I have a legitimate question for those who defend this game constantly... So LoveHurts, since you're always here and brush off most of the criticism and are always as hopeful as always, may I honestly ask you, what is in Domina that makes it so good and worth investing time into for you? I'm not trying to act all smug and all, I'm genuinely asking to be provided actual arguments, so please give me an intelligible answer and avoid mentioning "Best girl", "worst girl" or other patois that honestly tend to give me a headache. I want in your words to know if you're hopeful because you really see something or you're pulling people's legs. So much love for this game is quite concerning. You're in your own rights to like the game, but I, as many others fail to see or give it all the love you seem to pour onto it.
I've mentioned often how Domina fails at every basic things it aims to be. A bad and quite boring game that is honestly directionless, a bad attempt at an RPG, a bad attempt at a porn game, porn scenes being honestly repetitive and severely outdated by today's standards as well as CGs being subpar, dialogues so copy/pasted that you'd honestly get a much more expanded vernacular just by the sounds of giving a rimjob to the Thanksgiving turkey.
I get the game tends to showcase quite a wide variety of fetishes, but despite that tiny little nugget, is there truly any gold mine hidden? I'm not taking jabs at you or any other people who tend on either defending or being hopeful or even still supporting the game. We're all allowed to like whatever. I just want to know how and why.
On an unrelated note, on his latest "Sorry for the delay, Shakie is being overwhelmed and can't complete the vast amount of CGs" is such BS to begin with. In the timeframe it took for Deka to release one barebone Domina with a dreadful realm, I want us to look at a dev doing a similar game. Teary with Katalist, released like 3 characters, continued a decent amount of the story himself, did the art himself, made the animations, upscaled the entirety amount of CGs of the game. We got a one man band blowing "Team Deka" out of the water. This isn't about "Working so hard it's exhausting" as Deka tries to pretend, it's sheer laziness. One half-baked Domina a year is by far preposterous and needs to be addressed with honesty.
I'm definitely not the target of your question, seeing as I am rather harsh on the game and it's creator (when I post, which isn't often). But the reason I keep coming back to the game despite it's issues is the scat and toilet content.
It's so fucing rare to see that, that I am willing to put up with a lot for it. The game has a lot of negatives. Being Femdom, trash writing, horrible coding, no testing, milking the patron paypigs, oversized boobs, weird body proportions in general, etc.
But it has two important things that no other game has. Scat/human toilet content, and MC agency. Also Narcissa, she's one of the few that seem to have some vestiges of a personality. I love that girl.
There's so few games with scat content, that I'm willing to put up with a lot for it. Join that together with the MC actually having personal agency? It's pretty much GOTY.
Thing is, I'm all about that human toilet stuff, but I'm not into femdom/misandry/humiliation/etc. So being a hero on a quest to save the world, fighting the dominas, with repercusions and Alternate Game Overs if you lose too many times is pretty sweet. And of course, you can CHOOSE to give up the quest and become a hot girls toilet, some of them even seem to return afection in their own way. (See Narcissa - at least pre-rework).
Theres a few other games that get close, but none can compare to the 'almost getting it right' that Domina does (did?).
The closest similar game has been Salia Coels FemU. It's also pretty heavy on the scat theme, and at least the original had combat and it was always the MC's choice if he ended up eating a hot girls shit. The RPGMaker prequel FemU 0 is... Hmm... less then I was hoping for. Too much focused on humiliation, not enough MC control since no combat, no monster girls. Also the update rate seems to be dropping off heavily.
Vollbells Magical Femdom and Ai Shield on the other hand, just leaped head first into ALL THE MISANDRY! Like seriously, that (guy presumably) really really hates man. I guess it's a turn on for some people...
A few other ones that often get recomended are ToT and Katalyst. But one is a Reverse Ryona game with a flavouring of sex, the other is I have no idea. Both are also short on scat content.
Another mention of note would be anything by LuciferSynd, most recently Giantess Spa Investigations. But it takes the oversized boobs problem that most other game shave, and turns it up way past 11. Like, tripple digits. Also the usual problems of no agency, misandry, etc.
Seriously, what's up with that? Do people actually LIKE disgustingly oversized breasts? Are devs terrified of getting slapped with the loli label if every girl doesn't have GG sized anti-gravity boobs minimum? Gimme a scat game with a short and slim, B/C sized girl, and I'll fucking pay for it even if it is femdom.
That all said, while Domina is great for those facts, the lack of content, shitty bugs, and lack of any testing has completely turned me off of actually PAYING for it. I can load up a save with Narcissa from an old copy, I don't need to see whatever dumpster fire the newest versions are.
How can Deka even release the shit he has been without running it once and seeing everything is broken. Like... I've been sitting in RPGMaker quite heavily recently, and I'm testing constantly. Add 5 minutes of game play, test it. Add a scene, test it. Done for the day and preparing for bed... fucking test it again! Every scene is run through a dozen times, making sure everything works. Yeah Domina has complexity but... oh wait. It DOESN'T!
Each domina 'room' is pretty much completely independent of every previous room. Testing it wouldn't even require him to replay the entire game over and over again, Test Event right at game start can teleport him behind the locked doors to test each domina independently. There's nothing that happens in Raa's realm for example, that relies on how events played out in Katarina's realm. Even if there was... the Event to pop into Raa's realm bypassing the door could easily set the one or two switches/variables that might be required.
Time girl would, granted, be a bit harder, since it involves going back to previous realms... oh wait no, it wouldn't either! I don't know how Deka is doing it, but if it was me? You'd NEVER see the original dominas realms when doing Time Girls quest line. Every room would be a copy/paste of the original rooms, with only the new events needed. That prevents any buggy interactions between old/new events, and again if you need to know how something turned out, you can just grab a variable/flag that was originally set. If it was set. It's not like there's a lot of possible outcomes for each domina. You either get enslaved, beat her and volunteer into her service, or beat her and leave. But 2/3 are game overs, so they don't matter.
Ugh. I went on a rant there. It bothers me on a personal level how shity Deka is at doing his job.
I don't even care if Shaki is or is not tracing her art. Nothing new under the sun anyways, and no artist has ever gotten talented without copying the works of previous masters.
Sigh... soon. Soon AI will free us un-artistic devs from the tyranny of finding an artist. The explosion of horrible games will probably rival the one that comes with every RPGMaker release, but the pearls of quality will be there somewhere.
One more thing to add, on Deka's writing. I'm assuming that he's doing both the writing and the game dev. That's... actually really hard. Like really hard. The two require completely different mindsets, with game dev being all about logic and rigid process, while writing dialogue is pretty much the exact opposite. I can sit down with a word processor and write a pretty decent story. I can sit down with RPG maker and put down some good flow of events, map design, etc. But putting story into RPG maker? Even I can tell that the writing is stilted and unnatural as fuck.
