An fan-favorite monster girl hentai game that pioneered many MG games that came after it, even though it's not the first of the genre. While not the very first porn game I've ever played, it was the first hentai game I've played back in 2017, and to this day, even in spite of the many porn games I've played, this remains one of my favorites.
The story of this game is a fan-favorite among the community, and I very much agree with that. It's not the most amazing, original or polished adult plot you'll see in your life, but reading through it feels like a playing a music sheet and hitting all the right notes. This game is about Luka, a young boy living in a world where a war raged between humans and monsters for ages. He decides to go on a quest to defeat the Monster Lord and convince him to help him make humans and monsters living in harmony. On his way, he meets Alice, a MG who decides to follow him on his journey, intrigued by his motivations and his desire for peace.
A weak premice that has been done countless times again before this game (and sadly, also countless times after), but this is just the setting for the universe; where the game shines is in its characters. It's hard to properly explain why this is the case without spoiling, but while the premice of the game is honestly quite weak, you do spend a lot of times watching the characters interacting with each other and sharing their views of the world they live in. Luka isn't just a self insert like there are too many in J games today ; he has a goal, motivations, desires, and is proactive to reach them. I was quite pleased to see that Luka isn't dense or oblivious, but is actually quite clever from time to time, especially when he tries to talk his opponents down from fighting. Alice is quite mysterious at first, but thoughout the game you see her opening to Luka little by little, and she becomes more endearing and relatable as you discover her past and her reasons for joining him on his journey. It was refhreshing and endearing to see these two bounce off each other and influence each other's mentality, seeing how they influenced their world and fixed the chaos brought by the war step by step.
Of course, the story isn't perfect; sadly, the side characters (with the exception of the major villains) didn't receive the same amount of love or work as the MCs, but they serve their purpose well and the villains were made well enough to be entertaining and driving the plot forward. The plot is never to complex to follow, although as it is a japanese game, it is plagued with the usual japanese baggage or storytelling and characterization tropes that don't click at all for me. I know most of my gripes are due to cultural differences, but it's become very tedious to see the way the plot progresses, the way the characters talk, the different anachronisms or setting anomalies that scream japanese throught the story. it's a personal gripe I know, but fortunately it wasn't enough to damage my entertainment of the game.
As this is a VN made in Renpy, the gameplay is really limited. The dev team tried to implement a RPG-style fighting system that, while functional, is not nearly enough to call this a "game". The encounters with the enemies are all scripted, meaning you must play a chain of events in a certain order in order to win and progress the story. For me it was fine, since most of the fights give you a slight margin of freedom to hit the opponent the way you want, but there is an inventory system that is just here to add flavor text, and I don't understand it's purpose as none of them are used in battle. I've heard many people didn't like this system, and I can understand what, as it's sometimes very hard to predict what move your opponent will use next, and most of the encounters can be lost with one false judgement on your part.
As for the sex scenes, sadly, it's for me the most negative side of this game. It's weird to think that porn sequences could bring a porn game down, but here it's honestly the weakest point of this series for me. There are way too few high-quality sex scenes that are not high enough (all of them being censored, which is a big no for me), and way too many lows that are low in so many different ways, ranging from the bland to the downright amateurish and disgusting.
One the artists has even done monster girls designed to be nightmare fuel, and while it's at least justified in the story (partially and implicitely), it's still inexcusable for a porn game to have this many different art styles that range so much in quality, most of that quality being at the bottom of the barrel. It feels like there was no quality control whatsoever, and that the dev team was just desperate to find someone willing to draw for them, like they were doing commissions instead of making their own art. That, and on top of more than half of those sex scenes being the most vanilla shit you can expect from a porn game, especially a Japanese one.
So overall, while I personally really like MGQ and would really like to recommend it to others, there are many problems that prevent this game from being as popular outside of its niche as it could be otherwise. The japanese tropes are frustrating, the game might as well not be there and it wouldn't damage the story almost at all, and the sex scenes, overall, are too amateurish, bland and unmemorable for this game to be recommendable to a non MG fan. It's neat, don't get me wrong, and you should play it if you're interested, but don't get your hopes too high if you don't want to be dissapointed.
