RPGM - Abandoned - Hourglass [v0.24] [HuntaMann]

Alright. having finished 0.23a
I love the art, I like the characters, I like the story.
Not a fan of the gameplay.

1. Combat is tedious. You have to constantly switch around what you are doing every round.

2. Every character only starts with 1 (usually useless) spell or ability (excepting the priestess' heal ability), get no new skills on levelup. they get all their other skills or abilities from equipment. This does allow you to dispose of utterly useless skills like throw knife (give her an offhand knife instead from the shop to get a massively better skill at identical stats). But it seems rather pointless since stat distribution pre-determines what you are going to be good at anyways.
on the plus side fewer useless party members, if I find they have a useless skill I can just switch out their outfit to one that is not useless.

3. mages are really weak. they start with fewer stat points, int is not really useful, and in combat they are pretty weak. Spells are too limited and their cooldown is too long.

4. cooldowns... those are just unfun. They slow combat to crawl as you check through multiple menus to see what ability is off of cooldown. (honestly if all spells, abilities, and special were in a single pane it would be less tedious)

5. gallery is character locked instead of being shared which is a big mistake. It means if you unlocked a scene and then reloaded (because you do not want to go that route with your character) then the scene gets re-locked. since in that save you did not take that route.

6. the amount of points you need to do a thing are really unreasonably high. For example, flower girl is willing to whore out to some rando for medicine to save her grandma... you step in, stop it, save her grandma... now try to seduce... you need a charisma of 26.. TWENTY SIX! this is not even possible to achieve. I harvested literally every enemy possible for XP, and I still only ended up at level 7 with 12 points. meaning you need a starting charisma of 14... the bard starting charisma is 10. this is not the only example of utterly insanely high stats required to do actions.

7. Karma system is annoying. it forces your MC to have certain opinions based on unrelated choices, it seems to limit his choices.
Also it seems to be of the fable school of thought where you have over exaggerated extremes.
for example in the flower girl example...
evil: randomly rape her, letting her grandma die while breaking her mind
good: help her save her grandma selflessly and heroically. repeatedly save her from herself (she was gonna try to run around man eater wolf packs to grab a flower) and get railroaded into just handing over the medicine without first making any demands. Only after you hand it over for free (and gain a bunch of positive karma for the act) can you try to seduce... or suddenly go back to rape again. There is simply no option for demanding actual payment for services before the services are rendered or anything other than the two moral extremes.

Overall this game has a lot of potential. But need to do something about the combat mechanics

Oh also. while this is RPGM, this is a rare game that uses a modern version of this engine. So you can actually get modern resolutions

edit:
I restarted the game at v0.24 and this time I used cheats from the getgo. It was a blast! I had lots of fun.
I blasted through combat with cheats. I could alter my alignment at will so no need to worry about railroading choices. The unreasonably high stat requirements for choices did not matter.
5/5 stars for cheaters. I highly recommend everyone cheat

The time has cum for a porn review:

This review is up to v0-23.

Story: The start with the goddess was pretty interesting but it dropped off after you met her, since you are being sent to just do small quests while u gather your party and a few hentai scenes once per quest so far.
The only thing that stood out to me so far is that the Player has the choice to do smth good or evil but only small stuff so far like " do you want to rape this person" or "do you want to see this person raped", I hope to see more choices that you can make that arent necessarily rape only, but rather on smaller things that might have impact, one that I think would've been interesting is to rat Sigrun out instead of accepting her.

After going through the next mainquest you get a new goal and the world starts to open up to you, now with a clear goal and more choices along the way. The Story itself looks now more interesting, since you can make evil or good choices regardless of what you did before, which makes it look less linear and I hope it stays this way, otherwise I hope the evil choices keep expanding to be not only sexual.

Gameplay: Its a standard turn based rpgmaker game but you can choose one of 4 classes knight thing, thief, bard and a magic user, In combat you can actually use some skills that are worth using, instead of mashing attack and heal, at least for me as a bard.
Another thing that is unusual for rpgmaker games is that sometimes having a certain item like a gas bomb beforehand actually gives you an advantage in some battles.
Bossfights also have mechanics you need to play around, even if they aren't really difficult its more fun than mashing attack and heal which is pretty cool.

Text: The game has a lot of grammar issues some are rather small, others are huge, otherwise there are fewer spelling mistakes some that also stand out a lot like "dind't" repeatedly. Otherwise dialogue is fine and has some fun references or jokes. Some choices require statchecks and I think that's pretty cool, even though they prob won't mean anything once you've assemebled your party since their stats also count.

The art: The art isn't high quality and might not be for everyone, but I personally enjoy the passion behind it or whatever intention is behind it, since so far all the enemies have been drawn instead of using standard rpgmaker pngs, but otherwise its ok.

The characters: The MC so far is an amnesia self insert that lost his memories, but with the twist that some part of his old personality is still hidden inside of him, that is the hidden evil that urges you to evil things, like rape( even though it didnt activate when you stole the money of a homeless girl ). I like the concept but I think it doesnt really stand out that much since the old personality so far only kicks in once per quest, it would've been cool to have more dialogue choices with him instead of a ...

Sigrun just follows you around for no reason at first, but after finishing with the first city you are able to get to know her more, why she is following you and what happend to her, what makes her more fleshed out.

The only real thing that is pretty weird was with Estrid. First she only sat in the bar not wanting to interact with anything, then she clearly shows that she is pissed at being at the bottom of the family and wants to redeem herself, and suddenly she reveals that she is a cock hungry whore that wants to be assaulted by anything in a 5 meter radius.
That change was way too sudden without any hints or foreshadowing and seemed pretty out of character for me, so putting anything in to foreshadow that would help, like finding her at night going around trying to find someone that could assault her.

Another Character that appears after you've reached the second city joins your party, she is also fleshed out with her own personality and goals.

At least all Characters so far besides Estrid are well written and fleshed out, at least after leaving the first town.

Conclusion: The game is overall def over the rpgmaker game standard the porn swings from ok to good, but the game is mostly held back by heavy grammar or spelling issues like saying patients instead of patience ,otherwise this shows some signs of actually being promising, but we will have to wait and see.

I will update this as i go along if something else is noteworthy.

Fraun best girl

Good fucking lord, may you bless this beautiful creation. I've been itching to play a game from a vilain perspective, that does not resemble your ordynary sunday morning cartoon bad guy. It is such a shameim unable to forecefully put thie creator into a labor camp. But at least i can donate.

Really good game. Interesting mechanic of breaking into houses. Seems like decent game. Idk what about sound it's ok for me. Looking forward future updates.
Oh, the goddess wery pretty by the way ^_^
And that event with shy girl was pretty good.

an early release, but a refreshingly unique art style and lots of promise. characters are fun to interact with, humor is good, but some typos in the text "dind't?"... the genre (male MC male dom) is surprisingly rarely done well, so it's encouraging to see it in this game! looking forwards to future releases

story: catchy and easy to follow.

gameplay: is fun to play and with lot to do.

scenes (erotic ones): really fucking hot.

draws: very well done.

characters: well done.

conclussion: i enjoy every minute of the game, the grinding is none to too little (which is a plus) the characters and the story flow very well together (which is another big plus) and there is a psyco nimphomaniac (which is not the main character) making this game a solid good one.

this game deserve your time and money.

psdt: the MC is not a full GOOD GUY or bad guy, is complex like the circunstances that he is involved, now that could mean so very intense character developen on the future and i dont feel this is gonna be a happy game, keep that in mind.

Definitely something to watch, the art is great and so far the game's story and mechanics don't seem bad or really grindy. This is only a first release though so that may change. The tags are really good in my opinion, and I can only hope they add more great content like the rape scene in it already as it was pretty good.