Unity - Completed - Hentai Crush: Love Rhythm [v2.0.0] [Triple-S]

So hear me out. I've been playing piano for 8 years using synthesia as my primary musical notation and I cannot stress how much i like those kind of games. The CGs are on point but the game still has bugs which is understandable but never welcome. The translation (or script, is this translated?) errors happen, I hope they will be taken care of. The one thing that I dislike the most about the gameplay tho is the "tschk" sound when you hit a note. It's infuriating to hear it like 200 times a song. I'd much rather hear actual composition triggered by hit notes. Overall very good game but I image it might proove difficult to some users (I stuggled at the start to get the feel of keyboard to in-game interface). Also the music is louder outside the levels than inside which doesn't allow you to set it properly. ALSO ALSO: the voice actor. If she knew what she's recording AND had a contact with you while recording AND you tried to tell her what's wrong with acting you should probably thank her (If she's a hired proffesional voice actress). If any of listed above was not true the voice acting is a miracle and you should pay her more than you do.

Heads up to anyone looking to play: The mapping is horrible and some mechanics don't work well.

The art is good, and there's voicing and that's the only upside. The grind is horrible, some maps are mapped horribly, notes are off, it's just bad. I do not recommend this to anybody, and I regret getting my hopes up for a good rhythm hentai game.

For a rhythm game, it's pretty fucking terrible at creating rhythm beats. Grind is awful too. Art is fine, the voice acting is okay, but the gameplay loop is just unbearably bad. Music choices are decent. Difficulty is okay, not too hard, but again, the charts make no sense on what part of the song you're supposed to play. The vocals? The synth? The drums? It's infuriating

1.1 Edit

Alright I've got to give credit here, the version update to 1.1 fixed SO MANY problems. Particularly the grinding, and with the new mission system, rewards based on performance, and generally higher payout-per song you actually unlock things at a reasonable pace. (maybe even too fast since the missions are bugged )

They also crucially added an easy mode which should smooth out the difficulty curve for players who have never tried a rhythm game before. Big improvement!

In it's current state, it's playable. There's still some big ticket items to fix as there is very little h-game content and some horribly timed songs. I basically had to stop listening and play with my eyes. But again, playable.

In its current state it's up to about a 3/5. I finished the game on normal mode and had a pretty good time. The last song was a solid challenge.


OLD REVIEW
I really wanted to love this game. I LOVE rhythm games. I love high quality h-scenes. But my god this game is fundamentally broken, and it would take so little to fix it. I'm honestly so confused about the development of this thing...

H-Game - As an h-game it doesn't work. There's barely any content and this really feels like a rhythm game first with h-scenes tacked on. So let's talk about this as a rhythm/dating game.

Story - They included a skip button so as far as I'm concerned that is the story.

Songs - wonderful. Easily one of the best parts of the game. I could see these in a bemani game - I've seen worse songs in actual arcade rhythm games.

Look & Feel - (menus, UI, etc) very high quality. Tons of work went into this and it looks great. Which is where my confusion starts...

Pacing - absolutely atrocious. They spent so much time making the game look good that they forgot to make it fun. You will spend hours grinding the same songs over and over again to advance. None of the songs start unlocked. You should be able to unlock the next song after you beat the previous one, but that's not how it works. Instead you have to play that song a dozen times, buy a bunch of gifts, and give those to the girl before you advance. They have more than doubled the amount of coin you can earn per song & added missions for additional income. There's also a bug with the missions causing you to earn coins too fast in some cases...

Do you love this song? Because you better love it enough to hear it 10 times in a row to advance to the next level.

Gameplay - mediocre. I'd give this a 5/10 6/10 as a rhythm game. The timing is horrendous, and the grading mirrors the perfect/great/good/etc. of other rhythm games which just calls more attention to the bad timing. Worse yet, as you improve you get the exact same rewards no matter how well you do. So all that time you spent turning your goods into greats feels pointless. And honestly this is such an easy fix: Give us bonus points based on our performance, and give players a configurable millisecond-offset.

Honestly these complaints about the timing and pacing are big. These are game-breaking problems. And it kills me because the game looks & sounds great. If these gameplay problems were fixed and they tripled the number of h-scenes (seriously, doubled would not be enough) this game would get 5 stars. But as it stands today, 1 from me.

Pros:
-Interesting concept.
-Beautiful art.
-Nice soundtrack.
-Most of the songs are fun to play.
-Kinda decent VA.
-Kinda interesting stories.

Cons:
*Extremely grindy.
*Only one H scene per girl. (4 h Scenes even tho there are 5 girls)
*"Champ"

If you are just looking for the hot stuff you are better of editing the game's save file and saving you the grind hell. In the other hand, if you actually enjoy rhythm games and dont mind the few H scenes then this game is prob for you.

Decent rhythm game that goes from super easy to hit one button as fast as possible. The key locations feel a bit to close together when there are only five lines, feels fine with seven lines sorta like your playing a shitty piano.

The music in this game is kpop style, lots of references to Korea in general, but there are some English songs. The English voice acting is the one thing lacking for me.

The idea is basic but interesting. Dialogs are passable and the voice acting is good enough. The art is beautiful for characters and backgrounds. Sadly the gameplay has a huge mistake, there are no real rewards if you perfom well, combos and scores are mostly ignored. Also the difficulty is very challeging and you can't play with one hand :v