Reviewing: Self-Defense Dojo Secret NTR Lesson
Version: v1.9
Overall: 2/5
To summarize, this is a very grindy and time-consuming game with a very disappointing payoff.
Grab a save file instead of playing this.
I'm not going to give a comment on other aspects of the game. The gameplay of both progression and hentai is already too overwhelming to the point that other things wouldn't matter.
---DETAILS---
Gameplay (Progression Grind): 1/5
Progressing in this game is massively disappointing. It takes way too much time to literally do anything.
- Navigating the dojo takes 2 seconds each time you move to another area.
- Navigating outside the dojo requires you to watch your icon move from one place to another, which takes 2 seconds on average.
- Skipping 1 hour of time (by clicking the lower right "pass time" button) takes 2 seconds.
- Sleeping/Waking up takes 4 seconds.
- Training the girls requires you to watch an 8 second intro of nothingness before it requires user engagement.
- Training with the master provides minimal gains for the amount of time spent.
- Text skipping is slow. I estimate that it moves at 4 dialogues per second when you hold space.
- Lust accumulation requires you to finish each scene for minimal gains
These tiny amount of seconds may look like I'm nitpicking, but here's the gameplay loop that a new player is required to do in a day to progress.
- MC wakes up (4s)
- MC navigates 2 areas to go to the training room (2s + 2s)
- MC wears the dojo uniform (2s)
- MC trains with the chosen girl (8s)
- Training minigame - overpower the girl with speedclicking and timing clicks.
- After the minigame, enter a scene where you have to fill the girl's lust meter.
- The scene ends and the girl gains +150 affection.
The player is required to increase the girl's affection to be able to do more things. And in the first day, the first training wouldn't enough to level up her affection. Now consider this: The minigame and the h-scene are the ones where you are actively engaged to the game as a player. This is around 1 minute of gameplay. And in order to do that? You have to spend around 20 seconds staring at the screen doing nothing. That's 33% of the time wasted, and you have to do this repeatedly to progress.
Let's not forget that we have to make money too. You won't be raising affection the whole time.
- Work - 4s of cutscene
- Excavation - at least a minute
- Fishing - grind hell
Considering the amount of grind needed to reach a higher level of affection (which in turn unlocks more h-scenes),
we can say that for the entire game, you'd be spending more than 50% of the time doing nothing. If you can't imagine this, then think of it as having to watch a 1 minute ad everytime you turn the page of that hentai you're reading.
And worst of all, the game stops running when it's not in focus. So you have to literally watch the game while nothing is happening.
I will advise anyone that wants to play this game to please get a full save file, or get a boosted first-day save file with unlimited resources.
Personally, even with a cheated save, I wouldn't recommend anyone to completely "play" this game. Just play it for a while, and once you get a feel for the characters, get an unlocked gallery save and view the scenes.
Gameplay (Hentai): 2/5
There's nothing much good to write about this one. If you've seen some of the famous NTR (Netori) games then you would find the gameplay here as standard. However, you would also find that it lacks engagement, variety, and flavour. Once you enter a scene, you are locked to it until you complete it. Only then would you be able to enter a different scene to spice things up. This means you can't change position after you've selected it.
Also, the audio outside training scenes isn't synced.
What audio? The PLAPPLAPPLAP audio.
Plot: 2/5
The characters are given a basic background. They're enough to give you a sense of how they might act in situations which can tickle your fantasy, but story-wise everything just feels so disconnected.
Art: 3.5/5
It's mostly pixel art. The girls are cute, the MC looks nice, the master looks like a master, and the big bad definitely looks like the big bad.
While some of the scenes aren't to my taste, the game's overall art design still appeals to me, which is why I started playing this in the first place.
Unfortunately, the scenes and cgs aren't varied enough for me.