VN - Others - Completed - Scent of Seductive Flesh [Final] [Elf]

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I saw the art on the updates page and decided to give it a go without reading much about it. I'm very glad I did.

Story: I started this game knowing very little and I'm glad I did that. I read the first couple sentences of the synopsis and ignored the tags and I ended up really enjoying it. The characters are interesting and it's fun to deduce the web of familial relationships as you play.

Art: The star here is the art and the representative banner image does it justice. It's that kind of older anime style that gives all of the characters a lot of personality and the love interests a lot of sweetness. I also really enjoyed the animations and was surprised the first time one played.

Gameplay: Surprisingly enough I really enjoyed the gameplay. I actually found it kind of fun walking through the house and clicking on doors (getting random encounters and unique text each time). Also there's something about the graphical style of the kind of earlier PS2 3D graphics that I just love and, more generally, it added a nice departure from the usual VN gameplay (which the majority of this game still is of course). It's really a small thing and it's not utilized all that much or all that diversely (I immediately thought of a few uses for it that never materialized) but the value-added it great.

Soundtrack: There are some great ear worms in this one too. The sweet waltz song in particular has been stuck in my head for a while. Probably going to look for an OST after writing this.

Technical note: One thing that helped me to play this was installing a borderless windowed application on Windows. When I booted it up, I realized it was one of those applications that (for me) is either a tiny window or takes exclusive control of one window and messes everything up when you tab out. So consider trying out one of those programs if you're having issues (don't think I'm allowed to link any, so I'll just mention the one I used is free).

A lot of thanks to the translator for putting this out. This'll be one of those games that makes it difficult to go back to other games.

Overall 3.5/5. As a big fan of My girlfriend is a blue-collar worker, I was really excited to see this game translated, as this was one of the few NTR VNs that the Elf studio made before eventually closing in 2015. Overall, the story was really good, and uncovering the mystery makes it rewarding to play this VN. However, the sex scenes, despite being well animated, are not exciting and forgettable. The gameplay elements can feel like time-filler, and trying to 100% the game can feel very tedious.

• Story: The overall theme of this VN is Netori, but not exactly. In this story, any branch with any NTR is considered a bad ending, so rejoice avoidable NTR lovers. While the True Ending has no NTR, I felt there was a lot of missed opportunities with making NTR canon. There were a few bad endings where I wish they were canon and we actually got to play them out rather than time-skip straight to jail. There were also a number of times where I thought the story was going to go really deep into NTR, but never did. For example, our girlfriend Yuki decides to work for the household and Matsutarou had been hinting a lot about a "game" between you and him involving your respective lovers. Slowly the tension starts building up and you expect to get cucked, but... it never happens? A lot of the disappointment is really centered on the lack of action by the MC. Usually that is one of the common traits of a cucked MC, but man.. this MC is really fucking boring and really doesn't fucking do shit at all. And somehow all the girls are flooding when they're around him.
  Spoiler: Post-True Ending Spoilers:

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• Gameplay: MAKE SURE TO MAKE A NEW SAVE AT EVERY DIALOGUE CHOICE. God I underestimated how many bad endings there are in this game. During exploration period, you can visit other rooms to talk to other characters for a few lines, but it doesn't influence the story in any way. The other gameplay mechanic is clicking at objects in a CG to find an item, which is just dumb to do. I understand they wanted to try something unique with a visual novel, but the result is just frustrating. This game could remove these elements and it would make the game a lot simpler.
• Fappable: You could probably get one fap. However, I argue that most sex scenes in this story have very little or weak build-up, which in turn make the scenes lackluster. The scenes themselves are very long and pretty vanilla compared to most NTR stories, which is probably why I felt dissatisfied. There's a few eye-candy CG and teasing (via panty shots and ass shots), but that shit is not enough to get me going.

I think that this is one of the better VNs on the website. This VN has an engaging story, and the translation is pretty good. I usually skim/skip through a lot of hentai games because the plot is meh, but this game managed to keep my attention. The exploration function was pretty annoying to use though. Most of the sex scenes are animated, however none of them really turned me on. Also, even though there are a good amount of rape bad endings, I would say none of them are visually hardcore. Maybe 1 or 2 CGs towards the end were kinda extreme.
Now for the story. There's a lot of mystery involved in the plot. Many things don't make sense until you reach the true end. For me, it was very satisfying to reach the true ending and finally connect all of the plot points. I don't like the main character though. Some of the things he does don't make any sense. I won't elaborate on it too much, but how he handles situations with his gf at certain points don't make any sense to me. My biggest gripe with this game is its endings. The only satisfactory ending in this game is the true ending. The endings for Otoha, Kaori, and Yuki could have been better in my opinion, and I really wish they were. Especially the ending for --