Well, I finally got around to trying this one out... and the first thing I have to say is that man the difference between GPT 3.5 and GPT 4.0 is damn massive. Playing through this after playing through any game done with the latter is kinda painful, even if the translation is light years better than any other lightly edited MTL out there.
Moving on. Man. Selena is dumb. She has to be in the top 5 dumbest FMCs in hentai... Still. For all that she is dumb, I like the fact that characters in the game call her out on the fact that she's an idiot. It's not just the villain, but also that mage girl that helps her which seriously calls her out on it, and other characters around her basically comment on it in various ways. It's clearly a shock to the system for some of them that someone with her history can be so stupid.
That said, at least what follows after that is fairly logical. Caught in a soul binding magical contract, she has absolutely no choice but to follow the so called dark guild's whims, and the requirement that she dive in the dungeon every day plus serving the mercenaries at night means that she never really has the time to try to just find proper outside help. It's pretty clear that the contract was designed to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Though of course, the situation is made worse by the fact that the people around her happen to all be horny bastards that want to dick her too.
On top of that, the way the ending is worded implies that the seal might have been imperfect from the start and might have been breaking on its own, as when a perfected seal is applied, the dungeon collapses completely. This implies that the original seal was imperfect and that it was only a matter of time until it broke all on its own. It seems to me that the leak in it had nothing to do with the incident with her father in law, and said incident just let her discover what was wrong sooner. If anything, things might have been worse in the long run if things didn't happen this way.
All in all, fairly decent, though not particularly amazing in terms of story.
Though... I'm curious about the endings. So far, there seem to be 2.5 endings? One ending where the party loses to the Final boss and things go bad for everyone yada yada. Then one ending where all four girls leave the village to escape the rumors about them and so on and make a new life elsewhere, with good and bad variations depending on whether any of the girls were pregnant at the time. The ending for Selena is rather meh given that she apparently runs away from her husband and the two never reunite. It's basically a good ending for everyone except Selena herself. Is there anything else? Or is that everything? Is there no ending where Selena actually remains together with her husband?
I haven't tried to have Selena jump on every dick evah or anything of that sort to see what happens if you make things really extreme. The game also doesn't have NG+, which doesn't really motivate me to try another playthrough or anything. Plus, the fact that the husband seems to be away more often than not, and on top of everything, seems to have not been with his wife sexually or even kissed her for YEARS, make me seriously wonder how much he actually loves his wife and daughter. I can accept one of these things, so to speak, but both of them together make him look like a neglectful husband and absentee father. Rin expressing the fact that she barely sees her dad isn't exactly encouraging...
ANYway, moving on. The H. It's... ok. Not bad, not amazing. The art is so-so with very minimal CG variety per scene, and little variety in general, while the scenes themselves are pretty short and simple. The fact that the smut is not particularly special is part of what reduces the replayability, even if the impregnation system and the random element in it would improve said replayability if the scenes were better and if you had some more effort put into the repeatable H. The fact that there's basically nothing for the nightly fucks/orgies/gangbangs is EXTREMELY disappointing and there's very few scenes where 2 girls get fucked together at the same time, in spite of the fact that the game basically implies that it happens a lot more often than that.
The end result is honestly disappointing in terms of H quality. Especially since the H-stats don't seem to do anything? At least, they don't seem too. The escalation of the scenes seems to be strictly related to how deep you've gone in the dungeon and not anything else. Also, the fact that you can't have Selena recruit new mercs while pregnant is massively disappointing too.
Lastly, the gameplay. The gameplay is for the most part nothing special. About the only things that stand out for it is the mercenary group system which gives you 1-2 (maybe 3 if you recruit enough?) party members that act on their own and who's stats and skills depends on the individual members and their respective levels and the stun gauge. You can't control these guys, but there's some level of strategy involved in terms of how you organize them and what skills you select and whatnot. Furthermore, attacks start affecting them from the first guy and start killing them one by one, so you can put a guy with high HP first (high for these guys anyway), to improve the group's staying power, especially once you get access to healing... even if said access is pretty limited.
The stun gauge is fun too, even if not all enemies have it. I don't remember seeing this in any other H-game... but it's possible that it's a pretty rare. Basically, as you do damage to enemies, they also accumulate stun, and once enough is accumulated, the enemy gets stunned for a turn. The end result is that you can manipulate the battle with stuns based on hitting enemies, along with whatever opportunities are given to you by the mercenary meat shields.
All in all, while the rare/unique elements to the combat aren't many, there's enough of it to keep things interesting, at least for me. I finished the game with 4 mercenaries recruited, not counting then 4 that the game pushes you to get via the tutorial, and it's debatable if I even needed this many. At least on Normal.
Also, I'm confused, the dlsite description says this:
"- Of course there is a pregnancy bonus!
Knock up your favorite heroine and continue enhancing!"
What does this mean? I only had a couple of births happen for most girls, and I didn't see anything come of it? Was there something supposed to happen? Are you supposed to get some money for the birth? Mats? Stats for the merc that impregnated a girl successfully? What?
This bit is confusing too.
" Enhance mercenaries even after you make a contract with them! "
Is there some system to improve the merc stats beyond having them level up in the dungeon?
I'm a tad confused. XD