This game ended up being the latest bit of depravity that I ended up playing recently, and so, it's time for another one of my reviews of sorts.
To start with, it's worth saying that this is the dev's 1st game, and that it suffers from a pretty severe case of "dev's 1st game syndrome", which is to say, there's a lot of poor execution involved when it comes to their ideas, regardless of how good or bad those ideas were in the 1st place. The usage of this particular RPGM version that's outdated says a lot on its own, and so does the fact that the game's resolution is tiny even by this engine's standards. Everyone should
really thank
O&M's for the extra effort they put in so the game has a resize option. It does
not come with that by default. I don't mind the tiny resolution when it's on particularly old games and the like, but this one takes it a bit far even for this particular engine's limits... The dev doesn't even have the excuse of being set in their ways or anything.
ANYway, the translation is about what you can usually expect from Dazed these days. Still some pronoun issues here and there and whatnot, though not that many compared to the old days, and of course, far better than all the poetry of the bad old days. Interestingly enough, I don't think I've seen a single gender/pronoun/whatever issue in the story dialogs and whatnot, it just popped up in some H-scenes. A weird data point, but an ultimately irrelevant one I suppose. The biggest issues you'll run into is the youkai encyclopedia, where text is cut off on a regular basis. Unfortunately, given the difference between Japanese and English and what they put in there... I doubt anyone's fixing these without serious work, since the available space is absolutely tiny.
As always, a manual translation from an expert would be better, but I don't see that happening any time soon, if ever.
Moving on. Some peeps have mentioned that this isbasically like a hentai version of some Pokemon game or another... I've never played any Pokemon games, so I have no idea how truthful that is or not. It's not like Pokemon has a monopoly on the whole "fight with trained monsters" thing either. Regardless of how it compared to those games (though you'd have to ignore the fact that Nintendo was a big company even back then while this game was made by some random dude)... the fact of the matter is that the systems for this game are... not great.
The whole of the game revolves around fights using a singular monster. Each monster has an element that determines resistances and weaknesses and which also broadly influences what skills they have. You can freely swap monsters in battle, and swapping doesn't take a turn, and so the idea is that you build up a team that you can swap around in fights as needed so you face enemies in such a way that your team exploits their weaknesses while offering up resistances against their attacks. There's 12 monsters in total that you can recruit, and each of them also has 1 specific evolution (no branching or multiple tiers or anything). You obviously start with a single monster, and then recruit more as you move forward.
The system sounds pretty neat in principle, but it's pretty bad in terms of details. First of all, each monster gains experience individually, and while monsters that don't deal the killing blow gain some measure of XP, this is a fraction of what the one fighting gets. This wouldn't be such a big problem, if not for the fact that the party is limited to 5 monsters, and everything else is put into storage so to speak... and
those monsters do
not get XP at all. This is a problem because monsters of an element are not equal so to speak, some are better at some things than others and they have different traits and whatnot... and the game likes to throw enough curve-balls at you that you're pretty much forced to either train them all or grind a
lot to strengthen your favorites with stat-boosters.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that monsters only permanently learn skills as they level up and you won't know what those skills are except loosely based on their theme... and then you still see random shit like a random fire skill on a water monster for example. You gearing options are also very poor, consisting of 2 orb slots, which basically allow you to give a monster a couple of extra skills and 1 accessory slot, most of which are weak stat-boosters. Though later on you do get the option to grab ones which gives immunity to certain status ailments. Worse, the vast majority of orbs are obtained by killing specific enemy monsters over and over, collecting "sealed souls" and crafting orbs with them... and it takes
ten of these souls for a singular orb, all while the soul item has a drop rate of 1 out of 3, supposedly. It generally feels much lower.
All in all, the game is
very grindy, to the point where even I started feeling it. Though this is partly because the combat itself is just not that interesting. The number of skills each monster has is just not that high, and out of those skills, plenty of them are useless outside of boss fights or specific situations, or just plain useless period. For
some insane reason, the dev decided to put accuracy rates on a
lot of skills, particularly some of the harder hitting ones, but especially Wood and Earth Element skills. (I swear, the dev must have
hated those elements... They're by far the ones with the most issues to use and the easiest to fight against...) Y'know that Xcom meme about 90% accuracy rates? Well, this game seems to suffer from the same problem. It's insane how a 85% accuracy skill can miss
five times in a row. Seriously. It often gets so bad that it's just not
worth gambling with these skills, especially since the game has dodge rates too which makes things even worse.
The problem with that is that it reduces usable skills even more, which makes the game even more boring to deal with. Like. Sure. some of the boss fights take some brain power to figure out, depending on how much you prepared for one... But... The amount of tedium you have to go through between those boss fights makes them easy to forget tbh.
It doesn't help that the story isn't particularly great either. Just your typical "girl goes to kill the demon lord" plot. There's some mildly interesting details,
like the fact that Mizuki's mother was turned into said demon lord's personal slut, but it's not really anything you won't have seen before in some form or another. This wouldn't be bad if the characters were interesting... but they're all also fairly generic. Particularly Mizuki's boyfriend.
Because yes, this is supposed to be a NTR story of sorts, and I suppose I can give the game points for the fact that the boyfriend is actually part of the story and shows up in every town etc, instead of just being mentioned randomly for flavor.
Speaking of, the H content of this game is fairly varied. There's of course a bunch of defeat rape events. Pretty much all main-story bosses have a defeat rape scene, and the game's biggest bad ending is tied to losing to the final boss. There's also a bunch of other events in towns and whatnot that Mizuki can engage with. There's even 4 battle-fuck things... but those are tied to four very specific enemies and it's a major pain to trigger them.
The
problem with the H-content is that the side-events in towns and whatnot depend on Mizuki's lewdness level.
All of them. The minimum lewdness level to trigger
any events is 15, and the most lewdness you get from story mandatory events and whatnot is 6, if my memory isn't failing me. Basically, the game
needs you to lose, a lot. Because Optional events alone don't raise Mizuki's lewdness for the next stages on their own, and the lower tier events aren't repeatable either. For all that the game seems to have options in terms of the lewd stuff, in truth, the whole thing is pretty linear since you have to hit most if not all of the low tier stuff to access the higher tier events and so on.
This is before getting into the fact that the game's developments make a
lot more sense if you have Mizuki jumping on every dick that you can find...
You probably want to do that
anyway, because, quite frankly, the game does
not have an option to unlock all of the gallery. Main story events can be unlocked with money (more grind, wee) and most of the optional events can be unlocked at any time in theory... though one particular line of events seems to get fucked if you don't access it right away. (Either that or there's something screwy with it.) That's the fisherman village line of events btw. No idea what the deal is with it.
Unfortunately, I didn't know this when playing the game, and as is my usual habit for a NTR game, I did my 1st playthrough playing it straight and trying to avoid all the lewds... which was pretty easy because the game is not that hard for the 1st half or so. Later on, bosses start hitting harder and becoming more obnoxious in various ways, and you can end up with surprise death because a boss hits you with a sudden crit on a hard hitting skill that hits your current monster's weakness and you didn't even know it was possible... but that's more of an RNG thing than a skill issue thing tbh. The point is, unless you're
trying to lose, you will
not lose for most of the game, which means Mizuki's lewdness will not rise and you won't be able to trigger events.
The H-events are not bad when you do trigger them... but that's about all I can say.
All in all, the game is pretty mediocre. About the only reason to play it is to have all the context for the Honoka game (which is supposedly better than this one in a number of ways). If you
do play it, my recommendation is
to cheat like a mother-fucker and just plain ignore most of the grind and various shenanigans. Do a 1st playthrough where you have Mizuki jump on every dick in existence, then use items to lower her lewdness to see the other two endings if you want, and that's that. I'm not sure which of the endings is the canonical one, but even the good ending features some level of sluttification and kind of implies that
Mizuki's BF might die of snu-snu.
If you cheat to bypass all the monotonous grind, then this game is much better. This is coming from me, someone who generally
doesn't mind grinding in JRPGs.