RPGM - Completed - Magical Girl Celesphonia [v1.07] [Shimobashira Workshop/Kagura Games]

Great effort went into this game, which is really disappointing, seeing how terribly designed it is.

It's main problem is focusing on combat without creating combat suitable for HRPG. Instead it has that overused jRPG combat where you just spam attack and healing till you win. Even losing a fight is almost impossible if you don't fight underleveled. There is no point in thinking about builds or combos. Counter elements deal very similar damage anyways, so you might just as well spam one attack throughout whole game.

But that's just tip of an iceberg if we look at the rest of the game. Ambrosia had similar issue of hollow scenes that would no matter for character development and I was hoping for an improvment in this game.
No luck. There is quite a lot of scenes outside dungeons, but they have no impact on story or character. You see it, it increases your Hstats and that's all. You might even do it one or two more times to see different text, but they do not unlock anything nor MC has introspections about them nor they affect others. It does not have designed corruption progress, despite being corruption game. It's because corruption and story are two seperate elements in this game, which is very lazy aproach to give freedom for virgin runs. While in Ambrosia main story still was leading to getting corrupted (whoring oneself for info or repairing bridge, getting followers, becoming shrine maiden), but here it's never that direct.

I won't go on on dozens of mechanics this game has, like costumes, lust, domination/miasma/corruption, clothing damage, battlesex, skills system, defeat scenes, comments, statuses. There is really lots of them, but they also all show the same problems with the game. They do not matter. They are all here for you to have fun losing or walking in damaged clothes, but the outcome will be the same if you just boss rush.

So all in all, it is just another scene hunter. Story is terribly executed and railroaded, so that no character is likeable and it's just repeating "we killed monster, but now we need to kill bigger monster" for whole game.
Most painful is that RPG aspects got bloated by dumping every idea for mechanic that dev had and just leaving it for you to make a game from it.
You don't need to worry about anything here, because everything has so little impact that you probably won't see 80% of mechanics if you don't try to find them.

Still, it has high notes for effort that was put in. It doesn't change that there is lots of content and technically it's one of the biggest Hgames. Probably too big, as it's only good for collecting scenes and titles. It's like a playground for you to corrupt heroine, yet corruption never progress the story and only can risk in getting Game Over. Seems we have not deserved yet to get a game that is both big and has good designed rpg and corruption mechanics.

[Review for version 1.06]

Overall, this was one of the best H-games I've played during my "H-gaming career."

I tried the developers' previous game, Ambrosia, and I can definitely say they made HUGE improvements to this.

Although there are some of you who prefer "quick-fap" h-games, I would highly recommend this game to you! It takes quite some time to fully 'corrupt' Celesphonia to become addicted to sex, but trust me, it's worth it.

This game has a long runtime (9 hours for me), and the story is engaging and interesting. I'm not a huge fan of stories when I play adult games, but MGC's storyline was actually entertaining. As for combat, it's your usual turn-based combat. It may be a little disappointing when the monsters don't 'penetrate' Celesphonia when she is caught, but eventually that preconception will disappear during the later stages of the game.

Personally, I really liked the outfit system. You get to enjoy the satisfaction of customising your character to your preferences, and it really contributes to your, you know, 'beatin' your meat'. (¬‿¬)

Overall, I don't think I had any major downsides playing this game. The MC is likeable, the music is bangers, the outfit system is a literal godsend, and the art is a masterpiece, which makes this game a 5 (possibly a 6) out of 5.

Again, highly recommend you play this.

If you come for quick fap game, this is not the game for you. This is a long corrupted game with an okay setting, but somehow it feel quite empty.

The good things are the game has battle porn and the level of lust which you can choose to go to next stage when ever you want if the cap breached.

On the other hand, I like my porn game has good CGs which this game is lack of. It has good arts, but all CGs are static - I'm not actually mind it but it barely has any different expression or pose changing.

This is one of the better RPGM-games I've played, and probably the second-best heroine-RPG, behind Karryn's Prison.

If you've ever played a heroine game before, nothing in here should surprise you, aside from the densisty of content, and surprisingly good level-design.

MGC is a corruption game that understands the importance of "slow" corruption, simulating a much more slow and gradual descent into depravity in various forms. The character-building system is linear, and you can't exactly "build" the heroine, but it is still a very good system that allows you a lot of freedom and choice in what sexual content you want to focus on and see.

The game also has a rather high-effort take on the standard RPGM-battle system. The battle-system itself is bad, generic, simplistic, etc. horrible words, but there is variety and some depth outside of the battles, mostly to do with navigating the environment. The fact that the enemies are all generic repurposed RPG-enemies does little to help.

Shoutout to the excellent hypnosis-content, which kind of left me wanting even more. But alas, that's the trouble with this type of game that tries to cater to many fetishes.

it is very good that it makes me feel I will not play an ero game better than this game. it is the best ero game I played it deserve to be bought in steam or dlsite. also I feel sad that I finished it. the other games from the same developers they are also very good

Variety is the spice of life. It is also what elevates H-Games from the humdrum of GOR and Collecting Simulators to truly enjoyable experiences. Celesphonia, like Shimobashira's previous work - Ambrosia, has variety in droves, not only in terms of H-Content but in terms of how to achieve it and gameplay as well. Playing Celesphonia feels like playing a reasonable regular game but with the added spice of H-Content on top. Naturally, there are drawbacks. I'm not a massive fan of the art style and the way H-Content looks; the game can get somewhat grindy at higher levels; the corruption requires farming instead of happening naturally. However, these limitations do not in any way detract from one of the best H-Gaming experiences I've had by playing Celesphonia.

The story of an H-Game is expected to be a joke. However, what separates a good story from a bad one is how well it gives context to all the sexy shenanigans that ensue. I think Celesphonia does a fine job. There's a bunch of lewd monsters out there looking to lewd shit up and Celesphonia, the initially reluctant magical girl, decides to stop them since her friend gets done. There's lots of small tie-ins that lead to H-Content. For example, high miasma count means you get corrupted so our magical girl needs the help of a playboy masseuse to get that out of her system. What makes the story slightly more amusing to me is the dialogues at times.

What truly makes the game outshine most of the dross out there is the gameplay. Shimobashira gives you plenty of avenues to direct your attention to. You need to go to school to manage your reputation (low reputation results in getting punished ... sensually). You need to beat monsters to make sure the big baddie doesn't dominate the city. High domination means perverts and gropers abound. You need to make money to buy shit to defeat the big baddies so you can work at a cafe, prostitute yourself, sell tights to perverts etc. There are tonnes of things that can be done in the overworld when out of combat.

Combat itself is usual RPGM but there's a lot of variety in terms of enemies and attacks. Dungeons are long but not overly so. Enemies have different weaknesses and strengths, there's a myriad of collectibles, buffs, magical artifacts and macguffins to make you stronger. You collect monster souls and use them to unlock and equip spells referred to as engrams. There are hidden bosses in every dungeon that you can either stumble upon or equip the exploration engram to find. I found the combat generally engaging as far as RPGM goes. It does get a bit grindy at Very Hard and Crisis but I still wouldn't call it proper grind. In fact, I found the bosses easier to take down than going through the entire dungeon grinding. So if it strikes your fancy, you can probably just run pass or retreat from encounters and head straight for the boss if you're not super underlevelled. I always enjoy crafting and outfit changes and Celesphonia does a decent job at both. You need lots of money to buy and unlock everything but it isn't particularly hard to come by.

There's tonnes of variety in H-Content as well. You have your regular scenes on defeat. You have traps in dungeons. You have battle-fuck in the middle. You also have overworld events. Losing to bosses results in some lewd debuffs which make it easier to be lewder. You get titles once you've accumulated enough defeats or suffered enough from traps or teasing. There are many routes through which to experience the content. You get chikan on trains, scenes at the beaches, hypnotism. There's a cornucopia of content out there that should take at least two playthroughs to get since some of it diverges (low reputation vs high reputation).

Nonetheless, despite this eulogizing, the game does have its drawbacks. The biggest one is that you have to farm corruption. You only get the option to wear no underwear after farming exposure which can only be done through two or three repeatable things daily. You also have no particular reason to do those things apart from farming exposure/shame experience so it feels very grindy in terms of corruption. You don't need to take the train apart from the opening so the groping area is locked away. Miasma is never high enough to warrant a trip to the playboy masseuse. You can ignore the teacher who's blackmailing you. I understand this leaves the choice of content at the player's discretion but it takes away the idea of "reluctance" on the part of the the heroine. You can easily finish the game on the highest difficulty without engaging with most of its content. Which is a shame since there's a massive amount of it covering several bases.
Enemies are also a chore to battle at higher difficulties. You know you'll win if you don't set out to lose but it always takes a while. There are things you can craft which result in instant victories but they require a bit of grind as well. And finally, I'm not the biggest fan of transparent men and they feature fairly often in the H-Content here.

Nonetheless, it is very difficult to find a game that absolutely perfects my ideal type of H-Game. And Shimobashira haven't disappointed in both of their games. Whether it's the content, the gameplay, the means of achieving H and the slowburn corruption, this game has it all. Topping it off is a pretty stellar soundtrack which was a surprise in an H-Game. Some of the music I recognize from other games but it was nice listening to different tracks for every location and during battles and boss-fights. In summary, if you're out for a slow-burn corruption with a cornucopia of content, you can't get much better than Magical Girl Celesphonia.

This game not only has very nice artwork but it is also fun to play. I mean the gameplay itself is really good. I played it all the way through and I will do it again. It's definitely one of the best HRPG-games out there.

Played Ambrosia before, and this one is also engaging!
Outside the interesting gameplay with multiple stats progression to keep in check, the jazz music is too good, like really really good

Yep, buy it on Steam already!

Extremely well-rounded game, definitely worth a look.

The thing that struck me the most is the polish. This is definitely the work of professionals, and not the usual RPGM junk food.

The gameplay is solid, I played on normal and found it easy, but when I went onto the harder difficulties I definitely felt challenged in a good way. The systems it has in place work with eachother pretty well and I never felt let down by anything.

The art is consistently great, as well as the quality of the UI. Only letdown is the enemy art in battles is that weird hyperrealistic thing some of these games do, which generally works fine, but I feel like they coulda created art that fit in better. But everything else is stellar. Really fucking good hentai.

The story is kinda funny and does its job.

There aren't that many good RPGM corruption games. Celesphonia is certainly good (but not excellent), which makes it important.

The writing

The story is perfectly adequate. It strings together all the usual tropes: magical school girl fights horny monsters in horny locations in a mukokuseki city. There are no subversions or unexpected twists, but some subplots are kinda underdeveloped.

The gameplay

Unfortunately, the lewd aspect of the mechanics is mostly divorced from the combat mechanics with a few exceptions. The number of crafting choices is too big for a mostly straightforward RPGM game (a common problem), but the combat mechanics are actually not that bad, it's not pure filler, although it's only the bosses and the secret bosses that present any challenge on normal difficulty in the early game.

The art

The art is crisp and has no obvious deficiencies other than lacking animated scenes. The game is thankfully uncensored.

The lewdness

Celesphonia is very inventive with its lewd aspects of enemy dungeons. There's more to the game than just "the MC progressively becomes a bigger slut" or "the MC gets raped by every single monster", as the MC has to deal with cursed slutty equipment, hypnotic influence and literal pools of semen guarded by tentacles. The only problem is how easy it is to avoid the lewd stuff in the overworld, you even have to make a conscious choice of grinding the lewd stuff a bit to unlock more events, there are no "how bad could it be" moments that bite the MC in the ass later.

Summary

Celesphonia is not perfect, nor is it groundbreaking. But it's a very solid female corruption RPGM that tries to do more than just string H-scenes together with some dungeons. I want more games like it.

After playing for countless hours and finally getting the motivation to leave a review.. this game is really good if you arent too impatient. Try it out and you most likely wont be disappointed. A fully English translated game with quite a bit of content and some good music along with it for the little hub area. 10/10 could fall asleep to the music

This game is huge improvement from the last game, Ambrosia.
The live text makes more... convenient i think since when you talk to npc, you don't need to press extra Z button just t close chat window.
About the bgv, not so great, but it's still good than nothing but silnced.

For the battle part, this is the improvement from ambrosia, while ambrosia only classic turn based battle, celesphonia has mid battle sex, not just standard heavy turn based, and the battle more livelier than ambrosia thanks to live text when in battle, the enemy and celesphonia has dialogue and response based on their action.

The home, the environment, school, free roam, it's like a slice of life games and we are like controlling our life in a game.

Too long; doesn't give a shit: read PrinzEugen00's review as that reflects most of my criticism, but if you wanna see me nitpicking things compare to Ambrosia, please continue.

After spending like 120 hrs, though not totally 100% the game yet, but I feel like this game doesn't live up to Ambrosia at all. I had my hope up when people praised it to be better than Ambrosia, but sadly no. It's not a bad game per se, but compare to Ambrosia, it's definitely an inferior game, in every aspect in my opinion.

I'll try to keep it short for the review.
I noticed that Shimobashira designed this game to have non-accidently-mess-up your game in mind. For example, in Ambrosia, some instances can cause you to lose virginity without warning whatsoever. In Celesphonia, however, if you have lust level 1, there's only one instance that Amane can lose virginity from losing to enemy, others will either "torture" her or face fuck, butt fuck her, but no virginity taken. In the overworld, the game will either warn indirectly or it's optional prompt or prevent you from committing the act all together.
My biggest problem with Celesphonia is character corruption progression. In Ambrosia, you can pretty much turn maledom into femdom: in the beginning everyone is trying to rape Flode and she hates it. But once you get to Indecency lv 3, Flode is pretty much raping men with consent.
In Celesphonia, it doesn't matter what Lust you're at, it's always maledom, it changes Amane's dialogues sure, but it doesn't change the role in the scene whatsoever.
Prime example being Dex in Ambrosia and Tanemaki in Celesphonia. The two has the same goal which is to fuck the protag, but you can turn Dex to Flode's sex slave in Indecency lv 3 scene. Whereas Tanemaki will just keep raping Amane and turn her to his sex slave with Lust lv 3 scenes, and the game has specific ending for that as well.
To make matters worse is that Dex is tied to the main story, so if you want to progress the story you have to deal with him. Tanemaki will show up and grope Amane's butt and that can be the last time you'll ever see him if you're not exploring. And Tanemaki's scenes are just optional side quest too and the whole setup also has poor writing.

Speaking of poor writing. I do not know if the dialogues are to fit modern day or the translator is just some kid with Japanese knowledge, the language used in Celesphonia is horrendous. You're gonna see the word "fuck", "shit", "hell/fuck yeah" a lot.
And the writing tone in this game feels like Pokemon's plot. Oh, there's an evil organization and there's a big baddie, we need to defeat them.
Whereas in Ambrosia, though contrive and silly maybe, the story and the dialogues still show seriousness in it.

Okay, I'll stop it here, I want to address more issues, but who's gonna read this review anyway.

Finished this on the highest difficulty (Crisis? i think). Everything was perfect the first few chapters, its got a good corruption progress, rpg mechanic is super fun, hot MC, no extreme fetishes like (gore, fucked up stuff, etc), and an open-ended game where you can just do whatever you want. You can make different kinds of build and there are many equipments that you can synthesize and buy.

The flaws are noticeable in the later chapter. They literally recycle the same CG for each event progression, battle fuck also kinda sucks. At the few final chapters, I was no longer interested in the sex stuff. The only saving grace for me to complete this game was the rpg mechanics and combat. That said my enjoyment is still 4/5

TL;DR (IMO) Not something that you play for a quick wank for sure. It has a good sex mechanic and hot scenes but gets repetitive. Fun combat and rpg element.

If played on the harder difficulties, it reminds me of Karryn's Prison, which is one of the best compliments I can give it.

A lot of corruption games are lazily done, with the corruption either coming too quick or just automatically kicking in as time passes or when an event is repeated. What this game gets right is that it provides "excuses" for the corruption so that it all feels natural: blackmail, hypnosis, working undercover, or simply traveling in the subway train all provide ways for the corruption to slowly accumulate.

I compare it to Karryn's Prison on harder difficulties because at the start of the game on harder difficulties, you're ill-equipped to win fights. However, the game does have a loss mechanic where every loss provides an item, and every two of those items can be traded in for stat boost item, thus giving you a means of leveling via losing at the start without just tediously grinding the easiest fights until you can handle more.

However, Karryn's Prison had a game over if you lost too much, and this game is no different: losing generates Corruption (game stat), and if you generate too much in a playthrough, it's game over.

This, to me, gives value to the combat system (usually hate combat mechanics when I'm clearly not playing these games for the game factor) in that it itself can be a good way to generate corruption (not the game stat) and raise lust in a natural form of progression, but too much will end the game. This helps you stay a little more involved and strategic about how to handle the game moving forward.

My main critique for the game, if any, would be that I'd imagine the corruption is slow-going for some. You basically have to imagine that you'll want to decide on a schedule to repeat (for example: take train, go to class, go to PE, give in to blackmail) because the lust scale goes from 0 to 999. If you don't have an activity (or activities) that you do daily that generate lust, you will easily beat the game before ever getting corrupted. Again though, I think this aligns well with the Karryn's Prison comparison, because if you play that game without making it a goal to lose and instead as something inevitable you try to hold off as long as possible, then yes, it takes a decent amount of time before the corruption starts kicking in.

Overall, I can only highly recommend it.

I played on Very Hard on 1.03. It was difficult and felt like I couldn't win, but I made it through keeping my virginity. It seems to have an inverse difficulty curve - absolutely brutal at the beginning, and easing up as you get more and more options.
Thoroughly enjoyable, though the main character is easily the most interesting. The supporting characters were humorous at times, but with a few exceptions didn't captivate me.
More than anything, I truly enjoyed the mood of this game. The lighting, music choices, and character dialogue of the NPCs throughout the city truly immersed me. It was a stark contrast to most other RPG maker games.
There are a couple of moments at evening and night that felt special to simply experience.
It's not like my life was changed, but I'll likely think back on this game and those moments.

Ambrosia is one of my favorite HRPGs but unfortunately this game just doesn't live up. Rather than give us a robust sandbox to explore, Celesphonia instead emphasizes one-off locations and dungeon crawls. There's really no reason to go out of your way to corrupt the main character and even if you tried the options are incredibly limited without spending all your money on lewd magazines. The artwork and in-battle cut-ins just also feel like a big step down from the previous game.

Most baffling is this greater emphasis on unlocking skills and personalizing your player build, but it's done through this incredibly obtuse system. First you need to collect monster's essence, then you can choose either convert it to skill points at the cost of corrupting yourself or purifying it first for less points overall. Then you have to go to a separate location where you can then unlock your skills as you go. I don't know why this couldn't have just been a menu system, or why you need to go through multi-step authentication to learn new skills.

Ambrosia was also a slow burn if you wanted to play it that way, but you were at least incentivized to always build up toward the next H scene before the floodgates opened. Progression towards H content in that game was intrinsically tied to character improvement, and the game systems were harmonious in that way. Here it feels like the only reason why you would want to do H content is because this is an H game. Otherwise this game is mainly just a dungeon crawler with the option to get H scenes.

This game is below average. Art is garbage. Sex scenes as well as battle cut ins are bad and reused hundred times.

Despite main theme of the game is a monster/tentacles raping magical girl most of the content is vanilla and boring

There is a costume system but all of the costumes are ugly as well as the female mc. I don't understand why is she so average looking while every female character in the game looks better than her

There is a pregnancy system but it is as stupid and boring as everything else

I could've rated it at least 3 stars if it was not so grindy and time consuming

This game is a pretty big step down from Shimobashira's previous game Ambrosia which had one of the best corruption progression systems in any games I've played. The in-combat restraint-break system can get annoying and doesn't add much to the experience most of the time. The game over H-scenes are pretty lackluster. The costumes aren't as good as Ambrosia (I also don't like how you're locked into the magical girl outfit half the game.) The combat system is a breath of fresh air on crisis difficulty in a medium plagued by auto-attack-to-win games. 20+ hours game-play if you play casually on crisis.

A little grindy but otherwise excellent. The level balance is somewhat wonky, with skill progression depending on random drops(but the drop rate is high enough that that's not really a huge issue. ) but EXP accruing normally, so you'll inevitably end up massively over leveled if you're not rushing through the game. Also your Plot Skills have no actual damage boosters so they end up kind of useless at the endgame.

Story is good and like this author's other translated title, the translation team did an A+ job.

Oh and the porn's good I guess, if you care about that.