Well, this is one game that gave a LOT of mixed feelings. It has good and bad things to it, and I spent enough time with it that I think it deserves me having to suffer through the shitty review window to type something up for it.
First of all, I want to say that I'd rate this 3.5 out of 5 if I could and that the version I played was the latest available at the time, 1.12+DLC.
Now, let's start with the game's issues:
First issue, and the biggest one of it all, is the grind. Boy is there a LOT of grinding in this game... Like. Holy crap there seems to be no end to it. There's multiple grinds too, which make it worse.
1. Level grinding. It's an RPG, of course the characters have levels. They start at level 1, and can go up to 99. All characters get skills up to level 50. Jiao is special and gets more skills at level 60. Everything after that is just pure stats... except....
2. Stats from levels are pretty weak on all aspects. Luckily, you have the ability to collect Ki, which can be used to increase all stats including HP and MP. Ki is collected through H events, which should be great, right?
Wrong. You have zero repeatable H-events until the very end-game... with one exception, combat rape and combat defeat. Jiao can use her H-skills to collect Ki from specific enemies under certain conditions... but even with the level 60 skill, that's still just 300 Ki per encounter... a pitiful amount.
The best source of Ki is going with Jiao solo to "Arousal Monsters", getting her defeated and collecting the result Ki from the defeat event. The amount of Ki collected grows after a while up to 10k and you get another 8k from eggs she gives birth too, netting you 18k per run, and a run will, with Combat-H disabled, take ~45 seconds.
Sounds decent... except, you need 5k Ki for 50 points of stats, and, unless you're really good at the game, and lucky, and do some save scumming, you need ~1500-2000 Def and MDef on all 4 main characters to get through Chapter 7 and preferably around 3000 Attack and M.Attack so combat doesn't take fucking forever, because enemies have absurd Health pools and some even have healing and regeneration. On top of that, some of those encounters throw around AoE skills like they're candy, which turns a lot of fights into pure stat checks.
So, per character, just to be able to finish Chapter 7 comfortably, you need ~100k Ki, since you'll want to add in some Agi (affects turn order) + HP and MP as well, and maybe luck too even though I haven't seen the effects of upping that stat much. It's supposed to affect Crit, I think, but it doesn't seem to work properly.
You'll likely need more than that for Jiao, because before Chapter7's end, during the Free Roam period, if not from Chapter 6, you need to beat a certain boss that has 666000 HP. For that, I honestly recommend an attack stat of around 4.5k, the Sword Master's Legacy Item and the title that lets you start with 100 TP so you can spam the light attack and kill it in 2-4 attacks.
Luckily, the Dev seems to have realized how absurd this grind is, to some extent, and at the end of Chapter 7, during a certain event, as long as you're on the real ending route, you get rewarded with literally 100 mil Ki... enough to pretty much max-out every stat ever if you want too.
For the record, ~4k Def and M.Def will make any character essentially invincible to everything except instant death effects, which some bosses have.
Jiao with 9999 Attack, the max for the stat, will pretty much one-shot everything too with her skills, so there's that as well.
However, we get to the next grind, the worst of them all...
3. The Money and Materials grind. Like all RPGs there's money and stuff you can buy with it. You can also upgrade the main weapons and armors of the main characters. I will tell you flat out that this is a trap. Even at max level, none of them provide even as much as 200 in any stat. Weapon and armor upgrades are a trap, a time-sink, and a complete waste of your time.
This is because enemies do NOT drop money and barely drop upgrade mats. Some may drop potions and whatnot, but that's barely a drop in the bucket in terms of income. The real source of income is in theory repeatable quests and some not-so-repeatable quests. However, the rewards are absolutely pitiful, and on top of that, you have to go kill the monsters, go back to the guild to get the rewards, go back and kill monsters again... repeat until you're sick of it and barely get anything out of it.
It's a terrible system that just doesn't work well in practice.
This is made worse by the fact there's a money exchange for the rewards (Silver and Gold Ingots, Gems of 3 levels, Artifacts of 2 levels) and the prices for these things fluctuate every day. Silver prices for example can go as low as 3.8k something, or at least, that's the lowest I've seen it... and if you're unlucky, it can stay at those sorts of prices a long time, essentially fucking you hard in terms of income.
Which is annoying, because there are a bunch of accessories you'll want to buy... unless of course you just stat-grind to he point of invincibility and ignore the money issue for the most part.
Regardless of you handle things, I honestly, genuinely recommend to just cheat stats/money as needed once the grind gets tedious.
Moving on.
Other, less pressing, but still real issues are the pacing of the game, which is pretty bad with the free roam periods not having proper repeatable events and stuff. The H-scenes are also pretty bland in terms of writing and differences. You have 3 girls that are supposed to be very different, and that does show up for the most part... but at the same time, they still always go through more or less the exact same events. The exception is that Jiao gets access to some stuff that the other two don't, like bunny bar scenes, the option to dominate in the S/M club, extra scenes with Xiong and Blue Beard, etc.
The whole red-light district tends to fall pretty flat tbh.
Beyond that though, what's great about this game are the characters. They're perhaps not the most well written characters in the best story ever, but by hentai standards, it's pretty amazing even if it's all a massive power fantasy.
Jiao is a VERY atypical Female protagonist. She loves sex, she's a total slut, but she's also very in control of herself without degenerating into total bitch levels outside of specific scenes. She submits when she feels like it. She literally eats her enemies alive if she feels like it (nothing is shown, but its stated pretty clearly). She's all 'Tentacles are great, they have very potent Ki and they're great food too!' She pervs over men and women alike...
For all that she's a very obvious Power Fantasy character that's been heavily influenced by Xianxia trends and whatnot, she's just fun.
If there's one reason to play this game, then it's absolutely worth it for Jiao alone. Some of the other characters are pretty fun too in their own way, especially Xiong, who's pervy to the point that even Jiao's amazed with what he gets up too. The exchange where she said that he'd be invincible if he put the same kind of dedication into his martial arts, and he replies that he doesn't care about being invincible, but about wanting pussy and ass, hers in particular, was just amazing.
There are NO sexual bad-ends for any of the characters, just a lot of slutification... and in Jiao's case, the change from start and end is really fairly minor. XD
Jeanne and Leanna aren't as interesting. They're closer to typical hentai sloots, especially Jeanne, but they're still pretty ok by most standards.
All in all, I definitely think that this game is worth playing.
However, I definitely don't think it's worth 80$. Maybe 40 if you want to be generous, but that's about it. Especially since as far as I can tell, the DLC isn't even part of the game specifically, just a set of additional scenes you can unlock with the gallery.
