I wish there was a term for "H-game with some neat ideas which fails to fully develop them, perhaps because of its 4-hour runtime. Oh, and the scenes are mostly rape." Because Yhoundeh is another one of those.
Good:
- You don't have to fight any of the generals. You can have a chat with them (each step of the conversation costs money though), then decide if you want to be friends or condemn them to a life of getting raped in your prison. 2 of them aren't that bad, but maybe there are things lost in translation.
- The game uses an encounter-based system instead of random battles.
Bad:
- There's a system for getting raped during combat, but that'll only happen on purpose since either you or the enemy is dead after three turns. Even if you're trying to farm lewd points you still have to kill all the enemies except one before you start or else you can get stun-locked by sex (struggle free, then immediately get grappled by one of the three enemies before you get another turn).
- Combat is dull. You only have a few moves, but you'll be using the same two all game. Enemies will either deal either far too much or barely any damage.
- The game just ends. Here's a guy who is definitely evil, here's some people who maybe aren't as evil as you were led to believe, bam, here's the ending, it's all rape. Setting aside the ludonarrative dissonance (as always in these games, the protagonist could easily wipe out the whole town instead of turning into it's seedbed), the dev expects you to play through it two or three times to get to the bottom of their Cryptic Bullshit. This is simply poor design, particularly since you don't have any customization options and combat is dull.
- The game tries to incorporate elements of cosmic horror but it feels like the type of work where the dev just decided to throw Nyarlathotep in instead of coming up with something themselves.
- You get outfits but can't equip them; they're only used to trigger scenes. Really, the entire clothing system is scuffed. It gets a dedicated listing in the menu, but you're only option to wear the default outfit until you hit 100 lust and can choose to go naked. Theoretically letting the player wear more outfits would result in notably more art being needed due to the chothing-breaking mechanic, but the only two stages of clothes are normal and broken. This game eschews the gradual breaking of clothes for a "ward" which prevents you from getting grappled until it's at 0. But again, combat is short so you'll only need to refresh the ward against bosses maybe.
- You can't fight in the arena after beating its boss, though there's no reason you wouldn't be able to keep competing. Aside from me simply enjoying arenas, this also makes grinding for the money you need for the ultimate move additionally tedious.
- You can't work at the brothel to build lewdness; it mainly exists to show scenes.
- Yhoundeh choices don't really seem to matter. Stuff mostly happens and she's just sorta there.
- While I'm glad that DLsite offers a free MTL service to developers, it feels like a poor choice for this game since it turns cryptic dialogues into incomprehensible ones. Overall it's fine, but the MTL may leave you unable to parse the aspects of this game which are supposed to make it special.
Medium:
- The game incorporates a system of powerful, renewable recovery items likely inspired by the Estus Flask from Dark Souls games. However, it falls flat here since there's no skill involved in the combat.
- Again borrowing from Dark Souls, you have to spend money to level up instead of gaining xp from battles. Since combat still doesn't involve any skill, this results in there being no sense of "improvement" while fighting. Instead you'll just have a tough time with goblins, find the mascot who lets you level up, gain a few levels, then suddenly be stomping all over the goblins.
- Areas are small. While this does mean you don't have to walk far to get to the next point of interest, it also means Dark Souls elements don't have any time to do anything.
- A virgin ending is possible but tedious since you can't lose any battles and won't get any scenes since the game lacks the "increasingly lewd jobs" system most games of this type have and just jump straight into sex. There are occasionally some events which aren't sex, but that'll just lead to a lot of reloading (as always in RPGM, press F5) since you can't readily differentiate them from sex ones before you start.
- If you decide to befriend a general then you don't get any scenes, not even a consensual one.