But yes the final to the first game true ending was a litle more sad- Realy realy sad.
- Thread starter N_taii
- Start date
- Oct 30, 2022
- 49
- 23
I don't think the walkthrough of cat puzzle is right as i was unable to solve it with the help of walkthrough. But i had to came up with the idea of scaring the cat from left side to the bottom and was successful
- Sep 9, 2024
- 3
- 1
Despite being a sprite based hentai game the scenes were really good, I am pleasantly surprised!
Didn't really understand the blackmail tag mentioned as neither mom nor mc's step sister was actually blackmailed instead it's more like they were corrupted and behaved like a slut (based on their choices), it would be awesome if the mom was raped or blackmailed !,
Do anybody know any games where mom (can be of mc or other's but should be a mom of a guy) is blackmailed/raped i.e involved in non consensual sex instead of being a slut from the start ? (I have played 'friends family and strangers' which falls into this genre)
Do anybody know any games where mom (can be of mc or other's but should be a mom of a guy) is blackmailed/raped i.e involved in non consensual sex instead of being a slut from the start ? (I have played 'friends family and strangers' which falls into this genre)
I don't really feel the NTR here at all. Everyone just feels like friends and it's mostly because the protagonist is silent. When stuff started happening ijust didn't really care
- Jun 25, 2018
- 765
- 1,412
Hm, after all, the two main characters are just the character's sister and mother. In this game, in general, our character has a partner or at least a “love interest”?
PS: So far I'm playing the first part so hence my question ;-)
Yes, the MC's love interest is Celis, who is actually his adopted sister or something like that (I don't remember exactly the relationship, but I know they are not blood relatives).
The detail is that as Stormen says is that at the beginning you don't feel NTR at all, in the middle of the game is that you really start to feel the real NTR, also N_taii makes the MC of his games don't talk (he only makes them talk at the end of the game) what surely for many makes that it takes away a little bit of NTR factor not knowing what the MC says or thinks.
Although for HC3 the NTR factor is felt practically from the beginning, because there the MC already has a dating relationship with one of the girls, but I won't say much so as not to make you spoiler of the game.
If you've played the Henteria series, please answer a question for me.
In the first game, something happened that bothered me. During the scenes, we players played from the MC's point of view, which was great up until now. However, right after, the game would repeat the scene from the female characters' perspective, to show us what happened that the MC hadn't seen.
Do these scenes from the female perspective, even after we've watched from the MC's point of view, still continue in the second and third games?
In the first game, something happened that bothered me. During the scenes, we players played from the MC's point of view, which was great up until now. However, right after, the game would repeat the scene from the female characters' perspective, to show us what happened that the MC hadn't seen.
Do these scenes from the female perspective, even after we've watched from the MC's point of view, still continue in the second and third games?
We do see what happens when the mc isnt around, maybe we see a pixel animation and we see the scene later, but it doesnt show us a full scene as the mc then the same full scene as the heroine. I hate that too. At least that what I remember, but what we see that the mc cant or isnt even around for is a lot less tiring and really adds to the story. The perspective switch is definetly better.
- Jul 20, 2018
- 1,870
- 2,921
Welp. Henteria 2. It took me a while to get here. Some of it was the detours through the NTRPGs, some of that was other things, some of it was just the length of the game. But more about that later.
First though, I'll start with, uh, I guess you could call it a disclaimer.
I am not really the intended audience for this game for a number of reason. Whether it's the fact that I play it without sound. Or the fact that I'm not a fan of the widening of the definition of NTR. Or the fact that I'm not a fan of the second person "you did this/that/whatever" writing... There's a number of reasons why this game wasn't ever really going to click perfectly with me, and because of that, my opinions will likely be harsher than they would be if they came from someone who is an "intended audience" but just didn't click with the game for other reasons.
With that said, let's start.
I'll begin with the things that are less related to my pet peeves. First of all this game is long, as mentioned above, and puts a lot of emphasis on its build up, its story and on allowing the player to understand the characters and their relationships. Assuming one wanders around and interacts with NPCs and whatnot, it can easily take 6-8 hours until the first H-scene happens with one of the two main girls in the MC's life. Including that time, it can easily take ~30 hours to reach the branching point for the endings. Though obviously, these times will also depend on reading speed and whatnot.
Whether this is a good or bad thing varies from person to person obviously. If you want smut quickly, Henteria 2 won't deliver on that at all, even beyond the limitations of the scenes it has. Beyond that, whether all that time spent is worth it once you do start getting the smut will vary from person to person.
On top of that, Henteria 2 doesn't spend as much time in the individual endings as it does in the very long prologue, which comes with some issues, but I'll get into that in the spoilery bits later. Suffice to say though that while the build-up to the "climax" shall we say is quite long, said climax and its aftermath isn't really explored with the same level of thoroughness, and it shows.
Part of that is clearly because of the way N-taii chose to handle the ending split. There's only two choices that determine which ending you get, and both of them happen one after the other with barely any time between them near the very end. This means that there's no proper build-up to the split and no proper pathing to it. This can leave some of the endings feeling like asspull to some degree or another, not least of which because there's questions with no answers in all of the endings.
For me, all of the endings suck to some degree or another, and some of that suckiness is ultimately inevitable because of how N-taii set it all up. Having a massively linear story branch-off as drastically as Henteria 2 does is never gonna work perfectly.
I'll get more into that later though.
Moving back a bit to the H-scenes, the game builds up their content and frequency as you progress. At the start, they're pretty bad, kind of like Henteria 1, but that improves somewhat later, and at the very least, the sheer frequency of them becomes really good around quest 20-something. It takes a while to get there, but once it does, boy do you have plenty of material to have fun with from moment to moment. Scene length was improved from Henteria 1 too, at least enough of the time that you get some genuinely nice good length scenes without any stupid interruptions because the game wants the MC to run around or do a lore dump, so that's nice. What's the biggest improvement is the addition of the thoughts of the sluts getting pounded semi-regularly, which does a lot to improve the writing. If there was some more narration and whatnot, it could get really great and it'd fully compensate for the lacking visuals.
It's not quite there yet, but the H-scenes in Henteria 2 are overall massively improved from Henteria 1 and provide the player with plenty of fun and stimulation.
The only downside to it all is that, well... all the girls (and there's quite a few of them) end up feeling a tad same-y, on account of being uber-masochist submissive sluts that are obsessed with big dick and lots of cum. While N-taii tried to spice them up a bit with the details, the core of most girls and their escalating behavior in the H-scenes is the exact same, so some things are way too predictable. There's about only 2.5 sluts in the whole thing that stand out a bit more in their scenes, out of more than 11 named characters that show up for various length of times. I'm counting Moire as the 0.5 because while she's controlling in the Revenge ending, she also DOES enjoy being roughed up and humiliated with the Imp...
The fact that just about all the girls that end up in smut (outside of the Happy Ending) do so in contexts that are meant to be "wrong" or "corruptive" doesn't help either. It also kind of makes Zeno and Edwyr less impressive on account of the fact that just about every woman is a potential submissive slut and literally anyone can make bring said slut out.
This brings me to another problem of the writing. There's a lot, and I do mean a lot of situations where the MC or the girls or whatever end up in trouble or whatnot because of plot convenience more than anything else. Whether someone's conveniently in the way at the wrong time, walks in or out at the wrong time, some object is missing or present, some event happens or doesn't... There's enough of it happening that it feels less like Zeno and Edwyr were any good, and more like the Universe bends itself backwards to fuck Noah over, and of course to ensure that all the named girls we see get fucked stupid. Obviously, some of that is needed for any story, but it needs to happen in moderation, otherwise, the victories and defeats of the characters, be they heroes or villains, don't feel satisfying...
And they definitely don't really feel satisfying in Henteria 2... though this is also partly because the other reason why Zeno and Edwyr feel underwhelming is because Noah is pants on head stupid to the point where I sometimes wondered how the guy even keeps breathing on his own without reminders. Seriously. Some of the moments in the game are just ugh.... Celis and Aywin have that problem too to various degrees, but Noah is especially bad even beyond the obliviousness typical of the genre, and he doesn't have the excuse of being dicked retarded that those two do.
Now, some people are wondering why I'm being more lenient with Celis and Aywin than with Noah. Celis in particular likely gets a lot of hate because of how her story was set-up... However, their mistakes are more understandable to me than Noah's because, at the end of the day, this is a NTR and/or Slutification+Corruption game and the NTR label in particular comes with a certain qualifier...
Basically, in this genre, sex and pleasure act like hard drugs. Lust is a much stronger force than in reality, even by nymphomaniac standards. What this means is that once the pleasure started rolling in for Aywin and Celis, their mental faculties went down the drain with increasing intensity, all while suffering from an addiction to it all. In this genre, women get literally fucked stupid. Aywin and Celis (and pretty much most other women that show up for any length of time) all showcase this, and it's why the story works the way it does. Some might say that the pleasure train shouldn't have started at all for Celis, but I'll expand on why I think that works just fine in a spoilery section later.
The important bit is that the increasingly dumb decisions from Aywin and Celis make sense on account of the fact that their capacity to think clearly was constantly being impaired, and on top of that, like any drug addicts, it was all too easy for both of them to give in to their drug of choice whenever they were under emotional duress. It happens all the time in reality with things other than literally mind-bending sex.
Moving on. Next I want to address a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but since this probably won't concern most people, I'll put it under a spoiler.
With that out of the way, I'll move on to the next big spoilery bit, and I'll talk about the endings and why I think they suck to some degree or another. This will also include musings on the story overall, so beware, this one really does have a bunch of spoilers.
I'll conclude my wall of text that most people won't care about by saying that Henteria 2 is a character driven story. It's made for the characters in just about every way, even to the detriment of the overall plot or world-building. N-Taii wanted specific character driven scenes and moments to happen, and damn the consequences. The end result is not bad, but it's not particularly great either, but that depends on personal tastes too.
For me, Henteria 2 doesn't register as NTR, but it's decent in terms of slutification. Not great though, because it fails to properly account for it all in all the endings, particularly the only Ending that actually matters, aka the True one.
Overall, it was still pretty nice in terms of all the smut, so on that particular side of things, it was worth the time. However, it tries to take itself seriously and also tries to exist, so to speak, on a very big scale with a world affecting plot and whatnot, and that's not really a great fit for a NTR story which is usually smaller in scale and very personal.
I dunno if I'll bother with Henteria 3. I genuinely don't know. Definitely not until it's finished to be sure... though given what I read about that game's structure, I expect that its endings are also gonna have issues. But hey, if N-taii's smut writing improves in that one at least as much as it improved for Henteria 2 when compared to 1, then it might be wroth grabbing for the smut alone when it's done.
Guess I'll see when it happens.
First though, I'll start with, uh, I guess you could call it a disclaimer.
I am not really the intended audience for this game for a number of reason. Whether it's the fact that I play it without sound. Or the fact that I'm not a fan of the widening of the definition of NTR. Or the fact that I'm not a fan of the second person "you did this/that/whatever" writing... There's a number of reasons why this game wasn't ever really going to click perfectly with me, and because of that, my opinions will likely be harsher than they would be if they came from someone who is an "intended audience" but just didn't click with the game for other reasons.
With that said, let's start.
I'll begin with the things that are less related to my pet peeves. First of all this game is long, as mentioned above, and puts a lot of emphasis on its build up, its story and on allowing the player to understand the characters and their relationships. Assuming one wanders around and interacts with NPCs and whatnot, it can easily take 6-8 hours until the first H-scene happens with one of the two main girls in the MC's life. Including that time, it can easily take ~30 hours to reach the branching point for the endings. Though obviously, these times will also depend on reading speed and whatnot.
Whether this is a good or bad thing varies from person to person obviously. If you want smut quickly, Henteria 2 won't deliver on that at all, even beyond the limitations of the scenes it has. Beyond that, whether all that time spent is worth it once you do start getting the smut will vary from person to person.
On top of that, Henteria 2 doesn't spend as much time in the individual endings as it does in the very long prologue, which comes with some issues, but I'll get into that in the spoilery bits later. Suffice to say though that while the build-up to the "climax" shall we say is quite long, said climax and its aftermath isn't really explored with the same level of thoroughness, and it shows.
Part of that is clearly because of the way N-taii chose to handle the ending split. There's only two choices that determine which ending you get, and both of them happen one after the other with barely any time between them near the very end. This means that there's no proper build-up to the split and no proper pathing to it. This can leave some of the endings feeling like asspull to some degree or another, not least of which because there's questions with no answers in all of the endings.
For me, all of the endings suck to some degree or another, and some of that suckiness is ultimately inevitable because of how N-taii set it all up. Having a massively linear story branch-off as drastically as Henteria 2 does is never gonna work perfectly.
I'll get more into that later though.
Moving back a bit to the H-scenes, the game builds up their content and frequency as you progress. At the start, they're pretty bad, kind of like Henteria 1, but that improves somewhat later, and at the very least, the sheer frequency of them becomes really good around quest 20-something. It takes a while to get there, but once it does, boy do you have plenty of material to have fun with from moment to moment. Scene length was improved from Henteria 1 too, at least enough of the time that you get some genuinely nice good length scenes without any stupid interruptions because the game wants the MC to run around or do a lore dump, so that's nice. What's the biggest improvement is the addition of the thoughts of the sluts getting pounded semi-regularly, which does a lot to improve the writing. If there was some more narration and whatnot, it could get really great and it'd fully compensate for the lacking visuals.
It's not quite there yet, but the H-scenes in Henteria 2 are overall massively improved from Henteria 1 and provide the player with plenty of fun and stimulation.
The only downside to it all is that, well... all the girls (and there's quite a few of them) end up feeling a tad same-y, on account of being uber-masochist submissive sluts that are obsessed with big dick and lots of cum. While N-taii tried to spice them up a bit with the details, the core of most girls and their escalating behavior in the H-scenes is the exact same, so some things are way too predictable. There's about only 2.5 sluts in the whole thing that stand out a bit more in their scenes, out of more than 11 named characters that show up for various length of times. I'm counting Moire as the 0.5 because while she's controlling in the Revenge ending, she also DOES enjoy being roughed up and humiliated with the Imp...
The fact that just about all the girls that end up in smut (outside of the Happy Ending) do so in contexts that are meant to be "wrong" or "corruptive" doesn't help either. It also kind of makes Zeno and Edwyr less impressive on account of the fact that just about every woman is a potential submissive slut and literally anyone can make bring said slut out.
This brings me to another problem of the writing. There's a lot, and I do mean a lot of situations where the MC or the girls or whatever end up in trouble or whatnot because of plot convenience more than anything else. Whether someone's conveniently in the way at the wrong time, walks in or out at the wrong time, some object is missing or present, some event happens or doesn't... There's enough of it happening that it feels less like Zeno and Edwyr were any good, and more like the Universe bends itself backwards to fuck Noah over, and of course to ensure that all the named girls we see get fucked stupid. Obviously, some of that is needed for any story, but it needs to happen in moderation, otherwise, the victories and defeats of the characters, be they heroes or villains, don't feel satisfying...
And they definitely don't really feel satisfying in Henteria 2... though this is also partly because the other reason why Zeno and Edwyr feel underwhelming is because Noah is pants on head stupid to the point where I sometimes wondered how the guy even keeps breathing on his own without reminders. Seriously. Some of the moments in the game are just ugh.... Celis and Aywin have that problem too to various degrees, but Noah is especially bad even beyond the obliviousness typical of the genre, and he doesn't have the excuse of being dicked retarded that those two do.
Now, some people are wondering why I'm being more lenient with Celis and Aywin than with Noah. Celis in particular likely gets a lot of hate because of how her story was set-up... However, their mistakes are more understandable to me than Noah's because, at the end of the day, this is a NTR and/or Slutification+Corruption game and the NTR label in particular comes with a certain qualifier...
Basically, in this genre, sex and pleasure act like hard drugs. Lust is a much stronger force than in reality, even by nymphomaniac standards. What this means is that once the pleasure started rolling in for Aywin and Celis, their mental faculties went down the drain with increasing intensity, all while suffering from an addiction to it all. In this genre, women get literally fucked stupid. Aywin and Celis (and pretty much most other women that show up for any length of time) all showcase this, and it's why the story works the way it does. Some might say that the pleasure train shouldn't have started at all for Celis, but I'll expand on why I think that works just fine in a spoilery section later.
The important bit is that the increasingly dumb decisions from Aywin and Celis make sense on account of the fact that their capacity to think clearly was constantly being impaired, and on top of that, like any drug addicts, it was all too easy for both of them to give in to their drug of choice whenever they were under emotional duress. It happens all the time in reality with things other than literally mind-bending sex.
Moving on. Next I want to address a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but since this probably won't concern most people, I'll put it under a spoiler.
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With that out of the way, I'll move on to the next big spoilery bit, and I'll talk about the endings and why I think they suck to some degree or another. This will also include musings on the story overall, so beware, this one really does have a bunch of spoilers.
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I'll conclude my wall of text that most people won't care about by saying that Henteria 2 is a character driven story. It's made for the characters in just about every way, even to the detriment of the overall plot or world-building. N-Taii wanted specific character driven scenes and moments to happen, and damn the consequences. The end result is not bad, but it's not particularly great either, but that depends on personal tastes too.
For me, Henteria 2 doesn't register as NTR, but it's decent in terms of slutification. Not great though, because it fails to properly account for it all in all the endings, particularly the only Ending that actually matters, aka the True one.
Overall, it was still pretty nice in terms of all the smut, so on that particular side of things, it was worth the time. However, it tries to take itself seriously and also tries to exist, so to speak, on a very big scale with a world affecting plot and whatnot, and that's not really a great fit for a NTR story which is usually smaller in scale and very personal.
I dunno if I'll bother with Henteria 3. I genuinely don't know. Definitely not until it's finished to be sure... though given what I read about that game's structure, I expect that its endings are also gonna have issues. But hey, if N-taii's smut writing improves in that one at least as much as it improved for Henteria 2 when compared to 1, then it might be wroth grabbing for the smut alone when it's done.
Guess I'll see when it happens.
This was a ride. You have interesting thoughts on this. I havent seen the ntr ending because I honestly couldnt handle any more ntr, so I dont know how good it is, but I still feel like the true ending is the best. Both decisions that lead to it seem to me the ones that follow naturally witnessing what Noah went through. They were the choices that came from my gut instantly, they felt right. Obviously Noah would reject Celis. Im glad he actually pushed her away, it makes it all the more emotional from such a pure character. And the blue light feels like what started this while experience, the first intrigue, even if Zeno's actions dont stem from it. It feels like we should see this through, this whole thing is going to shit anyway.
And it feels true in the end. You can feel Noah's growth. The atmosphere is "its over, but it will never be the same". The mother is caring but more distant, like she has trouble processing what happened and what she's done. The village is done for and gets abandoned and everyone else moves on. Zeno gets actual harsh punishment. He now knows he wasnt willingly abandoned, his companion was forced to leave him and is now married to some noble. He rots in jail and get news his son died and has to know that the rest of his years.
Your complaints are valid and I see the game clearer, but damn does it still feel like an emotional masterpiece.
- Oct 9, 2021
- 789
- 756
Very good text! my problems are 100% with the endings and the way they turned out, they are all incomplete and seem to have been written by someone else? I felt out of place in all of them, True Ending is the most cohesive in my view (I don't like NTR endings, I think they're too obvious) I like the bittersweet feeling it leaves in the player, but it still doesn't show us the main thing in the end.
- Jul 20, 2018
- 1,870
- 2,921
Well, you essentially pointed out another reason why I'm not part of "the intended audience". I generally do not get emotionally invested in characters present in hentai works, because I go into them with the mindset of "these characters exist for the sake of smuttery", as such their plights or whatnot have no impact on me beyond how arousing they are or aren't.
Henteria, with its perspective being so heavily behind Noah's eyes and with the majority of its narration being in the second person, is intentionally or otherwise meant to be a game where the player inserts into Noah's head so to speak. N-Taii's talk about "it's the player's choice who they insert in" or whatnot that you can see in the 1st post is kind of bullshit when the game keeps trying to tell you're Noah and that your thoughts are his thoughts and whatnot.
That doesn't work on me, and it's annoying to boot, especially since I simply can't identify with anyone that has Noah's.... issues.
All that means that I'm less willing to overlook plot-holes and whatnot and the True Ending has no emotional impact on me. The NTR ending on the other hand had nice smut, including impregnation scenes.
Whether the choices towards any of the endings make sense or not are, tbh, a matter of perspective. We don't actually get enough of Noah's thoughts to know 100% of what he was thinking. His pseudo-catatonic state after the Zergan Brewery incident where he saw Aywin and Celis getting fucked could have been caused by the fact that Zeno bragged to his face that he'd killed Edvar, with the situation the girls were in being secondary. Even he could likely believe that the girls were fooled, drugged or otherwise manipulated... so the choice that leads to the Happy Ending isn't inconceivable to me.
In general, Noah's silent protagonist status means that all the choices are perfectly valid depending on perspectives.
At the end of the day, having solid multiple endings requires solid branching or consistent build-up throughout the game that leads to all of those endings. Henteria 2 doesn't really have that, so the flow into all of the endings is awkward. The fact that Noah has no voice and a debatable personality beyond "nice, naive, helpful, clueless" and possibly intellectually impaired doesn't really help because he doesn't contribute to the needed build-up in any meaningful way.
On top of that, as you've noted yourself, the endings themselves are too short and lacking in details.
I suspect part of that is because the game was made through Patreon and the like. Working via such a platform requires a regular delivery of content, which puts a certain amount of pressure to keep delivering. This makes it harder to take one's time to properly develop some things, and it's especially true for endings. The only way N-Taii was ever going to expand more on said endings was if he kept working on them while working on Henteria 3, and that was unlikely to happen.
The other problem is that Henteria 2's scale is too big, so to speak. There's just too many moving pieces, too many named characters, too much stuff that affects Noah, Aywin and Celis and too many things that are just plain bigger than the three of them and ultimately more important than their personal drama... when said personal drama should be the most important thing in something that calls itself "NTR".
For the endings, all of them to really feel complete, they'd have needed 6-8 hours of content, each, matching the prologue and initial set-up phase, to wind-down from where we ended up and properly cover the consequences of the whole mess and their variations based on Noah's choices. We're obviously not gonna get that. XD
Great write-ups! (And not only because they make me feel less bad about my own, relatively tame walls of text). A lot I could bounce off of, even more-so if this had come a month or so ago so things were fresher in my mind, but as it stands I'll limit myself to two main things:
Speaking of quibbles, I didn't quote it here, but I'll add that my views on how well Celis' fall worked seem to mirror yours pretty much exactly, with one possible exception: the fact that, after a certain point, she never even tried (to my recollection) to initiate sex with Noah. To me, the NTR logic only covers her being addicted to sex / pleasure in general, not from one specific source. That would have required the additional standard NTR logic of finding out Noah just absolutely didn't compare in bed, which was never established (putting aside that it evidently wouldn't even have been the case, based on some of the endings, as I recall).
To be clear, I'm talking here, as you seem to be, as a generalized statement; I don't think I agree with you about this game's endings either, being much more positive on them, but I can certainly see your points based on your write-ups.
That said, if you wouldn't mind / don't think it would get too off-topic, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you feel end-point-only branching endings don't / rarely work. To share my own thoughts up front, I basically see there being two broad requirements. (Or, put in other terms, two potential stumbling blocks).
First, from a logic of story flow perspective, it has to make sense that there would be (a) choice(s) that would lead to such branching. After a long enough linear story, the characters can feel established enough that some number of options in a choice finally provided might feel out of character for them to actually take. Framing this one in terms of Henteria 2, my conclusion is exactly the same as what you state, as well as what is demonstrated by the varying viewpoints shared throughout this thread: Noah's internal thoughts are enough of a cipher that any option could potentially seem in character, depending on what the player inserts for him.
The second requirement is there being some sort of thematic throughline from the story up to that point to each of the endings; even if it makes logical in-story sense how things branch, it would still feel jarring and disappointing as a player if the thread gets lost in that sense. I do wonder if something like this might be where you're coming from with your statements as well, but either way I disagree about the lack of execution in this case. To very quickly run through the endings myself in regards to this point:
Yeah, super agreed with this. Like, to the point where I'm pretty sure I might have used that exact same drug analogy in this very thread to defend my same viewpoint that I found Aywin and Celis more excusable than many in the thread seemed to. I tend to measure the progression of any 'corruption' more by change in actions when they're *not* being actively sexed up. Honestly, by that basis, I recall one of my quibbles with the game myself was that no character ever actually really gets particularly corrupt. I guess in a way that's sort of consistent with one of your complaints about the endings, except where you seem to view the endings as inconsistent in terms of the girls' 'recoveries', I see it as totally consistent with the lack of 'permanent' corruption that had ever been displayed, and was just a bit disappointed at that lack. My complaint was just more front-loaded than yours, in that sense.
Speaking of quibbles, I didn't quote it here, but I'll add that my views on how well Celis' fall worked seem to mirror yours pretty much exactly, with one possible exception: the fact that, after a certain point, she never even tried (to my recollection) to initiate sex with Noah. To me, the NTR logic only covers her being addicted to sex / pleasure in general, not from one specific source. That would have required the additional standard NTR logic of finding out Noah just absolutely didn't compare in bed, which was never established (putting aside that it evidently wouldn't even have been the case, based on some of the endings, as I recall).
I could see this getting off-topic, but you reference this sort of sentiment a few places, and it stands out to me not so much because I disagree, but because I'm not sure I can even see where you're coming from with it.
To be clear, I'm talking here, as you seem to be, as a generalized statement; I don't think I agree with you about this game's endings either, being much more positive on them, but I can certainly see your points based on your write-ups.
That said, if you wouldn't mind / don't think it would get too off-topic, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you feel end-point-only branching endings don't / rarely work. To share my own thoughts up front, I basically see there being two broad requirements. (Or, put in other terms, two potential stumbling blocks).
First, from a logic of story flow perspective, it has to make sense that there would be (a) choice(s) that would lead to such branching. After a long enough linear story, the characters can feel established enough that some number of options in a choice finally provided might feel out of character for them to actually take. Framing this one in terms of Henteria 2, my conclusion is exactly the same as what you state, as well as what is demonstrated by the varying viewpoints shared throughout this thread: Noah's internal thoughts are enough of a cipher that any option could potentially seem in character, depending on what the player inserts for him.
The second requirement is there being some sort of thematic throughline from the story up to that point to each of the endings; even if it makes logical in-story sense how things branch, it would still feel jarring and disappointing as a player if the thread gets lost in that sense. I do wonder if something like this might be where you're coming from with your statements as well, but either way I disagree about the lack of execution in this case. To very quickly run through the endings myself in regards to this point:
- NTR ending is self-explanatory, it's in the name, a straight continuation of the NTR arc from throughout the game.
- Revenge ending is a continuation of the cycle of 'betrayal' and revenge that had been laid on absurdly thickly in every bit of flashback in the game.
- True ending is the breaking of that cycle, at least for one instance, and the cost and permanent change that come with that.
- Happy ending is the one case where I'd give you that this test of mine gets failed, it's basically just an immediate gear-shift to 'everything is great now'. It's basically wish-fulfillment fluff, though I don't really mean that as a bad thing, since I think it was intended as precisely that; it's what a lot of people really want as a chaser.
- Jul 20, 2018
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There is mostly slutification present for the girls even when they're not being sexed up, but it's subtle. You can see it in the fact that neither Aywin nor Celis after a certain point kick up any fuss anymore over the Zergan potion when initially Aywin in particular was absolutely incensed about the idea of that thing even possibly existing. There's also how Aywin jumped straight into fucking the guards that were preventing Noah from leaving without even thinking about the possibility of trying anything else at all to distract them or help her son with a rope made of sheets to jump out the window or something. Nope. Straight into "Imma fuck these guys", and she obviously enjoyed it too.
Strictly speaking, none of the girls get actually corrupted in any real sense aside from the Zergan Potion example, but even that one is somewhat understandable given that they didn't see any notable side effects in people that didn't overdose on the stuff and didn't know that Zeno and Edwyr had been drugging some people in secret for ages.
However, the game doesn't really address this. Someone that gets that addicted as all the main girls do by the end won't be able to just stop at the flip of a switch. They'd either need to handle their new urges through other means or steadily "detox" over time, so on and so forth... and much like hard drug users, they'd never return to 100% normal and would always have to be wary of temptation.
I'm not particularly surprised that Celis doesn't try to fuck Noah. She doesn't really get the chance too tbh. Initially, based on how she keeps saying to Edwyr that "he's not like you", she likely didn't want a relationship with Noah to start up from the physical and be twisted like what she had with Edwyr. Beyond that, she likely didn't consciously realize that she's an addict, much like many addicts think that "they can stop whenever they want", even though they totally can't. Then, by the time she loses her virginity to Edwyr and it's fully revealed that he never intended to help her, he doesn't really leave her with much time to spend with Noah on her own to even get the idea to have sex with him, partly because Edwyr keeps dragging her with him to the military camp. Then the incident where she leads Zeno to Gavyn and Noah happens, Noah gets imprisoned, and Aywin and Celis dedicate themselves to Zeno and Edwyr to spare Noah from execution and there's zero time afterwards to think of trying that.
So I'm not particularly bothered by that point. Even if it DID happen, Noah wouldn't have been able to handle her addiction as an inexperienced virgin. It's a whole point in the revenge ending that Moire trains Noah in sex stuff too, not just how to fight, while the Happy ending has a 3-year time-skip, plenty of time for Noah to learn how to be good at sex off-screen. If anything, Celis fucking Noah would have helped drive a harder wedge between them, most likely, at least initially, and that's likely why N-Taii didn't use that sort of scene.
Well, on this subject, first of all, I should say that there's a degree of subjectivity involved in terms of how these sorts of situations are perceived. So having several endings near the very end of the game based on only 1-2 choices comes with certain issues that are not easy to resolve, and it's really easy to miss the mark in terms of resolving them.
First of all, as you, yourself noted, the choices themselves have to have a reason to be so meaningful in terms of how they influence the endings, but also have to make sense in terms of "why didn't this come up sooner". The Revenge ending choice being near the end makes sense, because Moire needed Noah to be broken before offering her hand to him to turn him into a monster even worse than Zeno. On the other hand, the choice that leads to the True Ending (or Happy Ending if the previous choice is different), raises the major question I mentioned in my wall of text. Why didn't Nieven interfere more, why didn't he do it earlier? Why didn't the Trees interfere more? Especially when there's a whole thing with Noah being able to speak with that one ancient Tree in the tribe that seems to be ancient enough to also be a Watcher?
The point is that when you load so much weight on 1-2 choices, you have a lot of room for Error, which is something I've noted in my original post.
This leads me to my next bit. You need to basically set-up the whole of the story before that point in such a way that the branching naturally makes sense... and I don't feel Henteria 2 does that well enough. While you can argue that Noah could have made any of those choices, you can just as easily argue that there's not enough build-up for some of them. For example Moire doesn't show up often enough and in meaningful enough ways to say that Noah would have a real reason to even attempt to trust her. The fact that all of the choices require some measure of mental gymnastics or have certain plot-holes associated to them is a problem, and not one that you can easily solve.
The Patreon model of making a game definitely doesn't help there...
Moving on, the last issue you have when making such a split is that the bigger the differences in the endings, the harder it is to justify them from a linear story and the more work you have to put into each ending to make them seem natural. On top of that, you have to be careful with the facts and events presented, to avoid questions like the ones I mentioned originally about "Why did X happen in this ending but not in the other when the characters are the same and weren't part of the choice?"
Moire not acting more directly in the other Endings except for the True Ending is the big head-scratch inducing example, though not the only one. However it's not the only one. There's questions that can raised from the facts in all the endings in various ways, and there's also ugly implications too.
All in all, I'm not saying that a pure ending choice split can't be done well, I'm saying that pulling it off in a truly satisfactory manner is hard. That said, as mentioned in the original post, I'm biased against the game in certain ways from the get-go, so the fact that I'm not fond of how the game ends overall isn't exactly an accurate measure of the success of his writing. At the end of the day, even a singular ending can be a disaster depending on how it's handled. Having four from a single split without build-up to each of them in the story increases the risk exponentially.
There's a reason why most games that have multiple endings do so via story splits that build up over time after all.
Thanks for the detailed response on ending thoughts! Makes a lot more sense where you're coming from now, can definitely see that point. I'm thinking part of the original disconnect is we seem to have different things that we focus on. In my case, the various plot holes / oddities that you point out just slid right off my back; I either didn't notice them at all at the time, or else just plain didn't care.
In response to your earlier bit: ugh, you've reminded me of what was probably my one pretty major gripe with the game. Spoiler-ing just in case, and to be consistent with the fact that you did. (Just so context is clear on the following, it's very much a rant, not meant to be framed as a debate or anything; for all I know you agree with me on this).
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- Oct 9, 2021
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I would like to know when N-Taii revealed how many endings it would have, I think it would help in this conversation, since perhaps this was unplanned and influenced the final result
I'm not him, but this kind of branching is VERY difficult to do in RPGM, not just as a matter of writing, but it's a huge amount of work for the dev, so they usually use the system of choosing the route at the beginning or a little after the beginning, or in variables like “level of corruption” which usually only changes a few interactions, the ending and the epilogue. I can think of few games that have this branching route done well.
- Jul 20, 2018
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We definitely focus on somewhat different things, though it's obviously difficult to say how much. I can add that some of the reason that I notice these things as I do is partly because I've played a lot of H-games over the years, and partly because I've done my fair share of writing and world-building over the years, not to mention just plain talking with people that write and whatnot that cause me to pay attention to these sorts of details. I suspect most people don't really pay attention to these sorts of details, or they're more willing to just overlook them.
As for the gripe...
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Oh, sure, from an additional level of effort for the dev point of view, I absolutely get the difficulty, yeah! Absolutely fair point.
Great write-up, thanks! Probably going to drop things here before I take over the thread with repeating myself, but been a lot of fun chatting with someone who aligns with my thoughts so closely while still have some pretty pronounced differences.
I will just say, staying on theme at this point, that your thoughts on betrayal / corruption in the game (or rather lack thereof) made me laugh with how completely they matched my own opinions. I'm legitimately considering searching back in the thread to edit links to some of my earlier posts into this message, just so you can appreciate the uncanniness too; I'm pretty sure I touched on the exact same points in more or less the exact same way back at the time I finished.
Edit:
Having found my posts (on last page, hah, not as though this thread has reason to move lightning quick these days or anything), it turns out I never really said much of anything about the various side characters. Reading your post had made me think I'd said more than I had, just because of how strongly it felt like reading my own thoughts written down.
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