RPGM - Completed - Shakori and the Fallen Kingdom [v1.0] [PuriPuri Studio]

cons:
- MTL poetry
- text get cut off
- the usual unnecessarily bloated dialogue from chinese writer
- no gallery

pros:
- decent art

Only play this if you don't have anything else to do to waste your life.

Hmmm... Well, what can I say? Around three hours ago my rating for this game would have been around a 3.5/5, but now, sitting here at 7 hours of play time, I feel like I'm pretty sick of it already.

Let's start here with the positives:

Honestly, I really do like the art style; the main character is adorable, and the older sister is hella pretty, to the point where I'm kind of resentful I didn't get to play as her for most of the game.

In addition, the lewd scenarios are right up my alley, with plenty of variety. The lewd artifacts with their small, self-contained lewd stories are a splendid addition. It's nice to read little titillating snippets of other people's experiences in lewd hell while going through the game.

Mechanically, the game attempts to encourage multiple playstyles by providing a wide variety of weapons and armors to suit whatever build you have in mind, which is an great choice when taken in tandem with the locking of leveling behind story progression, meaning they are your only real way of stat gains.

The negatives, however, are what inspired me to actually sit down and write this, because this is one of the few games that's actually managed to grind me down to where I don't even feel I enjoy playing it anymore:

Let's start with the mechanics. I closed off the positives by mentioning how fascinating those game design choices were, but here I'm going to burst that bubble by pointing out that because nearly every skill available is one that works off of attack multipliers, it genuinely feels like an exercise in futility to really go beyond what it takes to one-shot enemies, be it either crit-fishing or raw ATK. The lack of motivation to look at it any further is exacerbated by the fact that most of the item descriptions trail off into the ether, leaving some stats like CRIT or HIT having to be guessed at, since they don't show up in the status screen when changing equipment. The system lacks depth beyond a certain point, and while I have not really gone to the extent of checking whether crit chance/dodge chance stacks additively or multiplicatively, at this point I'm pretty much beyond caring.

The game advertises itself as a corruption game (and in fact, since I have some friends who rather like that genre, I pointed this game out to them as a potential relief from the general drought of good releases) but you never really feel it. You can generally go into scenes pretty much at will, without any variation or even nod to the fact that you've been through this before. Lots of talk of knocking up or mindbreaking, but pretty much nothing to show for it afterwards. It ended up feeling pretty hollow knowing there were no consequences to what, according to the main character, is the most mindblowing sex known to mankind.

What really killed my motivation to play more of this game was actually how tedious the h-scenes ended up being; most have a pseudo-animation simulated by rapidly flipping two images together, and scenes are padded to hell with stiff, robotic hip thrusting or weird tongue flailing, capped off with page after page of "oh! oh! oh!" as the translation tool used for it got overwhelmed, as it tends to do when it gets more sick of translating what I'm heartily sick of skipping.

I had actually started my playthrough wanting to experience all the scenes the game had to offer, because I heard in advance that the game had no gallery, but after about three hours, two and a half of which involved skipping aforementioned "oh!"s, I began just speeding through the game.

YMMV, but I really hate Bethesda's lockpicking, and the fact that they added that system to this game, except somehow even worse because breaking the pick resets and re-randomizes the lock, really put the cherry on top of this shit sandwich for me.

Frankly, I want you, reader, to try this game just to suffer what I have, and come back to me with your findings as something like an impromptu group therapy, but I am well aware of the fact that I made this game seem somehow less appealing than the entirety of its illustrated male cast. I appreciate that you read through this review, and if you end up playing this game let me know what you think!

The art is good, story is meh, it could have worked out great as your run-of-the-mill combat based girl knight corruption game. But no, they had to put bunch of random lottery based mechanic which can get on your nerve real fast and you can do nothing to circumvent them. On top of that, no gallery, devs simply didn't think about it.

Could have been a good game.

I wanted so hard to love this game. There's genuinely a lot to praise, and I can 100% feel the love that was put into it. Its issues unfortunately do a lot to drag the experience down, and it commits some (imo) cardinal sins that simply cannot be forgiven.

THE GOOD:

• The art is genuinely great. The main character exudes an innocent yet also sexy aura. Her different facial expressions in particular are wonderful and perfectly represent what she's supposed to be feeling.
• The game is filled with weird but welcome little touches. For example, almost every random NPC in the game has lengthy chunks of dialogue that serve to flesh out the setting as well as give the MC opportunity to express herself and show what kind of person she is. After earning the ability to wear only your translucent under-garb, she can even get fucked by some of them as they react to her lewd appearance. It's not perfect, but in a world where most H-RPGs only feature one to two lines per generic NPC, the effort was noticed and appreciated.
• The sex scenarios are varied and pretty interesting. I didn't finish the game, but I encountered multiple game-over-rape scenes, one involving a strip club, one involving drugs that was also Japanese hostess club themed, one that involved drug-fueled hypnosis and one that took place in a hot spring. Plenty of variety.

THE BAD:

• Combat sucks. Not exactly a shock, most games made in RPGMaker have doo doo combat, but it's still worth mentioning I think. Use MTool to insta-win or lose fights, you'll enjoy yourself more.
• Inconsistent player choice. Sometimes, like with the strip club, nothing lewd happens at all involving the MC and she doesn't get touched unless you CHOOSE to return later and continue the event chain. In the hostess club mission you only get assaulted if you lose the drinking minigame, making it more skill-based. In the hot club quest, however, your character gets raped and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. I spent a good half hour trying to somehow bypass this, but as far as I can tell you will always be overpowered and raped in the hot spring. It's frustrating and makes the corruption of the MC feel more inconsistent and awkward, going from returning to the site of her hot spring rape for round two to being embarrassed at seeing a woman strip on stage.
• The scenarios, while varied and diverse, are shallow. The strip club chain for example starts off strong: Everyone wears a veil to hide their identity, women dance on stage for the pleasure of dirty old men. Hot, right? So what happens? Does the MC get her veil torn off? Maybe even tear it off herself, ruining her reputation in town just to get her sick jollies off? Does she dance on stage with a full mini-game akin to the hostess club one? Nope. She's an audience member for two scenes, which is fine, but after getting up on stage herself she's instantly gang raped, no mini-game, almost no dancing despite the art for her stripper outfit being super cute. No new dialogue if you return after this point, it just repeats the event. Every event and event chain left me feeling some degree of blue-balled, like there was so much more potential that just went totally untouched.
• No recollection room, apparently. At least I assume so given the warning that pops up when you start the game. I personally don't really care since I only ever use them for hints, when offered, but I'm sure for some people it's a total deal breaker.

I walked away from Shakori feeling pissed, honestly. It seriously has the bones of a 10/10 HRPG, but it just fails too often to be anything more than average. It's like a runner jumping every single hurdle but still stumbling and tripping between each one; technically a success but still far from being great.

Warning before you read, I have not yet completed the game, but I have decided to drop a review for the sole reason that I saw some one star reviews and I really do not think this game deserves that. Especially because I simply disagree with most of the issues that were raised.


To start with, this game actually has a plot and storytelling style that is quite appealing and fresh. I have played games that were so..so sooo much worse. This is only mild spoiler as this is the beginning of the game.

You (Younger sister) and your older sister escaped from a raid lead by an intelligent goblin, this raid killed your village, (Basic stuff). Then you get a cut of 10 years to the MC joining the knights, but the order of knights is led by your older sister, who is vehemently opposed to you joining.

You as the MC want to prove your worth to your older sister and thru the main story you kinda do, around 1 hour mark. Your sister actually realized that she has been way overprotective, stepping on your self-esteem. I now have to see how to the rest of the story plays out, but now I see some character development. Which is very nice.

Onto other stuff.

Leveling..Instead of normal leveling you have your Knight rank. Instead of mobs giving you EXP you get EXP from missions, and once your Knight rank levels up, you get what you would normally on level up, stats, (maybe abilities, haven't finished the game), there are ranks from 1 to 12. You receive new side quests with lewd content at each new level.

I am aware that during one of the first missions you have a lewd combat ability(You get taken over by an evil plant), if those are something you can use as your normal character later I would be extremely glad.

Combat..So far the main combat loop is very simple, you get normal attack, double attack that however doubles the attack of enemies if they survive and a dodge that you use to avoid overpowered hits. Where the combat it made better is equipment featuring for example double attacks (combo attack) more health, passive on map and in battle health regen, retaliation, more gold and so on.

So far I am enjoying combat. Using gloves which have double attack you kill a mob on one or two hits and then move on and since you don't have to kill them at all since there is no EXP I fight only to look at lewd sprites that show up when you are fighting lewd enemies.

Edit. You can buy skill books and get new skills that way.

This game has a lock-picking mini-game, the one from all Bethesda games, brown wooden chests can be opened without picking them, while iron chests needs to be lock-picked and often have equipment. (I would recommend getting the chest at Knight Headquarters, some good armor there.) During the first mission into the village of Koto, every brown chest has 3 lock-picks, meaning you end the first mission with 30 in your inventory. (And you can buy them)

I am currently at 2 hour mark in the game, and was now told I can go on my own and explore, honestly I am feeling very optimistic about the game.

For the lewds, there are both sprites, full screen partially animated scenes and in battle lewds, one boss has a mechanic that it drags you across the screen and you have five turns to defeat it.So far, I am enjoying my time here.

Now on a sour note, this game is massively hindered by its currently wonky translation, it is passable, but bad enough to drag the game and since I think the story could be one of the more interesting things, if this had a manual translation I would be a happy guy.

I will possibly update this review when I finish the game but for now, I give five stars for the immense potential, try the game for yourself, keep an open mind and tell me what you think.

One of the most tedious and boring games I've played. The plot is nonexsitent, it's there just for the sake of being there. Visuals are shit: absolutely generic default RPGMaker UI; all maps outside the town are just empty spaces with some mobs scattered here and there; the town itself is small, and most places are not available for exploring for god knows how long (dropped the game after 40 min, unlocked only one location with a single interactable NPC). 99% of enemies' sprites are default RPGMaker sprites. Overall, the map design and visauls are made to drop the game in first 10 mins. Above that, the game is EXTREMLY slow-paced. Tons of useless, boring and uneeded dialogs, the MC movements can't be accelerated by holding Z or CTRL. The same goes for battles. Ah, yeah, battles. Well, it'd be better if there was none of them at all. The thing is, you can't level up, and as a result, you can't get any new skills or upgrade your stats. You can improve your stats only buy getting equipment. So, till the very end of the game you'l have to "fight" using basic attack/defend commands, and 3 VERY original and well-conceptualized skills, which are: weak attak(maybe it's unavoidable, cuz the translation is shitty, so I didn't get what's the point of dealing 70% of your attack as a skill), strong attack (x2 dmg), and evasion (you lose some HP, but avoid the next attack). Basically, that's all you got till you finissh this masterpiece of game industry. And btw, there's a lockpicking minigame like in TES or Fallout series, but good luck to pick a single lock, I swear the dev never tried to test this shit themself.

The game holds itself very well, the story is above average and the art is also good, lacking a little on the fight mechanism but its not a one shot fight and you do need to use items and strategize a little, and finally the translation, while not 100% good this is far better than your average MTL, hoping for a manual translation of the game in the future.