Unity - Completed - Oneshota Swordplay ACT: Hagokoro [v1.06] [excessm]

Very good 2D femdom game, variety of characters is nice, story is nice. Gallery is good, you can also create your own enemy character (pick clothes colour etc).

One of the best features I have seen was "surprise attacks" which have you complete simple tasks to avoid a surprise attack. The dance surprise attack that has you recall the numbers on the screen is by far my favourite.

Fun game with a few broken mechanics but Good overall if you are looking for the same as their other games. Some losing scenes drag on too much. But I guess you can turn them off in the options. Even using the Locale Emulator isn´t enough some times. Some missions just straight-up refuse to work and you have to retry and retry and if you have a lucky load then you can enjoy it

Version: v1.06

-This games gameplay was a throw back to the games of old where you shoot with a fixed and scripted movement, pretty nostalgic. Overall they didnt fail to make that type of game, it just gets a little stale at the end of it all.
-The story? hah, i wasnt interested.
-The sexual stuff is pretty good, especially the massive amount of customisation that is available to you.
-Progression was pretty fun if basic.

Cant be bother to write more, but overall, the game was pretty unique and fun.

I enjoy editing the text and scenes thanks to dev. A content expansion would be nice as after a while you've seen it all. The artwork is still very good. I like to edit out the lethality and make it more gentle. Not enemies but goddess. No kill but knock down. I still try to leave in the idea of the original story dev had in mind just altering scene preferences. I found this game through giantess search and there is not quite gts content but hints of it. Editing the events has kept me occupied while other game updates have content not so much my preference. So I thought I would give the dev a 5 star. I appreciate foot fetish and there is plenty of that you can modify through editor.

I'm going to try my best to keep this review informative, but no guarantees on that front.
For reference, I finished the game on normal difficulty, cleared all stages and subquests, and got 100% of the gallery and weapons. The game took me about five hours to complete in all, roughly an hour or so spent in the editing mode.

!!!EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!
If you want to play this game, change your locale to japanese, use locale emulator, or extract with japanese name encoding. If you don't do this, then you will not be able to play the game. Don't complain about it, this has been specifically stated numerous times.

Oneshota Swordplay ACT: Hagokoro is somewhat of a return to form for excessm, going back to the gameplay of their first smash boy hit Parade Buster. The game is fairly easy when on normal difficulty if you use the correct strategy (namely either counter spam or stunlock into oblivion with speed style). However, there are a few key differences.

Key Difference 1: Temptation Meter
When hit by attacks, your temptation gauge will slightly fill up. Temptation attacks fill this up more, while also doing a small DoT against you and making you unable to attack for the duration of it. Temptation attacks cannot be guarded against, but if you hit the enemy doing it with enough damage (or with something that has the ability to always cancel them), they will be stunned for a short period.
If your Temptation Meter fills up, you will be put into a state where you cannot act, however your health will be unable to reach zero from enemy attacks. Within this state, you can go into H-attacks and escape from there, or click through the dialogue quickly to enter into a minigame. This minigame requires you to click three buttons in the correct order. If you don't click the buttons in the correct order or the timer runs out, you will instantly die. If you DO click the buttons in the right order, you'll be able to use a powerful "Shadow Attack" for free, which brings me to point two.

Key Difference 2: Shadow Attack
Shadow Attack is essentially your Get Out Of Jail Free card. You can use it at any point, and it will stun all enemies for a short period of time while making you invincible for slightly longer, and enabling you to hit much harder and wider than you would with a normal attack.
Shadow Attacks naturally build up over time via taking out your enemies, and whatever armor you pick can make this happen faster, or even not at all.
I would always advise to keep at least one Shadow Attack on you at all times in case of emergencies, as they can be used to revive yourself if you die.

Feel free to insert a smooth segue here if you'd like.

Key Difference 3: Three different styles (do you get it)
Within the game, you have three different styles that you can use at any time. Counter (called Yanagi in the game for whatever reason), Speed, and Strong. All weapons in these styles have some sort of special effect, so make sure to read what they have if you want to equip them in place of your old weapon.
Counter style allows the use of weapons that have powerful Counters, utilized by attacking an enemy before they use their own attack. You can use multiple counters in a row if the weapon allows it, in order to make your attack range much wider and deal more damage. For this style, prioritize a high damage and high counter cap.
Speed style allows the use of weapons that are, well, fast. These weapons have the ability to hit EXTREMELY fast if you land enough hits/guards in a row, stunlocking the person you're hitting until the attack sequence ends. This is probably the style you should always be using. Prioritize a high attack speed (around 0.14 or so), low amount of hits needed for super speed (10-15), and the "Dodge" guard style. Damage isn't a super necessary thing for speed, since you'll hit fast enough to make up for damage lost and then some.
Strong style allows the use of heavy weapons that do a lot of damage in one swing. These weapons give you an "Anger" gauge, which builds up slowly over time, and much quicker if you dodge an attack with your guard. The higher your Anger, the higher damage your weapon will do. Prioritize high damage and a high Anger cap, as well as the "Dodge" guard style. Keep in mind that if you get hit by a temptation attack, your Anger will reset. It's worth it to use your Anger when you have it instead of waiting for it to build up and getting reset instead.

Key Difference 4: "Assault" battles and "Search" battles
"Assault" battles are just what Parade Buster had. Waves of enemies will come at you, and you have to destroy them all to win.
"Search" battles are WAAAY different from Parade Buster. You'll have a map, and you need to get to the boss tile. On all of the tiles you haven't captured will be a fight that you need to win, and a lot of them will have traps. These traps are minigames that you need to win, otherwise you'll be put at a heavy disadvantage. These disadvantages could be having your items used up, Shadow Attacks used up, or starting at only 10 - 20% health or so. Basically, just try your best to win at them unless you WANT to lose.
There are certain tiles that will give you extra loot, however these are GUARANTEED to have traps on them, so be wary of that.

Key Difference 5: Translation
This translation into english is an MTL. I believe it expressly states that on the very first screen. Granted, it is a VERY GOOD MTL that you can easily understand, but it is definitely awkward at points and sometimes uses the wrong words. Do keep in mind though that the game tells you exactly where the translation file is stored, so you can easily improve it if you want.

Key Difference 6: H Filter
Within the gallery, you can view the defeat scenes of any enemy you defeated, or any traps that were on a stage you beat. These all have tags on them, and if you click them, you can apply a filter to only allow scenes with said tags. This is useful if you're only looking for a certain thing, or looking to AVOID a certain thing.
You can also open the menu during battle and select which H-Attacks can be used. So, for example, say you don't like the stomping like me? Just go into the menu and disable it, and you won't have to see it again unless you want to.

Key Difference 7: Edit Mode
Edit Mode is something that I personally enjoy VERY much. It allows you to create a character using any of the ones you've fought as a base, then customize their appearance, personality, and voice actress. Not exactly sure what the personality thing does, but it's certainly there. The character that you choose as a base is what move set and H-attacks they'll use, but you can customize whether they'll use normal attacks, temptation attacks, or special attacks, as well as what skills they have available to be used. These characters can then be used in the game in place of what you used as a base if you would like.
You can also create your own dialogue, as well as your own H-scenes. That's a pretty big step up from the other games, where you COULD write your own dialogue, but it required editing of a text file within the game folder.
There's also the option to apply a "visual filter" over enemies if you'd like, which is really just a fancy phrase for changing their appearance (height, skin color, hair color) but keeping everything else the same.

I think that's about it for the differences, besides the obvious stuff like the game engine and the plot.
After this will be pretty opinionated, I'd assume, since it's my rating of the game. If any of the stuff before interested you, I'd recommend checking the game out.

My Rating of the game has to be a 4/5 stars. It's an excessm game, meaning obviously the art and animations are gonna be good. Also, the naughty bits aren't censored with a silhouette anymore like they were in other games, so that's good.
However, the gameplay does honestly get a bit stale sometimes, it's a bit boring to go around conquering all the tiles just to make sure I get everything in the stage before I fight the boss, even if this is just a limitation imposed on myself BY myself. I mean, it isn't even really hard. You can't even fail via attacking innocent people like in Parade Buster, you just do zero damage to them.
Someone trying to attack you? Dodge it and hitstun them into oblivion. Someone trying to tempt you? Hitstun them into oblivion. I'm sure you see where I'm going here.

Honestly, overall, it isn't that bad. It's just a bit boring sometimes. There are certainly some aspects it can be improved on, but I think those can be explained away via difficulties adjusting to the new engine, seeing as this is in Unity and all of the others were within WolfRPG. I recommend it, just don't hold it to the super standard that the other excessm games are at and you'll probably enjoy it.

TL;DR - The game is good, but not as good overall as the other excessm games. I recommend you at least try it out.

God, I would 100% let Yuki piledriver me and I would say thank you to her afterwards.

This is a good H-game. You can play the game with one hand while the other can stay in your pants. H scenes are numerous, not difficult to get, and easy to see again. These are some bare minimums but surprisingly few games get them right. Plus, H-scenes are animated, well animated.

However it is not a great game. Getting a 100% save is the best thing you can do.

H-games need porn more than fun gameplay mechanics but because this game has a clear focus on action/combat mechanics then that part needs to be fun. But it is not; mechanics are confusing and require little to no skill. Fights are unrewarding so you will just rush the game to enjoy the gallery. At least it's not grindy.

Some great ideas went into post-game content. There is a tag search system for H scenes and a limited character editor. In contrast gameplay ideas are poorly implemented. Exploration missions and the ambush minigames are just weird.

Fear missing the story/context to H-scenes? Fear not. They lost track of what made the franchise popular. Most games, at least the better ones IMO, had a very 'boyish' feel to them. You defeated enemies with a soccer ball, your allies had that stupid shounen design, enemy traps were comically see-through, etc; it was not always great but it nailed the 'shota' in 'oneshota'. Now it's gone.

Extracted it by running Winrar through NTLeas. I tried playing it straight away, tutorial was buggy. Tried with Locale Emulator, crashed on startup. Went back to NTLeas and it works perfectly. You people aren't trying hard enough. Trying the same thing over and over won't lead to different results. If you have invisible enemies, it's most likely a problem of the game not finding the pertinent file because of a mismatched name.

For an ExcessM game, this is pretty rough, it would just be a 3/5.
Compared to the rest of H-games out there, sure, let's call this a 4/5.
This game feels like an in-house build not fit for release, like a 0.9 version. The menus have this unpolished, basic feel to it, and I'm not considering the text formatting issues that automatic translation makes. When the game detects an input from the keyboard, it yanks the cursor to the middle of the screen, but the only way to change weapons is to press 1, 2, 3. Some times I've missed some hits after switching weapons since I expected my cursor to remain where I left it.
Visually, it is an ExcessM game, so the character designs are great and their expressions are fun and well done. However, the live 2D effect also feels like a v0.9 thing: Characters' accessories move out of sync with their clothes, their shoulders pop out of their tops, their torsos move in anatomically impossible ways in relation to their hips, and the second boss just jiggles left and right like jelly. It feels like it wasn't fully refined, or it could be fixed if they toned down the grand total amount of movement.
Onto gameplay. This is a return to Parade Buster, the studio's first massive success and perhaps what shot them into stardom in the scene. Instead of picking 3 random weapons, you must pick one weapon in each of 3 different styles, one focused on counterattacking, one in attacking quickly, and the last one focusing in powerful strikes. They each carry their own mechanics and this system is highly enjoyable to play. But, once again, v0.9 rears its head, and you can't change weapons until you go back to idle after a chance attack, and your input to change weapons will be lost, leading to situations where you'll be hit with a sexy attack because you are still attacking the enemy with the wrong weapon.
Surprisingly, even though the game feels unfinished, it never crashed on me. Twice I encountered a problem where only the left click would be recognised and I had to restart the game. In contrast to Parade Buster, this one lacks feedback. It's difficult to guess what you did wrong at any given time, and many mechanics aren't adequately explored, not even in the help menu.
Lastly, for sex scenes, i-it... it's ExcessM, come on... You don't need me here, you know they are fantastic and this game is no exception on that front. There may be less enemies than One Syota, Parade Buster or Yumesame, in fact the amount is closer to OS: Kariyume, but each enemy has 4 different sex attacks plus a sexy attack and a defeat scene.

TL;dr: Feels unfinished and it's the studio's first foray into Unity (full game, CASINO doesn't count), so expect rough edges. The gameplay is plenty fun but lacks feedback and extensive tutorials. Despite that, the circle's quality when it comes to lewdness still shines.

(See what I mean about the menus? This is the worst example I found.)