Manila Shaw is a game that's actually
extremely difficult to rate, strange as that may sound. It's difficult because it's not supposed to be taken seriously.
If I describe how
every, and I do mean
every, male character in this game looks like they eat steroids and dumbbells for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and every female character looks like she doesn't have any organs in her waist, well that's just comedic artistic freedom.
If I point out how
every male character in this game, except one, is a shallow, one-dimensional, criminally lecherous pervert just waiting for their moment to rape Manila's brains out to the level where even a village bicycle would look like a saint... Well, nobody is actually playing this game for the characters.
Manila cannot get pregnant until after she receives some weird injection. But after that, she can get pregnant and give birth the next morning only to get pregnant again that same afternoon. To hell with biology.
See my point? When you make a game that's not supposed to be taken seriously, you can take garbage and call it "art" because standards have been thrown out the window. I cannot compare to games that take more realism into account, like Acting Lessons or Being a DiK. So I have to rate this game on two other things instead, 1) quality of life, something
all games should have considered into their design, 2) does it accomplish what it's trying to do?
Quality of Life 0/5
The fact alone this is made in RPGM should tell you everything you need to know. It's a horrible game engine:
There is no dialogue history, so if you miss an important line of dialogue, you're fucked. If there is a record, I haven't found it.
If you accidentally make the choice you didn't want, you're fucked because you can't roll back.
Want to save your game? Too bad, you can't right now. You have to return to the map first.
Forgot to pick up an item you could have benefited from? Too bad, get fucked. That's RPGM in a nutshell.
But Manila Shaw might be a new low in some respects. In this game, you are required to go through nearly every little unnecessary nitpicking step of helping Manila navigate her life. You run her to the shower, change her into specific clothes, have her work at her desk, pick up the work document at the printer and deliver it, etc; and you repeat this uncessary process pretty much EVERY FUCKING DAY.
I suppose we should be glad breakfast, lunch, and dinner wasn't included. But all the same, I don't know what possessed Abaddon to follow through with this poor design decision, but if you're reading this, Abaddon sir, I sincerely plead with you to never include this function in a game ever again, or at least curb it. Half of these daily steps could easily be removed.
Combat serves no purpose in this game, but it exists.
If you want to see sex scenes, lose. Just lose. There is absolutely ZERO incentive to win unless you want to see Manila retain her purity.
But if you do, be warned, the turn economy is atrocious. "Guard" is supposedly important because it halves damage and gives you some special points, but the techniques you get from using them barely do more damage than a regular attack, assuming they hit at all. The RNG is heavily biased against you, and enemies hit hard enough that you usually can't survive more than one combat each day, and there are several chained combat events.
Inventory is an abomination too. Your items are equipped to your outfits instead of the character, it's weird. I had a martial arts style (which you buy as an item, oddly enough) equipped to the dojo outfit, and it went missing because I forgot to un-equip it when I changed Manila's outfit. So, I couldn't use its benefits in any subsequent battles. It would be far better to equip to the character directly, ya'know, like normal. It's what just about every other game in the world does.
Items have horridly inflated prices to set you up to fail even though we've already established that there is zero incentive to win. It's $5 to buy ONE bullet. $100 for a band-aid. And Manila gets paid only about $500 on a good week. That's $26k per year, or what we call, "poverty wage." I understand this is meant to be an incentive to make choices that increase Manila's corruption, but still, this makes me shake my head.
With all that out of the way...
Does this game accomplish its goal? 4/5
If you like corruption, pregnancy, and animated sex scenes (albeit not the best, but they're there), then yes, this game is for you, IF you can get past the tedious gameplay. Don't forget to download the animation pack first. The game is rather large and animations are downloaded separately to reduce the download size. You'll also want to turn off the audio. The oragsm sploosh and "heugh-heugh-OOOuuuaaa" noises are complete rubbish and annoying.
Verdict 2/5
It's kind of an unhealthy love/hate relationship. Manila may not care about quality writing or character development, but we can look past that. Manila is about the fetishes, and it's hot enough to tempt me to play it despite being made in RPGM. But then I remember this game suffers from such severe design flaws that I personally find it borderline unplayable. I think it's more frustrating than what it's worth.
My advice to you, reader, is play the Ren'Py version instead. The dev is trying to make a VN in RPGM and I just don't think it's worth it. It's far too tedious. Ren'Py would have been the more optimal engine in every category. I won't trouble myself with the main RPGM version, but I wish you good luck if you wish to try it.
Unfortunately, the Ren'Py remake is on hold at the moment of writing this review, but there is still enough content in it at present to rub your horn to for a few days. And it comes with a scene gallery.
Thanks for reading, hope you found what I have to say is helpful.