RPGM - Completed - Evening Starter [v1.02] [Barony Sengia / Kagura Games]

The characters and dialogue are fun, the h scenes are decent but repetitive, and the gameplay is unique enough to be interesting at first but quickly becomes a slog. I don't think you're missing much if you choose to skip this one.

The setup has become a bit of a trope. The main character (and therefore the player) has a debt to pay off, and a limited amount of time to do it. If they don't, they must resort to doing sexual things for money. This has promise, but after two or so outings at the standard difficulty, the player won't have any trouble at all getting all the money they need. You can still choose to do the sexual things instead of spending money, but it only serves to underscore how separate the h content is from the actual gameplay. You can't choose to do sexy things until the game tells you it's time, which is a letdown in an h game.

Speaking of the scenes: They're good, but almost immediately repetitive. Each scene is a still image with dialogue, which means the dialogue has to be good to keep the players' attention. The main character's first four "different" scenes have different images, but almost entirely the same lines. They change a bit when the character's attitude changes, but once you've read one, you've read them all. This means the scenes feel stale almost immediately.

The characters and their dialogue during the story are actually a lot of fun. They're unique enough that it's a nice break from the standard fare to hear their ongoing commentary & analysis. However they are also all Badasses Doing Badass Stuff, which doesn't at all fit the Lovecraftian mythos of the game. Lovecraft is all about Horror of the Unknown and the damage it does to mortal minds. The first time the characters see a true Eldritch Horror, one of them says, "Oh, that's a <thing>. Be careful - if it gets big, it'll consume the entirety of our reality." It undercuts any possible tension when the audience doesn't believe for a second the characters are in any real danger.

The game does have better mechanics than standard RPG games. On top of normal mechanics, each character has a gun, which require bullets that must be reloaded. Your character can only get/carry a finite number of clips – ditto with MP recovering devices - so you're constantly doing the analysis of figuring out how many of your resources you want to spend in each encounter. This is great until the third or so outing when you have so much money that you can buy absolutely everything you need and then some. This makes the game feel unnecessarily deep: what's the point of learning a bunch of mechanics if they barely matter? This makes the audience lose interest in the combat, turning it into a slog.

Speaking of losing interest, there's an absurd amount of backtracking and trying to figure out where the hell to go. In the first dungeon, for instance, you beat what seems to be the boss and your character says, "we should probably look around some more." Without searching through the forums you'd spend a very long time trying to find the random door accessible from the previous area that allows you to continue on to fight the real boss. It's helpful the game has a mini-map, but without the ability to enlarge it and use as a real map, figuring out what you have/haven't explored yet is a test of your memory.

Ultimately, there are some gameplay ideas that lack the balance to be very interesting, a Lovecraftian mythos that lacks the horror to have an impact on the story, and sex scenes separate from the gameplay that lack enough variety to keep an audience's attention. If you like games that reward players with sex scenes at the end of chapters, don't mind searching through the forum to figure out where to go, and don't mind backtracking, give this a try. Otherwise, move along.

This is one of the most great first person dungeon crawler i've ever played

Very likeable characters
Great gameplay mechanics
Good writing
Gorgeus art imo. i really dig this character style so much

minus the H itself, still fapped because Ren is simply beautiful. I wish i had a girl like her

This is a pretty good game in my opinion. Since I haven't finished the game, yet I am pretty hook on this game, I will drop an early review tho.
+ The heroine is cute as hell. I really dig the old-fashioned art style by this dev. Moreover, her dialogue is pretty good, make me fall in love with her.
+ The H-scene is prostitution, and you can see it whenever you're not in dungeon. After years of playing H-games, I fucking hates lose to see H-scenes, and even cannot tolerate it. It breaks the games combat mood.
+ Combat is okay, I enjoy it.
+ The atmosphere and settings are good.

Pros:
- Combat can be a bit overwhelming at first, but it ends up pretty fun.
- Good characters. Each characters will likely to leave an impression on you.
- Art is excellent, and so is the in-game music.
- Game encourage thorough explorations in dungeon and town alike.

Cons:
- Hentai parts are a bit detached from the game core.
- Items for resetting builds are limited.
- Certain information could be conveyed better; for example, one of the characters can receive supplies from the government to use in battles, but the game does not tell you how to receive them (answer: supplies are received after every returns from the dungeon)

Review written with 29.5 hrs of play time.

I really like the combat system. Enemies have huge variety of strength and weaknesses, which makes it hard to just brainlessly use the same skills over and over. Guns have reload and ammo supply system which may make them quite expensive, but if you invest skill points in gun skills it will become a very destructive weapon. Consumables also have big significance while exploring since it's easy to take a lot of damage in battles, at least if you don't take the broken TP regen skill which allows constant heal/cure.

The story is actually good and quite funny sometimes.

While the H-scene isn't lacking, the amount of time spent in battle is far too long, and the amount of H-scene doesn't quite back that up. I'd rate it a 5 if it was an SFW game but as a H game I have to show my dissatisfaction and rate it a 4.

The first thing that needs to be said about Evening Starter is that it's a rubbish H-Game. Like many other H-Games, Evening Starter relies on the heroine being in debt in order to coerce H out of her. However, the game utterly fails at providing a link between the H and the gameplay. It devolves into a dungeon-crawler by day and a scene hunter by night. Playing on normal, I had no trouble staying so far ahead of the interest that the H-content was a moot point. Furthermore, the game has an artstyle reminiscent of 90s anime and the aesthetic while fun, doesn't really make for pants-dropping ecchi for me. YMMV on that one.

That being said, the game is highly entertaining to play if you're into dungeon crawlers and exploring every nook and cranny of a map. There are a number of gameplay mechanics that make you forget that you were looking for a fap and start min-maxing and optimizing your party to the n-th degree. And in a remarkable turn of affairs, there is a story here and it doesn't just serve as a backdrop the sex. The story is obviously not going to be of great quality but it has incredible thought put into it as you encounter lore dump after lore dump and that makes for an engaging game. I ended up putting 10 hours into it before starting a NG+, and getting trolled by the game after I defeated the Shoggoths in the Warehouse encounter (it is doable even on Very Hard on NG+).

A bit about the gameplay: in a nutshell, Evening Starter is a dungeon crawler where you move around an unfilled map full of enemies and as you explore, your map starts filling up. It's a bit frustrating in the beginning especially if you don't know that "A" pulls up a full map of the floor so you can see where you've been and where you haven't. There is a great variety in enemies. About 7 pages full according to Ren's tablet PC. Enemies have attacks, strengths and weaknesses (although it didn't impact battles too much. Using an enemies weakness as an attack didn't seem to do much more damage)

Attacks are divided into physcial and magical and then there is elemental damage attached to these attacks. Some enemies are immune to physcial so you only need magical attacks. Guns themselves have a whole mechanic attached to them. Each member in the party is proficient at a different sort of gun (some are not good with them at all) and each gun has its own strengths and weaknesses, with damage done, magazine size all playing a role. If you run out of ammo in the middle of a fight, you need to spend a turn reloading. Ammo is a precious commodity and you need to have spare magazines if you want to use gunplay as your primary attack. Your clothing has slots where you can equip runes which lend buffs and protect you against certain magical attacks. Each party member has their own unique fighting style (and the game does a great job of explaining it in the Help section, it was invaluable to me). There's also a whole skill system where as you progress, you open up new skills for your characters and there's a limited amount of skill points so you need to be careful about your build.

I felt the game missed a beat with the guns. Money is the primary constraint in the game as you have to pay interest and repay your debt so using it to buy ammo when it didn't really do much damage didn't seem like a great idea. The game failed to create a trade-off between using magic vs using guns so I ended up being a primarily magic user with a melee fighter. However, this is a nitpick as I felt the game has created such depth in combat systems that one misstep isn't enough to derail one's enjoyment. There are other small annoyances - there are too many encounters and since each encounter is high involvement, there's a high risk you burn out battling the same enemies especially when you've figured out how to be good at the game since at that point, there is no chance of a loss, just a timesink. One character does have the ability to sneak around enemies but you have to activate that skill instead of it being a passive. And for a game with several dungeons, there aren't enough side missions. Of course, it would mean increasing the scope of the game but we've already established the H-Content is limited, walled-off and separate from the game, why not? Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun in building my party, going through the story beats and exploring dungeons.

Which brings us to the weakest part of the game - the ecchi. The ecchi side of the game is completely distinct from the dungeon-crawling side. Defeat in the dungeon gives you one measly CG, not even a proper event. The rest is prostitution to either earn money or in lieu of interest. And since there's an abundance of money, you'll never see them. The game does try to dripfeed some H to keep you satisfied through completion of fetch quests in the form of "Find X number of Y material in Z Dungeon" but it is again not linked to the gameplay with scenes coming out of chronology as you completed different fetch quests at different times. The scenes themselves are limited and I'm not a massive fan of the 90s anime aesthetic but it still looks good. Luckily, you get a code to unlock all CGs at the end of your first playthrough. It's hard to miss. I briefly entertained the idea of going through another playthrough at very hard and being forced into ecchi but the game trolled me a bit and I found that funny so I just ended up using the code. You're not missing much if you don't see the scenes.

The verdict? Only play this game if you want a game. If you have any hopes and dreams of seeing some big-tiddy-goth-anime-girl sexy times, you're in for a rough ride as there will be a lot of effort to get some average looking scenes that lack variety. But five stars because excellent dungeon crawler.

This is an excellent game. Absolutely deserving of 5 stars when considering just the gameplay, story, and characters. It's also not all that bad if we look at the porn stuff in a vacuum. Why, then, does the combination of the two seem like less than the sum of its parts?

Well, the main problem is the detachment of the porn aspects with the plot and characterization. It feels extremely forced and the characters' "corruption" doesn't reflect at all on their usual personality and actions. You save the day and do some prostitution on the side, just because. It's one of the worse implementations of porn into an otherwise good story. It seems rather forced and just there to make it a porn game.

The gameplay shines brightly though. It's a dungeon crawler. The game doesn't really use any super innovative systems other than the gun system, but it shows just how interesting you can make a game with proper balancing in terms of resource management and the power curve. Being able to choose your character build makes for some interesting decisions, but most characters certainly have an optimal skill setup once you figure things out.

The story is decent enough. A bit reminiscent of Shin Megami Tensei. The characters are quite charming.

Play this only if you legitimately enjoy properly balanced gameplay and dungeon crawling. You will have a great time if you treat it as a real game rather than fap material.

Well it is kind of like the other reviews say. There certainly is a thought out combat system, but that is why I don't like it. Encounters are somewhat random, you don't see any mobs but I believe they are always parked on the same tile. But each dungeon expect to have like 50+ encounters with these trash groups that you need to put thought in. You can't really just smack your way through you do need to choose your moves somewhat carefully, the mobs hit hard. Every few steps an encounter sometimes.

The plot was somewhat interesting. The scenes that I saw were all alright, the art is decent and the writing is ok, but nothing I'd call amazing.

Made it to the fourth dungeon and gave up. Maybe play this if you enjoy dungeon crawlers (I do) and enjoy repetitive combat (I don't).

To me you can have (high encounter rate + low effort combat) or (low encounter rate + high effort combat). I don't like (high encounter rate + high effort combat), too much combat for me.

Great gameplay, story, characters, and especially the world building, now this is a proper RPG. I really love the art especially the main char, she is so gorgeous.
Edit: Yep, finished this game. I often find myself comparing this game to AAA titles like the persona series, that's how good this game is. Hoping the dev will create more RPGs in the future.
By the way, the H-scenes...... kinda average

Pretty decent Dungeon Crawler.
The Art is fresh and lively, The characters are fun and unique, The combat is engaging (and just works), The atmosphere is fitting when tense and carefree.
The music sets the atmosphere well.
There's Also several Different endings depending if you cleared your debt, how you cleared it, and perhaps there's endings even beyond this.
(I got the "no debt sex, but didn't clear debt" end)

The Ero scenes are mostly rape or debt sex.
What I disliked most is that that's for all the sex scenes, no exceptions.
no vanilla.
No Romance.

Highly suggested for dungeon crawler fans.

(Try Normal Difficulty if you want a challenge.
EASY is probably too simple, and HARD is for lunatics)

Overall, the translation is great, the combat is fun, dungeon crawling is rewarding (albeit a little clunky), and the characters were unique and quirky. The Lovecraftian monsters also felt like a nice touch, and strayed away from the typical villain archetypes. The only complaint I have is the actual H-content which was extremely limited and repetitive, but, for what it is worth, fappable. Excellent game; decent hentai game.

The RPG elements to this game are professional tier, at a level where I would glady pay money for it. You have to pay off a debt and find special items to sell on the black market, to make money that is used to purchase better equipment to do better in dungeons to get better treasures and continue forward.

But the sexual content? BORING! Its all prostitution and if you have a good imagination, you can misconstrue it as rape. The thing is - how does one have sex hundreds of times with no mention of birth control or pregnancy? Not even a line of dialogue with her mentioning she's on the pill or something! Breaks immersion for sure!

The game is fantastic as a GAME - but it seems like the porn was an after thought, and that's A-okay, just a bit disappointing.