RPGM - Completed - Enishia and the Binding Brand [v1.04 Steam] [Shimobashira Workshop/Kagura Games]

Shimobashira as a game developer is a bit hit-or-miss for me. I quite liked Ambrosia due to the corruption, good art and generally decent RPG elements. Celesphonia though was not my cup of tea. I guess its combat and you having to go a bit too much out of your way for the porn in it (for example, by losing) wasn't for me.

Enicia is a bit more like Ambrosia. As usual the art is good and the leading heroine is pretty hot. There's a debt system and a time limit. The dungeon crawling with a dice system didn't work for me. Felt like a time waster. I much prefer when the porn is integrated into the combat more (good example would be Succubus Academia, bad example would be Kurenkisho Quolta). I enjoyed the corruption aspects, seeing Enicia get the lewd crest developed more and more especially. Wish there was even more you could do with it. I liked how in Ambrosia the character you're trying to save was corrupted. They could have done something similar here and allow several characters to get corrupted. Would have worked great considering the antagonists. Most of the porn scenes in Enicia are fine. A bit too basic for me but not bad.

Shimobashira is a good company that make good game like magical girl celesphonia,ambroisia, and anthesis. when i heard they are going to release another one i was hyped. But after playing it, it's well... mediocre at least. I cant find any side character thats interesting and the main character is well, pretty boring. I was interested at the end when the secret is revealed about the main character, but when i tried not paying the debt we dont get any scene. I think character is weak on this one, i love the character from ambroisia like the friendship with the plant monster, anthesis about the schoolgirl, and magical girl with schoolgirll and the teacher and her friend. Its a good game but just mediocre

Very solid game.
Yeah, it's ultimately a corruption H-game (we all know how these always play out), but it's an enjoyable one.

First things first,

• Very, very, VERY solid combat and "Sudoku" dice-exploration.
  • Basically, if you're a sucker for DnD, aka tabletop games in which campaign movement, as well as actions are controlled by the roll of a dice, then you will find the game's combat and exploration extremely good. I honestly find this quite refreshing when compared to the standard RPGM.
    • Exploring the dungeons was actually very fun and absolutely my favorite part of the game.
• The difficulty is just right.
  • I played at the max difficulty in both story and combat, and man, that was mad entertaining. I'm so bored of games in which you get to one shot everything. It feels great playing an H-game in which you can actually get your ass beaten.
    • I managed to pay the full debt with barely any leftover time. Even then, I was NEVER really sure that I was actually going to accomplish it in the given time. Paying it off actually felt like an accomplishment. The game difficulty is just right as it forces the player into actually paying attention and play it smart.
      • Money management is very important in the game. Now I can be broke both in-game and irl. How innovative!
• The sound (music and voices) were alright.
• The world is quite big, there's many things to do. So many actually that you may end up intentionally skipping content.
• The story is very good as well. It's not like, extremely good, but the whole blackmailing plot and seeing how our protagonist handles it is very interesting, to say the least.
• The protagonist is hot. Yeah, moving on.
• The free roam after the game clear is a very nice addition.
  • I only wish that they gave you a cheat menu or something. I am NOT grinding to see some extra stuff.

There were some things that have to be clear before playing;

• This game consists of grind, grinding, and then more grind.
  • You're paying off a debt so you better believe you'll have to work Enicia's ass off (and quite literally)
    • There's fishing in the game. Yay!...
• The corruption is... ehh.
  • The game has "lust levels", which make a RADICAL change in the character's behavior. In other words, one day she was acting normally, she masturbated, and now she's partaking in orgies (lust level went up by 1).
• The translation is... bad.
  • There were many instances in which the dialogue goes something like this;
    • "She is a man wearing a hat. She went up to that shady street with [1], but she didn't look like she was being forced."
      • This scenario describes a kidnapping. What the fuck, is the kidnapper a man or a girl? And who the fuck is "[1]"???
        • The translation confuses the description of MANY characters (and some items) and flips them around. In other words, sometimes male characters are referred to as "she" and female as "he". Some were even referred to as "they" for whatever reason. And no, it's not because of identities or whatever, but rather because of translation errors (MTL).
          • This makes some scenarios and situations REALLY confusing. For example, the witch lady, which kept being referred to as a male to the point that I myself thought it was a futa or something until the translation actually worked and made sense.
            • There were also some missions that had unclear objectives due to the translation.
• The game lacks branching paths, and the ending conditions are simply idiotic.
  • The game only has one path with slight differences in dialogue and endings. But at the core it is still the same branching path. If Enicia becomes a slut, she fucks a lot and gets a horny ending. That's it. No new characters, (unique) events, or anything like that.
    • The ending requirements are stupid. The only real difference between the requirements is how horny you let your Enicia be.
• There's only like 3 animated H-scenes, rest are CG.
  • The CGs are okay, hot enough, but the animations are ehhhh.

All in all, I think that the Little Saint of Horseshoe Street (lol, what a stupid name) is a very solid H-game. With good combat and a fun story, it managed to go above and beyond compared to your standard H-game. It's roughly 10-12 hours long if you don't skip much dialogue.

Have fun!

When taking this game into a vacuum this is easily a 5 star game, but when compared to Shimobashira's previous games i do share the feeling that this is a little disappointing. Shimobashira still has the crown for when it comes to high quality RPGM games but it's not the jump we where hoping for.

If you've played any of the previous titles this should all feel very familiar however the Dice mechanic in dugeons are the thing that divides most people. It's an okay mechanic that feels fresh but it's not as much of an upgrade as i imagine people expected, since dice dungeons are probably easier to make i do feel like there's slightly more dungeons content in this game but they're not as good as previous ones. It's more of a side-grade than an upgrade. Although there are some very good boards in this game there's also a few sub par ones.
One thing i do however enjoy is the party system, and how you are too weak to really fight anything, it's fun to import your own custom charachters into the game.

Shimobashira still made an excellent game and there's few games on the quality of this studio in my mind but this title doesn't surpass Celesphonia and for me sits around the same level of quality as Ambrosia.
I'm hoping that like previous titles there will be some fan made content or maybe even a DLC or something for this game.

This game is much better than average RPGM games. Graphics are pretty, music sounds good, not too much recycled from other games. I really like the adventuring. This would be a decent game even without the lewd, which is good too. Story is nothing special. Girl in debt, has to perform increasingly lewd actions to get money, until she starts liking them.

it's a decent game, gameplay wise the only thing i don't like that much is the dice mechanic but it didn't matter much after sometime in my pure run of the game. And a pure run is not that much harder than whoring the mc (actually my pure run felt easier for me)

the H content is good too, i like the voice, character designs and scenarios. Also has a good variety of men, we hab old men, shota, normal asshole guy, random molesters and monsters. There's also a yuri scene but only one i think.

There's preggo content but it's barebones, requires a game clear(clearing main quest, not just paying the debt) and it's so rng to get her preggo, she can have a belly but it's just a short scene, it does look nice that each kid has info on who their father is.

this is more like an experiment

we know that shimobara is not just any developer, but neither are they people who stay satisfied with something simple.

The game itself is pretty good. Although I'm not completely convinced by the combat system, it's not a bad thing either. There are quite a few hours of entertainment.
His biggest problem might be the eroge content which is... normal.

The main problem is rather that when you compare it with his previous works, you expected more.

At the end of the day I feel like they made a game more than anything to test new mechanics, see how well they worked, and give away something to sell in the meantime.

In the end, it's a good corruption eroge.
But it probably doesn't feel better than Ambrosia or Celesphonia.

Ohh Boy, i´m slighty disappointed

The Gameplay instead of the classic RPG Maker gameplay is good, some people hating the dice block style but is fresh at least.

The translation is very good watching their origin, and the art it´s nice, but the story and the sexual scenes are a backstep comparing with Celesphonia, and i love that game, in special the lacking of good hypnosis scenes is a desilusional for me.

But well it´s good in general but i´m expecting something better with this game.

I really like the previous games these devs made and it felt like they were only getting better after Celesphonia, but tbh, this one feels like a step backwards. It's still enjoyable but it felt kinda uninspiring compared to their previous works. They basically went with the same setting as
Ambrosia, and somethings felt left out, like how NPCs not reacting to how you look compared to the previous games.
It's still an overall fun game for people who enjoy the corruption genre, so I can't rate it that badly but I hope they can find a way to give us new experiences, instead of just a reskin with slight differences.

Okay so other people compare it to the dev's previous work, and that's fair. However I'm going to rate this game as is without comparing to the previous works.

Gameplay wise, I personally disliked the dice RNG that is part of the battle. However I know they tried to be different from the usual RPGM games so I guess B for effort.

H content - it was pretty solid, there were plenty of places to go, I normally hate H content that is gathered through defeat scenes but in this game it wasn't as tedious (as I didn't have to go back and beat the enemy afterwards).

I also liked the different outfits.

There wasn't much variation in terms of the positions and the harassments, but having harassment mechanic itself is a plus for me.

The only thing I didn't really like was where the penis entered the puss, it's like it entered through the lower abdomen.

so that's a B+

Translation was mostly good, I didn't have any problem understanding the content, there were some untranslated bits here and there, but nothing that makes the game more difficult to play.

TL;DR
Gameplay - B
H content - B+
Translation - A

final grade 4.5/5

I will rate it 5 because compared to the recent RPGM works that's been uploaded to F95, this one was by far the most enjoyable.

another banger from this dev. all of the same type of content that we know and love.

i wasnt a huge fan of the rng and board game mechanics but quickly got used to them and enjoy them. im not the biggest fan of combat in games so its nice that this makes it really easy to progress with little grind. theres also items you can buy to help with the rng. money is very easy to come by in this game so you can easily buy a bunch

Is it as good as Anthesis? No. Is it at least decent? ehh i guess.
All the games from shimboshaira have some mixed art, for one both bar scenes in this game look great, but the millionaires scene looks terrible. Compared to the other games this one waste literally zero time, it just goes "well, here's all our previous system with some added dice roll together have fun, get fucked". And so i did, at a rate way quicker than the other games. So there's lots of content as well, but like i said, the artist still isn't getting it after 4 games.

Probably my Favourite Hentai Game so far.

+ Many Rape Scenes
+ Great corruption system seeing the nun getting more and more lewd
+ Sexy Outfits
+ Many Sex Scenes non con and con
+ Raped from Goblins and held captive
------------------------------------------------

- Could be more Exhibitionist scenes

-- It is after version 1.0 but it seems like some things are still not done, found a building that looks like there would be a gloryhole event but nothing happens there. And the public bathouse seems like you could enter a area but it says "under construction" and even when you do the quest for the construction workers they never seem to repair it.

-- The Outfits are awesome but more slutty outfits would be awesome.

-- No animated sex scenes it's always "just" pictures.

Okay, okay.
In a lot of ways it should deserve a 5/5. But it's hard for me to justify more than 3/5. This game feels like a very safe attempt for the studio with no real creativity in it, and the few creativity there is ends up being super annoying instead of fun.

Indeed, it is hard not to notice how similar this game is to their previous title.
While Celesphonia was fairly similar to Ambrosia in some way, it had a totally different setting which helped make it look like a different game.
But this game just feels like Ambrosia v2. This is a "can I copy your homework" situation but they didn't bother changing enough.

If that was just that, I would have given it a 4/5. But then there is the RNG/TTRPG part of the game which seems to be their attempt at creativity (hint: it isn't really creative, but anyway). And I hate it. I don't play porn game to be repeatedly fcked by RNG. Especially, locking whole scenes behind RNG event which might or might never trigger depending on your luck should be a crime.

Shimobashira doesn't just make the second-best RPGM-games, they make conceptually second-best games.

Which makes this pretty hard to score. You would only recommend this to someone who wants to play more Corruption-games.

On the whole, it is a complete game, with a lot of art, a strong theme, good game-design and decent writing. And we only get a few of those a year.

But on the other hand, it still uses stock-combat, and -enemy-designs, the characters are bland, the MC is bland, especially in her design, There's a lot of grinding to the gameplay, and a lot of the side-content is low-effort. The hypnosis-content was especially disappointing, featuring next to nothing that usually makes it satisfying.

...And it's incredibly similar to their previous hit-game. I'm not an expert on these games, but I don't think I saw a single scene or scenario that was not also present in their previous games, which is a bad sign, given the lack of characterization for the MC. It just stinks of them playing it overly safe and maybe running out of ideas?

To get into the minor differences, this game has a bit nicer world- and audio-design, and a dice-based dungeon-system that I kinda prefer to the forced RPG-battles. The world-design also gives you a lot of different ways to complete the goal of paying off your debt, which I kinda prefer for games that encourage multiple playthroughs.

Overall, this is far above the average quality for this site, but also noticeably weak and lazy in a lot of areas. More of the same, compared to their previous work, which ends up feeling kind of dissappointing, because there was a lot that could have been improved on.

Also, the translation is one of the best MTLs I've seen. How far we've come.

im kinda dissapointed that the game isnt as good as ambrosia or celesphonia, but its still really good

the main drawback of this game for me its the dice system and it doesnt really have dungeons wich is a big dissapointment coming from the previous two games.
I really hope this is an inbetween game and the next game they release is better than the previous ones.

After 5 hrs of playing, I conclude that this game just need animated scenes to be perfect.

+
The art is clean and well drawn
Characters are well made
Changing clothes and hair also changes scenes
Voiced
Interesting dungeon mechanics
-> The dice system combined with not one way map makes replayability an option
Battle is decent
Big map
Plenty of easy to follow quests
Side quests that are also engaging
Corruption and leveling of job system
The combat is balanced on normal mode
Finishing the main quest doesn't lock you out and instead gives you a free mode

-
Dice system lacks auto picking
No animated scenes
Translation


One of the best RPGM games out there

Played right after release with MTool, this translation is much better HUH.

As for game - an excellent lewd work from excellent dev. It might seem like a "Ambrosia" copy-paste, but I don't mind.

Well paced corruption RPGM game with a lot of scenes, it's enought for 5 of 5 score.

More of the same concerning Ambrosia and Celesphonia, which isn't a bad thing. From the get-go this feels a little more grindy to get stats going, though, and similarly to the other two games there's a lot of extra stats and tracked things that feel like they don't actually do anything meaningful - like in Celes oral/vaginal/etc experience determined the text for in-combat molestation and nothing more, but as far as I've seen this doesn't have any and it's still being tracked. The gallery is pretty full, but in the same breath it feels a little weaker then the circle's other two games - better than average, still.

Combat gameplay wise there's nothing special to say, really. Similarly to lewd stuff, there feels like there's tacked on stuff; you can custom build two other party members... but the game also gives you two named NPCs (and a few other friends you can cycle in) to run around with, who actually have dialog and scenes and such, so I question the point. It's also a boardgame set up, which is apparently in vogue and is a little tedious to go through but a hell of a lot better then running through empty hallways.

Still, it's good. I recommend you play on relaxed mode, with no timelimit; the game gives you plenty of rope it seems with it, and actively encourages you to do spicy things to give you more time in the base game, but it feels a little unnecessary. If and when this gets a Kagura translation, I am playing on the MTL version, which is surprisingly solid and coherent.

I was a big fan of Ambrosia and it's corruption system and I was excited to see how the developers were going to evolve from their previous work.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that this game is nothin more than a copy of Ambrosia. Which objectively isn't a bad thing, Ambrosia was great and this game is just more of it so if you dont mind playing the same game again go for it.

But to me , the fact the developers just remade the game with the only difference being the really tedious TTRPG style dungeon crawling mechanic (more on that in a moment) left a bad taste in my mouth. Like they could have done literally any plot and their corruption system would have carried the game for me. But the lack of creativity brought what should have been no less than a 4 star down to a 3 star.

The TTRPG dungeon crawling was really the final nail in the coffin for me. Adding a shitty RNG aspect that made it tedious to even move around the map made me almost avoid adventuring and exploring altogether. Which is a really bad sign for a RPGM game where adventuring and exploring are the two staple features.

Overall, this game isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. But the complete absence in originality and creativity by the developers completely culled any chance of this game being one of my favorites. Though the AI translator deserves a big shoutout, the game was mostly coherent.