Ghost Hunter Vena is a very unique game in its concepts and designs paired with an amazing story with actually good world building, character development and well-paced story. Despite so, GHV still carries various problems that isn't very pleasant.
++ Pros:
- Art: overall a massive improvement from Vosmug's previous game, Xenotake. Vosmug's 2D blended with 3D artstyle looks better and less inconsistent in this game than it is in Xenotake. The game's "horror" theme gave lots of places where the occasionally uncanny looking 3D artstyle help elevate its dark environment. The enemy's design is much more interesting and the UI is pretty clean. The human character design however are... a bit boring at times because of the shared proportions between female and male characters, at least whenever they're not naked, it's good designs.
- Story: Ghost Hunter Vena's story is genuinely great. One of the few H-games out there with a really strong emphasis on good story telling and managed to fuse good story and adult themes. Although I've played through GHV twice by now, it still amazes me how well constructed everything is. The world building is phenomenal: notes that tells you about the past life of a resident in the mansion, building up the sadistic character of the main villain, several ghosts referencing the victims of the place. The pacing of your story is really well, how it all starts pretty goofy and sometimes serious while the story slowly shifts into a much more serious tone as the stakes slowly rises in the background, until it went batshit insane, all the while the entire thing has been about ghosts and sex. This story-telling is movie level.
- Character and humor: asides from the very serious, impressive story and how it can combine with sex so well, the game has its funny moments from times to times. It's great seeing the character interacts with each other and joking around and brings good vibes in this hell hole. Humorous as it is sometimes, it does great at building characters, and this is also something the game does really well. Each character is interesting, what they serve in the plot and their feelings are shown in a very well-written way. How Miss Sui slowly shifts from jealousy to total acceptance, how Rixa accepts that Leen isn't a weak girl, how Vena slowly loses her humanity and the opposite for Hand, all having serious undertones in the early jokes and great moments at the climax. It's uncommon to see this level of writing in these action H-games and GHV did it really damn good, maybe even the best.
- H-content: like I said before, the game really loves to show you that it still is an H-game, along with being a good story game. It's not the type of game where the story has little to do about sex and the event sex scenes are some forced type of shit, no the game's whole plot and backbone is built on top of the concept of lust. There is a great amount of H-scenes, both from enemies and from events for you to enjoy, and it makes for a great fap if you're into weirder looking stuff, but I assure you the weirdness is much lighter than the usual.
- Combat: the game's approach to combat is very unique. You fight ghosts by waiting for moments where they're vulnerable and quickly stun them with your stun attack before doing a big damage banish attack when they're still stunned. This two-step combat system is pretty unique, and it's very fun once you get the hang of it. The nature of it also brings lots of strategy to each enemy encounters, where you also have to be aware of your current position, what enemies are present, many ways to cover as much of their attack options as possible and so on.
- (Most) bosses: are pretty good, I enjoyed each of them. However, GHV's bosses are certainly pretty demanding in terms of execution and strategies. Most of these bosses are definitely not one off bosses you'd figure out in the first attempt, their patterns requires lots of practice and can be too hard at times. Behind the efforts it took to understand those patterns are genuinely well-designed bosses that I greatly enjoyed no-hitting.
-- Cons:
- Sounds: the SFX of the game is certainly fine, but it does not particularly stand out, especially with the constant reuse of sound effects, with little deviations even until the end of the game. The OST however is just kind of boring. The game's songs isn't very interesting, most songs sound almost the same, very formulaic and even if you noticed that the song changed, you'd still just shook it off instantly as it does little to your attention. It certainly fits its role at playing into the "horror" theme of the game, but aside from that, it's not pretty good.
- Enemies: although the game's combat system on paper is great, the enemies can pose some problems. Each enemies are actually pretty great as one on one battle of maybe 2/3 enemies of the same type versus you. The problem arises when different types of enemies pops up. Many times, they can create checkmate situations that are inescapable and although you're bound to get hit in this game due to its design, it's still a frustrating thing knowing that you couldn't get out of whatever fucked up situation they gave you.
- That one boss: this is the exception. The 3rd boss is utter bullshit sometimes with one of its attack, which exposes the really weird ways GHV works behind the scenes. The inconsistency of this game's hitbox annoys me.
- Transparency: this is one problem Ghost Hunter Vena hasn't improved from Xenotake, the game is not very transparent about certain important mechanics. The most important one is high/low invincibility. You're completely invulnerable to high attacks if you crouch and crawl, these attacks are usually leaping attacks or flying enemies' attacks. You're also invulnerable to low attacks while you're in the air with the Phantom Wings ability, which includes grounded enemies' attacks. No matter if the visuals on the screen looks like it should have hit Vena, it will not as long as you're doing the correct action that grants you i-frames to that attack type. Yes, such important information is not present anywhere in the game and I had to find that out by myself. There's a few more transparency problems like what's the actual hitbox of your attacks, the confusing navigation of the map at a few parts of the game, etc. but these are more minor and less severe.
- Resources: the game's concept of resource is also pretty unique to this game, but it's not executed very well at all. Vena has two bars, one is your vitality gauge (red) and the other is your level gauge (blue), both can be filled up by absorbing orbs dropped from enemy kills and special resource orbs around the area. Your vitality gauge also regenerate passively. You can make Vena become stronger using a variety of upgrades at altars in the map, which uses your "level". These two bars however has some major problems. First off is how utterly useless your vitality gauge is in practice. It can be used as a health bar (before your real health, the flashing lights that turns yellow and then red to signify you're close to losing, begins), recreate clothes and to use an ability that allows you to instantly kill every enemy in your screen. Clothes are kind of useless because when you're hit on the ground, you have to mash to escape your enemy while the vitality gauge drains really fast, opposed to when you get hit while naked, you can just press the direction buttons once (or twice in Extra/NG+ mode) without suffering any bar drainage. And that insta kill thing? Yeah, that takes the entire fucking bar to do and it will not activate if you don't have the amount needed. The level bar is also not really good, because to get full upgrades, you'll need A LOT of grinding due to how little amount of orbs the enemy drops. It's entirely optional because the game is doable with little upgrades., even still, you definitely aren't going to experience your full power unless you spend hours upon hours grinding the same room over and over again.
**Conclusion: Ghost Hunter Vena does a lot of things really really well, but the things it didn't do well... it kinda really sucks a lot at those. Still, it's not a particularly hard game and it's really worth it for the story in my opinion. I recommend playing it, but it definitely could've done way, wayyyyy better than it does now. 9.25/10.
