I kept an eye on this game for a while and was waiting for it to be finished, so now that it is "Final" I decided to go through and try the game.
At best, this game has a lot of content with some fun characters and some good story elements about transgenderism. At worst, this game is as "Wide as an ocean, but deep as a puddle". There are a lot of desire dimensions (which basically act as dungeons) as well as individual events with 5-6 different characters, and the game overall took me 30+ hours to fully complete.
However, at the end I felt that some aspects of the core gameplay loop and story elements just felt kind of underwhelming, usually because things would move on before it was given time to get the depth it needed. While overall I do like what the game does, I can only feel like there was oppertunity for more and some aspects of the game annoyed me quite a bit.
(Note: This review is going to be very long so you might want to just skip past to the other reviews if you want a simpler version. I tend to write a lot when I play a game for 30 hours)
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The main gameplay loop after the tutorial is that you start every day in your house, where you can briefly explore the town (I didn't find much to do in the mornings) before entering the Desire Dimension and having a choice of where to go. After clearing a dungeon or just leaving (there is no penalty to doing so) you can then engage in 1 "after work event" which allows you to get new skills and stats for both you and the eventual 3 party members you meet. There is also the option for buying new equipment and other miscellenous things.
I found the beginning of the game to be very rough because so much of your capability is reliant on both equipment and After-Work events. Immedaitely going into the Town Hall and buying "panties" can give your first party member Gwen 50 of any stat you choose, which can be a huge boost to your damage output. I only found out about this after trying to do the 2nd dungeon, so my first encounter with the Wax area was that it would take 4-5 turns of non stop attacking to kill 1 enemy where every single enemy patrol has 3 of them. As you might expect, that's not fun.
There is also no penalty for just entering the Desire Dimension and immediately leaving to go do an after-work event and skipping to the next day, as there are no time limits. I'm glad this was the case as I hate time limits, but this also means you can just spam work events constantly without clearing any dungeons until a strict story barrier before the next bunch. It also means you can basically infinitely grind Stat Boosts due to always having access to the Gym as a use of the time slot. This felt like a bit of a balance issue, but you can get absurdly strong without grinding and thankfully there is no levelling.
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Once you get all 4 party members and have some equipment + skills on them, the gameplay becomes more engaging although there are no major additions to the usual RPGMaker systems and you generally just use powerful magic skills every turn and recover MP with energy drinks. Gwen specialises in ATK, Julia specialises in Magic and Lani focuses on DEF/MDEF. I probably had the most fun building Lani around as a tank since she has a taunt skill and multiple buff skills. Once I found a way to make her immune to debuffs, she carried my team due to how many enemies rely on debuffs.
One barrier you'll encounter early on through the game is Charm, as a lot of enemies apply charm and this basically makes your party members kill eachother. Without immunity, you will die very quickly to it. Luckily you can buy an accessory that makes you immune to charm, which is definitely needed at times.
I will mention that I don't remember a single boss that actually required me to do anything different besides either use physical skills or magical skills. By the end game I had a build where I could do 20k crits on a Lightning skill for Julia which would let me kill end game bosses in less than 3 turns.
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POSITIVES:
The "Core" system is nice, and I like how many different skills you get at the end although a lot of them are just the usual specific element magic spell. Cores are a reward from killing bosses that can be equipped to grant you some of the skills that boss used. Having Cores that could grant party members new skills and also let you craft a unique item from them or absorb them for more TFs was something I enjoyed engaging with, especially trying to keep track of all the cores to make sure I had both the unique item and the absorbtion bonus.
It gave a reason to go back and fight a boss again, since you need at least 2 cores to get everything from them. While some of the unique items were a bit useless (like the reusable damage items), others were pretty impactful so I had fun with figuring out which cores were best.
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There was a good job done with Gwen, Julia and Lani as characters you engage with constantly. While some of their work events felt quite short, I did at least enjoy that you can spend time with each of them individually and they each had their moments to shine in the story, and it was a good idea to have a special dimension dedicated to each of them that focused on their personality and the Work Events after that meant you could understand more of their personality and what they like.
Also, I liked that you could romance all of them and not be punished for it. It was cool that you could go the movies with any of them as an after-work event and each of them have their own preference for movies, so bringing them to a movie they didn't like got them significantly less stat bonus from it. Much more interesting than just a flat stat bonus.
Marie's after work events (once unlocked) were really good. It was really nice seeing more of Maries backstory and helping her in the aftermath of recovering her memories. For me this was the highlight of the game, and she gives you some of the strongest skills available.
The 2 transition events for the Main Character were also interesting, and I liked that you could only bring one other party member for the second one plus how it was a major changing point for how the MC perceived themselves and their hidden desires.
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The game does feature some Bad Ends and BDSM content which will be the main source of any porn besides the gradual transformation of the main character and some of the romance events. Most of these are done using the paperdoll images you see in the previews, although rarely it will switch to other forms like sometimes there will be 3D models and I noticed AI Generated art at one point. For the most part though this game is pretty tame, and you won't really get much porn here. It exists but it's not a core focus of the game.
I did not spend much time trying to intentionally lose to bosses to get bad ends, but I went into this game more for the transformation content rather than the individual fetishes present in some of the desire dimensions. For some, the lack of unique art and the heavy reliance on the Paperdoll images will be a negative for them.
I won't mention too much about how this game uses art because it didn't really bother me, so this review is more focused on the story and gameplay elements.
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Since there are so many different dimensions, the game gets to explore a lot of different desires and fetishes and how some of these "desires" are manifested was interesting to see. If you wanted variety in the themes of areas you explore then this game does a good job of that.
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NEGATIVES:
The main issue I have with the gameplay though is that every dungeon just ends up feeling too similar. Not in regards to their visual design or theme, but how you actually progress each dungeon.
You enter a medium sized map with 20-50+ enemy patrols running around in random patterns, while you navigate around them or fight them for no benefit besides money, opening chests and finding where you need to go while having 1 interactable in each dungeon triggering a Transformation for the main character. Very few of these desire dimensions (which I'm pretty sure there are more than 30) deviate from this formula especially when it comes to enemy patterns. Basically every area ends with a boss fight to end the day.
At times I felt like I was playing a stealth game as I'd watch 10+ of these enemies do random dances on the map which I had to time to get through them. If you don't want to waste time fighting every single enemy, then you need to navigate past these fast moving patrols which sometimes just feels like a waste of time. Since each dungeon was usually just one big map and then a boss, it was kinda dissapointing when for most areas that was it. Many dungeons are literally a one and done thing where they become completely irrelevant once their short time is up. You find a new realm, you enter it, you kill the boss, you leave.
Story elements in these dimensions are almost always solved by just beating the shit out of the boss, and it got kind of annoying after a while since places that should have important value are introduced and then the game moves on as though they are just another obstacle to progress.
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I think I just wanted more development with some of the areas, and more interesting story elements with the characters and antagonists you meet inside these dimensions. I'll give 2 specific examples of characters which I felt the game handled poorly.
The first is the "Vampire" who you find out about from Gwen's after work events. She tells you about how her father sacrificed himself to save her and was absorbed into a dimension, and she has been fighting to stop these realms from causing issues in the main world for years. You then find a special dimension where this Vampire appears and he taunts you for a bit, especially Gwen. The result is you go through a dark castle with a fuckton of the same enemy patrols running around that you try and avoid, and then reach a miniboss which I won't spoil.
After that, you find the Vampire and fight him. When you win the fight, he "dies" and then yay it's solved. After navigating like 2 maps and one boss fight, this huge part of Gwens backstory is completely irrelevant for the rest of the game after maybe 20-30 minutes. He just respawns in his own dimension and has no impact on the rest of the story.
Gwen does thank you for killing him and it progresses her work events, but a character who is so important to her character arc should have more than like 20 minutes of screentime. I was waiting for a time when this character might reappear and cause trouble, but he never did.
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The second and more frustrating example is "Oberon, king of the fairies". About midway through the story, Marie goes missing and you find her in a fairy dimension. What you learn is that Marie was once human, and Oberon was the one who turned her into a fairy after they were absorbed into the desire dimension.
Oberon is described as a very powerful manifestation who has been around for hundreds of years and his realm is counted as particularly special. Once you get past the fast moving enemy patrols (it's a core game element to stealth past constantly moving enemy patrols), you go to engage this powerful enemy.
Immediately, a new major villain appears and INSTANTLY KILLS HIM. After some brief conversation, you rescue Marie and move on to engage this new villain.
This major antagonist to Maries backstory becomes a complete joke and is also never relevant again in the rest of the story. The only way to actually fight Oberon is you need to either wait an absurd amount of time, or pay money to a random ghost to respawn him. After that you can go back and actually get a boss fight with him, but the fight means nothing because these manifestations can't even die anyway.
It makes it very hard to care about many of the story elements when so much of the time, any "threat" you encounter is just dealt with a single boss fight. You often don't even get any history or motivations for some of the villains since they are almost always just a manifestation of human desire and nothing more. Even characters like the "4 Dommes" end up as nothing more than 4 boss fights because they only exist within their specific realms and you don't get any sort of feel that these people have any impact outside of their tiny little bubble.
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I just couldn't really enjoy some of the story development with the constant hopping between new areas when it always felt like you were just dealing with a villain of the day, even at the end game. Only the final boss poses an actual "threat" and even the final act of the game with the true final boss felt underwhelming because the buildup to fight him is just go through more random dimensions to get the stuff neccessary to find him and then fight him as the final boss which ends the game.
Any attempt to make the later dimensions "more important" just falls flat when they feel the exact same as every single dungeon you've done prior to this. One of the "big dommes" area is even an exact clone of a previous dimension just with horror elements, which made it feel even more pathetic.
While I like some of the dimensions individually for their concept (and some of them do expand with new areas after points in the story), I just wanted more out of individual dimensions and less problems solved by beating a boss and leaving afterwards. The game also relies very heavily on navigating patrolling enemies and any puzzle elements are usually not complex.
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While not as huge an issue, I did feel like some of the After Work events were too short, and it would have been nice if there was some activities or interactivity within these events. At least from what I remember, all of them are just dialogue between characters and usually don't last more than a couple minutes. What actually happens within them is nice though, so I don't want to criticise them too much.
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TRANSFORMATION CONTENT:
The Transformations of the main character also felt shallow to me, just because often the only impact any of them have on the game is 2 lines of dialogue in the Mirror at home. Your paperdoll image only updates twice throughout the game (besides the costumes you get) so you never really get a good feel for what the transformations are actually doing to your character.
In my experience, there were zero events or moments where a specific transformation is called out and let's you see the impact it has on the main character, instead they just kinda happen and you have to wait until 2 major "transition" events before anything changes with your overall character. You get multiple breast/hip/ass expansions but these are exclusively just lines on the mirror. Your party members never have an individual chance to react on these changes beisdes immediately when the transformation happens.
Stuff like suddenly losing all body hair or minor stuff like "Sweet Tooth" are never explored which is a missed oppertunity as you could easily have an after-work event where you go out to eat and it shows how this changes the food you eat but nope, almost always it's just 2 lines on the mirror.
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This lack of depth is even worse when major changes to your character are completely ignored to everyone around you. Let's take for example when you are hypnotised by the Witch to like feminine clothing and be more open about wearing them.
The result of this TF is that now your character can equip new clothing and gain the stat boosts from doing so. You would think then that now coming back from the dimension your male character wearing female clothes would be something that characters would comment on. But nope, people like Manny in the pub have absolutely nothing to say about this. For me, these kind of events are important if you want to make the whole concept of a character transforming from a man to a woman appealing as it shows the consequences and aftermath of each change, but that kind of depth is just ignored here.
It's frustrating having a character slowly transform over the course of the game but those transformations are just brushed over quickly and only exist to add to a counter for the transition events. The only ones that even change anything are the hypnotisms to wear clothing and accessories as those give you stat boosts.
Also, the first transition event (while the event itself is handled well), the aftermath of it is really bad. After it happens, you are convinced by your 3 friends to try changing your name and living as a girl as a trial run since they reveal that you might be trans. This is good, except one major problem. Before the day you were called one name (for example Chris) and then you now decide to change it to a feminine name (like Christina). When you go to the pub to talk to Manny, he immediately calls you Christina.
The same happens for the other NPCs outside of your party like Athena. How do these people now suddenly know the new name that was decided today? The game never shows you having this conversation with them, it either skips past it or it never happens and everyone immediately knows your new name.
These can seem like minor things, but this kind of extra depth is important to me when doing this kind of content.
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I can't help but consider the main character transformations "shallow" as it felt like more focus was put on the idea of transition and not the individual transformations themselves. Stuff that could have been interesting to see like "more gracefulness" and sudden changes in body structure are exclusively left as dialogue on the mirror.
It would not have been hard to make small events that let you have characters react specifically to these changes outside of just getting it or have some story elements where you do something but a transformation you aquired previously changes what hapens. For me, it is a huge missed oppertunity of the whole game.
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Spoiler about the conclusion to the Main Characters Transition Events:
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CONCLUSION:
In the end I think this game has a lot of content, and you can definitely have have fun and enjoy this game for what it is. There are some fun characters to interact with and I think there are times where the game does it's story really well (I really liked Marie's story events)
However, there just wasn't enough time spent on making individual dungeons more unique in how you navigate them, or having a bigger gameplay loop outside of just "enter dungeon, get past enemies, kill boss, done". Many bosses you encounter who should be more interesting are introduced and defeated within one boss fight.
While it didn't really impact my experience of the game, the heavy use of Paperdoll images as the main source of art will be a negative for some people and worth noting before trying.
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I think my thoughts and review are particularly critical just because I can see the potential in what could have been, but since the game is finished this potential will go untouched which is a shame.
A lot of effort went into developing the game, and I did enjoy the game enough to fully finish it trying to complete every after-work events and finding all transformations. So I guess that counts for something.
,but as a normal game i would play it and you have at least 10 hours of gameplay.
