Others - Completed - Renalith Saga [v1.02] [CHERIS SOFT]

Gameplay time: Over 24 hours (already lost track of time)

I think this is my first time doing rating some game.

The simple way i describe this game: art 9/10, story 8/10, and storyline 10/10

The art feels like nostalgic, the last time i see art like this is from Rance series. The story is good just the dialogue is long, sometimes i skip it but i know the essence of this story. Last, the storyline is crazy, the beginning of story is like ruined down to dip, middle story is trying to be stronger, and last the protagonist just want a peace from demon race and human race.

Man, this game really-really make me nostalgic with Rance series.

Absolutely did not expect this level of story from an ordinary looking porn game. CGs are very good, gameplay mechanics are simple (and avidable) but combat loop gets repetative after some time especially near the endgame, there it just becomes the check on how much heals did you bring with you. Also save system is kinda a chore with it requiring special item during missions, but again story did make it worth time spent

Good story. Nice to see different perspectives of the plot. But it is also a little trouble...because sometimes you sit before your monitor and must read endless (useless) dialogs. And especially towards the end....boring just boring.
Worst part...you can't save... it gets worse there are different battles without the option to save.
The fighting...ah, a little boring. Because no matter what enemy she fights the pattern is the same. Different H-events...for an former nun she comes around.
And we should not forget the equipment. She can only equip a weapon, body armor and 3 rings. Later on she finds a smith who can enchant the weapon and armor....now comes the catch....she gets the Saint Armor and her own Sword...now the armor isn't any better than her already enchanted one...and the sword is less effective...with her former one she gets 30HP back every turn...with her own sword she only gets some action points (at that time she don't need them!!!).

So overall voting for this is difficult: boring story (hey, she must be the stupids person on planet! How many times was she betrayed?) with endless reading....the same could be done with just a simple scrolling text and not the endless clicking.
Boring fights.
Boring action...it is like playing one of those VN again (wink wink Drakus) where you must repeat the same action over and over again till something happens (example: prostitution, dancing, bunny girl).
The H-content isn't much better...mostly prostitution (same stills) and some surprise rape (if she did something stupid).
Na, can't recommend this game.

a really nice and solid game.
Story rich, lots of plot.
Lack of hints to unlock scenes in gallery though.
Took quite an effort and time to test by changing the titles of the main character then defeat the final boss with large HP again and again to see if there are any ending which affected by it.
I personally wants more scenes of sided characters besides the protagonist.

A very poorly written story with a tedious and very boring gameplay loop. You only control one character and maps consist of just manually clicking circles one by one with random encounters. All you really do is spam the AoE move for the most part so it's pretty braindead with almost no strategy whatsoever. Later on in the game, bosses and enemies just become damage sponges so the game just becomes more tedious rather than harder. The heroine isn't a very interesting character at all and her aversion to not kill and let evil criminals always go free gets old really fast and makes absolutely no sense considering it's a war story. The only thing good is that there's a bunch of H scenes. A lot of these are defeat scenes which sucks because it doesn't follow the updated conventions that other games follow which is being able to unlock defeat scenes after beating any boss with such a scene. Nope, not this game. You have to get tents, save before a boss, and then lose to get the scene. Overall, not really worth your time. It really should've been a visual novel just to skip the tedium and useless grind. Even the mini game segments such as the prostitution part of the story go on for way too long where you're just clicking ad naseum. And finally, there is no virgin route. This doesn't bother me personally. In this game, the heroine gets raped and also must prostitute herself as part of the story.

Great game with rich story, characters, art, many xxx scenes. Battle mechanics and qvests also is not bad. Most of all I liked the management of prostitution. There are so many different endings and achievements.

For some reason, I just don't have much to say about this one other than... it's good. It's just a solid game done well.

- The story is interesting, having some surprisingly well-done twists and turns, and some pretty good characters.
- There isn't much grind, max level is 30 and I got there by the end naturally without doing any extra combat grinding.
- Felt intuitive when it came to how to unlock the scenes, didn't need a guide or anything.
- Translation is good, I can tell that a lot of time and effort was put into it by the translators.

90%+ of the scenes involve the main girl, no lesbian, a lot of rape and pregnancy. If you don't mind/like those things, give it a try.

At some point i forgot i was playing an H game cause the story is actually interesting. The H scenes are great but the only problem is there are too few for how long the game is. Other than that it's a great find in a genre full of low-effort games.

I know a lots of efforts was put into the game but it's too abundant for a VN H-game.
Gamplay: battle gameplay is such a hassle, you walk to the objective and then have to walk back. Death is perma death so using tent often will save you time.
Story: Nice story, nerds! Unfortunately, i use "skip"
Basically war with demon, human want to repel but can't due to corruption and rivalry or smth. But here you are, at the bottom of society (tbh, if there wasn't a skip button, i would drop the game from the beginning)
H-scenes: nice but with a little bit surprise that they are censored.

This checks most of the boxes you'd look for in a game like this, and can probably provide around 20-30 hours of gameplay on your first playthrough. There's plenty of CGs, there's a decent variation of endings/scenarios the main character finds themselves in (although there is a pretty heavy focus on pregnancy in almost every ending, it's still a Japanese game after all!) and there are plenty of outfits to collect and areas to explore. Additionally, the game has a decent hook to get you to replay it, since there are new dialogues, new titles, and new ways to play the game (virgin playthrough, etc.) which can only be unlocked in NG+. While the characters are a bit... anime-like, and sometimes shallow in their motivations, they are nonetheless also quite varied and you won't find yourself fighting the same type of enemy over and over again, and you collect a nicely varied cast of friends from across the game world by the end as well. Without giving any spoilers, I will say that this game also does (very) occasionally kill off side characters, which I personally like, but some might feel sad about. If you like hentai J-rpgs with heavy focus on combat and rpg aspects, and would enjoy actually playing through the game's story, while collecting CG occasionally, then this is for you. If you only want to view the scenes, I'd recommend finding a complete gallery somewhere and saving yourself a few dozen hours, though, as this is not a very easy game to just breeze through while skipping the dialogue (of which there is a *lot*, by the way).

I'd like to add that while I'm not deducting any score, there were some translation errors at the time of this review. I don't remember any untranslated text during the main story, but there were definitely untranslated texts during some brothel events, or during minigames such as with the bunny house customers. If the occasional stray line of Japanese will break your immersion, maybe hold out until the translation is finalized. It didn't impact my enjoyment of the game significantly, but YMMV.

This game is not perfect but its very good.
what it makes it difficult is the ocean of words that makes game of thrones look like a colouring book.

But besides that, the game is solid and well made. The story is enaging but with the mentioned ocean of text that cam make you lose 2 Hours if you intend to read.

This commits a cardinal sins for a porn game- slow start, so RPG game play with little connection to scenes, and 20 minutes of political cutscenes you do not care about.

Walkthrough- hit the fast forward button (ctrl) the instant demons show up. Only slow down the couple of times bandits show up or the thing with the nuns. Otherwise, do not release ctrl until you hit a screen that lets you save.

If you do not do this, you will be sitting through 30-45 minutes of political intrigue, battle without any actual art to go with it, and some basic gas lighting by the brothel madam... and all that with only a single chance to save using an expendable item in the middle of a dungeon.

The actual gameplay is also painfully slow. There is a reason why RPG maker games are common in their genre- it has quick simple movement and menu navigation using only the arrow keys. . Instead, this game uses point and click on tiny buttons in pop up menus you can't just click through easily for simple things like "Spam the AoE attack".

i'll put a 5 here, but just wanna say when i started playing this game i don't feel like it even deserves a star.

pros:
- gorgeous MC
- other female characters look good too
- good amount of CGs, and good CGs even if it's not animated
- a huge chunk of the HCGs are gameover CGs but a lot of them are pregnancy content
- MC is likable but it's not the type that you'll feel sorry for lewding her
- story gets better, not as good other good story based hrpgs tho, but it was good enough to make me stop collecting game over scenes at some point
- lots of outfits
- game is relatively easy so u can wear low def outfits like the whore outfit and still be fine, eventually u can refine it to have same def as end game armor
- bgms are good and there's variety, every chapter/area uses a diff combat bgm
- no need to grind exp(unless u escape every random encounter), the grind is on tasks like prostitution/dancing/bunny/etc (tho these are skippable too if no need for money)
- NG+ has added dialogues/perspectives and features/endings (virgin route title and preggo/mother title)

Cons:
- Horrible and very SLOW start, Seriously
- Forced non-virgin on first playthrough
- so much random encounter on some maps to the point where it's annoying
- linear story, player only gets some degree of freedom after a few chapters
- sometimes the game won't tell the player what to do (or where to go) exactly leading to frustration, tho i think that's player issue, happened to me twice tho (For example the part where finally we can prostitute, game just tells u to pay debt but it's not really what one has to do to progress the story)
- repeated tasks (there's a skip button and ctrl for fast text, but it's still repeated tasks)
- Virgin route is locked on NG+, since apparently we have to experience the canon story (Renalith's perspective) and Renalith has to be raped by bad ppl (NG+ is storyteller perspective)

i have a lot of time to waste so i had a good time playing this despite the horrible start. i don't recommend this game for ppl that want instant fapping. But the game quality is good if ya have time to spare and is patient.

- Thanks for reading ~

Some of the reviews are definitely not judging the game for what it is. It's like playing an FPS game then complaining about the lack of story.

The world is a lot bigger than a lot of other RPGM games I've played, though not as deep as some actual dedicated RPGs. The very beginning of the story is very slow but it does pick up pretty quickly, and it has a Rance VII-esque introduction with the introduction of all the different countries and leaders, and even as Renalith is going around, we see things happening in other parts of the world.

That said, while I'm enjoying the world, by far the weakest part of the game is the UI and gameplay. The combat is very basic and tedious, but thankfully it's pretty fast since you can just hold the speed up button and spam click attack. Navigating the Battle stages is a massive chore though, with random encounters and being able to only move one tile at a time. In addition, the dance minigame is pretty awful and feels tied to like 2010, but again, you can just skip it and it doesn't matter. The weapons have some effects but there's not really any thought in how they're given out, like getting a weapon that gives you an AoE first strike then immediately you find something better that has no effect, or someone important to you giving you a weapon, then you immediately replace it in the next town.

It feels like the devs had some belief that they had to include certain uninspired parts to make this a proper RPG but gave ways to ignore it, but they should either really be cleaned up or just removed.

Despite all the cons, I really am enjoying the game (still playing through it). The variety in costumes, the huge cast of characters, and seeing as basically none of these problems carried over into Kunoichi Karen, I am looking forward to their future releases.

Cons:
-Censored
-GC gallery practically
-There is too much text for almost no images.
-It starts with the girl being raped???

The more you play, the more disappointing this game is. They didn't even bother making the image move a little. Its just a CG gallery with less scenes than you can find in any random ranobe.

So I've noticed something about high quality games like this, and by the way this is a HIGH QUALITY game. Just the art alone is a testament to that. Almost every CG has a fully drawn background and shows full body posture of the main character Renalith and has fully drawn male partners which help set the atmosphere. Cheris Soft's next game Kunoichi Karin basically did the same thing, but if you compare both there is a clear drop in the tier of quality, namely the shading, coloring, and the size of each CG. Yet, Kunoichi Karin has over double the purchases of Renalith Saga sitting 31,667. On the books, I would be kicking myelf as a developer if I saw that my inferior product beat one that I put so much love in to. Renalith Saga delivers the quality and even the RPG fun and story on par with a Rance game just in a Female protagonist package. Yes, the quality is really that high.

But, here's why I'm giving it 4 stars. I obviously played Kunoichi Karin before this game, and really enjoyed my time with it, just like Renalith Saga, but both of them fall short in one category that they shouldn't have, CORRUPTION. Corruption is something that I think needs to be seen all the way to the end, and it feels bad when the final stages of corruption can only be reached by triggering bad endings on the way to the final ending of the game. In Kunoichi Karin, and in this game some of the only times she can have consensual sex is when she's drugged up on aphrodisiac, and almost every other scene is non-con with a few that turn consensual halfway through. So many corruption games completely devastate their narrative by doing this.

I want to make a prediction. Cheris Soft has a new game coming out soon called, "Renalith in Desire", AND sure enough Renalith looks like she's having a hell of a time having consensual sex. Kunoichi Karin definitely had a lot more, albeit proportionally very little compared to the amount of non-con, consensual sex than Renalith Saga and it double the sales with literally two-thirds of the quality. I think Cheris Soft learned what sells, even in a Japanese market, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Renalith in Desire" doubles the sales that Kunoichi Karin had. Wouldn't be surprised if it doubled the actual profits as well.

The poor reviews are really unwarranted in my opinion. This is an extremely competent game with decent combat, little to no grinding and a good story with great world building.

Additionally, you have a lot of costume options, meaningful (if simple) equipment.

It's a great game and easily better than 99% of RPGM shovelware.

This is from someone that didn't get past chapter 3.
I never went past chapter 3 because i didn't like the prospect of doing the same thing again and again until i reached 50 000 dollars from prostitution. Or at least that's what i think i was supposed to do. There are forced events here and there, but i have no clue how i'm supposed to trigger them so far. I'm not entirely averse to repetitiveness, there's a lot of CG hunter out there that i like, but that one i couldn't.
Big + though : There's a lot of story, and it's honestly pretty good. It's just a shame i don't download games from here for a good story.

Good game, as long you don't mind forced sex after prologue.
So far there's minigames/choice event such as dance, bunny girl, prostitute.
There are various costume to choose too such as maid, dance, warrior, and etc.