RPGM - Sword Art Online: The Trap of Breath Concealed Magic [Part 2 v0.701] [Fujino]

This review covers the entirety of the part 1, which is what I've played thus far.

This game has one redeeming quality, which are the scenes, as everyone has said. Everything else is terrible.

Here's a non exhaustive list of issues and complaints:

Battles are extremely boring, lengthy while also being unlosable.
Battle skills have an unholy amount of flashing and ridiculous amount of sounds going on.
Scene replay is janky.
Scene transitions are janky and can break the game entirely if you're skipping dialogue or press the confirm key too many times.
The game crashes often (on map change, on battle change, on scene transition, you fucking name it)
There's a shitton of walking around just to get to places (map is sparse with not enough events to justify it and there's not much to do in it other than just be a walking simulator; no item system, no quest fetch system, nothing, just going from point A to B to view scene)
Some maps are coded wrong (I interacted with a clerk from the left instead of from the front and that softlocked my game)
Whoever is praising the story is either illiterate or deluded; all characters barely feel like themselves and they're all varying degrees of way too fucking stupid. Corruption is NOT slow, the guy gets a handjob on day 2. Come the fuck on.

How on earth this has five stars genuinely eludes me. This game is held together with duct tape and dreams. Probably more of the former than the latter, too.

this review is based on Part 2 v0.551 (October 29, 2024)

currently, I am giving it a 4/5.
the gfx is good, especially Part 2 onwards. the game mechanics is OK, the story is excellent.

i would have given it 5/5 but i am deducting a point for the following reasons:
a) game is unfinished, so some stuff feels hanging or broken. even Part 1 tends to crash reasonably often.
b) pace of the game can be a bit slow at times.

overall its well forth the time and one of the better titles in the NTR/cheating genre.

Note: this review is for part 1. This is a linear visual novel of a cheating (netorare) story based on the Sword Art Online anime.

The single strong point of the game (and admittedly it's very good indeed) are the sex scenes, the majority of which are well animated with fluid and smooth motion and have sounds and moans. The forte of this developer is clearly in this department and it shows; the game is worth checking out just because of this.

But every other element of the game is at best average to mediocre, if not outright dogshit.

The story is pure porn logic and dumb even by NTR standards. It reduces both Kirito and Asuna characters into bumbling idiots. There is too much unnecessary dialogue with side characters, and also scene for side characters that we don't even care about. To give credit, the very beginning points of the story is decent enough, but it quickly loses any immersive grasp due to character breaking progression.

The rpgmaker comes with the ever annoying unskippable overabundance of emoji bubbles. The rpg battles are just there, base level rpgmaker just to show the battle molestation, which are pleasing but underutilized its full potential. Actually, there is a lot of good potential with such setting of hyper virtual reality rpg, but the author doesn't do much with it beyond the basics which is frustrating.

It is also bad how for such a simple game, it crashed to desktop close to 10 times during a full playthrough, with frequent hiccups and freezes specially at the start of combat or when animations play, sometimes I had to force close the game and open it again to fix.

The save system annoyingly defaults and ruins the 5th save slot (seriously?). The original translation was bad and ruined the story even further, and the gallery was shoddly implemented, with many scenes missing and no title or descriptor for each scene. Modders had to come and fix both the translation and gallery.

So 4 stars for the neat sex scenes, but 2 stars for everything else: the dumb story, dialogue, suboptimal engine and tech issues.
Final rating (for part 1): 3 stars for the effort and animations alone.

It's an NTR game that's bloat maxing right now. The first part is tense a bit quick and ends with some ambiguity. The 2nd part picks up and pretty much kills the ending from the first game by turning the ugly bastard into a straight up rapist. After that it's kinda meandering with tons of content but it all happens inside the game for a good chunk and blowing any pacing and tension there could be. Also exploration got nerfed so it's pretty much a VN. I love the animations, but for me NTR is all about showing scenes then found out the tricky ways they happened. I'll keep playing it for the animations and to see what happens but everyone, including the cuck, are turning into degenerates so what's the point.

[Part 2 v0.551]
Interesting, but too much text and plot (for me)

-Story, Originality
You are a cuck... From anime...

-Renders
Cool Koikatsu 3D models and animations.

-Sound
Some sounds and h-sounds.

-Playability
A lot of walking, reading and fighting, but a little boring.

-Performance
Runs okay.

-Bugs
Gallery in 2nd part doesn't unlock everything.

-Animations
Developer used Koikatsu nicely.

-Voice Acting
H-sounds.

-Grammar
Didn't see any mistakes.

-Amount of content
A lot of content, but a little too much gameplay and too little h-stuff.

Like it, but it is too slow for an h-game.

A game with actual plot and plenty of H scenes with a dedicated developer. The corruption is slow but worth the wait even now. The game has an interactive status menu to check if the FMC is being harassed off screen. Makes me diamonds.

Awesome game. It has its pros and cons.
On the plus side, I can note the gradual corruption of the heroine, which is quite fresh, because usually it is not like that. And the fall happens quite quickly.
The number of secondary stories is also good, but they lack a connection with the main plot, and it looks more like an addition, not a connected story. Which is neither a plus nor a minus.
The quality of the animation is at a fairly high level.
The amount of content is quite large, especially in the second part, which is clearly a plus.
On the minuses in this game, these are not always long animations, for example, when Kirito peeks, or accidentally sees something, as well as the effects and sounds that accompany this event.
But if longer animations were set, it would be a plus.
Also, there are often no sound effects where they would be appropriate, especially in erotic content, even in simple places, although perhaps they just do not load well for me.
The number of dialogues is very large. This is not exactly a minus, since it is quite interesting to read what kind of story is developing, but the minus here is that sometimes there is no connection with other events, even when playing the game for the second time. But again, this is possible due to the quality of my automatic translation of the game.
Result.
Even with a fairly large number of minuses, the game turned out to be quite interesting, because the author took the idea from a popular anime. And the characters themselves, their animation and dialogues, are quite lively.
At the moment, I give it from 4.5 to 5 stars.
If the game will have more unexpected moments, especially in the story of the heroine Asuna, the manifestation of her character in relation to the villain Inoda and her lover Kirito, as well as the manifestation of willpower, and not just her own lustful consciousness, then the game will be more entertaining, and my rating will not be so small.
Although where else. (smile)

I am a big fan of their previous games, so it's unfortunate that I feel I have to rate it this low, but I have not been looking forward to updates for a while now and thinking about it, there's a number of things that bother me.

- The story - the pacing feels... off. There's very little tension. It can't all be H scenes obviously, but the build up needs to be meaningful. I just drudged through the "Date Section" of the latest update and it felt phoned in and entirely predictable. And every event feels like this. I just can't get invested. There's endless padding/walking around that's just uninteresting.

- Playing the game - it's cumbersome. You rarely know exactly where to go. "Date in the Commercial District"... ok. You walk around aimlessly until the game decides you have ticked off all (unmarked) events. Fun. Then every conversation.is.broken.up.by.the.stupid.emoji.RPGM.things.breaking.up.every.stream.of.thought.or.cohesion. You can't skip (largely shallow) conversations well and even if you don't, you have to wait every few seconds for the same stupid emojis to play out. It adds nothing and makes it a pain to watch.

-Kirito - he is such an idiot that the love story makes less and less sense as the story progresses.

- Bugs, bugs, bugs - crashes, stuck screens, perk list that won't update. On that note the whole status UI seems pointless since it doesn't affect anything.

I could write more... but suffice to say that playing feels like a chore right now.

first part was a masterpiece, but the later updates were dogshit. i hate how it's going towards the corruption/pregnancy route. fuck this shit, this is gonna end like those mediocre ntr games where mc deliberately ends into cuckolding lmao. but it was good in the first part, 2 stars for that yo

Review updated (Dez/2024): Based on Part 1 (Complete) and Part 2 (v0.65)

*Story, Characters and Dialogues: 4/5
*Art, Renders and Animations: 5/5
*Sex scenes quality and quantity: 5/5
*Gameplay: 3.5/5
*Bugs and technical state of the game: 3/5

-A very good and kinky story for NTR/Corruption fans. With really great art and sex scenes!

-Gameplay wise, there's some unnecessary walking and searching for events in the map, but nothing too absurd... It's also, sometimes, a bit confusing to make some choices or search for some of the side characters scenes. (For example: A few scenes were available for me in the gallery, but I have no clue how did I miss them while playing). But this does not happen for the main heroine part of the game, because everything is quite straightforward with Asuna's story.

-Technical issues: A lot of crashes on Part 1. At least there's an Auto Save function to make it less annoying, but be ready to F5 a lot. I had considerably fewer crashes playing Part 2, but had some frame drop problems in some scenes involving the "side dialogue" feature. (Having a good/modern CPU and installing the game in a SSD may help.)

Final Score: 4/5

Honestly, I've only played the part 1 but I love this game. So fleshed out and a good pace, playing on her nice nature. I would like it if he affected her psyche more, breaking her mentally before going all the way. But amazing job!

I give it 2 stars all because Artysle is nice and some scenes are really good but the overall writing/characters are just so poor to me.

I know it's just an NTR game so some plot point is needed in the corruption process but many reviews talk about good writing/plot/character made me feel pretty disappointed.

(*below are more personal opinions*)
It made me tired and bored instead of aroused because of some flaws I already said above.

I really don't want to be rude to people but I feel disappointed. Not just from the game itself but from people who praised it too highly with the word "good writing/plot"

I like the plot line. But the OMC not so much. The problem is all OMC design remain generic for start to end. OMC can improve himself to attract FMC to give realism feel. You don't expecting FMC only attract to OMC magnum. Example: OMC begun to buff up off screen or hinting in dialogue, go to gym etc. This also give MC (FMC boyfriend) jealous & a red flag as FMC spending more time with OMC. This leading to FMC infidelity infidelity exposed unless MC's a retard.

Writing: 7/10
Imagery: 8/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Kinks: 7/10
Overall: 8/10

Had me in the first half, but then Part 2 just drops the ball.

Going to break this into 2 parts because of just how different the part 1 and part 2 directions go, so let's start with the good.

Part 1's focus on many in-game events involving combat, Kirito being distracted in the heat of battle, Inoda's invisibility skill, and the fact Inoda seemed to be a devious mastermind of trickery and subterfuge. He could pull the wool over Kirito's eyes and at the same time worm his way under Asuna's skin (or panties if you will) so slyly, it was great!

The animation was fun and I do enjoy the use of Kokaitsu models in the cutscenes, something about them just lends to the NTR vibe.

The progression was also fantastic, with a bunch of NTR events involving and not involving Kirito, where you could stumble across a random woman being pounded by a street thug who appears to be a reference to another game's characters but also find Asuna or another female acquaintance being railed just out of view as to leave Kirito oblivious.

Shadow play, mind control, trickery, implied sex, stealth sex, sleep sex, this had it all! I was loving it!

And then, Part 2 came along.

Writing: 6/10
Imagery: 8/10
Gameplay: 5/10
Kinks: 6/10
Overall: 6/10

Ditching the more open world vibe and going with a far more linear and heavy story centric path, the NTR becomes, as I like to put it, railroaded. You can't really miss any events unless you are purposely avoiding clicking on the heart symbols or inspecting the weird noises, and the choices become few and far between making Kirito seem less like an oblivious warrior and more of a hapless coward. Which breaks my immersion, since the Kirito I knew was anything but.

On top of that, Inoda, the mastermind, suddenly experiences a Metroiding and loses all his clout with Asuna. He was railing her in bed and had her slobbering his poll, but all the sudden she's back to giving him the shaft and Inoda himself is a blundering idiot who lets his dick do all the talking. Now it's Liz who has become the mastermind, with Inoda seemingly acting like an underling taking scraps from their master. Boo! Boo I say!

And the animations are very slimmed down, with the number of random sexual acts you can find being sprinkled in along the annoyingly long story driven paths, leaving my jerking hand high and dry. I come to fap, not to read a novel about Kirito's theory on how to fully integrate the human mind into the game. Sheesh.

Normally I don't review things unless I finish them, but when I hit the "fetch me a coffee Kirito" mission from the teacher, I was like "Oh gee, bet nothing untoward will happen to Asuna in the time I'm gone." It was so obvious, I could see the writing on the wall from a mile away. So I quit, I can't handle this dragging out anymore.

You fail to make a good NTR, when you have me wanting to root for the cuck.

This is the best game in the NTR genre in my opinion. Even in the pause menu, you can see what happens to the main character if she is not around.. The only thing I regret is that I didn't wait for her to come out completely to play the final version. There would be more such games with good and most importantly not boring gameplay and plot.. The game keeps you in suspense all the time. Just the best, I hope the author will finish it soon, I will even be glad of the third part!!

This is my first review in this site so it might not be relevant.

Part 1 was great NTR CGs, gameplay is just unlocking type scenes. Story it's sad to say very no consistent.

Part 2 was great NTR CGs, gameplay is not likable. I like the Anxiety Meter makes you wander around the map and look for sub events. The problem is what is the point of the Anxiety meter if you are forced to progress linearly. In my opinion it would be great to have some freedom.

My suggestion is make that players can move freely and not forced interaction. Like not make the player tied by the time. Let the players play on there own pace of the events. This will also give you alot of NTR moments as this make Inoda makes move on Asuna while the player are busy exploring the world. Now this will make the status camera relevant, and will make alot of anxiety producing moments in the story. Probably make it so that while Inoda makes move Asuna lust go up. Then when lust is high enough the Asuna fucking happens. right not the Status cam, Lust Counter, Anxiety Meter. Is too useless.

This might change in the future great work. Will the try the next update.

FIRST PART is ★ ★ ★ ★ for me. Acceptable levels of grind and consistent, satisfying progress in the corruption of the main heroine ("Asuna", who you could rename in this Part 1). And a unique twist to the game engine.

SECOND PART is a single ★ for me. It kicks off as an ambitious "reboot" of Part 1 by adding a ton of new mechanics, reworking the assets, and map. Good, right? Wrong . Here more is less, and much more is much more less. After 2 HOURS only seeing a brief boob fondling cutscene between two gals in a tub is Omega-level grinding.

I checked out of the experience altogether (rare in my case). I downloaded the "Save" for Part 2 to see the animations. There's some good stuff in there, but the game and character cast now feels bloated and slow (like happens to many promising games here in this platform - cough... Cyberslayers... cough... Twisted Memories... cough cough....) You've been warned

Absolutely a fantastic game, but the developer ruins it trying to make it more than it is. The scenes are above average, the dialog is tolerable (which for a porn game is a win), the plot is cliche but a cliche well done.

Now the game ruins it by the pacing of everything, and how long it takes. I get it, he is trying to build tension and give a background and reason to make it more enticing, but its way way way too long, you can easily spend 7h without getting to the "good" part of the game in the seccond part, and that for me is unnaceptable. He also adds a lot of different mechanics and severely underultilise them, making the game feel bloated.

Not to mention that when things start happening in this game, it breaks everything he was building, because instead of moving too slowly, things move in lightspeed.

A amazing game ruined by pretentiousness.

Genuinely baffled to see all the 5*s. Sure if you based 100% of your rating on the art/animations I can see that being the case, but how do you guys just ignore the boring as hell gameplay, awful character interactions , god awful character development, and the awful writing? I'm being serious when I say you could find someone doing those four things better in a A/B/O fanfic on Wattpad. That shouldn't even be possible but here we are.

The epitome of "Just unlock and watch the gallery instead".

My heart always bump when I know something happen with Asuna, but it felt crazy to me because I really want to know what really happen.
Too bad Kirito is clueless.
This game is top tier to my personal. I play the first part only for the sex scene but in the second one, I really took a time to read the text. The second one absolutely what I really looking into. Hope this game will continue.

10/10 NTR
10/10 Feel bad for Kirito