Well, revisiting this game was fun. For context, I played this waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when while it was in JP, using some tips from umlf to figure out what's what.
The experience is definitely way better in English... for the most part. The most disappointing part, even if I expected it, is the fact that the protagonist remains as a human with what's her face's blessing, rather than becoming an actual demon of some kind. The protagonist was definitely the weakest part of this game... but I suppose that's to be expected of generic self-insert bait.
At least Lunasoft still don't pull back punches on the implications in their games, even if they don't go as far as showing all the brutal CGs. If you stop to think about it beyond the horny, at the end of the day, this game is REALLY f'n dark... The protagonist basically kills the minds of most of the girls except Lynn, who's too strong, and Reina, who's already on the dark-side. Oh, and the DLC girls too, I guess, but being cock-addicted goblin breeders isn't much better... Then most of the seed beds (aka generic village girls and so on) actually get killed when used and the game tells that to your face.
Gameplay-wise... I didn't find Normal difficulty particularly hard? The game's not subtle about how it works, at least to me, and I've always been a fan of management and strategy type stuff. That said, I did shamelessly "cheat" by save-scumming to control how often the heroines invaded the dungeons and to buy extra turns on the earlier heroines by making sure they got captured as slowly as humanly possible. That let me do most if not all of the researches for that tier in peace. Except for the traps.
Traps are a trap early on. The only trap that starts becoming useful after around the third or 4th heroine is captured, is the poison trap which you can plop at the entrance and it will always land free damage for you.
Everything else? Gold sinks that you can do without. Only the slow trap becomes really good later on in the game, since you can afford to put a row of them after the poison trap and two of those fate things to attract elites, and benefit from slowed enemies running into your front line and getting decimated. On top of that, it helps to be able to sell trap items for more gold, which allows the trap research to get refunded and then even provide extra income with the black market.
Of course, with this strategy, by the time I got to the end-game, I was so well set up that I just sank 6k gold in the final research over two turns to just finish faster because I had nothing to do except breed hobgoblins and scrounge more stats on the girls. (Got Reina to 28 training sessions and everyone else at 21 before I got bored. Three of the DLC heroines were max corrupted and the mage girl was nearly there too.)
Not gonna try the higher difficulties though. I'm not a masochist, and there's simply no NG+ anything that would make it worth it.
At most, I might try Endless mode if I'm really bored... but that's unlikely at the moment.
