RPGM - Completed - Melty Brave Kittens [v1.22] [circle-tekua]

Disclaimer: I played this game on a virtual machine version of windows 7 and performance suffered (see more below)

TLDR: H-stuff 5/5, Gameplay ?/5, Story 3/5

First off the H-stuff. This game looks really good and also has quite a few very visually distinct character designs. There's a fairly wide variety when it comes to the lewd content, so it should appeal to a wide variety of tastes. The voice acting is definitely a nice touch.

Secondly, the uh gameplay. I'll be honest here I have no idea how to review this in my case. As mentioned above I ran this through a virtual machine version of windows 7. I'm also on a 8 year old budget gaming laptop. Thus I cannot tell if the lagging to unplayability, text being cut off, and very frequent crashes are a result of my that or something else. The only thing I can say is that I don't recommend playing this through a virtual machine I guess .

Finally the story was... fine. Nothing to write home about and it ends on a cliffhanger. The stars of the game really are the characters, which ended up being much more of a driving force than the story for me.

Disclaimer: this game exists both as an advertisement and a spinoff to Circle Tequa's up and coming major project so keep that in mind.

Imma be honest I'm not a fan of circle tekua's work as generally they tend to be either too grindy or underwhelming overall and by game 3 I really should have taken the hint and given up but with that said, I kind of like Melty Brave Kittens

3 stars because the game still feels grindy but I didn't want to completely tear my hair out thanks to the scenes and mostly interesting combat.

my biggest issue with the combat comes from diagonal attacks that almost always were hard to dodge due to either a combination of speedy shots the were hard to dodge and of with little telegraphing or too much visual clutter like with the diva twins who has both or phantom thief who had issues with most areas being too narrow to allow any wiggleroom to dodge.

otherwise great showing. and cool way to advertise your next major project

Covered, in a SeriesView on my Blog, the games from Circle-Tequa, including this game, a brave bet from Circle-Tequa all-in on the On-Map fight mechanics!
[Link to the Blog Post]

In the meanwhile, a Quickview for this game entry:


10th = 9.5
Who knew it would be this much of a boon to put all your stock on the On-Map battles? If it now involves Sexual Enemies, at the very least! Indeed, this game takes the On-Map combat from past games, and fleshes it out, allowing for equipment to modify your own projectiles, fired by either you or by your 2 "follower" magic hands that also fire projectiles, all of this to defeat Sexual Enemies in unique encounters per each, whilst avoiding them and their projectiles that can either damage you, or grab you into H-attacks that you need to escape fast via Minigame to reduce the HP / Level (caused by pure Succubi) loss. A segment close to the end of the game also has the now-expected Shrunk Vore Scenes for a number of Succubi characters.
As for the story, we now get a fresh one. You're the brother/sister (once again, able to select the gender you play as) that are demi-human children of an aristocratic family with a specialization in magic involving summoning Magic Hands to aid you in battles. You both had an older sister, that one day left the family to become "a mere adventurer", and you both idolized that idea, until one day, you yourselves ran away from home. You tried to start your career in adventuring, but ended up experiencing more of the unfairness of the world and the class stratifications along the way. Will you even find your Older sister one day?... Likely so.



Also, for Reference, the Scores I gave for the Circle Group and each of the games they have:

Series Scores:
================ Plot = 8
================ Gameplay = 9
================ Scenes = 9
================ Development = 9
================ Obtaining = 9
================ FINAL SCORE = 8.8
Individual Scores:
Succubus Hunter
======== 1st = [Haven't played; get only if Stauch Fan + Bought all the other Games from this Dev]
Succubus Tower
======== 2nd = 5
Succubus Story
======== 3rd = 5.5
Succubus Hunter 2: Escape the Lust Den!
======== 4th = 5
Lily Subaru!
======== 4.5th = 6.5
Succubus Tamer
======== 5th = 5.5
Succubus Battle!
======== 5.5th = 4.5
Succubus Tower 2
======== 6th = 8
Succubus Tamer 2
======== 7th = 8
Lilith in Nightmare
======== 8th = 9
Alstroemeria in Captivity
======== 9th = 9
Melty Brave Kittens
======== 10th = 9.5

This game has very good scenes, better than their previous games. Only that it felt less engaging with the story, and I wasn't the biggest fan of the gameplay. It feels more like a game I guess, but you are just fighting and then watching the scene in the gallery afterward.

Like, you can't enjoy the scenes because you have to hit a quicktime event, and then you are just back to holding a button and dodging. Different gameplay, some might like it, but I prefer the old type for this type of game.

Effective a sub-standard RPGM game with some interesting sexual scenes. And that is all i can give this game when it comes to its positive aspects. Everything else is either ok or feels like filler. I recommend you to skip this game, its just an above average shovelware.

Lagging too much even after changing the setting, it's just unplayable. And yes I downloaded, installed, then chose replace when putting the patches in the main file, didn't work.

This is surprising considering that previous games from this creator ran very well, even on my old PC. I know it's marked as completed, but I hope the problem will still be settled.

A very poor showing from a dev who has shown themselves capable of making good and fun experiences. The game is very short, scenes are lacking and not very interesting, characters are boring and bland, the "karma" system doesn't really add anything, most fights boil down to projectile spam.. I really wouldn't recommend this one at all.

v1.22
Coming from the other games, this title was pretty underwhelming.

It's short, relatively easy, and the story is underwhelming for the first title of this new world they cooked up. They seem to leave a lot out and/or unexplained. The list of useful equipment has taken an enormous hit and equipment experimentation is lackluster. Areas/maps are lacking detail. Combat is in open areas with nothing of note (which is counter-intuitive to all the stationary 'trap' weapons you get that would excel in narrow areas). As such, there isn't much to explore either.

The animations and girls are good though, maybe better than ever. The game is still fun to play, it's just lacking substance. It feels as though they're leaning more towards a scene viewer than a game.

very good game. many enemies and a fun simple story. i was disappointed by their last game but this is kinda like Lilith in nightmare again just better. the story is kinda short and the battles too and there is not much grind but it have a lot of great h-action and animations

I feel kind of sad. In my opinion, the quality of Circle Tekua's games was on a perfect incline, until they peaked with Succubus Tamer 2 (possibly my favorite H-game in history), and now I'm watching the quality of their games steadily decline with each new release. Granted, even this game is still superior to 99% of H-games, but I can't help but be sad because I know that this studio can do so much better.

I can see that they've been experimenting with genre, as their older games were mostly RPGs, while Captive Alstroemeria was sort of a puzzle game, and this one is sort of a bullet-hell. So I give them credit for that. But the worlds and stories of their latest 3 games (including the demos of Succubus Tail on Ci-en) are starting to feel really shallow in comparison. Their character designs are becoming inconsistent, if not flat out bad in some cases. They’ve also made it difficult to enjoy the H-scenes in combat, since when an enemy catches you, you’re forced to quickly time a button press, and when you lose you are kicked back to the title screen. And if you want to argue that you can still enjoy the H-scenes before getting a game over… Well, I’m experienced enough with bullet hell games that I haven’t seen a single Game Over (without intentionally doing so), and I’ve even gone entire fights without witnessing one single H-animation. At least they had the wisdom to make the recollection room accessible and fully unlockable from the beginning!

Suggestions? I feel like these devs should abandon the button timing mechanics altogether. Also I feel like the quality of the art in modern Circle Tekua updates is being sacrificed for the sake of animating them. I want more variety in fetishes, more variety in characters, and more depth to the story and game worlds. For fuck’s sake, you can’t even enter the item shops in this game! I’m glad they’re experimenting with genre, but why even incorporate an rpg-edge into what is essentially a boss-rush bullet-hell game, if it’s going to be this shallow? I’ll follow this studio into hell, but I do hope that they’ll return to their roots at some point, and sink their time into making something deeper, and more memorable than this.

Great animations and game play marred by some questionable design choices for the h-scenes.

So this replaces battle fuck mechanics with a top down action rpg battle. The good news is this battling is actually really fun and provides some complexity with the numerous weapon options and weapon modifiers. Honestly whoever designed and balanced the combat hit it out of the park by H-game standards. It's just challenging enough to be compelling but not overly frustrating once you learn the enemy attack patterns. The bad news is that this kind of system limits how long you get to enjoy the H-scenes and wonderful animations because most of the time you won't be seeing them at all. It also makes playing one handed pretty much impossible.

Even when viewing a defeat scene the design of them is very subpar. The majority of scenes involve the same looping animation with mild changes while the enemy girl says a line followed by 2-4 seemingly pointless battle fuck RPG messages about losing hit points or becoming excited/sensitive/etc. It's like if you took an average VN and put a blank few filler lines between every line of dialogue - just enough to annoy the player and take them out of the moment. It's even more frustrating because as said previously this isn't a battle fuck RPG at all so why wrap the H scenes up in that system?

It's a shame because the animations are GREAT. The content here is around 90% vanilla with 10% mild fetish involving light femdom, minor GTS play, minor foot play, general theme of succubus draining. But none of them are really explored enough to serve anyone interested in those kinks. It's more of "what anime trope of succubus do you want to perform mostly vanilla sex acts on you"

Bonus points for translation being good.

Bonus bonus points for providing an "unlock all scenes" option in the memory room right from the start.

Overall, this game is another pretty solid entry from circle-tekua, but it still feels sort of shallow compared to some of the circle's previous works.

Pros:

• Great animations as expected from this circle
• ARPG combat works well and is pretty engaging/fun
• Some fights can be challenging
• Specialized dialogue if you chose to play as the futanari MC.
• MTL is really good compared to non-GPT MTLs, thanks dazed.
• Ending sets up for a sequel!
• Futa MC choice and some Futa content

Cons:

• Due to the large cast of characters, there's not a lot of development for most of them. This is pretty typical of circle tekua though.
• Almost no romance other than with the orphanage girl. I miss the cute scenes from succubus tamer 2.
• Defeat H-scenes result in a game over and kick you back to the title screen.
• Most scenes don't show MC, or don't differentiate visually between Futa MC and Male MC. Once again, this is pretty common from this circle though so nothing new.
• Story is kinda meh, just two siblings looking for their older sister.
• Censored as all non-localized Japanese games are. This one is really excessive though.

Despite its shortcomings, Melty Brave Kittens gives you tons of H-scenes with a wide variety of scenarios (mostly femdom / seduction fetishes). The combat is pretty fun and a good change of pace from the usual turn-based RPG fights you see in H-games.

If you're a fan of circle tekua's past games you'll probably like this one too. It's pretty short and packed with content so you don't have to worry about spending too much time in order to see everything. Just save often before you take on any quests and you'll be fine.

If you know Circle-tekua, then you are already familiar with the formula.

Melty Brave differs only in that this is an ARPG, so while there isn't strict battlefucking like the previous titles, you are still fighting succubi that will try to get you to cum and drain you if they catch you or hit you with certain attacks.

The game employs RPGM MV's systems in a clever way. You have two 'party members' that are floating weapons with no hurtboxes, both of which can be equipped with a weapon and a modifier. Along with the player character, that is three different weapons. While there is a satisfying variety of weapons, I found most modifiers too tame to make some of the weapons useful.

You can grind for levels and gold in a generic monster clearing mission, taking place in a specific map, so no procedural RPGM jank. And then you can tribute either or both to your enemies waifus of choice.

The sex scenes are beautifully animated, the characters are gorgeous, and there's enough variety to keep the scenes from being repetitive (but don't expect hard or outlandish kinks, the weirdest you'll find is tiny-giant play.)

And the story has a branching ending depending on (reversible) decisions you make during the contract missions.

TL;dr: If you like Circle-tekua's games but you find them too long to replay, this will offer plenty of fun for a lesser investment, at the cost of the battlefucking mechanic turning into a fairly enjoyable action combat game.