RPGM - Completed - Enishia and the Binding Brand [v1.06 Steam] [Shimobashira Workshop]

Shimobashira Workshop producing good content although a bit disappointing compared to previous releases: Celesphonia & Ambrosia. Definitely a shorter game, feels like there were less scenes as well. I was not a fan of the dice roll combat as hitting double nat 1's three times in a row was a frustrating experience.

positives
- compelling premise for corruption
- does not spam you with mundane walls of text
- no grand kill the demon king storyline
- day to day game loop
- somewhat interesting minigames
- premise forces you to manage your money adding a layer of gameplay

negatives
- monotony of rpgm battles
- while the premise of the corruption is compelling, the way it occurs is through situations and odd jobs you get yourself into. which can be chaotic, disjointed and often too sudden
- there is a day, afternoon, evening and night cycle to each day but the world and it's npcs do not change much
- too easy with all game modes. unless you really try, you should be able to do a full virgin run half asleep

Solide game,,nice CGs, good main Story + advanced branching stories for you and side stories of your companions based on your decision.

Are you a real saint or a depraved Nun, decide it for you and your friends.

Excellent game if you have played in Celestia/Ambrosia 100/10

Gameplay so cool that you just enjoy battles and quests, lol

Scenes could be more but tbh the game overall super high quality

Jobs/corruption/quests - super high quality
HScenes - super high
Images could be better but good quality too

Just the fact that it is possible to finish the game, keeping the protagonist pure, is already a positive point for me. The proposal of the game where you have to pay a debt within a certain time is nothing new. But the fact that I can "pay" the debt in a way without humiliation and sex is something new for me. I liked being able to create my own characters within the game and I thought it was a cool way to immerse myself. But I have to say that making an RPG with dice-based combat gets old very quickly.

It's good, and I really like it, like all other Shimobashira translated works, but I still think Ambrosia is better
But I think the biggest reason this is my least liked between Ambrosia and Celesphonia, is because of the exploration system, you get a kind of board game map, where you throw a dice to decide how far you go, and something happens depending on where you land. I just really dislike that system, and it's mostly the reason why I played this game less than the others.

I still is a good game, and the H content is still up to par, it's just the gameplay itself.

Another banger by Shimobashira Workshop, the same devs that made Ambroisia and Magical Girl Celesphonia, though it's not quite as good as those two. Combat is standard jrpg stuff, but fairly well-balanced and consistently engaging. I was a fan of the "board game" maps that the dungeons worked on, and having skill checks run on rolling dice was very D&D/Balders Gate (in a good way), keeping moment to moment gameplay fun. The base CGs of the lewd scenes are all high quality, though it does default to the miniskirt outfit for a lot of them. Story was... average... The bad guys turn out to be the obviously bad guys who everyone says are bad, and Enicia beats them up. Did not have the 11/10 post-game content that their last two games had, which made me sad (especially as I was expecting it to be there, and it wasn't). The translation itself leaves a bit to be desired, it's MTL and a lot of little errors and awkward grammar litter the text boxes. Still, overall the game is absolutely worth your time if you like jrpg or corruption games.

I really like this dev's game. Their games are one of the few that I already finished but still replayed a few times.

But this, I don't know how to explain it, it lacks "soul". The game feels so hollow compared to their previous games.

GIVE IT A TRY, YOU WILL LOVE IT.

You are a nun. You have a debt to pay, and plenty of different opportunities to do so. Many different kinks to explore. Amazing graphics, wonderful game mechanics and over all really pleasant game to engage with. Its one of those games that feel like an actual game.
One of the few gems so don't hesitate to try.

If you are still not convinced have a look at the list below :

Points that make this game excellent:
- Great resolution and quality of pictures, animations, UI, scenes etc. Over all very nice graphically
- Sounds, background music, voices etc are awesome
- Concept of contracts opening certain aspects of game
- Steady progression of naughtiness dependent on progress in the story and on experiences (user behavior)
- Bunch of mini games that are fun and engaging and quite kinky.
- Exp levels for various side jobs and kink parts of your character
- Amazing combat with an actual system.
- Exploring based on this border like game with rolls etc, extremely fun and easy to get into
- Engaging story, and actually multiple stories from different angles
- Whole world to explore and be defiled in

and so much more that is hard to put into words...

Not as good as ambrosia, which might be my favorite h game, but still great. If you liked ambrosia go for it. Standard get corrupted to pay the deadline type game, but the scenes are varied and nice and the art is great in my opinion.

The "dungeons" are boards you go through with dice rolls which is not great but still better than your standard rpgm generated dungeons.

You can make a custom char, and if its male, he can have a "scene" with the mc while resting in a dungeon, which I thought was pretty cool.

I like the costumes, I wish more games like this one had a depraved costume you unlock, many dont.

I enjoyed it. If you liked the other shimobashira workshop games you will like this one.

Completed the game in 11 hours with a good ending (without corruption up). After completing, all the CGs were unlocked and I liked them.

I took a girl and a created character into the party.

There were no problems during the playthrough. There wasn't much of a grind. Except. I lost a lot of time because I tried to look for new content after every major event.

The plot is good, I liked it. However, I don't want to replay for bad ending.

The MC very cute and meek, the story quite insteresting and plenty freedom to MC stay coomer virgin like mine. Friendly to non-competitive player, there a option for who want jerk with too much grinding such reducing difficuly of mob and goal.

Even thou, grinding especially the dice is quite annoying, no history log, the UI bit less intuitive.

Overall, that is worth play imo.

After the release of ambrosia years ago, it made me expect more from the Devs on their future endeavors. However, celesphonia and now this game just look so subpar in comparison. The game is more than playable, but that is all there is to it.

Gameplay: It's definitely more creative than standard RPGM exploration, but having practically everything tied to dice gets annoying really quickly. This makes random events more natural, but also makes going for anything specific a lot more annoying. On top of that, having all combat locations makes them blend together.
Item balance is all kind of wacky though. According to the in-game weapon/armor list, I only found ~35% of all gear despite finishing ~98%of the game.

Story: Not very elaborate, but nice and neat. MC isn't dumbed down for plot, villians have logical goals, and ending is satisfying. Just fine as a backbone for a game of this genre


Scenes: There is a decent variety, although they are kept relatively vanilla. Art is good, costumes are okay. Some scenes support costumes, some default to one or another.


Overall: simply a simple high-quality game. I'd rate it 4.5 because I just didn't feel the dice and wished for more variety. But for an average user, this should be a good experience.

It's soooo boring.

The idea is good and the start is fine but you just gotta grind the same old shit.
Wanna try do modelling, okk did it thrice and it was just a swimsuit with no progression

The translation isn't great either

Pros

-very cute mc
-great art
-interesting story
-and gameplay

Cons

-Very,very slow burn to the point seeing the same scene 20th time because you're trying to get corruption up.
-boring because of slow burn.

conclusion:still recommend it but if you haven't played it dev has better (imo) games.

Ambrosia and
Magical Girl Celesphonia

Interesting story, beautiful character design, immersive world, and of course the ecchi. Like Always A Great Game From Shimobashira. The experitmental dice system, though. Not a fan of that. It's suitable in some places but gradually becomes annoying and thus lower the games replaybility value. However, don't get me wrong the game is still fun and I had a great time playing it.

A great corruption game.

Some of the quests break sometimes, sometimes its not obvious what you need to do, but remains one of the best. Give it a whirl and youll see if you like it within the first 15-20 mins.

Story is okay. nothing to write home about, but the adult situations make up for it in this case.

I recommend reading the walkthrough if you get lost

Yet another banger made by this group.

I like the tabletop-esque approach to dungeon crawling and combat. Despite there being a time limit it's extremely easy to manage. Good bit of content and a focus on corruption. Pretty much in the same vein content wise to their other games. They continue to put out quality games and this one ventures out of the mold a tad just to prevent their formula from getting stale. Here's hoping they put out another game in the near future.

simply put. same dev as celesphonia and ambrosia. but those games were better.

idk how is it possible when this game should have better graphics, but it just is. the art, scenarios, they are just better.

it's like the dev realized the "formula" for porn games so now doesn't put any thought in it just copy-pastes the previous games and misses the little details which made those games great.

i dont mind the time restriction system. you can choose a difficulty in beginning, you can have unlimited time if you want, or hard difficulty with double debt and half days to pay it off.

but normally you have 30 days.

but it has day/night cycle, with morning->afternoon->evening->night->late night.

on latenight you can only sleep. so you have 4instances to skip time per day. those instances are usually lewd events or adventuring. some things don't even skip time and can get you money/scenes. so you have plenty of time to experiment.

the premise is great. nun, have a huge debt, scummy debtor, puts curses on you by your own choice to decrease debt.

but for some reason the scenes are just not erotic enough. exact same scenarios as previous games just worse. huge disappointment.

some grind. hard to rate this. it's between 2-3. i guess the quality and amount of content is there, and i dont remember any gamebreaking bug, english is surprisingly passable, the gibberish english scenes are rare. there are many grope/sex scenes.

i think 3 is fair due to this compared with the boringness and spiritlessness of the game. this game has no passion, it's just a cash grab. although the quality is not as bad as some typical cash grabs but it's demoralizing to play a game where you know the author wanted to put in as little effort as possible to get the most amount of money. which ofc is standard behaviour but not in art/creativity, it just spoils the product. like here.