RPGM - Completed - EP Doll [v1.02] [Fuyou]

Pattern Recognition and Reflexes: The Game. Brutal and grindy.

This is the first "EP" game and worth playing if you're looking for a history lesson on the series. Plenty of content, too. But I hesitate to recommend it - the game is very well made, but in the spirit of vicious arcade games. Your reward for doing well in a section is a cheap death in the next, and you can miss out on actual bonuses if you don't try absolutely everything.

I guess the above can be a pro if you want endless hours of play? For most, it's a huge timesink with a drip-feed of payoffs.

A game about playing some guy who got some sexbot and is trying to upgrade her. A good idea, bogged down but atrocious, slow-paced gameplay. One of the first tasks is to maneuver your plodding character around instakill enemies in an extremely frustrating first act. Later you have to circle around behind enemies to backstab them, and it takes numerous hits to take them out. The gameplay is not fun at all, even if the animated sex scenes are pretty decent. I couldn't get into it.

[Review of v1.02 on 4/18/2022]

RPGM is not great for making games. It's really, really meant for making Breath of Fire, Final Fantasy 1-6 style games, the kinds with turn-based combat. That might tickle the nostalgia bone, but it also leaves much to be desired these days. I look back on these kinds of games fondly, but I really don't like playing them anymore, and my frustration is also compounded by how damn prevalent RPGM is amongst porn game developers.

Still, once in a while, a developer decides that they're going to play around with RPGM for something other than a typical RPG. What we have here is something like that; the first weird game of three from game developer Fuyou, the other two games being "EP Girl" and "EP Battle Girl".

This is my first time playing any of these games, and I think it's neat as a proof of concept. The mini games are decent, if slightly underwhelming. The pixel art is... serviceable. The animations are also okay. If I had to fault it, it's that everything is very stilted and MS Paint looking. It all kind of hits the "well, good enough" notes for me.

There's not much of a plot, and zero dialogue. You get a sex doll, there's mini games to play, and other folks around town want a turn on your new walking flesh-light. Let em at her... or don't. It's easy enough to avoid the... errr, is it really NTR if she's a sexbot? Anyway, you can avoid letting randos have your sloppy seconds.

And... well, that's it. This one is just kind of mediocre. Hopefully the next one is a bit better.

Changing my review after giving it a fair shot and it's a good game, albeit I felt it lacks a bit on the porn. Definitely not a quick one, as I clocked about 30 hours by the end (no cheats), but most of those were idle as the game has some idle mechanics. All in all, a bit repetitive, not so much porn, but a fun little game

It hurts to give this game a low score, this game has interesting concept and good art and it is clear what this game was made by someone with passion, but still, this is not a good game.
Amount of grind is ridiculous (btw "you can just cheat" is a terrible argument in defense of grind).
Character walking speed is too slow and somehow movement feels unresponsive.
Save system together with "great" idea to give some enemies game over attacks cause you to be fairly frustrated as time goes on.
However the art in this game is fairly pleasant and variety of clothes and poses is nice.

EP Doll [v1,01]

I played this game for around 10 to 15 minutes before giving up as i felt the puzzle mechanic in the game running around as small ball grabs you and you'll be sent back to the start again felt tedious unless you want to save every minute it didn't feel like it was worth it. Further on the next mini game didn't feel great either the way you fought the monsters was just weirdly unejoyable. The 8-bit sex scenes are looking nice, but that's just about it.

Very grindy but surprisingly addictive and the game goes way deeper than you initially expect.

I started the game and was faced with a simple game that seemed short at first glance. After a few minutes of gameplay I started unlocking new features, suddenly the new features kept piling up and several new games were spawned inside the game, each time you think the game can't get bigger a new feature appears and before you notice the simple game turns into a multiple hours deep and complex game.

Most ecchi games have a horrible and generic lore that can be easily skipped through. This game went the other way around and entirely removed every dialogue, this added a whole new layer where you keep building the narrative in your mind without having to follow hours of text and this helps with the story because it makes you wonder what exactly is happening, are you playing as god creating a new world? are you inside a simulation? are you just playing a game?
And regardless, even without dialogues the game is still pretty straightforward to figure out on your own.

The only negative point about was the game design that relies on time farming to unlock ingame currency. It is nice to get a big payout when returning from dungeons but you still have to rely on minigames to unlock extra stuff which can get repetitive after a while.

This game does not deserve its high rating for one simple reason (on top of a mountain of other smaller problem): it absolutely does not respect your time.

This game is a massive grind to the point where it is basically unfeasible to 100% this game without save editing. But my problem isn't the grind but the snail's pacing and deliberate design choices that only serve to waste your time.

First of all, your character moves like he's walking in molasses at all points in the game. Second, environmental hazards during the adventure mode will teleport you back to the "hub" area. Since there's no (that I could find) shortcuts besides one back to the boss room, you can be looking at repeating up to tens of minutes of slow-ass walking through mazes filled with annoying enemies to have another shot. Or you can quit without saving and reload from one of the many spread out save-points (since manual saving is completely disabled while in this mode). There's also specific enemies that can just flat-out 1 hit you. There's a particular room in level 3 where you need to navigate around these 1HKO enemies while navigating around tiles that send you back to the hub and the enemies move at max speed in seemingly random patterns that overlap. If you fail you need to retread a few rooms to try again and it is a massive pain in the ass. Boss fights are similarly time-wasting since they require little to no thought yet take a very long time to get through. It's painfully slow without a worthwhile payoff.

The game itself has 0 explanation and feels needlessly obtuse for no reason. Your reward for having your time wasted isn't even that great as I can't say that the H-animations are particularly well animated. The small pixel animations seem to vary on quality depending on the animation (the swimsuit ones are well animated but some of the maid ones are super choppy and jerky). I only got to 1 of the full-scale CG animations and the animation quality was the equivalent of moving the images left and right at varying speeds.

This game in my opinion is a top contender on this site for how much it blatantly disregards the players' time and patience.

For me, the only things that truly make this game stand out are 1) the weird psychedelic theming, 2) the decent quality of the art (not the animations), and 3) the variety in minigames (read: the variety. Not the quality).

If the player moved faster, the grind was halved (or more), manual saving was allowed, bosses either made more engaging or faster to beat, some basic instructions or explanations for game mechanics were provided should the player need them, then I might say this is worth a look. But seriously, it's not.

Playing this game after the novelty wears off, to me, feels like eating 500 potato chips for dinner instead of just having a full meal. Yes, you get a whole-whopping 500 potato chips but there is very little to actually digest and after the 100th chip, you're bound to get sick of them.

I'm really not sure how this game can have 5 stars. It's an intensely conflicting game. It's not a bad game, but it's an incredibly unpleasant one. It feels as if whoever made it had the coding, art, and animation to do so, but they completely lacked basic game design principles that makes for an incredibly unpleasant experience filled with things to unlock. Unless you are willing to cheat your ass off, do not touch this game.

PROS
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Art is very good. Animations are good.

A shocking amount of content that will last you awhile

A lot of different mechanics all in one, with a bunch of minigames, side games, side mechanics, etc. It's a very difficult to describe game with a ton of moving parts.


CONS
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This game doesn't really do any one thing particularly well.

The battle areas are extremely unpleasant and were either made by a masochist, or made by someone completely lacking in game design expertise. Instant death pits, frustrating enemy AI, boring bosses that go on for far too long, heavy grindiness, etc.

It's rare to have a game where this matters enough to be it's own extremely downside, but this game has no run button and you will easily spend most of your time barely making your way through the levels that are confusing and frustrating.


Overall... it's hard for me to say I enjoyed this game. It's practically impossible to finish unless you do it out of spite. The art is good, and a lot of work went into it, but the end experience comes off as far more frustrating than enjoyable, so at best I can give it 2 stars.

I played this game for 6 hours straight with no regrets

It's got good pixel H, and is actually pretty fun to play. It's got minigames, idle sequences, NTR if you're looking for it, and a whole bunch of stuff. It doesn't feel like a generic RPGM game and that's always a plus.

It does have quite some grind, but i see a lotta people doing save file edits so if you can't handle it, might as well cheat. EDIT: when you get to the end-game you should DEFINITELY CHEAT, the grind gets pretty ridiculous. Luckily it's really simple to edit your numbers.

very good game, a lot of content, good animations and really entertaining gameplay. Was stuck few times but figuring out randopmly what to do was the best part, can recommend it to all fans of wasting time grinding mindlessly

So this is a patently weird game, but in a good way! The game is kind of like Evoland, where the game starts off pretty basic but as you progress you unlock more genres within the game. It's really satisfying to see the world evolve as you play more and more. Also it's got some pretty decent dot H animation, which I always appreciate.

As for the downsides, this game is pretty sluggish and clunky. Your character doesn't move very fast, and you'll be moving around a lot. The game also gets very grindy. Love it or hate it, this game is part idle game and there are multiple resources and currencies that you use to unlock stuff. Because you need to do a lot of repetitive tasks and waiting around to upgrade facilities and unlock content, it can sometimes feel like an eternity before you make any sort of progress.

If you've got the patience, I really do recommend this game. Despite the minimalist presentation, it's got a lot of personality to it and it's a unique take on the HRPG. It's the kind of game where you'll kill time over several weekends to gradually complete everything it has to offer. Otherwise, I wouldn't blame you for skipping out on this if it sounds like a waste of time.

Good news everyone, it's actually a pretty good game. Bad news is, holy FUCK the grind. Buuuut there's save editor, so FUCK your grind Game, eat my ass!

First, the nitty gritty, the game is primarily puzzle focused. You need to have a good level of patience when going through the 12 dungeons of this game if you wanna finish it. And the grind. Good lord the grind, I do not envy you if you wish to play the game cleanly.

Second, the porn. It's pretty well done, especially in pixel art. Some detractors may not like the art style but I got turned on, so that's what matters. The sprite animations were already quite good, but in need of some variety. You gain more sexual options with higher Sex Level of course. At level 5, you get the good stuff, a big pixel art animation depending on the area you're in, marked by a heart. This is where the good stuff is. Because if you keep having sex with your waifu the art changes sequentially.

And third, in summary it boils down to fuck your waifu, get dolla, beat up the scrubs in the dungeon, and solve puzzles. A lot of all of them. I heavily recommend using the save editor to speed things along. The final dungeons also have the most lore of the game but also the most tedium. If you have the patience you might enjoy the game as much as I did.

Wonderful and weird game, haven't played anything quite like this before, even outside ero-games. I usually fear the [RPGM] tag, but this game uses the engine in creative ways and with almost exclusively new assets, so that's not a problem at all here.

It doesn't seem to use any letters other than in the menus, so the edited machine translation seems to work perfectly.

Only problem is that I don't really know how to describe the game without resorting to listing everything it's a hybrid of, so please just try it out!