RPGM - Completed - Phantom Soul Sword: Lambda Neros R [v2.03] [MOON KNIGHT SPARKLE]

I am positive I have finished every content of the game, from the fragments down to the colosseum, so I think I'll write a review for this game since I've gotten this far. Now I'm not good at rating stuffs down to the exact score, so take then with a grain of salt. Light spoilers warning

Story:8/10

Yes it is cliche. Yes it is predictable in some ways. But it is entertaining. The humor is just right, the overal plot is light enough to not make the players uncomfortable but not so light that it's difficult to be attached to the characters.

Content:10/10

Holy Rimua there is a lot. From the quests, to collecting fragments across the continent, to exploring variety of areas and monsters. Not to mention the outfits are gorgeous and the weapon system has much depth to be engaged in analyzing enemy's weakness and picking the appropriate element for that. Th quests also provide little stories that can be entertaining as well.

Combat:7/10

Credit where it's due, there are a lot of things you can do if you actually engage the mechanics and not just brute-force the game. Wether or not you build elemental affinity, choosing to buff or to end it quickly, all the while preventing the lust gauge from filling(until it doesn't matter in the last parts of the game). But as other reviewers might have said, it is basic. But is deep enough to be engaged in.

Art:8/10

Stunning art. Definitely fap materials. The boobs do be a bit too big for my liking sometimes, but most of the time it's not that big of a deal. Some have criticized that the cums are very overdone.... Unfortunately I am turned on by that so that will have to be a plus for me. Guess the game met its exact target audience.

Music:6-7/10

It's definitely enjoyable when you're exploring. You get the vibe of what area you're in. Can't say the same for the important battle BGMs.





All in all, a very enjoyable game. You feel the love and effort poured into it, and if you're like me, you will not be disappointed.

About 3.5/5 or 7/10 for me. I have unlocked most contents, but I don't think that playing further will alter the score that much.

Pros
-A lot of pink-hair girls

-Nice character + clothes design overall

-Puzzles are mostly fun and creative between gameplay.

-The game offers different types of weapons and skills to choose from based on different types of the sword itself. (Yes, it isn't only the void/darkness sword. Pretty OP, huh?)

-The story is good. Despite having walls of texts, when it matters, it is still good.



Mehs
-I don't understand the excessive cumshot scene. In some scenes, having it is nice, like when you win the fight over monster girls or got defeated by bosses. Otherwise, I don't see the point of everytime there is a sex scene, cum = 70-80% of screen. I don't hate it, but the game could be better without.

-Despite having a lot of sex scenes and CGs, most of them are just the same sprite with different alterations. For example, the petrification. One stage you are petrified and turn to stone. The next one you turn into gold/silver/etc. instead.

-I don't hate it when Nero came up with jokes, but some of them are too hard to understand, especially Japanese-centric jokes which are not funny when translated to English.

-Most of the H scenes are Rimua's. I understand that she's the FMC and all, but I want to see more of other girls' scene as well.

-Also, I feel like the scenes are not fappable despite the fact that I like pink-hair girls. It's not because the story is too much tear-jerking or there consists mostly big breats girl or anything, but I think that the defeat scenes are too generic despite having tons of unique enemies.

I mean, I don't want the monster rape scene to be very surreal and heavy like a certain guro/ryona franchise, but it should have more than "dicks in vaginas, done" type. For example, insect scenes. It should have like, a scene which FMC got impregnated with eggs, then they hatch right away within the scene (in case the developer doesn't want FMC to walk around with it). But nope, insect's dick inside, cums like human, then leave.

For me, if it's just "dicks in vaginas, done", then watching porn or playing vanilla type is the same.

Cons
-Unless solved, I will still put in here. There is a bug on this completed game which doesn't allow you to finish the 'find sticks' subquest. Why is this a con? Well, because you need to finish sub-quest in multiples of 5 in order to get special

-I think that the world is too big. Not the same as Karryn's Prison big which you have to do an ass-ton of things each 'day', but distributing the district into 6 (7 if you counted the palace), then have another 6 vliiages/subdistrict, then have another 6 dungeons on top of that? And all of these doesn't include sub-stages/boss stages/after story stages yet? Come on!

Also, the glosssary for items are too big. For example, you have an item which heals + remove a debuff status, but remove only one of them! The ones which cause real trouble are seal (because you cannot use skills) and sex-punished. Otherwise, it doesn't do anything (or do something but very insignificant)!

For example, poison status. In other RPGMs, it is a problem as it lingers even if the battle ends, and you have to have antidotes with you at all times. In this game? Nope! If you finish the fight, then it's gone! This causes a mindset that you better finish the fight quickly to remove it, or just heal and ignore it.

The cook list alone is very long, but only a few actually have uses for the MC, a few others for plot purposes. I think it's better to have a few than to have tons and tons of them with only little variations.

-No pregnancy content, or up until I have played (finish the bee queen route the first time), which makes the excessive amout of cum used useless IMO.

-No prostitution content either, despite living in the big-ass city. You can count the 'nero anywhere' as a prostitution, as it provides you with cash after having sex with Nero. But for me , I don't count it.

-Some girls have sprites of them and are canon to the story, such as Regulus's fiance or Rimua's mother, but they don't have the sex scene whatsoever, and are not mentioned again after their part of the story has passed.

I could understand that they were characters in the past, but some who lives in the present, such as Rine (the elf leader) and Katz (the black pirate boss) or other girls, like the one with monocle and the scientist doesn't have sex scenes at all? W T F indeed. Yeah yeah I know that we get the earjob/titjob for Rine, but ...

-I hate it when the conditions of unlocking the nude suit is being defeated 700 times. I know that this is a sex/hentail game and all, but after spending 30+ hours clearing it virgin route, I don't see the point of going back and intentionally lose again over and over.

Game's a huge time waster. It pretends to be a large scale rpgm project but in reality it's a shallow defeat scene collector. Story, combat, puzzles, hentai part, are all primitive and uninspired.
Also i personally feel scammed by the female protag tag because half the screen time gets the sentient sword dude railing random monster girls.

Why is this game so big? Combat is mid, art is okay, story is eh and there's basically no content. Personally don't really like the cum geyser shit either, you can get your point across without covering 90% of the screen...

It is actually a rare thing for such a well-made software-wise game to be that mid. But it is - this game is the definition of a "mid" game.

Honestly, it feels like such a waste these days to see how sad rpgm h-games are. For some reason, people tend to make really uninspired rpgm games thinking that somehow turn-based combat and ALWAYS the same approach wil carry their product somewhere good. Spoiler alert - it never does.

If you want to play proper rpgm h-game, just play Karryn's Prison and Agnietta (that one is buggy sadly, but all you need to do to evade those bugs is to save often and reload the game every hour or so). And no, do not believe people that would keep saying that Celesphonia or Ambrosia are great - they are not, they are mid; to be clear - those two are great for the first 1.5 h at best (if you are going for your first playthrough, and Celesphonia is a literal scam in a sense - it tries to convince you that H-stuff matters in its story, but it is not, while top two difficulties just make you to farm for like 30 minutes at the first area, after that you will be good to go just like with the Normal difficulty).

Getting back to this game - review by ShinZou basically sums this one out, nothing major to add here. The game is "pink" in everything - too lighthearted, nothing really happens to anyone, there is no real risk in our story, no one cares about your H-scores, sidequests are always, well, what they are - no point in waiting for anything from them.
To sum it up from me: this game has LITERALLY ZERO CONFLICT. IN ANY REGARDS. Everything is just but a 3- joke out of 10. Almost feels like all that H-stuff was added just to make this game stand up at least somewhere. Honestly, if you are not some bluesky sad excuse of a human - just skip it, you do not really need to check how mid this game is.

Overall score: 6.2/10
It is one of the rare cases that I played the game from start to finish. Without storming through everything, it kept me entertained for about 18 hours, which I played all in one day. The game certainly has some good things going on and some bad things. I will write down what stuck out the most to me.

Story: 6/10
I will not mention any spoilers. The story isn't exactly new. The main character finds a sword with an entity in it, and together they have to unravel a mystery and defeat the demon lord. That is pretty much all there is to it. While some elements were refreshing to see, others struck some clichés. The best part of the story is in the fact that it is very elaborate. With about 16 chapters (if I am not mistaken), it keeps you busy for quite a while if you do take the time to read it. Sometimes a twist felt like a genuine twist; other times, it was painfully obvious. And those twists do happen quite often for my liking. And while some corny jokes and 4th wall breaking are shown, it never bothered me and did make me chuckle at times.

Art: 8/10
The artwork is top-notch. The developers went quite far in making a huge amount of artwork for this game. I couldn't detect any AI influence, which is already a great plus. There are a lot of unique enemies, most of which have a sex scene in some shape or form. The lineart looked crisp and clean. My only critique is that a lot of the battle fuck artwork shares the same images with slight variations. But I can understand the cut there since there is a lot of other good stuff.

Music: 6/10
The music isn't bad, but nothing special either. I never had a moment when I noticed something special. The same song is mostly used for battles. Other areas have other music, but again, nothing that took me by surprise or made me stop a moment to just listen. Thematically, it all fitted the style.

Fetishes: 4/10
Most of the stuff you see is rather vanilla. Some tentacle, some monster in various shapes and forms. And though the artwork is great, in terms of fetishes, it was rather lackluster. My gripe is mostly with the fact that the rape scenes are often shown with some giant creature, who sports, in my opinion, too small cocks. In some cases, it was laughable, even. The cock size of some enemies was laughably small in proportion to the creature's body. In some scenes where it would have made perfect sense to show some bulging, we don't get to see it. And nothing more 'intense' fetishes are explored. Which is a shame because the game features a lot of potential when looking at the enemies. Especially lesbian action was hard to come by. While some scenes include it, most of the female enemies you defeat or get defeated by get a lewd moment with the male sword soul, no futanari, or anything on that front. One fetish that did surprise me to see was the excessive cum one. And they didn't hold back with it. Expect the main character to be completely drenched in cum at times.

Gameplay: 7/10
The gameplay, while straightforward, is quite enjoyable. You get a proper tutorial for most things, and it isn't really hard to figure out how to play. Battle is simple yet enjoyable for people who enjoy the story more than the actual difficulty. I played on Normal mode, and I only had two or three moments where I struggled. But I never needed to grind for levels. Other times, there were moments where the UI was a bit clunky, especially when you wanted to change your sword upgrade. Other times, when you enable the constant running mode, you sometimes have trouble aligning your character to a specific button or platform. This can be fixed by normal walking. A rather missed opportunity for a game with so much quality is the lack of voice acting. I think the game would have benefited from it. If not for some actual animated scenes.

There's something about this game that I really don't like. It has high production quality, and great art, but the writing and battle mechanics really put me off. Defeat scenes aren't fun either and it takes away from wanting to win. The walls of unnecessary text and over explaining is another major turn-off

+ Great art
+ Polished
+ Nice looking UI
+ Multiple outfits
+ Expansive items and weapons
+ Overall art direction and level design is well-done

- Terrible writing and over-explaining
- Battle and cum flashing, constantly
- Really limited H-stats
- Defeat scenes
- Battle fuck mechanics that promote losing
- Battle system misses the mark, despite at least trying to be interesting

I'd give this a 6/10. it's by no means a "bad game" it just does things weirdly and it doesn't work for me. Can't bring myself to read walls of shitty dialogue text either.

This game is overrated and average at best. People are giving games 5-star ratings too easily.

First off, if you're looking for an H-game and to fap, this isn't for you. There is so much dialogue, it's even tiring just to skip it. The story isn't that interesting at all.
While from the screenshots the H-combat gameplay looked promising, it completely fails to deliver when you actually play it. There is no depth in the H-combat system. The actual combat system is also pretty simple as well.

One of the things I hate about games is how the enemies don't attack you on the map, it really destroys the immersion that your protag is in any danger, it then makes it feel like you're just in an H-theme park. This game does that, don't expect to feel any sense of danger.

Art is ok, I'm not into overtly sized big tits that are deformed.

3/5
A middling experience overall.

Art: 4/5
Visually solid and fairly professional, but the use of jiggling PNGs undermines the otherwise polished presentation.


Gameplay: 3/5
Desperately needs a skip or fast-forward function. Combat is weak and generic. The side character feels intrusive. The female protagonist angle doesn’t really land either.


H: 3/5
Battle content is decent, but the poor combat system drags it down. Getting bound just means spamming the lose button until it's over.

Alright, pretty funny story, was skipping trough it like I always do, but than it caught me and I started reading it.

Graphics looks well, especially the shadow guy you meet (my opinion).

Combat tries it's best not to be the boring kind, but still a bit lacking.

haven't finished the game yet but i can tell i'll having a blast with this one. But i'll try to be objective here based on what i see at the moment (will change soon after i finished the game).

Gameplay 9/10

many aspect that is very RPG like, very detailed also about skills which affect "environment" and such. Pretty well done, the game itself for me is very satisfying, also you can change outfit too which is my cup of tea, another extra point.

Art 10/10

perfect, art is debatable for some, but for me personally it's one of top notch anime style art, even the sex scene is well-done.

sex 8/10

basically it's another corruption game from muscular "man" influence, it's not new in this aspect but still nice to have. Sex itself is pretty good, also thanks to the how good the art is and its diversity.

Story ?? / 10 (at the moment 8)

don't get me wrong, i usually skipped the story because we're playing porn games for the porn eh, yet this time i kinda enticed with the story, the facial expression is awesome too (especially Nero).

So all in all i'd give this game 5 for the effort itself. also toss and salute to Dazed for the translation,.