VN - Ren'Py - Imperial Chronicles [v0.8] [Lazy Monkey]

Just a short review I may revisit later.

The writing and dialogue in this game is a MASSIVE step up in quality from the last game this dev worked on.

There are some continuity bugs. Characters made references to choices I didn't make. I bent the knee to the king, and Cass ended up being happy I refused to bend the knee.

I am really enjoying most of the characters so far, but I do hope that we don't go to overboard in terms of LI's. The one elf bandit girl seemed like she was going to be much more present in the plot, considering the intro. However, we barely see or talk to her, which I think was a missed opportunity.

Finally, I don't understand why we were given the choice to find out who was spying on us, but were not given the choice to confront them and instead act all nice and trusting. Give us the choice to confront, or at least distrust this character.

Other than that, excited to see the games future.

Story 4/5
Story is good and it has some nice plots going, theres really not much when it comes to sex scenes atleast not yet, i dont mind that when a story is good then H-scenes arent really importen.

I dont understand the skill choice in the start of the game, i picked wizard but MC never uses magic to do fuck all, he dosent protect him self with magic and when someone challenge him for a fight for fun he uses swords and hes training melee combat as well, it just dosent make any kind of sense.

Im not really a fan of MC, he feels very submissive hes been exiled for 10 years and when hes allowed back it feels like hes bending down to kiss ass, he accepts that hes sister will be married off to some stranger and accepts that hes forced to marry someone as well, i wish he would have a mind of hes own instend of just bowing down to submit to whatever people tells him, and he trust everyone even Alaina who he knows is a spy it just makes him feel brainless.

The lack of choices really hurts the game as well, it dosent feel like your in controle of MC or anything that happens around you, almost feels kinetic other then being able to turn down a few girls, also not a fan of choices leading to forced sex scenes without you knowing thats where its going, like the wood nymph, someone tells ya go sit in the forest see what happens then you click wait 5 times or so to end up fucking some random creature you know nothing about, it just dident make any sense to me and you dont even get the choice to say no to it, so your forced to reload and not go if you dont want it to happen.

There are alot of spelling issues and worng words like saying He when it is a She which trows you off your reading having to check again what its trying to say.

Renders are pretty low quality and grainy which is i dont mind to much but it dosent help the overall experince.

Girls 3/5
I liked most girls and there is a ok diversity in builds, but again quality isent that best.

Animations 2/5
They just arent good, short and looks a bit weird, dont play it for the animations but for the story.

Choices 2/5
Not sure how much controle you have in this one, first there arent many choices to begin with and im not sure if LIs will be forced on you or not but it feels like it might happen which would lower rating even more, this version stops where MC is forced to pick between to girls and somehow i dont think you can say no to both no matter how much you want to, dev talks about freedom of choice but somehow i dont think there will be but time will tell.

Game has the potential to become better if it starts giving players the freedom of choice dev talks about, but it can also become a mindless fuckfest game forcing LIs on you, so i will revisit this one once it gets more content to see which route this game will take and leave it at 3 stars for now.

"Review update"
Had to lower my review rating since it did start forcing LIs and sex scenes on you, your forced to marry one of two LIs and forced to fuck them as well.
First i dident want any of the two options since none of them are good enough to become the queen, but MC is as always submissive and just follows along, where hes sister would refuse sex with her forced husbond your not allowed to do that as the MC with your now wife.

Its pretty shitty considering hole game up to that point has been about free choice in relationships, forcing them now killed the game and story.

Honestly a very solid game, with a ton of content to play through this early in development. I very much enjoy high fantasy games that are written with care and lore and have the sex be secondary to the story overall, and I think the author does a wonderful job of establishing each character and how they fit the story. The amount of choices seems promising, and the two potential bride choices seem to make the VN have a hugely diverging plot choice, which I hope is something the author can keep track of. All in all, play this game, it is very good!

Renders are nice, plot seems rather decent but the English feels unnatural and weird. Also, transitions between scenes are occasionally abrupt. Like the scene hasn't properly ended and we rush already into another.
In other words, could use an editor, native or at least proficient in English.

Nice story, nice models but renders are grindy. There are 3 different traits MC can choose one at the beginning. MC is a Playboy who flirt with girls and try to bed them. It's actually fun to see how he's trying to flirt in three different trait paths. Plot tightens with the arrival of your sister there is scheming in this game who gonna attain the crown. Plot is interesting. Overall I enjoyed the game.


Edit v0.7

Man dev stepup his game. First i thought this one gonna be a simple fantasy game. But man this got a nice medieval fantasy plot about love , power scheming and betrayal. Your choices matters. Man absolutely loved this if you are looking for medieval story game go for this one.

Keep up the good work dev looking forward to next updates

It's an amazing game. A better version of Game of Thrones than the series itself. It is interesting to watch the plot of interesting characters. At the moment, it is one of the best games on this site along with the eternum.

Short summary:


There is some potential here. Lots of ways the story can go, and the writing is not horrible. Women are pretty, but MC is off-putting and currently renders aren't great



Good Things

• Several pretty models
• The story is somewhat interesting
• The setting opens many potential paths

Bad points

• Grainy renders
• Bad use of sound
• Very few choices
• Low effort on lighting and scene setup
• MC is a total asshole

Lazy monkey never disappoints. Once again he has created a fantastic game with a very innovative plot and the type that I like, that of a royal family in which the protagonist is the prince. The thing I appreciate most is that there is incest. The mother-son relationship intrigues me a lot. I hope Lazy continues with this project without abandoning it because this game has the potential to become the best of F95.

5/5 so far. I enjoy the story, the sass, the character types. The only thing I'm not super happy with is the lack of certainty when making choices. It seems like it's easy to miss out on content. Hopefully some one will publish a walkthrough so they don't ...
****Spoiler**** Miss out on the telepathy ability, etc.

I'm mean it's pretty damn good, what can I say, but it also has his flaws.


Let's begin:


Story:

The story is interesting so far, nothing game-changing (heh), but well executed so far, I mean for just the prologue it's a great start.

SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!

The world is a nice fantasy setting, filled with typical fantasy lore (elves, Orcs, Humans, Wizards...) and a nice but somewhat confusing backstory for our MC.




Characters:
The Characters are gorgeous, Even the MC looks good, the render quality is very clean, and you get a lot of "flavors" in terms of body proportions. The Animations are a bit lackluster but watchable.

Most of the characters have an interesting backstory, and making certain decisions that favor one character over the other actually make you feel like they have some impact on the story. For example,
Tl;dr The main characters have interesting backstories and personalities and choices actually impact the story

the negative:
The translation is very bad, I mean like, I'm not a native English speaker (obvs) and even I noticed a lot of mistakes, and especially in a visual novel, written text is a huge part of the experience and can actually ruin the game experience. I think the game is originally in Russian, but pls find a better translator, it's one of the few genuinely bad points I have about the game.

Last words:
The story/game is actually interesting, the characters/renders are gorgeous, depictions have actually some impact on the content you see and the story. The game has a lot of potential, and I wish the best to the dev/devs

TDU.

I enjoyed Lazy Monkey's previous game 'Monkey Business' and naturally felt drawn to the new game.
This game has started strong. The improvements from the prev game is pretty clear. There are different choices and routes already and it's only v0.3.
Dev has a very good eye for aesthetics imo. All the girls look beautiful. Even the MC is nothing short of good-looking and thus easily likable. The graphics are great. Animations are good. And the main focus is and I'm all for it.
The translations needs work but readable anyway.

Imperial Chronicles is quite refreshing discovery out of all garbage posted in this forum and is certainly a game you should try out anon.

So what is this game about? MC is a drunken prince who claims back his heritage. And unlike in pretty other game this one has a decent plot: everyone is constantly influencing you, manipulating you, trying to get out something out of you. There are multiple of options to choose witch all have different outcomes, starting from scholar-magician-warrior class to whom to fuck or talk. MC has three sister, one is a witch, another is a knife psycho, and third one is sickly nerd. MC's mom has also his own games, as well all other characters around you. Overall MC is quite based, like in one case MC says something like to his provocative sister: "relax sis, I am only fingering, not raping you." Or: "I am not made of iron," while tugging his cock against the asscheeks of his sister. Why there are no more games like this?

As you can guess, incest has quite role in this game, so unleash that is not your thing just leave it out. Yes, this game has plenty of non-incest content, but the game really revolves around it heavily, and unlike in pretty all other games incest context somewhat makes sense considering MC is a half-elf (elfs do weird stuff), and kingdom recently had a series of violent revolutions.

Some complain that graphics are grainy, and if that matters to you just do not play this game. The plot is great, there is replay value in this game, and the jokes are good. Sex-scenes are clumsy at the best but the writing is solid, and if this all sounds good for you just try it anon.

Solid 4/5 due to graphics, but then standards today are rather high.

Really enjoyed this one, loved the story, and the character development, and the animations were good. I love the mom, I played as a warrior and I was still able to make the vampire my ally. no real complaints, he probably picked one of my favorite generes.

A very promising game. Playing as an elf and being able to choose different "classes" and having them all affect how you can make certain decisions is very interesting. There's also a wide range of kinks and the game keeps track of what you did with certain characters. Honestly very impressive. The only reason I deducted a star is because there is quite a bit of broken English. Mostly in how sentences are structured and some poor translations from Russian. Still, I highly recommend this game for its freedom of choice.

v0.3
The game is pretty good.
The story is interesting, the art is good looking, the waifus are great.

The game focuses on choices, lots of branching choices with actual consequences.
The consequences are not always big, but everything is being tracked and makes at least small differences, and often not so small differences.

Ironically it makes it a bit tougher to navigate, as you probably have to replay every update to remap the choices due to forgetting what was what between updates.
But as a renpy VN without any grind it is easy and quick to do so thanks you the ability to skip seen (and only seen) text by holding down ctrl until it stops.

TLDR

• Pros
  • Same models and genre/fetishes as Monkey Business
  • Good plot and plot-sex pacing
  • (Personally) interesting/engaging fantasy theme and medieval intrigue based plot
  • Multiple(3) archetypes for the main character that can shape their personal character, frequently influencing dialogue and interactions
• Cons
  • Some characters seem too visually similar
  • Very narrow/linear story progression; choices shape facets of a largely similar journey
  • Text subject to english/grammatical improvement/revision

I, like many others, came here following their previous game "Monkey Business." So far, it seems not only that the continuing quality of models, an engaging pace of plot, and continuation of genre/fetishes, but I have also found myself enjoying the fantasy theming and background as well as royal politik/intrigue among the main characters family and what the player would like. Especially the 'inbetween' scenes, such that erotic and personal/conversational interactions feel natural(within context as a sexual game). Also, the choice between 3 character archetypes- warrior, mage, or scholar- shape dialogue and interactions much more than i expected.
The only critiques I would give are that the models for the mother, sisters, and mage teacher seem too similar, even if they are family they don't seem as stylistically as distinct as i'd like, even hair style diversity would make a big difference. Or, perhaps give the full-blooded elf mother more pronounced ears. Additionally, so far it seems that the character archetypes don't really affect the plot-line in a major way; all 3 archetypes face the same events, albeit potentially handling it or feeling about them in a distinct manner. However, I don't really think this is a true gripe because it makes sense from a creator perspective to keep the storyline linear and coherent, as well as having a streamlined process of making and writing the visual novel itself. Finally, the english can be off sometimes, but the dialogue is still reliably comprehensible, and can likely be improved with simple proofreader suggestions.

Review of version 0.2

Imperial Chronicles is quite early in its development, but I was very impressed with what there is to judge. The models are sexy. I found the characters to all be enjoyable and as interesting as one could hope for the amount of screen time they've had so far. The music is good and well fitting for where it's placed. And the plot has me impatient for a new update to see what happens next, which is a great, if annoying for me sign.

The only Con I've seen is the English isn't quite perfect all the time, but it was still way better than most ESL games in that regard. Everything is completely understandable, including its rather funny humor, it's just that every now and then you'll get an awkwardly phrased line or two, but nothing that hurt the game for me.

All in all I'm very much looking forward to playing the next update and hope Lazy Monkey has the best of luck in this endeavor.

(Adding some more thoughts after 0.7: I honestly can't stress this enough how good the writing is. It has got even better. The plot captures the intricate politics of royal courts from medieval times perfectly, and let's you play an important role in shaping it. The writing honestly feels like you're reading off a script of a big budget professional TV show. Whoever is the script writer, give him a raise!
However, there's now a big issue where the name of some new characters are written in Russian even when you have the game set to English.)

(Based on 0.1) Monkey Business was pretty good and the dev promises to not repeat the shortcomings of that on this new game so that's a pretty nice attitude to have while developing a new game. Making it VN instead of Sandbox certainly makes it less time consuming for the average player. Overall this one is off to a good start.

Pros:
1. Good setting and good writing. Plot seems interesting enough and seems to be heading somewhere. The medieval world seems interesting aswell with stuff happening as the plot progresses.
2. Good models. Seems uniquely enough instead of copy pasted models found everywhere on this site.
3. Characters seem to have personality.

Cons:
1. The girls lack the THICC
2. Sometimes dialogues lose coherence or maybe it's just grammar error.

Amazing visual novel (hopefully becomes a sandbox game at some poiny) . Love the medieval times setting. Intriguing plot, great potential and characters. Can't wait for this story to keep unfolding.

I'd certainly say this is a good introduction. I enjoy fantasy AVNs more than others, since their stories are often far less boring than the regular modern-day stories that are often mundane or repetitive. I'd say story-wise this game is better than the dev's previous work, Monkey Business, as that was filled with a lot of inconsistencies and made little sense. However, the true test is *after* the set-up.

Writing-wise, there are several grammatical and spelling issues, so either the dev speaks English as a second language, or they're just not a very good writer. They clearly try and distinguish characters by how they speak, but it doesn't go beyond "rude" or "cold" or "shy" really. You can see moments where it tries to be more, but it just rounds back to the more simpler and direct approach.

Visually it's good, I wouldn't say it's great, but it's definitely enjoyable. The sex scenes aren't great either, but I think the set-ups help enough where it isn't a major drawback.

In terms of choices it feels quite good. I enjoy AVNs the most when I feel a sense of accomplishment in balancing my choices in order to achieve the best outcome, however this game has more examples of "pick one or the other". It's certainly an easy way to diversify play, however for me I find it more annoying, due to the fact most people don't replay AVNs unless the writing and/or sex scenes are top-tier.

Easy 8/10, could certainly improve and get to a 9 or 10.

-- EDIT v0.3 --
The grammar and translation seems to have improved, as I almost didn't realise that there had been issues in previous versions before reading this review back. I wouldn't call it amazing, however any improvement is good, and speaking in a second language is always going to be more difficult.

Story-wise I still consider it weaker than I would hope, however that has more to do with the slower pace than the potential in the AVN. The main crux is that there are multiple threads being established early on, and so there's a lot of sitting to see those threads actually tie together. In fact, it still doesn't really feel like the story is out of the prologue, as in v0.3 we meet our third sister for the first time. My hope is that with the quality of writing on display, when the action picks up then it will be very enjoyable.

An issue I've noticed the longer I went is that the choice at the beginning seems of be one of the few opportunities you get to genuinely make an impact on your character as a whole. At the beginning, you get the very generic choices of "intellect, strength, or magic", you can tell when it's relevant and I appreciate that fact, but then there are multiple instances where it feels like instead of choosing your one competency, you chose what two you're INCOMPETENT with instead. The easiest way to think about this if that the MC had no choice in what he'd be strong in, he'd be fucking useless. For a man who's entire EXISTENCE essentially revolved around these 3 specific aspects, the fact he seems to be so weak in the majority of them ends up making it feel more like I'm piloting a drunk idiot with a very specific set of skills.

Ultimately it hasn't really changed my opinion, however it's improved my confidence in the ability for this game to be truly excellent.