RPGM - Completed - Didnapper 2 [v1.1.2] [DID Games]

When you start playing, then, assuming you like bondage like I do, you're probably going to get excited and think it's a 5 star game. The production quality is high, everyone has beautiful sprites, the 'voice acting' is very cute, and characters get tied up all the time. What you don't realize is that, in the first 20 minutes, you've already seen most of what DIDnapper 2 has to offer. If I had to describe this game as briefly as possible, I would say "one-note" and "anodyne."

Gameplay - 4/10
The basic gameplay itself is mediocre to bad. It's basic rpgmaker combat, but the skills you have access to are scarcely better than the basic attack, which makes every fight feel flat. You have to tie enemies up when they get to 0 HP, and vice versa, you get tied up when you reach 0 HP. This will seem cool at first, but they don't really add anything to the gameplay. Outside of that, there's a stealth mechanic, which is pretty cool, and then there's the 'escape' sequences, where you have to escape from bondage. These escape sequences are pretty amazing - the first or second time. After that they quickly become a nuisance, once you realize they boil down to nothing more than doing the same QTE 15 times in a row (literally). The strategy for escaping is always the same too - untie your torso so you can move, go and pick up any sharp objects in the room, then untie your wrists. There's other stuff you can do, but there's no need. You will never get close to failing. Part of the problem is that it's simply impossible to balance QTEs, and the other part of the problem is that QTEs are just annoying as hell. Seriously people, can we please stop doing QTE?

H-Content - 2/10
Look, I love bondage. But there's two huge issues here. First of all, the bondage is all the same. Almost every binding is a minor variation on 'arms tied behind the back with rope around the torso.' Seriously, I just described like 90% of the bondage in the game. There is no creativity or variation to it at all. And then the second issue... and this one I really can't understand. Okay so every enemy in the game you have to tie up to defeat, right? So there's one bondage sprite per enemy - which is pretty cool. But guess how many bondage sprites there are per protagonist? Also one. Your main party members are constantly getting tied up throughout the game, and it's always the same art every single time. It gets old SO fast. No variation. Why not ditch some of the one-off enemy arts, and add in more main character art? The main characters matter way more than generic enemies! Ugh.

Then the game also has no sexual content at all. No, beyond that, the game basically lacks sexuality. There's occasionally a vague innuendo, but it has all the teeth of an "adult reference" you'd see on the Disney Channel. Look, I like softcore bondage! But did the game really have to feel like a saturday morning cartoon? How am I supposed to care about getting captured when (1) I know nothing bad is actually going to happen, and (2) I know I'm inevitably going to escape after doing a bunch of annoying QTEs.

H-Integration - 9.75/10
The integration of H-content into gameplay is actually quite good. People get tied up during combat, and almost constantly throughout the story. The game also attempts to fuse gameplay and bondage in multiple fairly original ways. It's pretty cool, and I applaud that! It's just a shame that both the H-content and gameplay are so lacking in themselves.

Story/Writing/Characters - 2/10
The characters are all tropes, and the story is extremely haphazard - you can tell it was written more or less on the fly, without much forethought or regard to coherence. Aden is probably the most interesting character, but even she's not much more than a basic tsundere. There are also plot holes, if you care to look for them, which you probably won't. Not only that, but the structure of the plot is repetitive. Walk into some area > get captured by somebody for some reason > escape > beat the boss > go to a town. This same loop happens more than a few times, with not much to differentiate. I should also mention that there is absolutley no weight to anything that happens. The game is lighthearted to a fault, to the extent that, if you're like me, you'll have a hard time caring about literally anything in the story.

What disappoints me is that I feel the game isn't very far from being a masterpiece. The pieces are all there, they just aren't united by a strong design. Oh well. Maybe DIDnapper 3.

To sum things up: I think Didnapper 2 is a very niche game with tons of kidnap & bondage and beautiful illustrations <3

Compared to Didnapper 1, both the graphics and artworks have definitely improved significantly while keeping some aspects of the gameplay unchanged. I absolutely love that you can get recaptured and bound (even more restrictive) after making a desperate escape.

True to its name, the damsel is often tightly bound and left helpless in her restraints. Additionally, you have the options such as pleading with your captor to loosen the bindings or threaten and get punished with tighter restraints. The type of gag used changes in intensity after a few failed attempts to shake off the bindings. The gagged noises pair well with the sticky situation. CG Gallery is readily available on the home page and can be reset at any point of time. Overall, the well-written plot, smooth graphics and gameplay make it worthwhile to play this game. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did!

I'm looking forward to playing more games like this!

P.S. I kinda enjoy listening to the bgm......or is it just me?

Nice story, nice sequel, loving it!
Bought it to support the devs...

So anyone who likes bondage and sexy damsels..
Grab it and enjoy it

Whats more to say?
Artworks are nice and very well drawn..
Fights seem balanced so far (chapter 6)

More story DLCs are planned (confirmed)

Would buy again!

Review for version 1.0.1, released on 2021-12-12

Improvements over its predecessor
The game features several improvements over the first game, including better graphics, the addition of limited voice acting, shops that are clearly highlighted, and a happy ending that doesn't make you feel all your efforts during the game have been in vain. Also, male characters in this game do not act as if they are eunuchs; they have definitely heard of feminine allure and desire it.

In every other department, the game has deteriorated.

World
This game features a massive world that the player can freely roam! In every other game, such a world would reward the curious explorers with treasures. In this game, however, the world is filled with clutter and is difficult to roam. There are very few treasure boxes and they are filled with worthless items like potions and Tarot cards. There are no amazing secret weapons, set items, kinky clothes, riches, or magic genies. To make matters worse, unbalanced enemies roam the world, turning any attempt in exploration into a nightmarish waste of time. (More on this below.)

So, overall, when you spend time exploring the world, all you find is a couple of potions that you consume in one or two battles.

Story
In Didnapper 1, I made the mistake of taking the story of the game too seriously. The premise was intriguing. It took me in. This game's story is over-the-top comical, bland, repetitive, and derivative. Let's start with the blurb:

On a small fishing island, out in the middle of the seas, an Aion girl named Seles sees her life changed forever after getting caught up in a dark plot. Now on the run, she ventures the world’s countries in search of answers, gathering a following of other girls all setting out for their own reasons. However, the open roads are a dangerous place indeed for a group of young travelers, as peril and captivity lurks around every corner…

Click to expand...

That's not a premise. It's a glamorized version of all there is to the plot. Seles, the MC, gets kidnapped from her hometown. She spends the next ten chapters roaming the land of Iidra, blundering naively into the clumsy traps of bandits and pirates. Everything about these miscreants is the same, except their names: Tainted Dagger, Dark Havoc, Crimson Scar, Captain Ahab, Legion Knights, Riftian Slavers, etc. Seles is indeed looking for answer, but not because she needs one. On the contrary, one of the characters called Kaie foretells the ending seven chapters in advance!

Because the story has never been a concern of the developers, it is riddled with plot holes.


To add color to this repetitive narrative, the story has adopted elements of Romeo and Juliet, Huckleberry Fin, Final Fantasy VII, A Fistful of Dollars, and even Didnapper 1. Half-way through the game, you ran into the mention of a person called "Eris Lockharte" and you immediately remember Aeris Gainsborough and Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII. Paying homage is not bad in itself; but when the homage is more interesting than the story itself, you have a problem.

Characters
In Didnapper 1, there were only two NPC types: Jerks and eunuch jerks. Men loved capturing women but not for their feminine allure. This game doesn't suffer from that mistake because now, there are two NPC types: Kinky jerks and kinky lesbian jerks. By chapter 5, I knew exactly what each character says. By chapter ten, I had invented a minigame: I anticipated their stereotypical evil laughter and laughed at the same time.

Main characters are no better. They are bland, predictable, repetitive, and unlovable. It is as if they have one line only. "Seles" keeps saying "Sorry!" Aden's go-to line is "Are you an idiot?" How can one possibly love Aden when she is so condescending, ungrateful, and bitchy? Kaie is no better; she loves calling everyone's idea "foolish!"

Zhara has two contradictory traits: Cut-throat bandit and naive revolutionary. The same kind of contradiction can be seen in Eileen, who is most of the times childlike and naive, but canonically a shrewd politician.

The only plausible characters are guest appearances from Didnapper 1. Leroy is the only villain that doesn't do the stereotypical evil laughter. Carol and Evelyn are supercool. Chelsea is a new character, but her name and her attire come from Didnapper 1. She admits that she has read the story of Suki in a book and has sewn her outfit after Suki's. As for her name, it is the same as the name of Didnapper 1's queen, minus the typo.

Gameplay
In a word, unrewarding and unbalanced.

• Grinding and leveling up is useless because enemies level up too. No matter what you do, you'll never gain an upper hand over the enemy.
• Some game-changing skills become irrelevant because of their high TP cost. Simple actions, e.g., slapping an ally awake, have ridiculous TP costs. What is this TP anyway?
• Enemies who are disabled, bound, and gagged can inflict debuffs on the party by glaring! They could not do such thing while their hands were unbound.
• Aden accumulates a lot of skill points but has no use for them. Eileen desperately needs more skill points all the times.
• Eileen's healing magic becomes obsolete too soon.
• The game features elemental magic, but halfway through the game, all enemies lose their elemental affinities. One element is no better or worse than the other. There is no need to strategize.
• It is impossible to stop ailments and debuffs. You combat gear cannot stop them.
• There are no cool weapons, armors, skills, or tactics to unlock.

Fighting in this game is not fun.

Sex and BDSM
There are no sexual contents whatsoever and there are even less suggestive contents than the first game. You no longer have access to a dungeon filled with your captured enemies. Throughout the game, Seles gets to interrogate women thrice; they are pretty uneventful.

In short, the game is tamer than the teaser on the official website. Those teasers have higher render quality!

Quality
A big problem of the first game was that each of its characters were designed by a different artist. Hence, they looked inconsistent. Athena's combat sprite and world avatar didn't match. You'd think this game has fixed that problem, but no! Half of the enemies look totally cartoonish. They look like something that the DeviantArt artist "Aster Effect" has created! (Edit: I checked. They are truly Aster Effect characters.) Kaie's sprite, on the other hand, resembles a angry woman lying on a bed for sex. Some outfits don't appear at all. (Maid outfits, Aden and Eileen's causal outfit.)

Overall
If you don't have time for playing this game, don't worry. You're not missing anything.

Version reviewed: 2021 Linux Demo v1.0.1

Note: Based on the v1.0.1 demo through rescuing Eileen (in Chapter 3). I did not play the first game.

Summary
Average game overall and wasted potential. It's a bondage and DID game but has game overs. Maps are bigger than necessary. Combat feels pointless. Good art and displays of bondage.

Presentation
The map spritesheets are nice and are more than just the default RPG Maker spritesheets. The menus look great. The bondage scenes are pleasant enough. Female enemies you tied up only have one pose per type so that's a bit boring. I've only seen two varieties of Seles in bondage but they look nice. Seles bondage scenes are dynamic and change according to which restraints you have or have left to escape from. Struggling out of restraints uses animation although it's very basic with just a couple frames for each restraint.

Bondage Minigame
This is the game's selling point. There are points in the story when you're captured, bound, and need to escape using this minigame. You'll be given a number of restraints of varying levels to escape from using a simple QTE system where you press the direction keys as displayed. You can inspect the restraints to figure out their level but i found no need to do that. Disappointingly, the minigame ends as soon as you free your wrists regardless of all the other restraints. It's not very exciting because the QTE gets old fast. I also didn't find it challenging at all despite setting the difficulty to hard.

Combat
This really serves no purpose other than to level up and get item drops because the in-combat bondage is very basic and simple. Participants in combat can only be bound if they're female and below a specific low-health threshold. When someone in your party is bound, you can struggle or use your special captive ability, and you can have another party member help free the bound member. The fight is over when all members of either side are bound if female, or have no health if male. To me this is disappointing because there's only one bondage pose per character and per enemy type, and there's no levels to the bondage so it's pretty boring. You're either bound or not. I also don't like that you have to be low health to get bound. I think it would be better if you were prone to getting tied up at any point but you'd have a QTE to resist and a QTE to free yourself.

Gameplay
Chapter 1 and 2 are completely on rails. Chapter 3 starts to let you do what you want. If you have a wanted poster in the town you're in, the guards will try to apprehend you or you can surrender. Either way if you lose, you'll be captured, thrown in prison, and play the escape minigame. Otherwise you are doing the typical RPG Maker things of talking to people, buying things, and doing quests. There's combat in hostile areas but if you lose, it's game over. Having any game over in a DID game is pretty disappointing. Would be more fun to be captured and try to escape. In the segment i just completed, rescuing Eileen, you get to change into maid outfits but annoyingly there's no bondage scene for them and you can't keep them.

Rating
3/5 because it has some value for your time but i felt that the bondage gameplay was a let-down. I considered dropping it to 2/5 just because it has game overs in a bondage game.

I completed the game and what can i say: I'm disappointed . Its more a Book then a Game. Not bad writen but for me too much text and not enough Gameplay, special with the ladys.
Like "DeathmanForces" said you can edit the gallery.json from false to true just to see the gallery picture and there is not much more content.
Only Seles (main character) can be used for escape training and she has ONE Outfit, thats it. I am not Kidding.
You have one situation in the whole game where you get asked which of 3 ladys get bound but there is not picture or gameplay in that situation, so you see nothing.
About the Bondage variations in Escape training: You have the choice for Normal, Chair, Hogtie and Frogtie. If anyone played the demos before you cant expect anything new.

If you want a well writen Story where you even laugh sometimes its Okay, give it a try.
If you want it for the Bondage dont have too much hopes.

2 stars because they did some visible work in this game but they missing to much to make this really great.

It's amazing, though the RPG-elements are too short. It would have needed some additional items, not just one or two wepons per person. The fighters only get stronger by leveling up. The fun part is more on the escape phases that are brilliant. The developer seems to be fascinated by the idea of the heroine being bound and gagged. This is known as "shibari" in Japan - the beauty of a helpless woman who is watched by others (men) who enjoy it. Actually it would have been good if the bondage levels were a little bit more varied. Wrist bindings are nearly ALWAYS level 6. It would have been better to make it according to the guy/girl who binds her. The roleplay elements are too basic. Why not invent a "escape" attribut who raises after escaping of many bondage situations?

This review is for the v3.5 build of the game.

Pros:

1. Graphics are all right
2. Story is somewhat engaging
3. Linear, theme park style game and story
4. Beta debug crystals everywhere and ability to save when you want is needed

Cons:

1. No sex. Not even a little hint of sexiness other than sort of a tongue-in-cheek bondage combat mechanic with most characters never even getting undressed (other than some game progression screens with some main characters stripped to underwear for 'tickle torture'). But even this really falls very flat.
2. Money system is way out of balance
3. Boss fights do not scale well from chapter to chapter
4. Linear, theme park style story
5. No sense of character advancement. Your character never gets new skills, new spells, abilities, etc... What you have at level 1 is what you will have at level 40.
6. You basically have to cheat to get through the game (mostly due to lack of money)
7. Risk vs reward balance is way off. Game suffers from scaling issues both in enemies level from chapter to chapter and also in money rewards. The bandit you killed at level 1 that rewarded you 50 gold will reward you the same thing as a level 40 bandit. The same 50 gold even though the battle may be 5x as long and cost you 5000 gold in potions to get your party through the battle and after battle recovery. All I can say is 'thank god for Beta cheat crystals' that can give out free gold.

Ok, to start with - I am not really sure who the audience for this game is. I can't really say its BDSM. I can't really say it is something like light rope bondage or shibari. (I was hoping it was, but just fails to really deliver. Bondage seems like it is just a mild game mechanic as an aside and no major purpose.) I can't really say that it is purely adult - maybe more like a hormonal 14 year old teenage boy sort of adult. But really you don't even see characters even in underwear. So... not sure? It's like PG-13 sort of adult.

I guess game play wise, the only thing I can say is be thankful for those Beta developer crystals all over the place. Because you will probably need them. The main issues with the game are the level progression, lack of sense of advancement and lack of ability to really make gold to continue playing.

When you start the game, at level 1 - your first few battles usually net you 50g at the summary of each battle. Well, guess what - at level 40 you still get a summary of the battle with something like 50g as a reward. Even though you may have dropped 15,000g in a boss fight in potions and supplies to get through it - it only looks like it rewards you 50g. So it becomes pretty evident pretty quickly that if you want to get through this game to even see the storyline - you are going to have to cheat like hell to see the content. Just to be able to keep yourself in potions and supplies.

The other major issue is game scaling. The game seems pretty well balanced at levels 1-10 or so. After that, the disparity becomes more and more evident. At level 1 that starter potion heals pretty good when you only have like 250hp total. But guess what... at level 40 when you have close to 1000hp total and you still basically only have your level 1 'potion' it kind of sucks ass. I guess you could use those '60%' heal potions, but those are going to cost 2000gp each. Even with your healer in your party - you may find that those bandits you are fighting that triple-hit for 90, 90, 120 can be pretty painful when the max you can heal is like 200-300hp damage per turn. The game scales by adding slightly more HP as you progress in levels, but damage output, healing spells and other items don't really progress. Like I said - those level 1 skills you started with are the only skills you will have all the way to the end of v3.5. Nothing new and only slightly more damage output as you progress. Which just leads to very tedious and long drawn out battles because neither side can really do much to each other. It becomes a game of attrition - who can outlast the other side the longest and win sort of game mechanic.

The other issue is game chapters, As you progress, you go from chapter to chapter. The only issue is, due to the way the enemies and things are populated in the game, you may finish a chapter and be woefully unprepared to face the boss at the end of the next chapter. So you may find yourself having to grind levels (or cheat) just to be able to somewhat progress the story line. You find your companions have fallen behind due to game mechanics (story characters come and go as the story line calls for it - you cannot choose who is in your party) so that leaves some characters drastically under leveled for content and having to play major catch up (or cheat). This also triggers the catch 22 - not enough gold from farming XP to keep your party in potions so that they can survive combat. Which - leads to you having to cheat again to survive.

OH YEAH - I forgot the mini games. Not sure why, but somehow the developer translates 'difficulty' as having to press continuously longer and longer key combinations to get a result. So the lock picking and struggle mechanics get longer and more frustrating as you progress in the chapters. Again, your skill seems to be stuck at level 1. So while at level 1 you can struggle free in maybe 16 tries, at level 40 you will have to get like 99 try combinations almost perfect to get free using your level 1 escape skill. Something else that I hope they fix as the game nears completion.

OVERALL - this game has major potential. I know v3.5 is listed as a BETA. And I look forward to seeing if they can fix the issues before final release. But as it is right now, it is more or less a playable sort of demo because game balance and other things are no where even close to being really polished. It is definitely a great start with the amount of content so far (a good 10+ hours I guess of game play so far). I do look forward to the next update though, so it does have some positive things going for it overall.