HTML - Masters of Raana [v0.8.4 public] [GrimDark]

Ok everyone, I am here to explain why I enjoy this game. Although the combat is not to my liking and we have all discussed this with the Dev, he is constantly trying to make improvements on the game, enjoys talking to his community about the game and what to add/fix/improve, and he humbles himself a lot with understanding how his community enjoys things. I know a lot of people are having issues with the first Kymanto fight but it is fairly simple to understand if you do one thing, create a new character, put your points into range combat, and your passives in range combat. Do the fury missions for money and get you either a rifle or assault rifle. Now there is a mercenary that is fairly cheap named Aiko. HIre her and recruit the two free slaves. You can train them and they are fairly good with combat. You can either give them a pistol or train them up with their range combat. They make early fights very easy and that is how I was able to do Kymanto first fight with no issues. But if you have any questions or want to give your opinion better on the game please come join Grim's discord for Master of Raana, you won't regret it, and you won't regret giving the game another try.

It looks good at first, but the further I go the worse it becomes.
As other reviews have said, it is very poorly balanced. After a few hours, I just said fck it and cheated my stats to have a somewhat funner experience. Also, yes, if you grind enough and understand the combat system you can definitely manage without cheating, but the fact the I played 20 minutes and I quickly get into a main mission that seems undoable without grinding 5 hours first is poor balance.
Now that my stats were high enough to survive and earn money, I could turn properly to what I first came for - the slave management part. Which is just as confusing and grindy as the rest of the game. Also, doesn't help that so many images are still "WIP".

This is a fantastic game in so many ways. Advanced and deep interactions that make the slaves feel alive and unique, a rich world with so much stuff to do (I didn't even buy my first slave until day 40) and a lore-history that spurs your imagination.

Fighting is hard until you get the hang of it. Some people here think it's too hard but my advice is, DO NOT go out alone unless you're targeting single enemies. You'll be killing it with a good armor, a rifle and two medium mercenaries.

Sex scenes are nicely written and renders are very pleasant to look at.

Keep up the good work! I'll be following this already nicely polished gem. Can't wait for the final product!

The game has huge potential but as of 0.7.8.1 the slave training and stats training mechanics are absolutely horrible

Pros:
-In depth sex activity although with somewhat limited renders for now
-Limited yet nice looking renders on your slaves
-The world is pretty fleshed out and consistent to its world building
-A personal one but the BDSM and submission related dialogue made me absolutely coom

Cons:
-Training for your and your slaves stats is completely RNG A.K.A "imma savescum this shit until the stat number goes up"
-Slaves have a lot of stat yet i dont see too much implementation on said stats beside small flavour text
-Combat is lackluster, not to mention the limited number of armaments to use

these are the things i can think of on the top of my head. overall like i said, this game has a huge potential and i do reccomend you to at least try it if you liked the theme of slavery games

Well realized post-apocalyptic setting, interesting and expansive skill system, very nice renders and generally consistent art style and mostly excellent writing .

What could be improved:
Combat is a main part of the game but is not very tactical nor impactful and could be improved (this is something thousands of games do well, just steal take inspiration from an RPG that has it figured out).
World map could be touched up and could use a minimap (good source of inspiration could be Sunless Sea and a lot of city-setting D&D campaign maps).

Great game! Loving the art and gameplay. Please update and you have my support! 10/10. I hope you guys finish this game soon and cant wait for the next updates. The story is amazing, Love the dice rolls combat, especially the customization for the girls dresses!

I think this game is a Hidden Gem. Am imaginative story around challenging game play. It does take some effort and repeated attempts to quickly progress through the game but careful attention adds to the imaginative experience. This game highly rewards the effort you put into it. Very much looking forward to discovering all the wonderful treasures of RAANA!

The game has a great framework and I love the game

I think the combat part needs to be adjusted, and skills have very little effect on hit rate and damage.

And the accuracy of melee weapons is low. I have increased my melle combat skill to 60, which is still very low.

anyway I hope this game will be completed , it's a great game.

Thank you for your efforts

Sure seems like a ton of work went into this. Really impressive. Many locations, many quests to go on, and tons of things to do at your house with and without slaves.

There are also many things that could be improved. For instance, when you turn off the sound under settings, you would think that the sounds would be turned off. Most sounds are, but not all.
The grind factor is way up there as well but others have mentioned that a lot and I kinda like games with lots of grind.. My experience w the dexterity stat, for example, was that I worked on it twice a day for 10-15 days for a 2 point bump. I tried a few different things, but it still seemed almost pointless to try to raise any of my stats at all.

The game is setup so the MC has a distinct disadvantage in most everything. When you click on Raiders for example, you don't know how many there are, what weapons they have or anything and you can't back out of it, so basically it's a suicide mission every time which means you get robbed as well. Of course if you hire the mercenaries to go with you, you will win sometimes but it doesn't really seem worth it.

Again, I got my stats up some, in the low 40's I think, but still had to shoot at 1 enemy a good 10 times. Almost all shots missed by 1 inch. I noticed the enemy didn't miss. Since ammo is sooo expensive, it's not worth fighting, especially since you can't aim in this game.

My slave that I 'rescued' was mad at me the whole time and didn't do much. So it seems the only punishment is to tie them up to the rack and spank them or slap them, which didn't do much in my case. Again, I'm probably just playing it wrong.... I ended up just leaving her tied up on it hoping she would go ahead and die but she never did.

Seems like the main thing this game needs, other than the sound fixed, is just some tweaking of settings to get the balance of power to a more equal footing. It's such a great job otherwise. Just seems like after a while you just kind of give up. Also, you have to play the game a bit before you can even change the sound or other settings, I think. Sorta weird.

Anyway....just a couple thoughts.... I'm going to try again and I'll come back and edit this if/when some of this changes....or I figure it out.....

EDIT: This was made before the 0.7.9 update, so things have probably improved since, but I know not to what extent (as I'm gonna wait before restarting a playthrough) so will leave this up at the very least as a timecapsule for the game's improvement:

As others have mentioned, there are plenty of fantastic elements to this game and it has the potential to be at least a 4.5/5, but it's already gonna be a long review and that's not why I downgraded it:

The Grind. The main way players increase in power in any game like this is stats; in this game you can *have a (low) chance* to improve 2 stats in one day by a single point (some of those 'chances' cost money), but you also have a chance to *loose* stats randomly just from sleeping - sometimes 2 stat points at once - on both you and your slaves (2 of whom you also have to level up for combat) as well as loosing stats (often 4-5 stat poins) when you loose a fight and also loosing stats (sometimes as many as 3 at once) when you go to work; just keeping your and your slave's stats as they are is hard enough - let alone increasing them.

As for money, at best, with as many upgrades to passive income as I can get minus the relatively small costs for merc companies is 75 dollars a day (because 18 dollars a day is little compared to the 2500 dollar hiring fee) - throw in a job at the factory (only reliable job early if you don't have specific stats stupidly high) and you get between 105 to 200ish depending on the day and your luck in stealing. The best armour you can buy for the player costs 6700, for your slaves it's 6500 which you'll want to do twice and then the best armour upgrade for mercs costs 2200 which you might also have to do twice - so that's 24100 just to get armour - throw in weapon and ammo costs as well as merc hiring fees, medicine and skill training you're probably looking around 28-30k-ish to get started.

The reason for that is difficulty - now, the grind wouldn't be too bad if, say, you didn't need the BiS or super-high stats just to play the friggin game. To give you an example, the first bountry quest you can pick up from the town hall; with the best mercenaries I could find upgraded with the best equipment I could give them, the best gear I could get for myself and around 4 hours of grinding stats on myself and my slaves(save-scumming to prevent stat loss), in a 5v1 fight, we barely got him to 2/3 hp before he wiped out my entire squad. Why? Because like many enemies he had more powerful armour and weapons than I have access to atm as well as very high stats. Remember, this is the first bounty in the starting zone. Also, the reward for defeating him? 2k dollars.

You aren't grinding to become more powerful than your opponents, you're grinding to get a competitive disadvantage so that maybe you have a 30% chance of victory that you save-scum to get - and that's just unsatisfying and makes everything except BiS irrelevant. Now it might be that it gets better, but after 12+ irl hours of play I still feel like a level 3 character in a level 10 area with level 15 bosses. I'll keep going because under those issues lies a good game, but you should be aware of the difficulty/timesink before you download!

Probably one of the best if not the best slave-management game I've ever played.

It uses pre-designed character which have its own pro's and con's but I personally prefer procedurally generated characters for slaves for added randomness and uniqueness so gameplay is not always "cut-and-dry",

With that being said, the world building is awesome and dynamic, UI is neat and clean enough, bugs being fixed all around, WIP content is ambitious, and the only thing I can see lacking (as of the current version) is the turn based combat which feels like it's just another "stats" to raise (=grind) in which I honestly hope to see it develops further, if you try to aim for the sky why not shoot for the stars?

OVERVIEW
if you are a slave-management genre fans I would recommend to download the game and support the developer because I can see the potential of the game and where it's headed, and if you are not a fan of such genre I would suggest you try and play the game to test the water.
Cheers and good luck!

A very addictive game that already has a lot of tasks and things to do. A very open world with lots of random events. Complex management systems and upgrades for combat encounters. Excellent! Very addictive.

Played for about 16-18 hours now after finding game on F95. Great game with lots of branching possibilities and great art and music. Looking forward to seeing what happens next. Great side quest as well. Maybe best management type game I've tried.

One of the most interesting and engaging games here (and probably least buggy). I like the mechanics, there are limitless possibilities to expand the game, as well as to actually play it. Even though there isn't so many renders at the moment, but they are consistently updated and of high quality. Hats off to GrimDark!

I very much like the concept of this game, and the setting is damn near perfect, but I have some notes.
My first and core complaint has to do with the UI.
Fundamentally the UI is non-intuitive. The red text in the text window for more information is a clever system, but it's not really obvious unless you know it.
The slave/mercenary system is kind of half-integrated, for squads, but it's completely different for at home interaction.
When you're at home managing your slave, there's no way to tell (or even make educated guesses) how any particular interaction will effect her. IDK if there's a perk for that, but it feels like the kind of thing any competent slaver would have, so maybe it should be a default option/function?
That of course is part of my complaint about the UI in general being just unintuitive. Individually, once you know what each part does, it's fairly obvious, but on the whole, the elements don't seem to share a theme, graphically or functionally, so you have to learn each one individually.
I would like to see that streamlined.
Aside that, for an early in-dev game, it's quite polished. The in-world aesthetics are pretty nice, the map is small, but well laid out, and the humanoid models are actually pretty good.

This is a very good start. Normally I get disappointed by html-games but this one surprised me in a good way. It might actually end up being a better slave trainer than my current (and long lasting) favorite Jack-o-nine-tails. I really like that each girl has their own backstory and personality. And the world seems internally consistent and interesting.

Great concept for a game.

Should spend some time flushing out all the "basic" art for the starter slaves. Also, should give some attention to how different character builds might go about solving a problem. As it currently is player kinda have to experiment with finding the "most correct" solution rather than "their character's" most likely solution to the problems presented. As a result the player tends to be railroaded a little. That might make the game a little "easier" but that's okay - it'd better than the existing best strategy of just throwing money at mercenaries.

Additionally, the dev really needs to fill in the missing artwork for at least all of the free "found in world" slaves and the tier one slaves.

Even the things like the artwork for the weapons and armour feels like something the dev could have upgraded for next to nothing by farming out the icons to someone on fiver. At least then the art styles in the inventory would be better and more consistent

I give it a 4/5 but only because it's in such an early state. Hopefully those things get fixed. If it keeps living up to the promise it'll be a 5/5. If they don't fix the obvious things as they progress I'll revisit this and give it a lower rating

Fingers crossed.

Very nice Game !

This Game is very interactive - and you have to learn a lot to be an excellent Slave-Owner.
There are many difficulties to overcome and to get a proper income so you can afford everything you need to let your House be pretty and your Slaves happy.

The Story is well told - Gameplay is very divers - and you can decide to become a Fighter with Mercenarys at your side - or a Scientist who teaches at the Academy... choose your Start-Stats well at the beginnng.

Many funny dialogues and nice Maps, lots of different Locations to visit and to speak with the residents - and do Quests for them.

More stuff will come up - and the Developer is almost daily active to answer questions and is open for suggestions on his Discord-Channel.

So, what do you want more ?
(Or should i say : MoR ?)

See you at his Discord-Channel, or in Raana !

I was awestruck by the depth and great lore of this game, and besides some WIP pics showing up here and there, it's hard to believe this is still in early development.

You can do almost anything. Academy route, adventurer/warrior, gambler, slave trader, factory worker.

And the details when interacting with slaves is as open and deep as the world surrounding the MC.

Nice RPG system that's exciting. I like a little random – that you can highly affect with the right gear and skill training. You have a small chance to score a critical hit and take down a high-level enemy even if you're weak. Just as in real life.

I like it that you can optimize your character and start right away as a decent fighter/academist/subduer or whatever road you decide to take.

Keep up the good work devs!

Good ideas, bad realisation.
-1 for combat system. You win because of random. You lose because of random. You can`t affect this random, apart of long and boring MC training.
- 1 for all other rolls. It`s not like you win some, you lose some. You process forward or lose. It`s frustrating. And to minimise this you have a long and boring training. Decades ago slave maker have a sheduler for such things, but now it`s forgotten ancient techology.
-1 for 18+. Ok, I understand laws in this world. But I don`t understand laws of ingame world. Slavery of underages forbidden? They don`t allowed to go outside? What? Why? Nothing. Same about girls reaction on your advances. Why? Is chruсh strong here? Or something else forsing ppl to look at sex as bad thing? It`s all need explanations ingame.
Everything else is more or less ok for trainer game, apart one render with wrong foot direction.