RPGM - Pokémon Cultivation [Beta V0.1.39 Hotfix] [Man Don't Hop]

This'll probably be long, so I'll put a TLDR here. Good game sells the fantasy of hypnotizing Pokémon and Pokémon characters and breeding them. However, QOL is terrible, the grind is ridiculous, and honestly... It's a Pokémon game without a need for the Pokémon. I'll explain

I played this game through to the end of what was the end a couple builds ago and jumped back in when I saw the Beta overhaul. First egregious thing I saw QOL-wise is... You gave us Fly on the table however if you catch a Pidgey or something to teach it to... You can't use it. This wouldn't be a problem if you didn't have to go back to the starter town to train the partner Pokémon, but you do. And since this is an early gen Pokémon game... The walking and battling in the game are super slow so this ends up being really tedious.

Next thing is the Partner pokemon. They're great, they're strong I like the training CGs even if they are minimal and their custom sprite are a great touch. But... The training is essentially: Walk into the basement, use training item, get a "!" above their head, walk upstairs, sleep, Walk into the basement... The grind without payback isn't necessary here and is effectively time bloat.

And now, the balance. The game seems to be balanced around you using the Partner Pokémon in your teams, almost entirely. Which this is what the game's about so that's fine. But essentially this means that all those wild Pokémon you're encountering (It's a Pokémon game so you'll encounter a lot) are completely useless unless you want to grind their levels for a large amount of time.

To sum it up, it needs some work, it needs some QOL things like fast travel, or I'd even take a item to remove random encounters, and it'd be great if the training system was revamped. I'd take us having to buy a training item that's one use, do a mini game of some sort and then having to do a quest or something similar over this

Honestly would love to give this game 5 stars, but it just isn't quite there yet and I'd be being dishonest if I gave it a 5 star review. Having been playing this game for a long time, and seeing the beta release, it really is pretty fun and I personally quite like the pacing of both aspects of the game, though the basement mechanics could definitely use a little more explaining as to how they work for newer players. There's also definitely quite a few balancing issues, the level curve is pretty bad, especially when wild mons are staying around level 20 while the trainers around them have level 35+ mons. To me, right now this game is a good game with potential for greatness, but it unfortunately currently stops at just good. The grammar and wording at some parts are also a little off/outright wrong, but I'm personally very lenient on that kind of stuff because I know damn well I probably missed half of them cause my brain just corrected it as I read it. Once more content is added, balancing is fixed, and bugs are ironed out, I'll almost certainly be bumping this review up to 5 stars. As it stands though, it's a 4 star experience at best.
tl;dr, Pretty good game, pretty poor balancing. Not the best experience around, but still a good one imo.

I can respect this game for trying to be more like an actual pokemon game and follow the storyline and such but it all kinda goes out the window absurdly fast. The biggest problem with this game is the balancing. The major battles you run into with the angry pokemon and the trainers with the shadow pokemon are so absurdly overtuned with cracked stats and such that it just immediately kills all the fun of the game if you're trying to play it legit.

The levels of wild pokemon do not keep up with the player and you'll be running into trainers with pokemon level 20+ when all the wild pokemon are still like level 8. The grind in order to get better takes so much more time than its worth because to get the porn is just as heavy as a grind. The porn is limited to very specific pokemon trainers that are story specific so you can't actually do anything with anyone outside of that, and the pokemon you get are specific to the angry ones you lock up in your basement, at least to my knowledge.

The basement pokemon though are still just as bad because of the grind it takes, except in this case its a money sink as well. Absurd stats, good move sets, and you gotta battle them some more after training them to a certain point in which, again, the stats and the moves make it more difficult than it needs to be. Combining that with the need to constantly dig in the mines two towns over for shit to sell for money to buy chow and such, it's just drawn out for no reason.

Everything about this game in on the track of being a proper pokemon game but it severely needs a balancing adjustment and a look at the bigger picture on how to implement the porn elements. In its current state you're better off getting porn elsewhere and you're better off playing an actual pokemon mod or game if you want that experience. Right now this really ain't it.

Having played the game for 2+hrs I can say it does a great job of being a fun pokemon game. However, the porn in the game leaves much to be desired. I am looking for more scenes, more corruption, and I really feel the porn aspect needs to make it's way into the game more.

If the game was a bit more focused on things like bringing pokemon, trainers, and gym leaders to their knees to suck my dick and a little less focused on being another version of pokemon it would have a better balance. It plays very much like any official game with little difference. Given that part is done, just make the story more about getting my dick sucked by unwilling girls/pokemon and put in more kinky stuff like sicking my Absol on her for a fuck fest. If there were more sex scenes and porn to pursue it'd be a better H game, which is what most of us I think are here for. Make the sex a main theme, and less an after thought.

TL;DR 3 stars because little sexy rewards for lots of grinding, and not much focus on kinking it up, though good example of how to rip off a pokemon game the right way. If it gets more scenes in earlier gameplay with some porn in it, it could be 4-5 stars easy. Just needs to polish it's self up.

edit: I've played more of it, what I said holds true, although there is a bit more sexual content than I first got, it takes a bit to build up to it, so more earlier would be more rewarding, also, not enough really feel of their being corruption so far. This far about 12 hours in. So it does have some play-ability time wise which is good. Still tho, more sex scenes more frequently is needed.

This is not a fun Pokémon game or has good integration of porn. The main game balance takes a nose dive due to shadow moves which you don't get yourself to use and that just have no downside, worst battle in the whole game is the double battle in the cave against the Aqua and Magma grunt. The Houndoom has the move shadow wave which attacks both of your Pokémon and one shots anything outside of a level 28 Combusken. The Simpour has Shadow rush whilst only hitting one target does over half damage. I also notice the moves that should have been super effecive against them weren't, so I assume their type was also changed to shadow. This battle was not a issue in earlier versions, I don't recall but I did beat it in the past easily. However since all progress from the past versions was made null and void in a recent update I've been exluded from all the new content due to the imbalance in this one battle. I either have to grind at the pokecenter for hours, or try and fail over and over again at this one battle. The rest of the battles are only hard the first time around but all the ones with shadow moves feel like cancer. God help you if you are using a strat with any chance of failure due to rng. In terms of the porn is just a money sink, you get a few scenes from winning major battles but for most you have to spend money on frivolous items for both NPC and your special Pokémon. I hate how much I have to button mash to give them these money sink items, each time you give something for affection you have to do it one at a time. It really needs a overhaul since it wastes time even if you know what to do. Only quality of life feature is gallery letting you rewatch any scene you have obtained, the quality of the scenes are fine is just the needless button mashing to get each one I want to be gone. Each time I have had to start a new save due to a version update overhauling a lot of things, I dread these two things. Obtaining everything you had done earlier is just not fun, is grinding and is not why I play these games. I did love the items. I did love the quests. I just don't like all the ways this game forces you to waste time. Gym battles fine, trainer battles fine, but fuck the shadow moves and all the menu mashing for shit that could be done all at once. I have wasted too many hours to catch up to the new content, to gives this a higher rating. I also found no help in the walkthrough for the battles, it feels like a troll when I try to use it. [v0.675.7 Demo] fucking broke my rose tinted glasses.

Ive been playing a lot of pokemon fangames and I like that this uses the upraded version with questlogs and better scripts and all. There's a bunch of issues still but overall, this is a title to look forward to.

Main Appeal:

It's sorta a dating sim with both humans and pokemon
It has actual combat with some difference in items and rules
The creator said he wanted to get underutilized pokemon the spotlight

Downsides so far (some minor)

The translation is a bit whack at parts
No gallery (to my knowledge)
Throws you into crazy hard combats sometimes
Just a demo

This game is both promising and entertaining. The art is fantastic and the concept of breeding both Pokemon and people tickles my pregnancy fetish. Not to mention the RPG elements satisfy my autism. The reason I'm giving it a four is because there's no dialogue in the scenes, there is no way to repeat events/no gallery, and no pregnant sex yet. Once the last two gripes are satisfied, this game's getting five stars!

It took a while, but I'm a man of my word.

Pros
- Legit feels like a pokemon game
- NSFW stuff feels fairly natural
- The mixing of multiple different aspects from many games, (shadow pokemon, team rocket, aqua, magma, maybe more?) The gym battles are a pain in the ass by having that one bs pokemon, very authentic. Granted last one i played was soul silver but still.
Also it just having all the minute details like berries and such.
Just very authentic pokemon game feel.

Cons
- NSFW is too detached from gameplay.
- The exp trainer grind mechanic feels a bit too gamey but understand why its there
- Balance could be a bit better (trainers after the first gym still using sub lvl 10 pokemon is odd, they should at least be using lvl 10 pokemon)

Really my only true issue is how nsfw content is integrated. It's almost totally detached from the main game. You capture specific pokemon that have nsfw events, you then put them in slave rooms and grind out nsfw events. Then you go back to playing pokemon.

No chance to lewd the trainers you beat, or pokemon you encounter. It's restricted to specific things. Not sure if the plan is to make nsfw more openly integrated or keep it segregated to "basement training" and "relationships". Hopefully it gets expanded so that it becomes much more like a lewd sandbox.

Other than that, great stuff.

I always wanted a pokemon nsfw game that was well made, had good story and wasn`t abandoned and when I say this game and tried it out I had a blast, for the longest time a was pretty bored and wanted to play something like this. The menu was one of the first thing that just caught me off guard and absolutely hooked me into it, the fist scene we have with the team rocket grunt was very well made in my opinion too. After some more updates and exploring the game further I began to really enjoy just playing it normally like any other pokemon game and I think the reason for that was that I got rewarded with new scenes or special pokemon every time I defeated a gym leader or a hard boss. And I loved the discord community it was able to make around the game too and honestly I have never even considered giving money on patreon before but now I kinda want to, when I get some extra money tho, need it for food and stuff ;-;

As of version 0.52

The game has the same underlying problems that all fanmade pokemon games seem to have, especially the ones made using the same RPGM asset pack.
These issues include:

1. Leftover redundancies for the sake of "nostalgia" - I don't care what the reasoning is for the game to be filled with so many textboxes that you have to click through for every damn action it's slow and wastes player's time.
Why can't I just pick the berries of off the tree and be done with it within a second, why can't I just talk to nurse in Pkmn. Center let her do her job (faster may I add) and then be on my way, why does battling take so damn long? Oh right it's so long because it needs to tell you exactly what you can deduce yourself from audio and visuals that are also present, it also assumes you don't know how to count so it will tell you how many times double kick landed

2. The worst part of these games pacing wise is adapting to the obstacles the game throws at you, I am dealing with pokemon that are nearing/over level 20 but the wild ones are at 6. What does this mean you ask? It means you have to somehow not oneshot a lvl 8 and then grind some more to bring them to usable level. Don't you love making alt characters in MMO's where leveling is an unfun bitch? This is what it feels like

3. This one only applies to porn pokemon games but an issue still - sexual content is barebones at the current stage and while there may be more in the future the way it's delivered doesn't wow me so far, 2 scenes where I didn't have any agency in deciding if I want to see it or not and absolutely nothing in regards to pokemon MC is holding in his basement. I have no interest in human characters in this game if I did there's plenty of games out there that offer the same and are often much better, as for pokemon I have no damn clue what to do they just sit in their little cells and that's it

Overall if you had issues with a similar Pokemon game on this site when it comes to grinding you're not finding any salvation here. The dev is far more receptive to feedback so there's some hope but how far it goes I don't know. Make of it what you wish to me it wasn't enjoyable neither the porn or the game side of it

Can be brutally tough at times, but has been super fun to play through and watch as development continues. Picking third gen as the map was a great nostalgia trip, while mixing hentai in made it a fun fresh experience lol

Pretty fun for pokemon game
Major battle is pretty hard if your not prepare
Thank god this game has exp(and money )farm in pokemon center
Hybrid pokemon concept is something I never thing of but now I love it

Gameplay was what I expected with good quality of life improvements to the original games. I wish there was a bit more with the H content though. Very promising though, can't wait to see what gets added!

Very nice start. The quests are an interesting addition to the pokémon gameplay and the art is very nice. "Boss encounters" i.e. Gym Leaders etc can be quite tough, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Very bad balancing.

The game expects you to grind in an unopyimal way, all trainers after first gym have super potions, can only grind using lvl 10, while Pokemon are level 24, even being 5 levels above they are stronger than they should be.

Even after grinding, they just make it harder, with even more unoptimal farming. I am not wasting my time until they get balancing under control.

Other than that content is good. It's just the balancing that is scuffed.

For the game to be still in its infancy, it offers enough content to give you an idea of how big this game could be in future versions. The art is very good and I hope that over time some Sprites will be retouched like the one of the protagonist and some NPCs the same with the mapping that has one or another graphic error

v0.1 (first release) - I usually avoid playing games at first release but the tags and content touted in this game at v0.1 were too tempting. Alas, I probably should have waited as while the content exists, I wouldn't call it satisfactory. That's probably what you should expect, but being able to breed a character is usually a pretty late game thing so I figured this dev was maybe ambitious. The game is definitely on the better side for a release 1, but it still has a way to go. I can't really say where it will go, but the game is very polished for a release 1 so I'm hopeful.
To rank my three primary attributes of an H game:
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Gameplay: OOOOO
It's a pokemon game through and through. Have you ever played one before? Then you know exactly what to expect. It's a tried and true formula that most are familiar with. Would be 5 gold rings if not for a few performance issues (ex: relatively consistent stuttering when walking - lightly annoying at first but gets painful after hours of playing) and a few things that could use some polish (ex: your HM's go into a void, they exist but don't show). 4 gold rings.

Writing: OOOOO
Again, it's a pokemon game. Normally I'd say pokemon writing is ~4/5, and I'm only knocking this down a bit for some typos and grammatical errors. I'm sure they'll get cleaned up in time, otherwise expect pokemon-level writing/story/etc. 3 gold rings.

Sex Content: OOOOO
Again it's a pokemon game... Lol, jk - no, it's not in this category, but honestly it's not far off... that is to say that what sex content is there today is very light in my opinion. This is not just a quantity issue (although I'd say quantity today is pretty decent). Even if there were more scenes, I don't think I would change this rating. Showing a couple images on screen with no text, no animations, limited audio - it's just never going to be satisfying imo. Dev could add some descriptive text during the scenes - this would do wonders during the scenes with humans specifically (back and forth dialog is nice!) but would also help a lot in poke-scenes too. This alone COULD take this category up to 4 gold rings (if done well). Of course, animations would be amazing, but they are obviously more complicated/costly to do.

Edit: Judging by the changelog, I think a lot of the information in this paragraph is no longer accurate, but I haven't played to confirm. I'll also add that it's a bit of an effort to get any of this light H content today. Scenes only start popping up a fair bit into the game, and there is a bit of a faff to gain access to them. You get them by increasing your affection with the pokemon/human, and you do this by feeding them pokefood/candy respectively. It seems to take a lot of pokefood (because sometimes you are rejected), and the candies are quite expensive. This is fine, except you have no idea how many food/candy items you need for the sexy times. Lame. Why not just make my buy one $5000 item that guarantees the scene? That way I don't have to keep going back to the store and back to the female over and over again trying to minimize how much money I spend (because I don't have a ton...). Anyways, lots of room for improvement here, both in the scenes and how you get to them. 2 gold rings, only because of the custom art.
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Overall Rating: OOOOO
Average of 3 stars, and I think that's an appropriate rating today. Honestly, that's a really good rating for a release 1 imo. As mentioned, the weak spot of this game is the H content. The structure today is no more tantalizing than a normal pokemon game in my mind (that is to say that neither are tantalizing). However, there is a lot of potential here and I think all this can be cleaned up in time to make this a 4 star game in the near term, and a 5 star in the long term.

Tried the demo and so far I really like it. The menu is slick, I adore the encounter menu so I know how many Pokémon are in an area, completionism at heart, the quests are fun and cute and give pretty nice rewards, the story is fun and doesn't really take itself seriously, and anything with shadow Pokémon is a plus. All that said I can tell this is a demo, a good one at that, by the unfinished locations and teasing of more. There is a basement in your house that you just can't enter, you can't go into the second floor of the Pokémon center, you can only really travel so far, and only so many romances/ breedable Pokémon have been implemented. (Side note how many are you planning on adding? If its every poke girl/ Pokémon then this will probably have 100+ hours of content but I'd sure as hell support it. If it's only the most popular i.e. Cynthia, Misty, Lopunny, Gothitelle that is understandable but I can tell someone will be upset that x isn't doable. Plus their is definitely some set up with both of the starters chosen.) There are some minor stuff like you can go through the bookshelf in your house, you can't rest in Dawns bed despite being told you can, or that the Pokémon center healing animation doesn't include the pokeballs being placed and glowing. I also will point out that given that the relationship system is based around gifting candy/ treats to women/Pokémon, and that this all costs money in the Pokemart, there either needs to be a way to farm money early in the game, quest reward cash needs to be higher, the items need the amount of relationship they boost buffed, their needs to be a none item way to increase relationship points such as NPC specific quests, Pokémon battles, or events, or certain trainers can be refought for cash, even if they don't give exp. I don't want to have to wait until rematching the elite four to romance Carol because I wanted more pokeballs. All that said I think this is a game absolutely brimming with potential and I will watch with bated breath for how it ends up. Can't wait for more.