This is what I picked out of my backlog, and I honestly didn't know what to expect of the game. It was one of those random picks where I just knew that the art looked nice and nothing else... which was why I ended up pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort that was put into this game as I played my way through it.
Still, like all things, perfection is impossible... though in this case, the worst element of imperfection is actually not the dev's fault. Mostly. What I mean by that is that the game's biggest issue is, tbh, the translation. This is one of Otaku Plan's weaker releases, with numerous issues like plural for pronouns in completely nonsensical places, inconsistency of terms, odd turns of phrase... so on and so forth. It's not outright horrible, but it's bad enough that I'd seriously wonder if it's worth paying them for it.
No wonder Kagura's head got super big if this is the level of competition they face in terms of translation quality...
Ahem...
Leaving that aside, the other weak point of this game is the story, which is just... short, simple and relying quite a bit on references to Japanese mythology in certain areas. More importantly, it teases at various things but doesn't really provide a pay-off to said teasing, making it feel like the game is either incomplete, that the dev intends to have a sequel, or that they're just not great at world-building and story telling. It's not terrible or anything, but it doesn't really stand out even by H-game standards.
Especially with what I assume is the True Ending being so lazy... Though playing through multiple endings does reveal some more bits and pieces of information here and there.
Like the fact that Reika's forbidden lineage has something to do with Kitsune, given that she turns into a nine-tailed fox-girl in that one ending before raping Mana. There's also implications about Mana's potential having an actual source of a more Western bent, but the game doesn't really dive into that.
Honestly, I wouldn't recommend playing this game for it's story... If a deep engaging story is your main criteria for picking up a game, even an H-game, this one is not for you.
Speaking of H-stuff, this game is one of those actually fairly rare games where the content is ALL about rape. Literally
every single H-scene is a rape scene, no exceptions. On top of that, from the ones I've personally read through, the majority of them do NOT feature the girls having a good time of it. I didn't check them all out (and I don't know if I'll bother checking them all out), but I stuck my nose in a good sample of defeat scenes, Bad End scenes and Event scenes and they all followed that particular trend. While there's no depiction of violence, some scenes do mention hitting, squeezing too hard, discomfort and so on to various degrees and in emotionally, the girls never have a good time.
Well, I suppose Reika has a good time in the ending where she becomes a Fox Girl and rapes Mana, but it's definitely still a rape scene and Mana is definitely NOT having a good time in said scene...
The vast majority of the scenes are related to losing in combat, or having Mana be defeated in any of the parts where you end up controlling her, with only a tiny amount of scenes happening as part of the story, essentially. Even then, the juicy ones require certain defeats to happen at certain points in the story to ensure that Mana or Reika aren't virgins when you reach the specific points in question.
In Mana's case, the reason why it matters is because the guy wanting to use her for a ritual wanted her to be a virgin for said ritual so it was more powerful, but in Reika's case, there really is no explanation for why the tree doesn't rape her if she's a virgin...
Now, the fact that the scenes are tied to defeats isn't as bad in this game as it is in others made in RPGM. This is because the dev put in some actual effort in their combat system, and while the game isn't particularly hard, if you bum-rush thing expecting to "enter key" your way to victory like in other games of this ilk, you're gonna get Reika raped
really fast.
This leads me to the gameplay... but before I really dive into that, I want to praise one thing about this game. That being the game's mouse support. This game's mouse support is
amazing. Seriously. The dev ensured that it can genuinely be played entirely with just the mouse and that you don't need to touch the keyboard at all if you don't want too. While plenty of games in this RPGM version have mouse support, they almost always tend to require keyboard usage for non-standard features like back-logs, fast-forward, toggling run/walk and other things. Not so with this game. Even with the non-standard combat UI it has, you can absolutely manage everything with just the mouse.
Honestly, lots of H-game devs can learn from this one when it comes to managing their control scheme... and this is on a game that doesn't mix its gameplay with its smut almost at all, so it's not like there's the urge to play one-handed that some other games out there induce.
Moving on to the nity-gritty of the gameplay itself...
I'll start with the combat system of this game, which is honestly a first in an H-game that I've personally ever seen. On the surface, it's your typical turn-based combat with 1 action per turn for everyone. However, this game makes it interesting through several elements. The first is your classic damage types and damage resistances, which is not new, but it's well implemented in this game and you can definitely feel the difference of properly exploiting an enemy's weakness. The skills themselves have some stand-outs in terms of what they do, the biggest of which being that certain skills have extra effects under specific conditions, and learning those effects and using them properly can make a huge difference in terms of how you can manage battles.
However, the biggest things that make the combat interesting are the resource system and the stance system. The resource system is interesting because it starts low and regenerates every turn. Reika's starting Focus Points are determined by her stats, but she regenerated 20 per turn. In and of itself, nothing that special. What makes it special is that skills have two values that interact with the Focus points. The first is the usability value, that is to say, you need to have a certain value of FP to use the skill. The other is the cost value, that is to say, using the skill actually uses this value of FP. There's a skill that has a usability value of 10 and a cost of 30. This means that Reika can actually use the skill at 10 FP and it'll drop her FP to -20, which will regenerate to 0 on the next turn. The values vary all over the place, with some skills requiring more FP to use than they actually cost. This variation of ability to use and actual cost encourages the player to think a bit more than usual about the order of their skills, particularly when taking into account the regeneration side of things... especially since if Reika FP drops to more than -20 in a turn, she skips the next turn, so you have to account for that too.
Skipping turns can be bad in a number of ways, but at the same time, if you see an enemy is low on health, you can take the hit because you know that the combat will be over so the missed turn doesn't matter.
The next system that makes the combat interesting is the Stance and Insight system. All enemy attacks have a "direction" so to speak. They're aimed high, middle or low. Reika's stance can focus in one of those directions, and if it matches with the enemy, she takes reduced damage and in the case of certain skills, she avoids negative effects from them too. The game doesn't tell you what direction an enemy move has from the start (On Normal difficulty at least), but as Reika faces that enemy in combat more, that information starts being revealed more and more, until she can predict the direction of almost all of their moves, letting you take reduced damage. Additionally, blocking in this manner puts the enemy off balance, which interacts with certain skills, the most commonly used being a skill that lets you block an enemy's attack and retaliate in a way that causes "break damage".
The last element of the combat system is not something particularly new to H-games. The break-gauge. All enemies have a second bar below their HP which fills out as they take damage or interact with certain skills. Once it fills out, their stance is broken, and Reika essentially receives an extra turn where she can take special actions against them. What those are, besides an extra attack, depends on available skills and in some cases on story elements.
All of these elements combined make for a particularly interesting combat system, and while it's not a difficult one to master, it will absolutely screw up anyone that doesn't actually pay attention to said system and doesn't understand how to use it. Which some people miiiiiiiight have some issues with on account of the... dubious quality of the translation and its phrasing which makes some of the info more convoluted than it actually is...
Still, I genuinely had quite a bit of fun with the system. I played through the game and NG+ too mainly because of this system.
The whole thing is helped by the fact that the game has a nonstandard leveling system. Or better said, it doesn't HAVE a leveling system. Instead, Reika has stats, and those stats grow based on her actions against various enemies... within certain limits. She doesn't gain anything from weaklings. The skill system gains points either by defeating certain strong enemies, or 1 point per stat gained, which makes stat grinding doubly important... though it's actually not that hard to grind for stats once you learn that you can literally steal them from enemies. Beyond that, you can ALSO learn skills by stealing them from certain enemies, which causes Reika to permanently learn a variant of the skill that's uniquely her own as long as she wins that fight.
Combined with all of the above, it leads to a lot of potential variety in terms of how you approach the game, when or even if you use certain consumables... so on and so forth.
Again, I had a lot of fun with it all, though I personally never felt particularly pressured in most fights, with the exception of
the giant worm/Nozuchi and the bonus optional bonus, and for the former, it was mainly because I didn't know that
you're supposed to let it swallow Reika the first time so you can beat the Gaki inside it.
The bonus boss is designed to be utterly obnoxious, and without a guide, you will NOT beat her on the 1st try, and probably not on the second or third either, because she has multiple phases and she keeps pulling out new moves and in one case, completely changes how a number of her moves work making old tactics against them back-fire...
Seriously, who the hell could predict that the fire move would turn into the counter move...? That was pure bullshit...
It's
theoretically possibly to beat her on the 1st playthrough if you maximized your gains, have the right skills and RNG doesn't dick your ass with stuff like multiple high damaging moves being chained together... But I seriously don't recommend trying that particular bit of masochism, because there's no way you're pulling it off without a lot of luck. Especially in the last phase, where she drops her ult more frequently.
ANYway...
Besides the combat, the game also has a certain level of puzzle and exploration elements too, a number of which interact with the skill system in a number of ways. Specifically, there can locked items/doors, and certain skills sometimes allow you to unlock them or break the locks or so on. This doesn't always apply, but it does so often enough that your approach to various things on the 1st playthrough can vary greatly depending on which skills you have. Some extra items are completely inaccessible without these special skills, but you can essentially re-spec whenever you want, so as long as you're patient, there's no reason to miss out on anything. Just be thorough about the exploration.
Speaking of, like other RPGM games out there, this one features enemies that respawn when you re-enter a map. Unlike other RPGM games out there, you're provided with a method of preventing these enemies from re-spawning if you want too and are willing to expend resources for it. Are you passing through a certain area a lot and there's a specific enemy that keeps getting in your way? Beat it up and seal it, and you'll have clear passage. This is more of a concern on the 1st playthrough up until near the end of things. At that point, you'll get the option to craft an item that basically gives you access to infinite sealing.
Oh, it's worth noting that the items you use to seal enemies are also the items you use to repair clothes. Now, you might think... "Why would I care if Reika's naked?" ... well... the answer to that is that she loses defense when naked, which makes fights harder, and it also makes molestation attacks from certain enemies happen more frequently. Though, admittedly, those don't seem to do anything except waste the player's time... You definitely feel the difference though. Still, based on the dlsite description, it feels like the in-combat restraints should have been more dangerous... but maybe the Otaku Plan release bugged it? I dunno...
All in all? I had a lot of fun with this game. While it's not perfect, it was a fun playthrough, and I'm genuinely curious to see what the dev comes up with on their next project. If I were to rate it, it'd probably be worth 4 stars. Sadly, the meh story, the weak translation and certain aspects of how the H-stuff was implemented keep it from hitting 5 stars for me... but it's absolutely a game I could recommend to most people unless they're
really averse to rape, or averse to thinking about the gameplay... though it's honestly not that hard as long as you pay attention.
Lastly, there's an "achievement system" in game... I got most of them through my 2 playthroughs... But I have no idea what the remaining 2 are. (The last one is the "get all other achievements one".) Does anyone know what I'm missing? I'm honestly curious here...
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