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

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. The combat system is a breath of fresh air on crisis difficulty in a medium plagued by auto-attack-to-win games. 20+ hours gameplay 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.

Honestly, this game was much better than I expected! And as an actual game as well! I for once actually enjoyed the combat and the story in one of these Japanese h-games SHOCK!

The game technically lacks the mind control content tag, but there is so little of it in the game that I kind of understand the omission of it.

This was a good game and a good wank, but I got a little too attached in the end which was a weird although not entirely unpleasant feeling!
Have a good day gentlemen!-

Overall a very solid corruption title with a good translation. Like other Shimobashira titles I would say its a VERY well done RPGM game but nothing special to really blow me away like some titles.

Pros:
- A large amount of scenes scenes that feature a good level of corruption progression of the protagonist. Typically 3-4 progression stages per event. I enjoyed the writing of the scenes and they have a variety of poses / angles in them. Scenes very well distributed throughout the game from the beginning and you are never far from getting another one.
- A ok variety of outfits.
- Heroine has a design I personally really enjoy.
- Combat while standard was done perfectly fine for a RPGM game. ( IMPORTANT TIP: escaping battle never fails, enemies when overleveled can instantly be killed from behind. You can avoid nearly 100% of grinding by only killing enemies this way and always leaving combat if you fail to approach from behind).
- Dialogue was enjoyable, the story was nothing special but was done decently well.
- Checkpoints in levels so that you can lose if you want and easily get back to the boss. No instant game overs.
- Some scenes hard to find but there is a gallery where you can unlock tips, also can unlock every scene after game completion.

Cons:
- Even instantly killing enemies I felt it was a little grindy, not too bad though.
- Progression on some slut stats like shame resistance is confusing and you will probably need to look at a guy's post here on how to unlock.

Conclusion: Play if you want a very well done corruption game, that is still somewhat your standard RPGM format.

As I read others reviews, peoples are judging this game according to really strict criteria which hardly any adult game of this kind yet achieve (or maybe some game which really hit their kinks). Or comparing it with its really successful predecessor from same creator.
But if you compare it with most of other games from JRPG genre, it is really great game.
Here can be seen that this is not just some copycat, but creator make extra work to make this game unique.
It is not just simple dungeon runner with linear story, but have lot of side activities and story which you may enjoy outside of main quest.
And more so this sandbox fatur is really nice in my eyes, even if it hase some flaws. But very few other games have something similar.
Also art is really nice, not oversexualized.

So In my opinion, this is really great game and deserve all five star.

TLDR: The game is alright, but, incredibly, nothing special. Amazing visuals and dialogue tho.


Surprisingly enough, somewhat of a downgrade comparing to Ambrosia. My thoughts regarding this game are probably all over the place, but bear with me on this one.

Good points:

• Relatable heroine. Unlike the priestess MC from Ambrosia, Amane has quite a bit of personality. She's not your stereotypical magical girl because she's mostly fighting for herself(although that somewhat changes during the story) and doesn't shy away from murdering her opponents, which she often proclaims she'll do whenever she engages them.
• Great visuals with lots of variety. That includes maps, outfit customization options during peaceful phase, cut-ins, pretty much everything visual. Enemies are your usual RPGM game enemy placeholders you've seen somewhere at some point before, though, but I can ignore that.
• Samey corruption system from Ambrosia, albeit with a few new shticks.
• Funny dialogues.
• Interesting customization system both skill-wise (unless you discover the powerful magic of nucleus which allows you to steamroll your fights) and equipment-wise.
• Just like in Ambrosia, you have the ability to do a virgin run if you so desire or go turbo slut, as well as anything in-between.
• NG+
• Lots of kinks for your kinky needs.

Bad points:

• Very meh story. You expect it to have some sort of a twist at some point, but it never does. The interactions and dialogues beyond the actual story are what carrying this game.
• The game becomes rather trivial if you spend an extra hour grinding your opponents. While the game tries to convince you that bosses have their own gimmicks, you never quite notice that once you go full nuclear on them. There's no point in managing your consumables and such, because there are always health/mana replenishing crystals at waiting for you at dungeon checkpoints(around 2-3 in each dungeon, and each can be used once a day, which, even then, is quite enough), which further trivialize the game.
• While there are lots of locations and such, they feel rather empty. There's also no real downside to having high Domination(city corruption value), aside from more and more perverts roaming around at some(but not all) locations who will harass Amane if they catch her, and an increased rate of molesters on the train that you, save for that one time at the beginning of the game, will never take. Quite disappointing, because the game implies heavily that the city would change if Domination becomes high enough, but it never really does.
• While there are lots of outfits in the game, you barely have any opportunity to use them. Once Amane becomes Celesphonia, she's locked into her magical girl outfit till she leaves the dungeon. In Ambrosia you could fight in any outfit, but here it's not the case and, let's be honest - it sucks.
• Barely no saucy sandbox gameplay, which further eliminates already miniscule options to see Amane get violated in her normal outfits. In Ambrosia you could sometimes get fucked by random NPCs just for the fun of it and choose how, and in Celesphonia you either get some minor petting from molesters where they don't go any further than that(and you don't get any option to let them either) or get locked into a full-blown scene where, most of the times, your outfits and poses are predetermined.
• I already said this, but I want emphasize that point, because it's important: the game feels empty. There's lots of stuff in the game, true, but here and there, if you look at the game with an attentive eye, you start noticing that some things feel like they are somewhat unfinished or haven't been properly fleshed out. Sure a big game is good, but a small game with plenty of packed content is better, that's what I'm trying to say. Ambrosia wins this round.

In conclusion, I want to say that the game wasn't quite a disappointment as it may seem I make it out to be, but just... kinda average, or even lacking compared to the last game. Still a pretty good way to spend your evening and a quite enjoyable one too, but nothing to write home about. The game is... alright, but the reason why I give it four stars instead of 3 is for great visuals and amazing comedy at times.

I expected more. Though, if you haven't played other games from Shimobashira Workshop, then it'd be a pretty good one to try for your first time.

Generic magical girl corruption RPG done right. This game is a prime example of why there are enough copycat games that it became a genre in the first place.

Great combat, great character building, great art, great voice acting, and great story. None of them are jaw-dropping amazing, but the game is great in every single aspect, which adds up to an amazing experience.

And despite there being a few ignorant reviews complaining about grind, there's a few different difficulty settings that can make the game trivially easy or really difficult.

Only real downside is how the porn aspect doesn't really connect to combat growth and about maybe a full third of all scenes locked behind losses in bossfights.

I was expecting much from Shimobashira
In my opinion, turns out Ambrosia is still a better game
Flode's character is better and more likeable than Amane, Ambrosia has much more interesting places, equipment and stuff, some corruption parts not as tedious as Celesphonia, and i hate Celesphonia is mainly using similar that similar "text" thingy in the upper right screen like Karryn's Prison, i think that doesnt suit the gameplay

Shimo still using Faceless Muscular men everywhere for everything and that had let me down, and i think it doesnt suit for the setting of the game where in modern time, and even Amane grew up there, there are still no real people
while it kind of fine for ambrosia imo, because she was transferred to some desolate island and she was an orphan from the beginning. Even Flode's interaction between her and reverend priest nick has better writing and more depth than Amane and her family and Kazuki

Not to mention the BGV they using is some annoying boring hentai voice I often hear, i prefer to have them off

Ambrosia is gameplay heavy H-RPGM but Celesphonia is much heavier and not rewarding at all
All the secret bosses are lame as hell compared to ambrosia
the battles with enemies are so inefficient, you were expected to play like another heavy Turn Based RPG game (eg: Octopath Traveler, or Shin Megami Tensei) but why would they do that with a freaking porn game.
It made the gameplay so much tedious and boring I want to skip as many as possible.

For the SEGS Scenes, it felt so-so. I have played so much better H games in the period of time after beating Ambrosia till now. Maybe my standards have been set too high

3.5 stars, rounded up because of see of way worse games around

Everything was told below. Game starts really good but quickly devolves mostly thanks to too easy combat and most of content available as game over rape - the most awful way of shoving porn into game. Also corruption is not slow. She is innocent virgin, then sucks random dick and the very next day takes into ass for money. Other than this I really enjoyed writing and enjoy game mechanics with random text floating around, backstabbing to reduce grind and generally game mechanics are well though. Also prison scenes with heroine getting rapes are well executed.

tl;dr: really good idea but it got into generic game half way.

I was hyped for this game when it was announced even before the translation. It actually made me buy the game on steam and 20 hours in I'm not done yet.

Also the people who said the combat is generic and boring probably don't like grind in games at general to be stronger lol. (perhaps they forgot the game was tagged as an RPG?) The grind wasn't even that bad and I got a build that can wreck shit efficiently.

A surprisingly decent amount of replayability as most dungeons actually have secret paths that will only show up if you have specific items equipped or a skill. Erotic scenes are also top notch as the main Heroine's design is so cute and hot. Seeing her get fucked silly is fantastic. There's just a surprisingly huge lot of content in this game in general which made my purchase even worth it.


tldr: game's so good it made me actually buy it. Expect to use a few braincells to min max stats in an RPG game. and when the dust settles, fuck her silly as the game incentivizes you to do so.

It's quite good, far better than most of the garbage Kagura games publishes nowadays and just about worth the asking price, but not nearly "the best game ever" as several people here have claimed. At the end of the day it's still very predictable for an RPGM magic girl corruption game. Again, it's far from a bad/lazy game but don't expect something revolutionary either.

I'd sum it up as your typical RPGM game but longer + a not completely ridiculous speed of corruption + a non bad end pregnancy system (no post-pregnancy mechanics like violated heroine though) + a relatively customizable combat progression system. That's about it. H-scene quality is just ok. Plot is just ok. Grind is still quite high.

A promising start but sadly it fails to carry it forward. Lacklustre combat H scenes, story that quickly becomes generic after the introductory scenes and underwhelming corruption.

That last point is the real shame since it's often the main draw of these games, sadly this one falls into the all too common pitfall of tying most of the corruption to you losing battles and then making the battles too easy. On hard at least, maybe on ultra violence or whatever the top difficulty was called it feels more convincing but personally corruption loses all of it's intrigue when the catalyst is "then the heroine decided to stand still and not fight back" or "then she read 50 porno mags and instantly became a turbo slut".

Between this and their previous title this circle is so close to making amazing H-RPGs, but right now they're barely above average.

EDIT: Eventually went back and played through on the hardest setting, first two dungeons require more grinding but it's soon back to being too easy.

Very well done, sometimes unnecessarily difficult, but interesting. There are too many items and very few that can be useful in battles with monsters. The stories themselves, despite some excess of text, have logic and are not annoying repeatability.

I expected so much more with the pretty incredibly high rating this game got from the users here. The sheer amount of 5 stars is really deceptive, sadly. This game is the epitome of generic corruption, but that's hardly the issue. Standard RPGM Grind, boring combat with pseudo battle sex sprinkled in, and incredibly lazy CG. I know that tastes range from one user to another, but this game is, in a word, lazy.

Most of the CGs in the game, save for losses on bosses, are the same 3 images reused over and over again. Lose once to a normal enemy and you'll actually see all of these images in a single go. They just slap tentacles or human hands and genitals over the base image and call it a day. The loss scenes are horribly basic, having no variation either. When you lose to a boss, it's slightly more, but only slightly.

As for the art, it's more cute than sexy once you actually get the scenes. The genitals are terribly drawn, and essentially are just...open holes. The proportions get noticeably worse for many of the loss scenes too, as if the artist struggles with drawing human bodies at different angles. Thighs look warped, arms look stubby, etc. It's fine all in all, but far less so since there are hardly any images.

Getting harassed in public does nothing for your character, despite the game supposedly being amazingly well made with its corruption aspect. Getting harassed in public has zero effect, at least it doesn't within 3 hours of playing. A guy cums on you in public, nothing happens. You cum 5 times on a train? Nothing happens.

This game is just really stale, and is a huge time sink for how little you actually get. I just am stunned by the 5 star rating. If the art were better and there were more, or perhaps if the game wasn't so focused on forcing you to run through so many different enemies to get to your destination for each mission, sure, but...it has nothing that makes it stand out. This is generic in every possible way. Mediocre art, terrible gameplay, very basic corruption, and W A Y too many ways to get real game overs.

If your corruption gets too high, game over. If the overworld's enemy level gets too high, game over. The latter is fine, but the former is not. Gaining corruption is the best way to actually get to the lewd content, which is what most of us are here for, but in doing so, you continually edge closer to a complete game over. The way to remove corruption is very, very tedious and slow. It's better than a game over when you lose to enemies, but it also serves zero purpose to gameplay. It adds nothing to have 2 stats to keep track of when you're already forced to slog through this boring game.

Lastly, my poor ears. The boss defeat scenes apparently have their own audio, because there's a unique moan for those scenes that is 1) Painfully loud and didn't get turned down by any of the settings and 2) Was blown the hell out. I mean, that microphone sounds like it died after recording that. Obviously a funnier thing to nit pick, but the last thing I wanted while trying to enjoy was having my ear drums blown out like that poor USB microphone they used.