*This review was written on the dazedanon AI translation of the game. Names and terminology may differ from the official Kagura translation.
TL;DR: You like corruption elements, NTR elements, good story, good gameplay, hate Game Over Rape, don't play. If you like ryona, rape, humiliation, wetworks, etc. content and don't mind GOR, try it out.
Holy Light Flash Princess Pony Celes is a game that I have very mixed feelings about, despite my frankly egregiously positive score for it. On one hand, it is, at best, an exceedingly plodding, poorly balanced turn-based RPG with sometimes frustrating quest designs and map layouts with a largely forgettable plot and cast of characters. On the other hand, for those who fall into the somewhat niche audience that this work's h-scenes appeals to, it has some of the best scenes of its kind, and unless something around the quality of Demons Roots comes out this year, I have every reason to believe that this game will be my personal favorite h-game of the year; and to pre-empt claims, yes, I am very, very biased. However, I very much recognize the many, many flaws this game has, and that, for the vast majority of people, this game will completely miss the mark. So, I shall detail and analyze each aspect of the game as objectively as I can so that you may decide if this game is up your alley. This review will contain spoilers for the game, nothing super huge except maybe details surrounding the NTR Ending.
First, let's talk about the story. It exists. Moving on - okay, no, let's seriously talk about it. It's... fine? It's your bog standard magical girl story of a normal high school girl being given powers by a cute little mascot creature and then she has to fight an evil organization that wants to take over the world while hiding her identity and balancing her hero life with her normal life. You can basically guess every twist and turn several chapters in advance, and none of the characters are even remotely memorable, be they on the good or evil side of this story; the one character who is remotely memorable is still marred by the complete wasted potential of her character despite being a fairly major player in the plot. Some may say that story isn't that important in h-games, but I would personally disagree. Having a good story with interesting and likable characters enhances the overall experience, including the actual erotic scenes; you will be far more into characters that you actually know and care about getting porked than ones you really don't have any attachment. The overall failure of the writing is especially baffling to me, as the dev's previous game, Brilliant Blossom Princess Prececile, another magical girl h-game, had a far more interesting main plot and cast of characters, that's a story for another time. To sum it up, you aren't playing the game for the plot. But you'd at least hope the gameplay is good, at least?
The gameplay is not good. In fact, I would say it's pretty bad. It's not horrifically terrible or borderline unplayable, it's just... not well balanced at all. Oh, sure, the first few chapters are fine, but you really start to feel the wrinkles as you go into the middle section. The first problem you run into is that the game is all too okay with letting you run into areas that will absolutely wreck your shit. Yes, these sections are optional, but when Chapter 3 (out of 9 or 10, by the way) is letting you tackle the game's equivalent of a post-game dungeon without even really giving you a hint that you're doing so until you run into an enemy that takes half your HP with two attacks, that's kind of a dick move. Another flaw is that healing with MP sucks dick; your initial heal only heals maybe around 15% of your Max HP, which is a problem since it costs 15 MP to cast, and your starting MP is 100. This is a problem that persists throughout the entire game since even the strongest spell only heals about 40% of your Max HP, costs 4 times as much as your first heal, and has a fucking turn cooldown if you use it in battle. So, if you are badly hurt, you will essentially be burning through your mana pool in order to heal yourself, which means that you have less mana to use your offensive spells, which means you get hurt more often, which makes you feel like you just wasted MP. It's kind of mitigated by MP items being very easy to obtain and very cheap even from the beginning, but it still turns battles into a "nuke the enemy before you run out of steam" affair since you can't use said MP restoring items in-battle.
Unfortunately, this dovetails into the next problem with the gameplay, in that money is very scarce in the early and mid game, and purchasable equipment costs an arm and a leg. Which is another problem, because you largely rely on equipment to become stronger, and new equipment unlocks with every chapter. This means it can be very easy to fall into the trap of waiting far too long to upgrade your equipment due to the costs and the knowledge that new, even more expensive armor will be available soon, which is even further compounded by the fact that some of the dungeons (optional and main story) will give you some pretty good equipment as loot, making you even less likely to buy equipment in fear that you'll just find an extra copy or even an upgrade as loot somewhere. I have a personal example where I found a pretty good pair of earrings early on in a dungeon (earrings boost your magic damage). Since I got those, I just didn't buy any for around 4-5 chapters since I thought I might get another pair as loot along the lines. I did not. Instead, I barreled through the game with piss-poor magic damage that was only marginally better than regular attacking until I said fuck it and bought a brand new pair with about a third of my money, and my magic damage easily doubled or perhaps even tripled, making fights much easier than they had been. This, I admit, is a personal failing of mine, but it was one that the game very much did not go out of its way to correct, which I see as a flaw in and of itself. Of course, by the end of the game, you have so much money that you can just buy whatever you want, and you run into the opposite problem where everything is a complete and utter cakewalk, including the bosses. So to sum up, gameplay sucks.
Edit: I don't know if it's because I had more knowledge of the game on my second playthrough on the official Kagura translation, but I had far fewer money problems than I remembered. Though, I did frequently get the rewards from the Coin chests and I did dip into the optional super dungeon with respawning enemies from time to time, so that may have helped alleviate my concerns with equipment and money respectively. Consider a large chunk of the criticism here invalid, but I'll leave this section up to document my then-thoughts on the matter.
But, the game isn't all fighting and fucking; sometimes it deviates from the norm and presents you with minigames and other activities to break up the monotony. So how does it fare? Pretty fucking badly, with them being jank at best and frustrating at worst. The quickest and most egregious is, unfortunately, near the beginning of the game, with the karate minigame with the pervert gym teacher. Even though this section is entirely optional, a good brunt of the complaints about this game center around this section, and I frankly can't blame them too much. The game does give you a hint to make it easier if you lose and watch the h-scene, but those super obstinate may just reload and try without even seeing it, which would lead into a very frustrating scenario, especially since you have to sit through a fairly lengthy cutscene each time you want to redo the fight. The fact that the dev decided to have this minigame this early is baffling, especially since it was also present in the demo that released several months before the game released and the dev didn't change a thing about it despite almost certainly getting the same criticism as it's getting now.
If that was the only such minigame, it would be a frustrating affair, but ultimately forgivable. However, it is not. The other example I can think of is two separate occasions in the undercover bunny girl mission (it makes sense in context). The first is actually starting the job. The game makes it think that this "minigame" works like several other maid/bartending minigames in other games, with customers occasionally asking for drinks and you have to get there quickly in order to satisfy them. This is a complete fucking lie. Instead, the entire thing is incredibly scripted, and to even activate a customer to want drinks, you have to go to the fucking staff waiting room and talk to one of the bunny girls there, and only then will a fucking customer ask for drinks. I am absolutely fucking baffled as to why the dev even thought such a misleading questline would be an even remotely good idea, given the relative commonality of such a minigame in so many others of its like. And that's not even where the bad part ends. Shortly after that, in order to get access to a code to a room later on, you have to go through a really jank stealth section. Is it patterned after a generic stealth mission? I fucking wish. Instead, what you have to do is get spotted by a guard, then jump over a counter, and then their AI just... kind of stops. But you have to make sure that they stop at a point where they can't see your character, or else they'll keep chasing you, and you're kind of fucked. Oh, and you have to do this with two more guards. Oh, and even though it presents the right path as a viable one, if you actually manage to get through to the right section of the guards, there's another one right there at the second floor who's unavoidable and you have to go back to the beginning and go left instead. It's just... so fucking odd and nigh incomprehensible to me how something like this made it through the planning phase.
Lastly, let's talk about the H-scenes. Now, this is where I should be positive, as I said that the h-scenes are my favorite parts of this game, right? Right! ...Except, before I get to the positives, I will first tackle the negatives, or at least negatives for the vast majority of people. Let me rip off the bandaid right now: 80% of the scenes in this game are Game Over Rape. There are around maybe 8 scenes that aren't, and all but one are either masturbation or molestation. Even the fabled NTR ending is basically a glorified Game Over Rape scene as the game ends several chapters early with that, and it basically just kicks you to the title screen. This factoid will alienate about 70% of the playerbase on this site as GOR is the bane to most users' existence, or at least that's the overall opinion I've gathered in the case from the comments and reviews. But things are at least looking good for NTR people and corruption fans, right?
The NTR fans got fucked and the corruption fans wish they even got that. The NTR elements of this game are practically an after-thought, with a few NTR-ish elements popping in some of the GOR scenes, and the actual "Self-Insert character gets cucked out of their main love interest by a gigachad" section is literally just the NTR Ending part, which is about 20 minutes of "follow the linear path" as the guy gets cucked. The main protagonist just believes that Self-Insert-kun, who she literally just hooked up with five minutes ago, is cheating on her with another girl, and immediately hops ship to NTR man. So anyone hoping for a deep, humiliating experience where the NTR elements are a key part of the story, you will be sorely disappointed. So what about corruption fanatics? Well, the "corruption" stat in the game, Lewdness, is a joke. It literally has only one use in one (uno, un, I, singular, 1) questline where if she has 50 Lewdness, she can willingly go to the club as a bunny girl and give a patron a titjob. That's it. There is literally no other use for the stat. You can make Yui the lewdest, rudest, anal-beadingest degenerate in the city and it will have absolutely no effect in any other scene in the game. At that point, why the fuck do you even have this stat as a thing? I don't know, and I don't think the dev knew either.
So with all that said, why the flying fuck am I even giving this game even a modicum of a good score? Well... have you ever seen that "This is my hole! It was made for me!" page from the Junji Ito manga The Enigma of Amigara Fault? Well, this game is my hole, and it is perfectly shaped to fit my dick no matter how erect or flaccid it is, because Jesus Christ, the developer and I may as well have once been the same person in a previous life for how well this game hits all my erotic pressure points. If you are at all a fan of ryona, humiliation, wetwork, rape, domination, power loss, or any/all combination of the above, this game is made for you, and there are very, very few games that as stimulating and arousing as this one is. Yes, the NTR elements are disappointing, and the corruption bits might as well not exist. The plot is standard shlock, the gameplay is a poorly balanced mess, and the puzzles are fucked and all over the place, but there are almost no other pieces of erotic fiction that are as good as this dev's in the ability to display the sheer downfall of a heroine, of a human being, watching them completely and utterly break, physically and spiritually, forced to watch as everything around them, everything they tried to protect and hold dear, is taken from her or even turn away from her, possibly even ending with her death. Is it an absolutely fucked fetish? Oh, one thousand percent. Which is why this game has gotten the scores that it has, for good reason. It's a niche fetish, one that doesn't appeal to many, and the many problems with this game may be too much even for those who do fall into those niche fetishes. If I was a purely objective reviewer, this game would get a 2/5, a 3/5 at best. But I am not. I am a horribly, horribly biased bitch. Despite everything I've said about this game, for all that I've bitched and moaned about it... I'm still gonna keep playing it for the h-scenes. This hole was made for me. And maybe, just maybe... It's worth it for you to see if it was made for you too.
As a final note, a huge thanks to dazedanon for not just his incredibly fast GPT translations, but also his diligence in updating and correcting any mistakes that pop up in the process; he even patched in a fast forward dialogue skip in a patch. No kudos is enough for providing such amazing quality MTLs at such a remarkable pace. You are phenomenal. Thank you.
