Monster Girl Hunt stands out in its premise but instead of delivering a warcry, it simply stands amongst its contenders and gives a shrug.
That, alas, is Monster Girl Hunts main problem: It's the game equivalent of a shrug. A yawn. A tepid fart in the midst of a hurricane.
The premise is promising: It's Pokemon but with a pornographic twist using Monster Girls: A premise which, for some fucking reason, gets very little look-in due to us being in the worst fucking timeline and everyone instead regurgitating shitty Ren'py games into our eyes. You're some kind of hunter/trainer/thing who has turned 18 so surprise motherfucker you get your own monster (Well, it comes to you technically) and now its time for adventures.
That will take you on a walking simulator.
Unfortunately, the decent premise attempts to obscure a game best described as "eh". NPCs offer nothing of substance beyond cringey dialogue (More on that below) or perhaps some quest advancement, despite the game teasing so much more. The games questlines involve a lot of back and forth walking and fetch quests. The first half hour had me walk from town to a manor, with Farmer Breeds to give me the gist of the controls and mechanics, then back to the town for the MC's sister, then back to the manor, then down to a second town, then around that town trying to find NPC's to talk to (Searching through empty, lifeless houses. I guess all the NPC's are out getting some Monster Girl poon while i'm doing shitty quests?), then find another NPC to talk to, then head west to find another location, then find out the entrance is blocked and having to find another way into a three way junction which means retracing my steps and going North, then come to a place where outright monster girl slavery is coming, then wandering around an area clicking doors, finding the right door, heading east across a path, then into another zone, which I get halfway through before having to backtrack to the first area to see Farmer Breeds............
Did reading through that make you roll your eyes? Say "Fucking hell Olduvai, that's tedious shit you're writing, get on with it!"
Well, imagine playing the fucking thing.
All the while fighting and grinding through battles.
Ah yes, the battles. The bread and butter of the game. Handled well, it could turn even the poor general gameplay into something to happily tolerate. After all, we're hunting Monster Girls, we're capturing them, surely that means the battles bring something great to the table? After all, the creator promises " high quality turn based encounters", so surely that must be what it brings, right?
Right?
Oh, bless your heart.
The battles are your typical Pokemon-style fare: Pick an attack, wallop an opponent into submission. Their clothes fall off (One of the very, very, VERY few good points of this game is the amount of random outfits that the NPC's will wear.) and you see some nudity, but that tiny bit of teasing titillation is about all you get.
I was hoping that winning battles would bring a decent reward (i.e; hey bby wan sum fuk), but instead I was deceived by my own expectations and instead received my worst fears in that the game depends entirely on grinding battles so that you can level up your monsters and are rewarded with a dull trickle of events, which culminate in some 'eh' drawings (Which look about as polished as sandpaper) and some okay animations. (The end of Nim, the cow-girls route, has an okay animation. It's average. It's fine. En-route is basically a bunch of drawings put together to create the illusion of movement and progression.) That's right, the battles themselves are meaningless but to grind up your companions in the hope of seeing SOMETHING.
Alternatively, you can use attacks to bring up the lust meter! "Ah, now you're talking!" I hear you exclaim "That must mean there's something great!" Well, dear imaginary reader, if you're thinking of bringing lust up in the hopes of some wank-worthy content, then i'm afraid i've got some bad news: It's a very simple masturbation image. That's it. That's all. Likewise, losing battles in the hope of a generic rape scene just so you could see something resembling porn in this porn game results in swiftly being teleported back to a designated healing location.
Yawn.
The overworld graphics are very much 'eh', too (See a pattern here?) With overworld sprites appearing relatively decent but with a very minimalist style.
The humour is very much porn game style i.e; The same old tired porn gags which is essentially the writer nudging you repeatedly going "EH? EH? EH? YA GET IT? YA GET IT? IT'S A PORN GAME! WE'RE SO PORNY! OH SO PORNY!" which comes off more as a 13 year old who just discovered the Carry On films.
The positives are.....well, it has potential. That's really it. That and there's a few decent animations there if you can get past the fucking inane grinding for it. Also, the characters are well-designed as they should be, and the amount of alternate costumes are pretty damn good.
There's clearly still plenty of work ahead and the developer clearly is looking to push forward with the game. It has a ton of potential to really deliver a blockbuster in a genre dominated by cookie-cutter Ren'py and RPGMaker games, but right now it's not reaching that potential. It's not reaching any potential, even, it's just about reaching mediocrity and staying there.
I could give it two stars, to the point where I think three stars is quite generous, but the dev clearly has passion in the project and it's bringing something unique to the table, even if it is drowned under tedious gameplay and the sexual content is more of a tease than porn.
Maybe in the future, it could reach 5 stars. We'll just have to wait and see. At the very least, it's not a Ren'py game or an RPGMaker game, and thank fuck for that. Godspeed, Tiny Devil Studio.
