VN - Ren'Py - Completed - The Concentration of Lust [Final] [Meepower]

Tl;Dr : not worth your time at all.

Details:
While the game art is interesting and its renpy, you expect a game with a story mostly, but it isnt. you constantly have to do a mini game memories and probably you'll spend most time doing so. I havent reach the sex scene as the puzzle was a big turn down, not only it straight up hard that require your brain power, but it also takes a long time. if you kill the enemy in 10 turns, means you have to do 20 of the mini game.

Pros :
+good art

Cons :
-annoying mini game and there's no way to avoid it and it will be the majority of the game.

The game would've been better if it wasn't mostly just dialogue im only giving it 2 stars for the cg art, the combat makes it worse since theres so much stuff to keep track (the correct orbs). You pretty much have to have good memory and track of things (which I don't) or else you're going to have a rough time playing this game. There's better options out there people don't bother trying this game. (You can if you want but take my warning.)

Just to get my feelings out of the way: throw this game in the trash. I don't even usually review games but this one annoyed me so much i had to.

With that sorted onto the more objective reviewing.
Pros: Art -The art and artsyle is in general great and i guess that's about it.

Cons: Writing - Never have I ever before seen such monotonous and repetitive history telling. It takes ages to go from one battle section to the other with hundreds of passages that could be summarised into a few senteces. Characters keep saying the same things over and over just with different words, it's insanity. Also (and i understand this is a porn game and normally a good plot is not it's forte) the characters seem like a bunch of children from a childrens book, with their drives being completely dumb and their actions barely understandable. Gonzo porn has better acting than these characters have a personality.
Gameplay - This part completely kills the game. This alone should take the game to 0 stars but i don't think i can give that rating. The fights take forever, and are mostly bullshit. The game is hard, yes and that shouldn't be too bad, but when you have moves that literally double the duration of a fight (the ones that give the enemy two turns FOR THE REST OF THE FIGHT) it becames a question of "did you manage to counter it? No? Restart the fight". Maybe you are a god at these times of game and doesn't care about taking more turns, but i don't think even someone that's fairly above the normal person in terms of concetration and perception could be expected to be completely constant over several DOZENS of turns doing the same complicated and laggy click ball game. Also, the Master of all spells, but has a lot of restrictions on his own spells and has to drink a fucking mana potion after casting 2-3 spells while his opponents get to cast whatever the fuck they want constantly without any drawbacks? Classic.
Edit: The CG - I almost forgot about it. Because it's one click, it's one image for one click of duration and it's not even the same artstyle as the rest of the game, it's not bad art mind you, but it's also not as good as the characters portraits and it's just ridiculous for how low effort the scene in general is.

Overrall: Garbage, but i love the art (not the CG art, although again it's not bad). Put it in a decent game and you might have a great piece. Everything else throw it in an incinerator.

Let's start with the Positive:

The art is good.

The story has some good points.



Now onto the Bad:

The story sections go on longer than they should. Multiple times I was ready for a fight to start (because it seemed natural at the time,) but then they would continue to talk for over 100 words longer. Everyone here felt like fighting was the last thing they wanted to do, despite them saying they wanted to do exactly that.

The art (for as good as it is,) is very sparse. There are 8 H-"scenes" that are 1 CG with a combined line count of less than 50. Besides the scenes, everyone is 2-4 poses.

The gameplay is extremely slow, and without an exploit the game is extremely difficult with even the first proper enemy doubling their actions if you fail 1 event. The length is worsened by the startup to every single move that lasts for a long time (a blessing due to the exploit, but you shouldn't judge game design based on exploits.) Events also fail completely if you miss 1 orb, leaving no room for failure. Enemies also have a lot of health that takes 10 turns (20 events) on a good run to defeat, worsened if you happen to fail the double turn attacks (which are permanent) and have to deal with 2 enemy attacks each time.

There is no official cheat mode to make it easier for people wanting to enjoy the story, and I would not have finished it if not for an exploit I found here. keksx4 found one that allows you to pick the orbs by holding control while the orbs are green still. This drastically cuts down on play time.

The Fixes:
The story needs to escalate the conflict with each character more consistently, maybe allow some exposition after the fight instead of front-loading it all.
The gameplay could use an easy mode that cuts the enemies health to a quarter. This would allow people not extremely good at this game to be able to enjoy it.
The fights need better risk reward. Some powerful spells that are easy but expensive, and some that are hard but cheap would help give more strategy to what spell you pick.
Some debuffs and buffs that you could apply would also help the battles feel better instead of all spells being damage, shield, or heal. Buffs should also have a time limit or a way to remove it. As it is, if you fail to stop a double attack buff in the first half of the fight, you should just give up and restart as it would take less time due to how many attack you will receive.

I can see a good game in there, but it is marred by all the bloat and seemingly missing parts.

This is my second time writing the Fixes as I accidentally clicked off, so I sped through it a bit.

- Decent CGs (Backgrounds and characters).
- Story is... well it's a story.

Could have been a good afternoon game 'n goon session™ but the fights take ages to complete and one doesn't have enough blood in their body to keep the upstairs and downstairs department going.