RPGM - Completed - Croix X Scramble [v1.08] [ninjinpasta]

The art is really freaking good with some pretty hot setups and scenarios, the game is entirely hypnosis and rape so if you're not into that then obviously don't play this but if you are its pretty amazing.

The game is a VN with minimal gameplay except a few puzzles and a battle system that serves as a way to contextualize some of the scenes but its not really a game with any kind of gameplay

I'll treat this review with a pair of pincers because truthfully, I believe it should be a 2.5/5 as a hentai game but a 4/5 overall.

It has everything you're looking for in a semi-high production RPGMaker game. It has a cohesive story that stays on track, a likeable protagonist and overall really good ideas for an erotic game.

Now... the part that I seriously just can't stress enough: This game falls off, and it falls off hard. You'll get introduced to kinky fetishes and other fairly hot scenarios with the premise "Lose against an enemy, unlock scenes". It's really the same run of the mill stuff you see in other H-Games with RPGMaker, particularly OneOne1 stuff - but here's the twist; around Chapter 3 or 4, the game itself doesn't know anymore what it wants to be.

Almost every fight after Chapter 3 is 100% Story, zero erotica, it's like the dev forgot that they were making a hentai game because you can immediately tell at what point they felt like making the story more about action and chuuni "Power of friendship" lessons.

Where in earlier chapters they had nice defeat scenes, suddenly your character either goes "I luckily managed to escape" or it downright goes "And then Croix got her shit rocked, the end. GAME OVER."

The game itself explores ideas that it doesn't want to fully execute. There is a pregnancy system, you're introduced to it fairly early on into the story, but you only get... pregnant by getting bad ends(?). And those bad ends lock you inside your dorm with a "Reset your body to not pregnant and retry the fight?", which immediately just undoes it. You can't do anything with this pregnancy status either, you just have a rounded belly to look at for a solid 1 second before you get bored and redo the fight.

Really if I was being fair to this as a strict H-Game, I would give it 3 stars bordering on 2.5. There simply is an incredibly noticeable shift from Hentai focus to Story focus. My suggestion? If you want to give the story a go, play until you finish the True Love Cult. Afterwards, dump it. Hell, get bad ended by the Cult Leader and become his wife, then turn the game off and simply accept this as the true ending - you'll be much happier than playing through the game doing arduous, tedious and long dungeons only to find out the dev hasn't prepared a bad end for the dungeon, so you're just getting a "GAME OVER." for your efforts to even play this far.

Now, here are the positives:
The UI is fancy, the premise of the game is promising and the artwork is lovingly crafted to go along with the game and its aesthetics.

Many downright irrelevant gimmicks of this game that other games would simply brush over have their own artwork attached to them, cute little chibi animations of your character going to bed for example, loading screens with rough sketches of the main characters Aroma and Croix and a very dedicated, genuine affection for the characters. You can tell that the person who designed and drew the art at the very least cared about their creation, it's not a simple cash grab type of game.

That being said, what went wrong? Why do I think this isn't a 5/5?

Simply put because the creative juice just ran out around the midway point for the Dev. The True Love Cult was the pinnacle of this game's erotica and it was only barely in the middle of the game. After that point it degraded itself very poorly into trying to be a serious Story game which... IT SIMPLY DOESN'T WORK. You can't have the main character give a blowjob in a pissed down alley two chapters prior (which was not a choice by the way, it was forced on the character without a way to avoid it) and then act like your protagonist is going on a full purity route right afterwards.

Had his game kept me tied to it, I would've given it a solid 5/5. It has all the right signs and systems of a good H-Game, but it simply chooses not to use them correctly. Bad Ends lack impact, the scenes are too tame, too "Please merchandise Croix and turn her into a marketable plushie". There is no continuation of anything that happens to Croix, you're forced to imagine yourself how each Bad End would turn out for her - or in the worst case, it would drop you a 4-liner "She got killed lol" GAME OVER.

Note: Played 1.08, gave up halfway through it was too boring

Don't let the fancy UI graphics or the attractive main character fool you - there's nothing but a basic run of the mill game to play here. Boring RPGMaker cg collectathon with bare-bones combat that only reward h-scenes from losing. Scene diversity is extremely lacking - it's mostly either rape or hypnosis rape. Corruption is terribly lacking - Croix does not respond differently to scenes no matter how much "development" she has gone under.

The actual scenes themselves are lacking as well. The amount of cgs that are reused is very noticeable, with only adjustments between her small handful of outfits. There is no voice acting at all, and the sex sfx sounds like either an empty ketchup bottle or plunging a toilet. No animation on the cgs. Woefully underwhemling despite the art being good; although I will say it is suspect in terms of how it was created, as some other posters have asked about...

Story is very similar to the school building map itself - large, grandiose, but terribly superficial as there's no justification for it when so few happens in all the time it takes to go through it. By the time I reached the halfway point, there was already two cases of mass public hypnotizing - why?! Is the hypnotism well so dry you had to repeat the same idea but just replace the culprit? The story has some moments, and I only went through half of it to be fair, but it was just not worth going through the slog.

Much like how the game opens up travel in the school building by entirely skipping it and giving you fast travel, go grab a full save and fap to the characters - that's the only value here. My one positive note that I'll leave with is that the game at least treats it's one side character with a large handful of scenes (and doesn't even give the other side character a sprite - neither here nor there).

Some have compared this game to the Persona series. I get why. You spend a lot of time in school talking with various characters, doing mundane tasks. There's also an agent organization you're apart of, trying to apprehend magic-users who abuse their powers. So you go on missions beating up baddies between the school segments. There's also some 'free-roam' parts where there is no main story and instead you collect some porn scenes.
On paper, that sounds like a pretty mediocre concept for a porn game. Most of the time will not be spent on porn. You're better off playing Persona if you want more personality, better writing and deeper character relationships. The porn here is alright, the art is good, but the scenarios are about as cliché as they come.

This game is quite complicated and interesting. I am giving it a solid 5-star rating, but not for its pornographic things, for it is a really great game. This game reminds me of playing Persona 4. I am not joking. This game has more budgets than most rubbish porn games, which makes it looks like a normal game having some porn parts.

If you like JRPG porn games and know how to play them, I recommend you try this one. It's more stylish than games made by ONEONE1 . If you hate RPGM or just want to have some pleasure, don't waste your time downloading it. It is bad at hentai part.

The H in this game is really nice, the art looks really nice, and the scenes itself make sense in the plot and world the devs have whipped up here.- too bad that's the only redeeming factor.

Every scene is either Rape, or statutory rape, which if that's your cup of tea, play this. I'm not the biggest fan of rape-play but I can at least rub one out to it if its what I'm working with.

The plot was fine, I was bored enough because the space between any H content is hours between themselves, and the main story sections force you to wander around lost in a school looking for the right NPC or the right room to find the exact 1 RPG tile to slick on.
P.S go to the settings and turn on the Hint Mode, makes the game so much faster.

There was a lot of budget into this game, a lot of time spent, but it wasn't in any of the correct places.

Also the only real "Route" if you could call it that- I call it the only H Scene story line, was all about the MC being hypnotized into becoming a guys wife. So that's basically just the only Ending you will get because it's the only fucking H Story line to progress when you can Progress.
Absolutely fumbled the execution of this game

I honestly don't get why people are complaining about this game. This game should get a higher rating because it is one of the best games that I have tried so far. Good CGs and an evenly paced plot. Honestly its the best game that you can find out there right now.

It's a real shame that I have to rate this so low, because there was clearly a lot put into this game. It has great art, and is fairly polished for an H game.
But you know the only thing worse than an H game with a shitty story nobody cares about? Forcing you to go through said story to get H content.

It's bad enough that the combat is almost completely removed from any H content in it, but it's one of those "lose to see content" kind of games. One thing I see a lot of people complain about too is that it feels like a virtual novel, which is true until you get to free roam, but even the free roam sucks because you have to complete the story to unlock any of the free roam content.

It pains me because the H content itself isn't bad, but it's so convoluted to get to. It's so badly designed you'd think they're trying to cure you of your porn addiction and forcing you to play a regular game instead.

** No control ** Perhaps the biggest faux pas any video game devloper can make. You've got no conrtol over any dicisions in the game, you're just watching a badly written visual novel that makes you do all the work. Play Karryns Prision. It is the game you'll be hoping for every minute you waste playing this.

Even though the game is a lot less sex-heavy as I thought it would be. For some reason completing the game on a virgin-run felt right and it made the pacing of lewd scenes to gameplay better in turn too.

Personally one of the few gripes I'd have with this is 'if' I didn't enjoy the pacing and worldbuilding outside of sexual stuff, there seemed to be more variety than there actually was. (As the 'demo version' recollection room has a bunch more different lewd scenes that seem to as of yet, go nowhere. However there's also a holographic Aroma saying "stay tuned for more updates" So my guess is that more side content/sub-stories will be added later?
All and all quite good, I wish there were more tomboyish kind of nerdy protagonists like this without the magical girl setting. More of a slice of life thing with other fun stuff sprinkled in.

i find this game review is both overrated and underrated at the same time , nether 1 star or 5stars , overall this is a very average RPGM game on DL site that sold over 10 k unit , the game is neither good or bad , nice art and entertain story that all , the rest is basic city exploration and dungeon clearing with lossing Hentai section , there school section which can be interesting but served no purpose than to remind that MC is a student without next to no school activity whatsoever which is a huge let down.
overall just play for fun or get a save ,3/5 not good not terrible , very genetic .But for the price around 2000 yen at lauch this is pretty decent !
Edit , just check ci en and x dev said there will be more contest like 2.0 in the future . for now just bug fixed

painfully slow meandering bullshit 'plot.'

scant number of heavily re-used CGs

your typical trash "lose on purpose" h-system

it's a crap game with a decent production value, damn shame that effort didn't go into anything decent. the 3+ star reviews are entirely generous reviewers the game absolutely does not deserve.

I'm not really sure what the story is about, you are some kind of hero or something who is pretending to be student if I understand corectly.... game has too much text, in my opinion, so if you want to play it for story, be prepared for reading.
I haven't played a lot yet, but so far it seems like a game with big map for no reason, I hope it's just that I'm still in tutorial, but it's very linear - no benefits for wondering around.
Graphics of the game is pretty good, you can see it on images.
One thing to remember, only translated thing in the game are text bubbles and other normal text stuff, so when there is text on image, it's still japanese, kind of annoying, makes school map unusable for me.
Fighting is kind of standard RPGM. Actually most stuff is, so if you don't like RPGM games, won't like this.

good art, solid h-stat system. Aaaand i'm out of positive things to say about this game. Now on to the negs:

The story is boring, like, really boring. It's unnecessarily padded out and generally just a waste of time. Stories that could have been easily cut down to 5 minutes got dragged out to 20 (if you skipped through most of it like i did). This wouldn't be that much of a problem if it wasn't for:

STORY-GATED PORN PROGRESSION. YAY! No, seriously, this is the bane of my existence with these type of game. You basically trapped yourself in a loop of edging and blue-balling because 'new' scenes you unlocked are incomplete as fuck. Why couldn't they just do it like Shimobashira games where scenes are unlocked through stats instead of 3 hours of the most boring, predictable story ever.

Gameplay is boring, you might think the cool UI makes up for it, but no, there is nothing actually unique about it to keep me around. And most of time you're not even in battle, but running around the map for fetch quest or some shit.

Good art is literally the only saving grace this game got (really good art though). Everything else is just an annoying waste of time. The game locked away actual cool shits like convenient traveling and h-scenes behind paragraphs of pointless dialogues and making you run around like chickens. Battle is just you losing to collect h-scene then go back to deal with the bare bone rpg gameplay.

A solid game with a interesting story. Not your typical "fap fap" game. The slow pace is compensed by the design elements that is very well done.

There is no grind, just story. Most h-scenes are tied to the main story.

I like the game.You will like it too if you are not on "full fap-fap" mode, and are willing to enjoy a good narrative and cute artstyle.

Somewhere in here is a great art style. It's pretty hot. For real.

But it's buried under a fuckload of shitty dialogue and bad ends that require a restart. Fuck what a waste of potential

That said, if you're a big VN fan, you'll probably get a kick out of this. Stuck navigating? A helpful hint mode points the way without being super intrusive.

First off with the bad points:
The build up here is slow at first (true like one previous reviewer mentioned), battles are mostly fluff in-between imo and exist to give access to defeat scenes, so do not expect a too deep of an experience with that system.
Furthermore there is a lag whenever you move between maps and areas that takes a few seconds to reload each and every time, so there's that too.

With that said, the game has high production quality, UI, images, backgrounds and everything visual is just beautiful imo.

The translation is very good with the exception of the occasional wrong pronouns used here and there in a minority of the dialogues.

The sound/music track is decent enough and I don't think it's just stock music in this one(?).

Lastly the story and ero material throughout the game are more than enough to keep you entertained for its duration.
The scenes I've watched so far are very erotic (I believe there are more than 50/60 in total available(?) for both the main heroine and the side store NPC character).

No idea why some of the earlier reviews were so harsh on it, you can clearly see that the game is on top of the monthly sales on DLsite and with a near perfect score of almost 5 stars over there, so I'm not alone in deeming it 5 stars worthy here.

This would normally be a average 3/5 scene collector but the polish bumps it up. That being said it IS an average RPGM scene collector. For the amount of "game" it might have been better to just do this as a VN.

Generic combat with outfit destruction that dosent affect much ( few lines of dialog when talking to NPCs).

H-Stats are tracked tho they dont seem to change any of the dialog/ gameplay.

Preg Mechs: every internal cumshot has a dice roll. If it hits, you get an extra fertilization picture at the end of the scene and are marked "Pregnant" on the H stats. Except once again, those stats dont actually go to anything...

Pick it up and give it an hour or two before finding a full save

I don't believe it's fair to account for the amount of time a game took to develop when rating the finished product. I also believe that this game could have been much more, but I'm reviewing what we have when we got it.

If you've played Vampire Notes or the dev's earlier stuff you'd have very well known what they tend to focus on. Presentation, exceptional artwork, weak gameplay and weak corruption. This game falls into the same holes and has the same strengths.

RPGM games tend to be pretty ass in terms of gameplay but a lot of that comes from seeing the exact same format iterated upon a million times. You find AOE spell, spam it. This game does nothing to improve upon the base systems other than giving it a snazzy UI, and admittedly that's a flaw in this day and age. I can appreciate the puzzle sections but the core fights need to have at least something going on. See "Revived Exorcist Priestess (tentative)" or "Wolf of Shadow" for a fresh take on RPGM combat.

The H-content is lacking in terms of variety, and potentially amount, ymmv. Croix is extremely hot yeah, but how many of the scenes are just the same frame of her getting her tits grabbed? Yes it's an extremely well drawn cut in, but it doesn't substitute for full CGs.

The writing has pros and cons. I played this with MTOOL before dazedanon posted the AI version but I got the gist. The plot is somewhat basic, the characters are better. Quirky sure, but interesting.

Where this game shines is in the presentation, maps, and art. The transitions are a nice touch, the UI feels unique and doesn't hurt my eyes, the maps are most certainly not just stock assets or your boring rural RPGM town. You can tell that this is where the majority of the development went, and you either appreciate it or hate it for that. The actual character art and CGs are something else though. There's a legitimate argument to be made for the art being best in class, shame there isn't all that much. What we do get though is fantastic.

So all in all, it's not the best game, but it's a very pretty story. The art's damn good and with any porn game I consider that to be the most important factor. I'm biased, four stars.

While i did enjoy the game cause the artwork is so good, the story isnt that bad, well this game has many potential scenes that went wasted, the janitor, the thugs, the homeless guys,... no only the nerd who do hypnotize got all the spotlight(i really dont like hypnotize genre, now i despise it even more)

Oh and also the pregnancy content is boring as well (to any fellow who enjoy pregnancy go play Goblin Conqueror, you will see how pregnancy should be handled)

But regardless of all the lacking, i think this game still have many things to enjoy especially the artwork

Anyway thank to the devs and the uploader for this game.