RPGM - Completed - Succubus General's Troop Augmentation Center [Final] [Touhou-marupon-dou]

I love almost all of this circle's games. I also have a tolerance for RPGM type of things, and I wont be judging by the MTL. I think this could've been one of their best, but unfortunately suffers from a few things. Overall Knight of Livestock was better, but I would have really loved this one to be better than it.

This is a game like witch's porn-o-licious adventure or kobold's knight of livestock in terms of MC's corruption progression. In gameplay, it's more like livestock in that you are a captive working from a small base of operations, but you do get to go out and do battle.

The battle is turnbased, but automatic and fast. It definitely does not feel nearly as slow as a typical RPGM game combat wise. The idea is to build a composition, but as long as you match the level you should be able to win easily. If you lose, you don't lose your progress and can retry the battle immediately and often times luck out and win. If you have trouble, make sure you keep track of the "strong at offense" monsters and make sure you have at least 2 of them. Then find a path which consists of elements they are strong against.

Back at the base is where all of the h-scenes and most of the story happen. Your job is to breed stronger and stronger soldiers using the protagonist herself. You then take the stronger soldiers out to battle and progress the story/corruption.

The story and atmosphere are good for what it is. A lot of text, but you can get the gist of everything by skipping through.

It is very much worth a play if you like the art and content, however there are some quirks that i'll detail how to get through since it can feel kind of grindy.

1. To turn off the birthing animation, since you have to do it a ton, go to the menu, go to the breed menu, and then press shift. There is some text in the upper left that should turn from green to yellow.

2. You can repeat the tent areas to farm birthing tickets. You should also just use your saved up tokens to purchase more, and as early as possible since inflation will happen as you progress. Use these birthing tickets in the breed menu on a monster category, then go to the unit menu and make them all studs to level up your soldiers. One batch of 10 will level that category up. Repeat until you max out the level. You will generally need 20-40 birthing tickets each time you do this if you want to max each monster category, so make sure to repeat the battles a few times after you beat them. Hold ctrl+z to quickly get through the showing of newly birthed monsters.

The story is good, the art is top notch,. The gameplay is interesting, grindy? yes! but there is option to lower difficulty. The "tags" are vary
However, the H scenes are kinna not impressive? I was expecting they are animations like the UNSKIPABLE "gacha"
And since the MC give births to a massive army, i would love if the game had similar gameplay to Goblin Burrow. ( both suffer from bad H-scenes, personally)

ok, The MTL isn't the worst, BUT, as my brain start to hurt, I will not deny that hand translation is a milion times better. The game is playable and the MTL isn't the worst, but it's MTL sadly...Anyway, 5 star cuz I love this artist and the way he makes you feel bad every time. I hope more of his games get translated, even with MTL, I don't care at this point.

So after I changed my team comp after wiping to lvl 70 boss game keeps crashing with "syntax error unexpected identifier" when I try and return to the fight , Given that this visually seems to be 60-70% game completion and I've felt the same since lvl 30 I doubt game will change my opinion even if I could play beyond the crash. My current opinion after 4-6 hours, Death by a thousand cuts, even without regards to translation.

We can start with what many will consider a dealbreaker. The translation.
As of writing this is pure MTL with no editing. Dialogue can be understood but its a stretch to call most of it readable.

Tutorial is also in a terrible state since MTL does poorly at manual-style language given its so much terminology, doesn't help that text goes outside the window. I was able to modify this manually in the code but a lot also needs manual linebreaks added since alot was offscreen even at fontsize 14

Now let's get to actual gameplay, mostly unrelated from the translation
Basic gameplay loop is as follows,

1. Breed(gacha/lootbox) troops
2. Look through the unit list and make a comp
3. go invade a map
4. Roguelike inspired route choice
5. If you win lose
   1. Reattempt same fight since there is no loss penalty OR leave area and make a new team before going attempting again
6. If you win
   1. New level cap -> Stud all units / buy stallion leveling items from shop to increase stallion level to new cap before you restart from step one

And I got issues with almost every step of this loop. Presented here in same order for their respective section

1. Breeding: Main issue here is the MTL, or in fact lack thereof. You will need to get slightly moonrune proficient to read the skills so your critically important healer or frail attacker doesnt get the taunt skills
2. Unit list: Lack of UI support, specifically skill searching. Game has you breed a fuckton (pun not intended) of units and then you gotta sit there and look through them one by one
3. Overworld: No comment
4. Route choice: I hate it. The choice only impacts enemy variety and encounter amount. There are no event or treasures along the path and paths converge at boss so its basically just a case of not picking a elemental path you are weak to.
5. Lose: Given its all auto combat a fight can have massive variety if enemy oneshot-crits someone in your team, your teams focus, etc.. Its nice that you can reattempt a fight instantly but it can feel like smashing your head against a brickwall and It shouldn't swing from me getting wiped turn 2 to beating it turn 4 with exactly same unit composition
6. win: Congratulations, you earned the honor of throwing your entire army in the trashbin since the stats from levelscaling are highly needed and theres no way to level a unit permanently. Time to rebuild from scratch...again... and again... and again. If it wasn't apparent I'm really not a fan of how dispoasble your units become.

And this leaves out my others issues like general stat balancing, shop costs scaling with progress with no added benefit, the tedium of having to level the 4 different tribe stallion levels instead of Eineiks stat as a broodmother, minor menu delays etc.

For what is worth I really enjoyed the art and story. Forfax looked fantastic and it was a real mood vibe meeting her again in Cetus compared to before she was sent down.

TL;DR
Story seems like it be real nice if it got a proper translation. Gameplay somewhat weak even if properly translated. Might actually consider playing the game on cheat mode just for story.

I might post a minor guide-ish-discovery-thing about the skills for those still inclined to play the game.


EDIT: So I figured out what caused the syntax error, was able to progress to final overworld map(LV99) VS the 5 heroes. Rammed my head against the wall for like 1-2 hours trying various team comps before I swapped to story mode difficulty, beat the level and then game crashed during cutscene. Everything I felt before is still valid along with details I never mentioned and new things that came up.
They shot themselves in the foot with the gameplay but I like the world, characters and story going on