Well, I finally found the patience to deal with this mess of a game... I'm pretty sure I tried a JP version way back when and it was a crashy mess. I also remember trying a version from here in the past and I couldn't get anywhere with it. Finally, recently, I tried the Kagura version and the MTL version out of curiosity to see how they handle on my current set-up... and while the MTL version is basically unplayable, the Kagura version is tolerable... especially after I turned off V-sync for the game... I have NO idea why that matters...
ANYway, Gyu games and poor stability are normal, so I'm not surprised that I had so many head-aches with this thing. Had similar problems with Mai's game, and that's AFTER M1zuki fixed the outright game blockers and stuff that the game in question had...
Leaving that aside, this game has plenty of issues besides that, though it definitely feels much improved over the Mai game in some aspects. (Like the fact that you don't need a convoluted guide to really get all the stuff) The systems however are much like what they were in that game. The party and the characters work more or less in the exact same way. The skill system is just as annoying, and the whole thing with the monsters outside of bosses leveling up with the party is as poorly thought out as ever. It makes all those maps with barely anything in them pointless, because you can go anywhere to grind, including the very first forest in the game. This means that for the most part, outside of times when you run into a boss-fight that bodies your team, you have no incentive to fight whatsoever. It's easier to just avoid everything and run to the boss/event/whatever. This becomes even more relevant if you use the NG+ feature, because you can just bum rush every boss and event.
On top of everything else, the random skills system is super annoying to deal with... However, at least magic spells are more useful than they were in the Mai game. From what I remember, magic stuff was downright useless in that game. In this one, you have several options that are useful, and there's of course that Meteor spell you can get near the end that's really strong.
Beyond that, I have no idea what Gyu was thinking with this game's balance, which is very stupid. Especially when bosses can sometimes use a highly damaging, AoE move 2-3 times in a row which WILL wipe your whole party out, especially if it's a magic move, because the MDef stat is insanely hard to increase in any real amounts... I heard that there's a reflect skill that some character(s) can learn? Well, I never got it. Never got Alicia's supposed party-wide counter skill either. Not sure if it's a matter of wrong equipment or what...
All in all, playing this game's combat for the most part feels like playing roulette more than playing an RPG.
Moving on.
H-stuff. It was ok. Could do without all the pissing silliness. Seriously. I think that content got worse than in the Mai game... which is a shame because Gyu does a lot of pregnancy stuff on a level that few others do... which is one of the reasons why I was interested in this game in the 1st place. Besides that, man, the guy reused CGs and animations A LOT, sometimes without stuff even making any sense. (Just look at how Maya's underwear changes randomly in the same damn scene on more than one occasion...)
Another problem, at least for me, is the fact that all the guys that fuck the girls are assholes... and I suppose that's normal for H-games of these types... except the problem is that they're pretty much always the same TYPE of assholes. There's very little variation in terms of behavior towards the girls, which at times creates a feeling of "just get on with it already, I've already seen this crap already...". They all have more or less the same kind of fetishes and so on.
It doesn't help that the girls go from innocent virgins to turbo-sluts to reluctant whores all over the place... The sex stats don't really seem to DO anything and instead everything is tied to story progression and specific H-events more than anything else. Rick and Seriph also go back and forth over knowing or not knowing that the girls get railed. For example, you can trigger the Thales events early on, which causes Seriph to learn about stuff. Or the event with Alicia getting fucked in Seriph's bed... but nothing comes of either of these and in some other events, Seriph still behaves as if he doesn't know what's going on, or as if that's the 1st time he finds out or whatever...
I will, however, give Gyu props for the fact that in the slut route, Seriph can fuck and impregnate Maya in a repeatable scene if you follow the whole training to resist the seal thing. Funnily enough, it's still treated as Polon baby for whatever reason, even though it's never stated that Seriph took Polon for that scene.
Kind of disappointing overall.
As for the story... haaaaaaaah. Man this story is a mess. If Gyu didn't state via that NPC that he started with one idea and ended up with something... I'd have still been able to tell because this thing is just... ugh... The game has WAY too many moments where the party is saved by what's essentially divine intervention... which makes the whole thing rather unsatisfying for me...
I played the slut-route first, and started to do a virgin playthrough after that... but I'm not sure if I'll finish it... This is because so far, the Virgin Playthrough does NOTHING to address the issues that force Alicia and Maya into prostituting in the 1st place. It also does nothing to explain why Rini would NOT fuck around for the sake of getting rare weapons and/or tomes whatever. (That's besides the point that Rini does NOT get fucking anything for fucking around in the slut route, which also ticks me off...)
Quite frankly, it looks like the story was written with the slut stuff in mind and the virgin stuff was tacked on just so they can say that they have it. I dunno. Maybe I'll try to finish that virgin playthrough. Maybe something changes much later... but I don't know if I can be assed because you can use the stuff in the gallery room to reset virginity and stuff ANYway, so you can see all the endings. Not that the virgin endings do ANYTHING to address the issues either...
All in all, it makes me wonder if I want to bother with any further stuff from Gyu. On the one hand, the amount of pregnancy stuff he puts in is damn rare... On the other hand, the pissing stuff and now scat too is getting worse. On the 1st tentacle, his stories are... uh... they're a thing... On the 2nd tentacle, if game stability keeps being this bad, I dunno if I want to deal with this sort of crap again.
Haaaaaah...