Ren'Py - Divine Adventure Rebirth [v2.1] [Masquerade]

So thus far, this game is surprisingly good. I never heard anything about it but decided to give it a go, and I'm far from disappointed. The visuals are a little inconsistent with side characters having anime PNGs as their sprites which could be jarring and is slightly amateur, but once you get used to it, it doesn't really take you out of the game that much.

I very much appreciate the creativity in letting the MC be a God of Destruction rather than a very strong Saiyan which is the obvious choice for any Dragon Ball game ever. I love the setting of living in a castle with Vados, the Oracle Fish and the two guards, and the amount of content is absurdly big, at least compared to what I expected.
The story is a bit unorthodox for Dragon Ball but it's not really a bad thing, the twists and dark turns it takes keep catching me off guard as the game isn't afraid to take anything from the player: his powers, his home, his friends and Vados. It balances off its humorous tones with those dramatic sequences and plotlines and that's fantastic. There might be some disjointed story beats, weirdly paced character arcs or entire character forgotten for a good portion of the game (looking at Caulifla, Videl and 21), and the story isn't exactly a natural continuation of the Dragon Ball world, but it takes up a life of its own. This really is an original story disguised as a Dragon Ball parody, and honestly, I don't really mind it as it's way less boring than retelling "Goku fights against strong villains".

When it comes to the playability and user interface, I'd say it could be a little less vague. The game heavily relies on you repeating the sequence of going to sleep and clicking on the "Quest" feature to progress the story, and barely requires you to use the vast interactive features the castle offers: the map, the universe map, the garden... And if it does deviate from the usual formula, it doesn't tell you anything, so you might want to continue the story but get stuck since the "Quest" feature suddenly has nothing, and then you're on your own. Some sort of a journal or a hint system could help this issue, but it's fine as long as those deviations are not too vague or hard to figure out. Also, a shorter way to get quickly to the bed in the castle would be an extremely beneficial quality of life change.

In addition, it wasn't uncommon for an error to pop up during the game, and while most of these could be skipped, one of them locked me out of finishing the fight against Gin and his angel and skipped to its aftermath, skipping a bunch of story beats that likely will be important later. I don't mind minor bugs of course and they didn't detract from the game's quality, but they were slightly inconvenient and with how ambiguous the game can be about what you should do next, it gives off the feeling that perhaps I as a player did something wrong and screwed the progression.

The characters also feel pretty faithful to their original selves, and despite the new artstyle for the girls that isn't anything like the Dragon Ball artstyle, it gives the game a life of its own and its own flare. This Vados has the essence of the original, but has enough personality of her own and the artstyle shift allows her to be her own character without it being uncanny or jarring. This isn't the DBS Vados with some extra lines and a lewd undertone: its a new original character that is roughly based off of a fairly one-dimensional character from the show. And that's true for all characters, whether it's Caulifla, Lazuli or Heles.

The son plotline is also very interesting and throws you for a loop, Gin being the initial antagonist makes sense and sets him up to be the primary boss to defeat, but then the twist with the son turns things around, especially with how grim and depressing he turns the game. Vados betraying you I'm a bit mixed on, as that makes her character slightly unlikeable and untrustworthy, which isn't a bad thing, but she was the one character that was portrayed as the most loyal, so having her betray you just gives off a feeling of unease. I appreciate trying to humanize her and give her flaws rather than being the MC's lapdog, but unless she's given a proper redemption arc and owns up to her betrayal while acknowledging MC's shortcomings, her character will be significantly less likable after this, for me at least.

One thing I'd like to see implemented is more replayability. Once you unlock the girls' rooms in the castle you can replay some scenes- and Vados scenes are always available, but a lot of scenes are a one time thing that's never displayed again. Initially I thought that using the Namekian dragon you could basically access any scene and CG that you played through, but you really can't. For characters that aren't in the castle like Caulifla, or scenes that you can't replay like the majority of Videl's and Heles's, I'd just love to have a way to revisit everything rather than having to replay hours to get there again, whether it's through the dragon or having more options in the character interactions.

Overall, I did enjoy this game a TON, it has colorful characters, nice visuals, a very subversive and original story for a franchise as overdone in media as Dragon Ball, and its characters are easy to get attached to.
Hope to see more, thank you and keep up the fantastic work!

The art is great.
The writing is decent.
The gameplay is boring.
The UI is atrocious.

The story is as linear as one can be. Progressing the story consists in clicking 3 buttons, pressing 3 other buttons to rest and then repeating the same cycle. It is tedious and unengaging. Sometimes you'll be prompted to take a decision. It will at best reduce the amount of grind necessary to unlock a 2-pictures sex scene but in most cases it won't have any impact at all. Sometimes you'll be tempted to click different buttons and explore different locations because the previous quest ended with "we need to meet character A to progress the story" but it'll be in vain : just click the same 3 buttons everytime.

What truly unnerves me and pushes me to write this review is the user interface. There is no better way to describe the UI of v1.0.7 than quoting these wise words from a wise man :

I am very highly educated, I know words, I have the best words, but there's no better word than stupid !

Click to expand...

So many mistakes were made I don't know where to start. I don't know how much thought was put into the process of designing the UI but it was clearly not enough.

• Half the buttons don't do anything. When you click them, you just go to a screen telling you that you can't go there or it isn't available yet ... If the button is useless, don't show it.
• Important stats are not shown. Some actions will arbitrarily make you tired. Once tired, you won't be able to perform some actions. But the only way to know whether you're tired or not is to navigate through the terrible UI to click the action you want to perform and then be told whether you can do it or not ... Have an icon somewhere telling whether you're tired or not (a sleeping head or a yawning face for example) and grey out buttons whose action you can't perform (with a disclaimer when you hover it explaining why).
• The actions most often done are hard to reach. Like, seriously, why do I have to go through 2 different screens to sleep ? It is the most common action, just put a shortcut somewhere, a bed icon or something, and let me get on with my divine adventure ! Same for questing : 3 clicks E-V-E-R-Y-T-I-M-E.

This game has the potential to be a good VN but it is set back by a clunky and actually unneeded UI. Because, in the end, why are there so many buttons when every day is spent pressing the "quest" then "sleep" buttons ? Does the game plan to be a sandbox game at some point ? Because it's been developed for 4 years now and it still isn't. Game dev, you have to decide whether you want to make a VN or a sandbox game because the middleground where your game stands on is a tedious enthusiasm-draining mess.

This game is perhaps the most loyal adaptation of the Dragon Ball franchise into porn that could possibly be made, and I mean that in the worst way possible. I'm a huge fan of Dragon Ball, and that's why I have so many complaints about it as a franchise. Here's a rough outline of the kinds of issues pervasive in the Dragon Ball canon:

- A lack of linear progression
- Abandonment of plot lines and forgetting entire characters exist
- Misuse of a crowded supporting cast
- Repetitive and bloated story lines with unsatisfying endings
- Fan service that either goes too far or not far enough
- Exposition of overly-complex internal world logic that is then retconned and rewritten constantly

All of these things are present in this porn game parody when the strongest thing a porn game parody could be is simple. Meet iconic Dragon Ball characters, have sex with them.

Android 18 has the closest to normal progression, but it is not tied to the game mechanics that it pretends to be tied to. Bulma is used and forgotten. Vados has half of her progress happen normally, then completely halts, and then skips to the end as if they've had a sexual relationship the whole time.The MC kidnaps Videl and then forgets about her for months. The MC romances an OC princess but her progress is spread thin and her sex scenes are minimal. Bulma's mom shows up but since Bulma's progression is forgotten, her mom doesn't show up again for a long time. Kale shows up every once in a while but her story progression doesn't make any sense. Heles shows up and has an entire story plot twist involving Android 18 before either of them have their basic stories fully completed. The MC creates an entire "daughter" character that he also forgets about for months because she doesn't do anything.

There is a main story connecting these plots together, and it's the same boring Goku-lite main protagonist you'd find in Xenoverse, Legends, Heroes, etc. He's not likable or unlikable because he doesn't have any actual discernable personality.

This could all be solved by simplifying it down to collecting them like trophies and having simplistic dating sim mechanics like it pretends it's supposed to. There is an entire hub world built around the fact that this was what the game was trying to do that is still completely unused except for Android 18 whose progress is not actually accomplished through the dating sim stats.

The art is a fantastic rendition of Dragon Ball characters in a new style, but not any better than the average twitter-posting artist who makes Rule34 pinups. Overall, twitter pinups and comics are a better alternative than this game due to not being tied to a game with a bad story and worse gameplay.

This game is BEGGING for animations. It has an amazing art and a cool story to tell with likable characters (mostly because they really like you) but fails to tell those stories because of a poor choise of dialogues, scenes and UI.

Art is great but that alone isn't enough, I'd rather be reading a comic on it or something else because I can't bare to click mindlessly and grind just to watch a picture even if really well made and detailed.

If you enjoy it still you'll find great art and material, just don't get your hopes up that much.

I legitimately thought I had bugged the game and did stuff out of order several times because the story is so disconnected. I'm still not certain I haven't, but the description of the game plot on the main page is nothing like the actual story. It's a visual novel in Ren'Py, it needs a cohesive story. I think the story needs to be redone from the ground up.

The assets like Vados and 18 that all look like they came from the same source are stellar though, super hot. Not all the art is like that, but what is, is really good.

I came to jerk off, I stayed for the story. Honestly, this shit is top tier. More of a novel than a porn game. Id say put off a few hours to get to know the game, and if it strikes ur fancy, either as a porn game, or as a interactive novel, then stay. Can't wait for the final update!

How people can like this game?

-Inconsistent Artwork
-Zero intention to integrate the "Artwork " with the game looks like someone went to the rule34 webside pick a bunch of DBZ fan art and dropped it into a Ren'Py Game.
- Story is a Joke, uninteresting, and the worst of all unnecessarily long.
-Grindy just to extented the duration of the game.

I'll try to be very quick here, as the protagonist of this game you become a brand new god of destruction picking up the slack of Champa and Beerus after the tournament of power, and also the main plot is about something like, "oh no the Z Fighters are gone what are we going to now!?!?", for the sake of you the main character getting to Bone all the pretty sexy girls. So is it fun? Yes!!! But also no??... It struggles with the game part a lot, for example, there's a ton of basic bugs and infinite loops that have not been fixed yet despite being on this site since the beginning of Christian creation and change its name 410 billion times to please the Patreon police and possibly angry Grandpa Toriyama.

7 out of 10 " okay this isn't half bad! I Have a good chubb going on!"

I haven't played this game in a long time, so my review doesn't reflect the current version of the game, but from what I remember the game was great, the only thing it was lacking was animation/sounds, then it would be a GOATed game.

This "game" is more like a bare-bones CG Gallery with some... stuff tacked on to make it appear to be more than that, which seems like an awful lot of effort for such little pay off.

This is yet another smut game that needs to focus on what it has to offer. What this thing has to offer is some decently rendered fan art of dragon ball characters in sexual positions... and not much else. Since it's obstensibly a visual novel, its primary hook should be its plot and story.

Unfortunately for this game, the story is frankly incredibly stupid. Most porn games have shallow plots, but at least they're straightforward. Usually some variation on "A horny guy is in a situation around one or more horny women, sex hijinks ensue". Here you're a god of destruction, created on a whim, who is charged with finding the dragon balls. The problem is your character has no personal stakes in finding them, nor is there any greater story stakes for doing so. So there's no narrative drive, which basically strips the context out of any sex scenes. At that point, you might as well just look up porn gifs, it'd save you more time for a better result (those at least are animated).

So the story objective is arbitary- find the dragon balls, because that's what you do in dragon ball. Thus, you have to find a scouter in order to locate the DBs (I haven't watched this show for a long time, but I do remember it actually being pretty important to the plot in the Freeza arc that scouters couldn't find dragonballs). Right here we run into a conceptual issue. The writers have two premises squashed together. They started with a cosmic-level deity protagonist, but tried to insert him into a plot that's obviously written for protagonists far lower on the power scale. This is like a story about Superman taking the One Ring to Mordor, and actually having him walk to Mount Doom because that's just the Lord of the Rings goes, man. Why would you write that kind of story differently, my dude?

So, instead of maybe using your massive cosmic powers to pull some strings, or finding one of Freeza's goons (who IIRC have these things lying around in bulk) and just taking one, you go to a random chick's planet. In all the universe, she's apparently the only one with what amounts to a space smartphone. She's the last female of her race (the tuffles iirc), so everybody's fighting over her, and this is made your problem for some reason. You're a saiyan- you know, the guys who did planetary genocide for a living, and you're the god of destruction, who also does planetary genocide for a living, but even more. You'd be hard pressed to find a scenario an MC should care less about. That's the level of writing here.

Anyway, she doesn't want to give you the thing, and she has her fucking invisible robot beat you up. This is some schoolyard writing, and obviously hiding assets the creator didn't want to bother creating or commissioning. Can't even find clip art of a robot? Fucking lazy. You scurry back to your celestial palace, "train" by playing an insultingly simple sliding puzzle a few times, then go back and point a finger at the robot and it dies. You then get the scouter, and the game becomes a dating thing. Apparently, you "spend time with" the queen in order to stop the wars over her??? As in, you go on picnics and shit. Then there's a stupid subplot about male franchise characters disappearing?? But let's date? Who fucking cares, I stopped playing at this point. Not only is the plot some stupid bullshit, the characterization of the MC is all over the place. One minute a psychotic despot, the next a sweet caring dating sim protagonist. I swear they write this based on whatever whim they're feeling at the time.

This type of game can only survive on the strength of its storytelling, and holy crap, this is some hot garbage. It's not even dumb in your usual porn-contrived way, or even in your standard Dragon Ball way. On top of that, this is barely a visual novel. The character portraits are single, static images, no matter what's happening. They didn't even have the good grace to draw multiple facial expressions to carry the conversations, which is where you'll spend most of your time in this game. This shit is standard, c'mon.

Lazy, unfocused, and bad, even for porn games. If you care, find a gallery collection of the handful of still images. You'll save a lot of time you could be doing anything else.

The MC
Feature Bloat
Story
Conclusion

this game is kinda like visual novel with choices you can make and with some other added gameplay content like fights and traveling to other planets, game is linear which isnt bad thing btw, i like linear games its important to me to not miss any juicy content from artists or replay game again and again to see it all which is incredibly boring, sadly game has some bugs like i couldnt lower health of MC clone during our fight and also there are multiple "this is the end of current content" messages that were lazy let behind even tho game was updated way further, also it feels like DEV forgot about some stories like training your own created human - you get one problem and it doesnt get continuation about it instead u jump to another unrelated thing and previous problem/story get completely forgotten
i liked very much that heles plot twist but game feels unpolished i wanted to give 2,5/5 but i can only give either 2 or 3 so i give 3

This one is a pretty hot mess. I don’t know if my game is bugged because this whole thing is laid out so poorly. Once you finish the opening it’s laid out as a classic sandbox where you explore and grind points except there doesn’t seem to be much available that actually matters. You just click through the main quest over and over to unlock more scenes meanwhile parts of the main hub you live in are vacant until the author decides to unlock them without clear direction. Personally I found that to be more and more annoying as time went on.
The story itself is nothing to write home about. You play an OP MC that sorta just cruises along wherever the writer fancies. Characters come in and go out with very little consequence. At one point you’re supposed to train a specific mortal only to then go in a completely different direction with no reference to your previous plans. It feels like the story is being made up as the writer goes along.
The art is truly the saving grace here and all the women personally fit my tastes. Some of the scenes look super similar though which does get old. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing content, however, because of how poorly everything is presented to me.
Give this one a pass especially if you’re looking at the pregnancy tag because I assure it’s not worth it. The one thing this has managed to succeed on is that it reignited my interest in Dragon Ball so I’ll be watching the actual show. Unless you’re a super fan of the series though avoid this game like I mentioned before.

It has potential. I really like the artstyle. But the gameplay is a little boring. This is just my personal opinion. Currently the best dragon ball universe game which exists. Its definetly worth a try to build your own opinion.

Im a fan of DB series,but this game is really poor.

Pro:
-Decent art

Cons:
-The story is everywhere.I dont know how they do it,But it feels like multiple writer put their story in this game until it become a mess.Not to mention,they seems like they doesnt know what they are doin and where it will ended.
-The characters is one dimensional.There is not much interaction with MC and the other characters except to fuck.At some point in the game,a popular character is appeared,then they just vanished and no one mention it again.
-The dev handle the DBZ character like J.J Abrams handle SW.They ruined them with bs weak power level and plot armor that doesnt even relate to the plot.:
-Make the girls have a different body proportion because almost all of them are fat and have an exact same weird body.Some of them doesnt even look like a DB character until their name is appeared in the game.

The art work is great and all the characters mostly look like they belong to the same universe, except for a certain fish.
While there are some issues the game is being actively worked on and is making good progress. Maybe not enough progress to be called v1, but still it is obviously that a great amount of effort has been put in

I really wanted to like it, because it's dragon ball, but I can't.
Objectively it's terrible game that only used dragon ball for it's popularity.

For starters, your decisions don't matter in 99% of cases and in cases that they do you will be meet with game over if you picked wrong choice.
Story is utter garbage that can't even be bothered about it's own integrity (one example is going to different world when vados was kidnapped, you could go there before without any problems but next time you suddenly are told that you will lose your powers because writer decided so another is forgetting dragon balls exist and can be very powerful if used right) that feels like there are multiple writers working on it and none of them knows what other writes.
And let's not forgot shitty OC's that devs feel need to put in for some weird reason (I mean it's fucking dragon ball! There is already enough of interesting chcaracters in source material.) Easily anything involving them is worst part of this "game" (visiting different planets just for titjobs? timetravel arc? mising vados arc? check, check and check) and yes I hesistate to call it a game because it feels like kinetic novel with some stop points requiring you to click to proceed.
Art doesn't even look anything what dragon ball, which is also is bad look for game that wants to be based upon it.

Devs also have weird fixation about main character being underdog, few examples include your fight against clone who is for no reason way stronger than you, tuffle bombs being stronger than anything you can do, even that first stupid robot kicking your ass at first.

If you wanted to have underdog then you shouldn't make mc a god of destruction. It's simple as that... But at this point it feels like they don't even want to make dragon ball game, that's probably why the sudden influx of shitty OC's and crossover with another game that was abandoned halfway through development.


On the bright side they fixed some bugs that were in for almost a year.

This game is objectivley terrible. The only reason this game has gained any sort of traction is because it is the only developed dragon ball game. Everything, from the UI, to the story, is absolutley terrible. But its the only DB so I guess Ill play it.

Models/art- 2/10
Well, to start off, they clearly had no intention of making their models anything like the show, but even disregarding that, the models are ridiculously proportioned. Do people even like that stuff? Like i seriously dont get how people get away with this type of stuff, its a real boner killer. The well proportioned characters are Caulifla, Android 21 and Videl, but other than them, everyone else is made terribly. Vados looks nothing like herself and looks like Mona Lisa with gigantic tits and blue skin. And the biggest problem with art in this game, is the terrible secondary artist. It may be because the second artist is trying to emulate the main artist's work, because no professional artist should be making art that bad. You will notice clearly how bad the second artist is, it almost looks like it's meant to look ugly. Videl was one of the few well drawn characters (seen in the BJ scene) , but when you see the Android 17 x Videl x MC scene, you will literally lose blood from your penis. It's sad really. What makes it even worse is that the first artist isn't even that good, the artstyle is fine, and the quality is there, but some of the bodies are just awful. Android 21 and Videl carry this section for the two points it even got.



Plot- 1/10
They clearly did not think through their story. It looks like they had a beginning planned out, but the rest wasn't even thought about. I can't say it has plot holes because that would be an understatement, the whole thing is a plot hole. To be fair, I don't even think there is a plot. It's just not cohesive as a story. It seems that someone with a small amount of Ren'py knowledge and no writing experience or interest had a dragon ball fetish and decided to make a game since there were no others. What is the purpose of your mortal, what was the point of the scene in the old game they developed, what is the MC planning to do now, they could have made the whole plot about the MC being a horny bitch and wanting to fuck all the girls and I would still give them more points than this. Forget being interesting, the plot is just laughably bad, and the fact that they say that their "game may not have the most coherent story" on their patreon has to be the saddest thing ever. People are paying monthly for your content, if it's bad, then make it less bad, instead of just telling your supporters, "hey youre stuck with more terrible content this month" But I'll give you a point for making the MC strong as fuck for a change (even though that's also a product of lazy writing). But to be fair, I still play the game, just waiting for the scene where we bone Videl, also because this is the one and only db game. And to be even more fair, I play the game for free, so I guess its not terrible in terms of price to play value.

Dialogue- 5/10
Yeah so the dialogue is fine, partially, we don't hear much from the characters that we know best, Goku and Vegeta, and the way they got the characters willing to want to fuck you was incredibly out of character, but I mean I guess its not easy to do that without watching the show and really analyzing it, so I'll give them half here.

Scenes-5/10
There are no animated, which is fine, I'm cool with static, but the scenes are very run of the mill, I already talked about the two artist issue. Nothing special, but a lot of the angles (such as pretty much any Bulma scene) are terrible, and the artist seems to be making it harder for himself, but the caulifla scene in the grass and the first android 18 scene was pretty good, so half here again.

Content- 3/10
I want to give them a break, but I can't. I mean yes, there is a good amount of content, but it isn't the content you want. I can't even say that the game is grindy because it's not, its all just pointless clicking for a long time.

Consistency (releases)- ?/10
Not counting this because they release on time usually, but the amount of content given is near nothing. I can finish an update in 10mins tops. They hit consistent releases, but they can only do that because updates are pitifully small.

Creativity- 3/10
In terms of creativity, I can give them some points, but they added too many different things ruining the gameplay. They try to do different things, but its too ambitious and it just isnt enjoyable.

Bugs- 6/10
Yeah, its pretty bug filled, and there are bugs even in the most deeply planted parts of the game near the start. but with rollbacks and sometimes ignores you can play through it just fine

Actually the worst main menu, settings screen and UI I've seen in any game on this site. It's a puzzle just to navigate the main menu while it blasts royalty free garbage at my brain. Fucking terrible so far. I don't care if the rest of the game is good, I'm boycotting this shit.

Playing this one for a year now.
This is one of the best DB inspired games until now.
Game mechanics are simple, but can be a little confusing at first.
Art is really good once you get used to it. (I like curvy girls, but the art is somewhat exagerated).
The best from this game is THE STORY. The plot is really creative and after some time it gets very intriguing (the player can feel some of the character's pressure as god of destruction).
I can promise all of you, the plot will not bore you at all.

Pros:
- GREAT STORY (some really good surprises).
- Art is good enough.

Cons:
- Has a few bugs.
- Art needs to be more like:
https://ibb.co/jT8bhvQ
https://ibb.co/QKK7QZp
https://ibb.co/fqPj7gj
https://ibb.co/PmF0HL6
https://ibb.co/6Y23fVt
https://ibb.co/nbLSbHC

And less than this one:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/807059195718126173/

- The game needs much more art and animations.

All and all, this is a very good game. I'm giving this one 5 stars.

I'll be watching this thread closely.