VN - Ren'Py - Jikage Rising [v2.09 Arc 3] [Smiling Dog]

Review for v1.02c
Recommended: YES
#TL: DR
It's your standard trainer. It has animations, good writing/dialog. If you are looking for a trainer set in the Naruto universe definitely play this game.
# Pros And Cons
## Pros:
+ Simple UI
+ Good storytelling.
+ Character design.
+ Some sex scene variations.
+ Animations
+ Main characters
+ Hint system.
+ Trustworthy developer.
## Cons:
- Iffy turn-based combat.
- Some errors and possible coding smells.
## Things I didn't like but aren't cons:
* Scene art for Sakura, Hinata, Ino, TenTen towards the start of the game.
# Overview
After being pulled back in time you get to talk to your ancestors' ghost who tells you how to cast a mind-control jutsu. And so the game begins! You slowly corrupt the heroines, do turn-based battles to earn money and materials for outfits, gamble that money on more materials and outfits.
This game has a pretty simple game design, but it's still very enjoyable.
#End notes
Realy good game. Definitely worth playing!

There are 2 perspectives to this game:
1. I am a fan of Naruto
- Good game. If you're into Naruto then conquering these characters that you've probably watched when you were a kid feels like a fantasy come true. The story is mediocore but the dick is horny. Out of the 2 perspectives, I belong here.

2. I am not a fan of Naruto
- I admit, it's just unlocking alright CGs with grind. I speculate the developer is going for the quantity-over-quality strategy. I just can't deny how this would have been a great game like other well known parody-trainer games if it had a well developed story or animations or game design. But it doesn't.

[Edit (4/24)] I changed my rating 4 -> 2 because I felt the game failed at making "Arc 2" meaningful. At least in Arc 1, the game made it so that the girls attempted to resist, even if it meant more grind with less creativite ways of grinding. Now in Arc 2, you just click once or twice somewhere, skip dialog, and tada you have a horny slut. Arc 1 was an ok, low production game; Arc 2 is just additional text and images.

I really do not know why this game has received such high rankings from other players as it's piss poor in almost any aspect.

I don't really care about porn-spoofing of someone's favourite children's cartoon series. Quite honestly, I find them a bit off-putting, especially when main characters are not fully developed sexually and you, as the player have to make them your slaves through some lame mind control trickery. But taht aside, the game mechanics are practically non-existent. I don't know why so many players tolerate (wrong word, it should be 'like') gameplay consisting of clicking X-times until something happens. That's basically what this game is about:
- go to location A, speak to girl B about girl C,
- go to location D, speak to girl C about stuff girl B told you
- repeat 3 times and then enslave girl C by clicking on her picture repeatedly until mind control bar reaches 100%
- now the enslaved girl C will be visiting your sad excuse for an apartment at nights, where you further break her by sticking anal beads up her butt and making her strip for you until she collects enough submission points to get promoted to next level, where you can dress her sluttily and reveal to her that you are her father, I mean 'Daddy'.... Rinse, repeat, find another child girl to enslave...

Anal beads in 2021? C'mon game devs! Didn't you know that these toys fell out of fasshion somewhere between president Obama's first and second term? Butt-sluttery is now about XL buttplugs and realistic replicas of dragon and orge's dongs! Be creative: game-wise, story-wise and sex-wise. Otherwise, you'll be churning out one yet another after yet another 'trainer game' that looks, feels and plays like something made by a 10-year old who's just discovered masturbation while they were learning how to code with their TV playing Cartoon Network in the background.

I just want to put it out there, I gave an extra star because I have a naruto fetish. Everything below will be a bit tainted by that.

This is your bog standard trainer game, you know the genre. Mind wipe a girl, turn her into a slut, dress her like a slut, force her to call you [insert preference here], and that's about it. This game is like that, exactly.

Now the site has a rule about not mentioning other games to avoid cross promotion, but there is a DADDY to all trainer games. THE trainer game. You probably know it. Now that is a good game, not a great game, but a good game. This however? No, I wouldn't say that it's good.

The art you see in this post is a bit misleading. There isn't that much high quality art in this game, a lot, if not most, and especially the sex, is quite bad. Dare I say objectively bad? Yes, I dare.

Characters just standing in front of you look good. Static art of the milfs looks good. The girls however do not, animations look exceedingly bad. It's just not good to look at.

The game is basic. The stats, the combat, everything that isn't a VN is just bad. Made with no regard to numbers, balance, strategy, or anything even remotely interesting.

The open world could be replaced with a "which girl do you wanna have actions with today" and not much would change.

I like being able to dress girls, degrade them, have them go insane, have them starting to degrade each other. And the game does that, a little. But it's not worth the grind to get there.

I love naruto, any naruto porn just gets me. But this game just does not hit the spot. Not in gameplay, not in writing, not in porn.

If you don't like naruto, or have no pre-existing inclination towards the ladies in the main splash art, easily consider this a 2 stars.

This game overall is deserving of a three stars, and is this is very good for my ratings. To me it's simple, this game is the only Naruto game worth playing. It takes a tried and basic type of game and adds a parody to it, while still nailing the basics for this type of game (Mind control/corruption trainer). The parody aspect is not only good, but there is no tradeoff for having these characters in game for quality of story. But that said, although it does what it is meant to do, it lacks compared to some other parody games, like Four Elements Trainer. Then again, 4 elements trainer is one those great games that are rarely matched.

Let's begin

Models- 9/10
The models are as close as you can get to the real thing, and very easily the best Naruto sprites on this site. There are very clearly two different artists. One is much better at drawing the characters themselves, and struggles with drawing scenes with multiple characters, and needs some work with drawing bodies well . This artist is usually seen drawing the non-animated scenes (which personally feel better drawn to me) . The artist doing the animated scene, (currently on a break) draws bodies well, but the quality feels lacking, and looks slightly less accurate. But that being said, both of these artists have done an amazing job and have their strengths.


Plot- 6/10
Since there really is no goal other than having sex for the MC, there is really no main antagonist. The point of the game is really to have sex rather than having other goals and meeting people on the way. This makes the entire game have no real story other than sex every night. But I think this is the way a lot of trainers work, but there is at least some outer goal along with wanting to just have sex. But the story itself makes sense and isnt rushed or underdeveloped like other games.

Dialogue- 9/10
The dialogue was perfectly accurate for the characters. One of the hardest things to do in parody games (especially for shows like these) is to maintain the character's personality but also being able to make them lewd. They nail this aspect.

Scenes-8.5/10
Since they don't animate frame by frame, the animations are very smooth, but that being said, since they use an engine that animates a 2 d model, (forgot the name), it looks kind of mushy, and the face looks like it's a filter, and the body parts don't always move in unison. Still very impressive they pulled this off and this is just tiny critique. The non animated scenes are actually very nicely drawn, well made and proportions are there, but these scenes are just one image with some slight changes and text at the bottom.

Content- 9/10
for a v.18 build, it has an pretty great amount of content, I would say maybe 3-4 hours maybe? I don't remember exactly so don't quote me on that, maybe more, maybe less. but at v.18, only at the end of arc one, with at least two more to go, plenty of characters already confirmed, it is safe to say the final product of this game will take a while, but also be a very big game. The devs seem to be ready for this for the long run and dedicated to making this very big, which is great since this is the only Naruto game that is decent.

Consistency (releases)- 10/10
This dude SmilingDog is very possibly the most consistent dev in terms of releases. Dude never misses a release, every month he is getting some content out every month, no matter how small or large. This is a category I felt was very important to add, especially with some other devs for other games leaving for many many months, like ICSTOR. I respect a dev who maintains timeliness, especially since they run on a monthly payment system. That being said, I totally understand if Devs need extra time before a big release. But this dude goes beyond. He couldn't release Apollo Alexicon (one of his other games) one month, so dude went and made a whole other mini game to hold his patrons over. If anyone deserves the support, it's this dude.

Creativity- 3/10
The game is great, but there is absolutely no creativity at all in this game,. The game is just "Take control of girl, train girl, have sex with girl by the end" There is no creativity when it comes to how you even get to control them, it's just "oh, you have mind control powers and the person forgets about it" Only reason this even got 3 points is because they included a fighting system and multiple outfit possibilities.

Bugs- 7/10
This dude gets bugs out of the way pretty fast, but some of his early releases, ("a"releases) are filled with completley game breaking bugs. This is expected, but some of these bugs just make the game unplayable. Maybe they could try running through the game once as a test run before uploading it? But by the "b" version everything is fixed. And to be fair, I am on F95zone, so beggars can't be choosers in terms of what version of the game I get. But bugs like that are kind of confusing in terms of how they got there. Still great though, bugs are not a problem within the week of release

The hype does not live up to the expectations. The art is mediocre at best, look at the feet and the lazy animating should tell you everything. The animation is all done by transforming a still image, there is no new frame or anything. In order to get to Tsunade you have to go through a boring journey of leveling up each of the other women to level 5, despite under Sakura's information it says; "will help me to get to Tsunade" this mechanic creates this monotone slump where you just spam a bunch of times on buttons that are hardly efficient, if the mouse is on the button after next screen their brighten function doesn't work at all, seeing the same old scene where it shows either the pure laziness of the programmer or their sheer ineptitude. However, it might be that the game engine they use is just incapable of holding up the massive amount of slapstick that the developers put into this.

There is hardly anything worth talking about in this game. The passion is non-existent, and there is no soul. Look at the main character's room, the background art can just be summed up to sheer laziness. At least draw and render over the image you stole! The faq says nothing is stolen, yet once you see the outside of the Ichiraku Ramen you can clearly tell its just a rip off from a frame in the anime.

To make this as constructive as possible; keep your stuff consistent. The backgrounds are all over the place, it swaps between clear frame ripoff images from the anime to poor 3d images of rooms. The art style is all over the place, there is a clear difference when you look at the "animations". Either learn to actually code, or change your game engine.

Has all the elements a 10/10 Ren'Py game have, repeatable scenes and progression to unlock more scenes.

I hope to have more scenes with each girl, like footjob for each girl, anal for each girl etc.

The art could be a little more polished but it's good.

i played it and did everything i could in the game in one day
i know this is only a henti/adult game but holy hecc i'm lovin it no mcdonald's
i'm so ready to see anko's level 4 and 5 control lul
i can't wait for moar of the game :3
smiling dog really does put a smile on my face

-art fidelity to the original naruto art rather than copying the chars designs and slap it on another art style entierly
-consistency in updates, bug fixes AND content are delivered on a good basis (weeks but never months)
-plot, it's there, we both know you're not here for it but at least it tries
-interactive map and combat, again, you're not really here for it but it's here and derives from simply mainting crtl to skip to porn
-animation quality is varied between very nice and average, but overhaul nothing is bad and it all sticks to the artstyle.
- it's a good game and it allows you to bang anko, what every man dreamed of when she was introduced, thank you smiling dog, you are a true friend T__T

TLDR: at v0.15e there is plenty of good content and h-game functionality, even for those who are not naruto fans.

Things I liked:

1. Tsunade has tig ol bitties
2. the main 4 girls are cute and hot (although Hinata looks very boyish...)
3. replayable scenes
4. corruption/harem theme
5. decent character development
6. lots of scenes with changing dialog based on corruption
7. a good amount of decent animation
8. custom artwork
9. ability to go backwards in dialog (no blue balling...)
10. It gives you the chance to just skip a minigame or a particular fight that is kinda hard. That was a blue-ball relief.

Things that were okay:

1. the amount of tig ol bitties. At least there were some (two, attached to Tsunade).
2. UI / gameplay
3. The unanimated scenes. Not many of them but I was kinda bummed they weren't animated. Still decent though.
4. the grind on skills. I almost put this in the "things I didn't like" section, but it's not horrible. It'd be nice if you could just have one option for training that gained points in all skills, since there is nothing special about any of the individual trainings (no custom scenes during strength training, for example).

Things I did not like:

1. I DIDN'T GET TO FULLY CORRUPT TSUNADE AND ENJOY THOSE TIG OL BITTIES IN SLUT MODE!! (not a complaint, I just can't wait for future updates!)

For a v0.15d this is a great amount of content! The game is a bit grindy at times but rewarding nonetheless. Also the artwork is very good, I really like how similar it is to the real thing. Looking forward to future updates!

good for naruto fans, sad that the emphasis is put on the young ones instead of the more adult and well developed ones. Also the art quality and animation during the sex scenes is kind of ragdoll-ish. In this case i would have preferred still images but with a lot more quality and detail.
Gameplay is ok. Walkthrough needed or you'll spend lots of time on try and error.
Also some random game overs so think of saving often.

This is another example of how great a Ren'Py can be.

The story of this game is very interesting and somewhat believeable in the Naruto world which adds a lot.

Each character speaks and acts like they are in the story itself which helps to elevate the game.

Pros:
+Sex scenes are plenty and all very good .
+Combat is eh but its easy.
The inital grind is also easy and quick.
+Story is excellent and the english is good.
+Outfits!
+Hinata
+Tsunade (need I say more?)

Cons
-A little grindy for specific things

Thats it!

Short but has a lot of hope if they add more.

So far has 4 main girls and a total of 8.

Has some missions for money but each has a group of ranks (As of writing this it seems A and S are not made yet)

Few different scenes and overall a good 3-4 hours of playtime right now.

These girls look no way close to 18 ... i have played it trough now just for tsunade because she looks damn fine, but every time i see the other girls i feel like a child molester. sure its all fictional and it says that all are 18+, but this just isnt right. especially hinata looks like a damn kid, guys fbi is sure watching you now... and me too. also i personally dont like the gameplay much because its just repeading the same steps over and over again, no clues to solve or even any need to think about anything, just click her, click there again and again.

I really love this game..this game is really well made..the characters doesn't look much different from the anime..and H scenes are nice..the story is nice..the gameplay is nice..im also really craving new updates..and really waiting for the next arcs..keep up the good work

Nice games, i love the art and the "original" part of the story.
Character are quite good, have a gallery function now so you don't have to save in all good scene.
Hope you can finish this series, i like to see Konan in maybe arc 2 or 3.

It seems like gonna be a good game. It have good art, good history and much ladies. Just need a better combat mechanic, like, the actual is slow and boring as fuck. Well, is a good game after all, at least, i recommend it, go deep into that shit man, go deeeeeeeeeeeep.

An excelent game with a great developer who talks to the people and adresses problems instead of ognoring them.

Pros:
Great art
good storytelling
nice genre
good pace of game

Negative:
I would like more outfit options.


All in all a good game and a developer you can support.

Dear reader,
If you are expecting for a short and sweet review, this ain't it.
This is arguably the best Naruto parody you will find on this site (of course opinions may differ). The character designs are amazing and catch a feel that you are actually playing Kishimoto-sama's creation.
The girls look believable in the trance state and it is actually fun to grind!! I absolutely love how they do not have hangers- instead look believable.

The dev is a man of culture obviously (look at his avatar! WHO'S A GOOD BOI?) and is extremely reliable. Get this: since last year, they have not missed a deadline and this is with being connected to another project that is much heavier. Plus, I don't know if you noticed, but, they are on the forum as well always ready to take suggestions and correct bugs.
If none of the above seem to make you want to love his work, then may I entice you with the community over here. It is extremely healthy compared to others and let's hope this stays so.

I am leaving a 4/5 review but really it is more a 9/10 just because I think it can always be improved. TATTEBAYO!