 runs, if you're a n00b.

I'm not here for a quick fap, I'm here for the story. It has my favorite atmosphere, mostly dark and gloomy. The characters in the game may be familiar to you from somewhere, but not in their happy state. It actually tells the truth of fairy tales. Before they were suitable for children. The music and sounds make the great atmosphere even better. The game is easy, especially if you followed the walkthrough. Art isn't for everyone, but it's definitely great for me. Bosses are quite different from each other. I've never encountered a bug.

Oh, without forgetting, you can be good or bad in this game. Up to you.

To summarize, this is a game containing porn, not a porn game. Which is better for me. I'm going to the second game now, definitely play it!

at first i dismissed this game as an over-complicated mess of half baked ideas, but giving it a second chance i fell in love with this game. if you're looking for a quick release (like me the first time) then this game is probably not for you. the game borrows heavily from the souls series and adds some ideas of it's own. the progression is really fluent and i haven't had any trouble with navigating the map, it all seems well thought out and neatly put together. the game takes about 15 to 20 hours and has multiple endings, the characters are great, and the art even better. i'm not sure why this artstyle appeals to me so much, but it's just so simple and elegant. sex scenes, although sparse are great and the combat even better. not gonna lie i've had more fun playing this game that any of the souls games, give this game a chance.

fromsoft hire this guy

Decent art for being drawn, I found the game very complex and unenjoyably due to how complex everything was. It was way too much work, and not enough fun.

As someone else said the sex scenes are lacking in the game, which is normally fine if everything else is ok.

I give one start for moderately good writing and one start for the artwork. As far a story a pliability, That is just lacking in this project.

Do you remember those fairy tales that you read as a kid? Have you imagined what happened to those fairy tales when the story is over? Have you ever imagined what it would be when you live with those fairy tales? Then wonder no longer, this game is for you *

"My son first played this game as a virgin, now he's a depressed virgin, 10/10", local dad

"My daughter played it when a stranger in internet recommend it, now she won't get out of her room. Sometimes i heard her crying from her room. Well, at least she won't get pregnant anytime soon", local mom

"My sister always bugged me to read her fairy tales stories before she go to sleep, even though she's 10 years old now. After i tell her the story of this game, she never ask me to tell her fairy tales again. Thank you BLACKSOULS", local brother

*terms and conditions may apply, sanity not guaranteed

AMAZING GAME, the turn-based combat is okay, but it's made better with the parry, evade, and that bar that indicates when your enemy will attack System.
But that's just the side content because this game's lore is magnificent, I loved the homage to some of the characters, Tortoise and Hare were Pate and Creighton , Caramille was Kalameet, and many more.
And most characters are uhhhh......

Absolute fucking ruthless.

Overall, Great game 10/10, It may or may not be a biased opinion.

Not only a memorable experience, but one that will also leave you craving for more.

This game is pretty good. It honestly doesn't even feel like an H-game at all. Don't get it wrong, there's plenty of CG, but Black Souls simply feels like an actual RPG.

• The world is as fascinating Dark Souls'.
• The music was spot-on.
• Bosses all feel unique. Hell, it's been over 6 months and I still remember a few.
• The characters are really fleshed out and even have their own questlines with their own endings.
• Don't even get me started with the actual ending of the game, it's simply genius. I didn't expect to have such a difficult choice. I love it.

This game is heavily insipired by Dark Souls 1. It doesn't give you any directions, just a goal: Murder X people, reach the castle gate, and become king. Usual souls plot.

However, Black Souls is not perfect:

• The game is just too easy. Compared to your usual souls, there is no "builds" in this game. You simply level up and you are allowed to use whatever you want. This means the following: You can be a tank that can also wield heavy ass weapons in one hand while casting ridiculously overpowered magic on your other hand. By late-game, bosses simply die.
• Save system: I honestly wish this game had the souls save system: It saves whenever you reach a checkpoint. Instead, the game allows you to save at any moment, allowing save-scumming, which really reduces the already-easy-difficulty with a save system that makes it so that you can't die. Dying and learning from it is what makes Fromsoftware games unique. This game doesn't have that.

Black Souls is probably one of the best H-Games I have played. I honestly wanted more after beating it. It's a pity it's not on steam because I'd honestly be willing to buy this game.

git gud or alice trying
this is a very nice game. more strategic combat than the sequel.
you may or may not cry.

required reading before getting into the sequel.
in this game the abyss truly does stare back at you.

This game is incredibly difficult to actually get through, I managed to soft lock myself even with a walkthrough. Feels like lots of the content is cryptically hidden. Not a whole lot of sex scenes, but the art was good.

I really wanted to rate this game a 5, but the combat was too punishing in my opinion. It detracted from the enjoyment of the rest of the game.

The story is well written and the art style is very unique. I can say these are the parts of the game I enjoyed the most.

It's certainly worth your time checking out, you can tell the maker put a lot of work into it, and they've created a really cool world. I just had a hard time with the combat. I found myself avoiding it most of the time when I could. YMMV.

One of the best RPGM games out there, if not the best. Combat is very engaging and unique, lore is very interesting to follow (which on this site happens rarely enough to be pointed out), art is unique and for me personally absolutely beautiful since it fits the scenery, map is huge and game is filled with nonlinearity (meaning u can technically go wherever you want, you might get fucked if you enter somewhere if ur not strong enough though).

There is alot more to point out but you can get more throughout reasons why this game deserves all the attention it got from other reviews. This is without a question 5 stars, wish I could give it even more.

Amazing game full of SOUL
Don't be discouraged by sketchy art
Very engaging combat that really lives up to the game's namesake and feels like turn based dark souls. Story is sparse at first and you have to piece it together yourself but the ending is absolutely worth it.

I HATE, HATE, HATE rpgmaker games, yet this... THIS... Is THE ONLY GOOD RPGMAKER GAME.

I hope the needless styling conveys how strongly I assert this position. Most RPGmaker games I drop within minutes or begrudgingly play for h in the case of hgame RPGmaker games like Roundscape, but this game... I was hooked within the first five minutes and I played for eleven hours straight without eating.

5/5 - The best RPGmaker game in existence.

Come for the sex, stay for the depression.

Black Souls is a very high-effort Souls-like RPG-Maker game with sexual content.

I think it's a very good game overall but what really stood out to me was its ability to evoke a fairly wide range of emotions.
There are scene that are genuinely sad, disturbing, heartwarming, and even cute.
It's a much wider range than I expected from a "porn" game.
That said, it's a pretty dark game overall so expect that to be the prevailing theme.

I'll now go into a bit more detail about the different aspects of the game:

General Setup:
As the name implies, Black Souls is Dark Souls inspired.
- Game is set in a dark medieval fantasy type world
- You earn "Souls" which are both your general currency and used to level up
- There are bonfires which serve as heal stations and fast-travel locations
- There are fog-gates before boss encounters and combat is pretty challenging
- The map is not strictly linear and you have some freedom in the order that you do stuff

Additionally, you can recruit quite a few different (female) companions to aid you in battle.
I think there are about 8 companions you can recruit in total, but only 3 can be summoned at a time so don't expect to use all of them in one playthrough.

This also being a hentai game, giving companions souls to level-up comes with a sex scene and you can also fuck them normally in a few situations.
For the more evil-minded people, you can also rape any women you come across (including your companions) as well as kill any NPC.
The "evil" aspect of the game didn't appeal to me personally but there is plenty of lewd content even without it so it's not required to have a good time.

The premise of the story is that you have this fog that is turning people into demon-beasts.
To stop the fog you need to defeat a head demonic princess, and to even approach said princess you need to kill or make a deal with 4 other demonic princesses that are spread across the map.

All bosses you encounter are based off of a fairy tale, though they tend to be heavily twisted in some sort of dark way. As an example, one of the first bosses you encounter, Hansel and Gretel, have the modified backstory of "Abandoned by their mother during a famine, Hansel and Gretel hallucinate a house made of cake"


A dynamic changing world:
One of the signs that this is a high-effort game is how the map changes as you progress.
As you defeat bosses time "progresses" and you have NPCs appear, disappear, have new tasks, new bosses appear etc. etc.
Furthermore, this chain of events is not linear which is easy to miss if you only do one playthrough. Depending on what you do, different NPCs will die and/or turn into demonbeasts.

To give an example, on my first playthrough I rescued a companion after defeating a boss. Standard RPG stuff. On my 2nd playthrough I defeated the boss later and the companion was just dead. Had that been my first playthrough I would have dismissed her as just one of the many corpses you come across, but no. I could have saved her, but she died because I wasn't fast enough. Truth hurts.


The combat system:
Dark Souls has a very skill-based combat system, so you might wonder how that translates to an RPG Maker game where battles are primarily stat based.
You would be right to worry that instead of being fun challenges, bosses are just level-checks that you need to grind for.

Having done my second playthrough on the highest difficulty where pretty much everything will 1-shot you if given the chance, I can happily report that the game is beatable with very minimal grinding.

What makes the combat work are a few aspects:

1. Non-alternating combat turns
In BS each character has an AP bar that fills up according to their "Speed" stat.
When the bar is full, they get to take their turn.
So different characters take actions at different rates, which adds a lot of potential depth to the system.

"Speed" also determines who gets the first action in an encounter, though there is some RNG involved as well.

2. The "Evade" and "Parry" actions
The PC starts with these two actions.

Parry: Until your next turn, negate EVERY standard attack and attack once in response.
Evade: Until your next turn, negate almost everything. (if an action is evadeable, you will evade it every time, but some actions always go through)

Depending on the encounter, Parry can make you invincible while doing damage and Evade can make you invincible in general.

By using these abilities correctly, you can survived encounters even if taking a single hit kills you normally.

3. Status effects
There are numerous status effects, for example:
- Stun
- Sleep
- Poison
- Silence

to name a few. You can probably guess what they do from their names.

Bosses are resistant to these effects, but rarely completely immune.
A lot of battles can be won by figuring out which effects work and applying it at the right moment.

4. Buffs and equipment effects
The character can equip one weapon and up to 4 different rings.
Weapons can be upgraded and at their max level they usually give a powerful new effect.
Basic rings will just give general stat upgrades or make you immune to a certain effect, but some will also grant you very powerful effects.

With the right equipment you can gain effects like taking multiple actions per turn or having a particular stat doubled.
If you know where to find the gear, you can create some very powerful builds.

--

With these systems in place, beating a boss is more like a puzzle where you need the right equipment, companions, and strategy rather than just needing enough stats.

That said, the combat is not perfect. My criticisms would be:

1. Taking the first turn is usually essential in order to even have a chance at beating a boss. In that sense, having sufficiently high Speed is a stat requirement for bosses.
This is alleviated a bit by the fact that you can specialize and spend souls to raise only speed, but still.

2. Even a "winning" strategy is usually a bit RNG dependent. It's common that you need a boss to not use a particular skill on a key turn or to not resist a status effect at some point.
So even if your plan is solid, it may only have 20% chance of success and just trying until it works can be annoying.

3. There is no way to check a character's stats in combat. This makes it hard to evaluate whether a buff is worthwhile or not. An ability might say "raises attack" but you have no idea how much it actually raises attack by. You just need to experiment and try to get a feeling for how effective buffs are.


Art-style:
The game uses a very hand-drawn and somewhat scribbly art-style for CG images.
I like it and I think it fits the mood of the game pretty well but I can also see it being unappealing to some people.
Take a look at some of the sample images and decide whether it bothers you.


Quantity of hentai content:
In what I think is a bit of a design issue with the game, it falls into an awkward spot where I don't think it has enough sexual content to be worth playing for that alone, most of the time you are fighting pretty un-sexy monsters, but the sexual content that is there makes it hard to recommend to any normie friends.

So it has a target audience of people who are fine with the sexual content but aren't using it as their primary motivator.


Conclusion:
Anyways, I absolutely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys dark fantasy settings and challenging gameplay.
The game has a lot of care and effort put into it and it really shows.

I'm not sure what to add that others haven't already said. I was attracted to the simplistic illustrations which was different than many of the other games i played, but was drawn in by the story. There were several plot twists that I didn't expect, even making me feel genuine emotion for the characters. This is the type of game that would still be incredible even without the h-scenes, the creator seems to have a good grasp on storytelling with evenany side characters and enemies having their own backstories. basically I played for the "plot" and stayed for the plot

As a dark soul fan I really enjoyed this game, while many other RPG game have good art what set this one a part is its distinctive way of drawing. And the story is absolutely god, there is no good ending because it only exist in our heart. As well as letting me remember this quote whom I heard from my favorite story. "Human hearts are more terrible than devil. How many people in the world can understand the truth hidden behind the truth, and how many people in the world can truly be kind".

This might not be a very ero-focused game, but I found it deeply "enjoyable" as fantasy literature and recommend it to anyone who can stomach it or derive from it the same value I did. The ero content sometimes reuses images, but you're almost certainly not going to notice without making many different choices across a number of saves, or until the very end. Not counting Soul Feed, anyways. You can miss content entirely, the same way you can in the Souls series. Utilize this thread, the fandom.com wiki, and the game's own text document if you deeply care to avoid missing anything. The combat is the standard turn-based rpg shit you'd expect from an rpgmaker game, and is ultimately not that bad for what it is. If you dislike it, there are a number of easy ways to avoid (or quickly finish) the majority of fights. I like the author's own art, and I believe the way he used the resources he purchased was effective. The translation seemed odd at some points, but it was ultimately high quality for a title this indie. I only encountered two lines of untranslated text, both in the same area. I played the final version, and completed every ending.

I very like the game plus the two other game around the same univers. The lore is big, the game is difficult and resist each time I play. I very like the story of all girl and the ending of baphomet and the one of mary sue was very gratiful. I love every second I play the game and like we could just deseactivated the H, it make the experience very fun, even if some important dialogue are in the H scene, so it past them.
But at the exeption of the second, it's a obligation to have the true ending for reach the new game plus, so it didn't make me fell like a reward for succeed to discovered the secret of mary sue, and only by doing the one of the ending for the second time cause the dead of a heroine if there all alive, so it put some new mystery, where we have the obligation to do it for acces the new game plus.

This review is a long time coming.

The best way to describe this game. It hurts. This game is Grimm's Fairy Tales. There is no real happy ending for everyone... but maybe for yourself. No matter how nice it looks, it is a trap. No matter how sweet it is, it is poison. Everything in this game dies and worse is your character will do so the most. Though if you can harden your heart, you will see it to the end and wake this false dream and kill the nightmare.

The story is bitter sweet.
The art plays with the theme.
The game is honest with itself.
The choices will matter and change.

I only recommend this for those that are willing to play though all of it.
If you just want porn. Play another game.
If you want a game to play with your emotions...

Excellent quality game. This is one of those h-games that are games which happen to contain a decent amount of hentai. However, the hentai definitely isn't the focus of the game.

Story 8/10

This is one of those games which gives you snippets of text and you piece together the story yourself. However, the game gave you enough snippets (and the complexity is quite low) that you could piece together what happened.

There's an overarching story that really only comes into play after you get the first ending and see all the heroine endings. Then you work towards the "true" ending.

This game has a very dark theme and executed the darkness very well. The characters are broken (inside) and almost nobody's sane.

This type of dark fairy tale re-interpretation isn't unique, but it's always enjoyable.

Gameplay 9/10

For an RPGM game, the gameplay was quite enjoyable.

The maps are linear-ish with small branching dead-end paths. I like you how go from biome to biome with little fanfare. Each map has a unique (dark) theme that creeps you out in different ways.

Combat was surprisingly decent. I mean, it's a hack and slash at its core, but you get little upgrades to your battle strength after nearly every conflict. Those little dopamine hits are nice. Most cannon fodder are cannon fodder while the bosses give you a rough-ish time, but nothing you can't grind out and defeat.

Choices (kinda) matter. You can kill/rape/let live basically everyone. You get different scenes depending on what choices you make (with the heroines). In terms of story progression, I don't think your choices matter. You'll just make non-optimal choices (like missing a character, item, drip-plot).

One minor nitpick is that you have to hold shift to run. I prefer RPGM games that let you toggle the "Always Run" option.

Art 7/10

What can I say? Not my style. It's a very rough art style. What you see in the previews is what you get.

But again, the hentai wasn't the focus for this game (although there's a decent amount of it) so it's mostly vanilla sex (strange choice, considering the rest of the game is so dark). It's amazing that even without the hentai being the focus of the game, the hentai is done quite well.

Atmosphere 10/10

Obviously this is a special category to call out and rate. This game had a dark/horror atmosphere which it executed amazingly. The music transitions when you encounter a special character was always on point and enhanced the atmosphere of this being a dark fairy tale.

Although I bash on the art, I still think the rough style contributed greatly to the dark atmosphere.

And again, almost every character is broken (inside) in some way or another. Combined with the drip story-telling style, most characters are decently developed and revealed to have multi-dimensional nefarious backgrounds/intentions.

Overall 9/10

I don't give high ratings easily but credit must be given where credit is due. This is a fantastic game.

Really. All I got are nitpicks. Art style could do better (but again, personal preference). Story could have been a little richer (and that would have polished this game to a sparkling shine). Maybe maps could be a little smaller (I think 50% of my gameplay hours was spent walking around and backtracking).