IMPORTANT EDIT per Review/Rating Rules: This review is from 2019 and no longer reflects this game in an objective manner as it is no longer maintained as an actual game project. Please play a version older than 2020 for this review to be relevant or you will be very disappointed. Thank you for your understanding and apologies for any inconvenience. Rating has been left untouched as a reminder of the original state of the game, as well as the review itself, and should only be used for archiving purposes.
Pre-review summary
You play as Ethan, a 19-year-old apprentice from the Eternal Fire dojo trying to rescue his master and captive friends from a crew of jailers with various twisted personalities. Little does Ethan know how insane the female jailers he's about to face are and what he got himself into...
Story and originality (80 out of 100)
The plot is solid but has some quirks. It is still addictive and the characters - including the jailers - have an attaching touch to them. The grammar and typos also lower the score, but this is well above your average reverse-save-the-princess game. Being able to pick a gender would have made the originality skyrocket as it is still rare in RPG Maker games, but it would also have required a lot of additional dialogue and scenes based on gender, which, let's keep it obvious here, really isn't easy to do.
Graphics (100 out of 100)
(No sound output here so leaving this to other reviewers)
The sprites are nice. A lot of effort was put in the anime/western hybrid CG and layering, and even the character "stands" instead of typical faces. Scenes are really well done and while there is very minimal censorship at (only) one point, the game gets a full 100 here.
Playability (90 out of 100)
Relatively straightforward and simple to play, fights are intended to be hard and reward you if you lose, allowing you to keep trying and still get loot, XP and gold. Being able to save everywhere is a major plus but the inherent performance quirk with a lot of saves (you'll need them!) that comes with RMVX Ace damages the playability. Workaround: If you don't already know that, keep your saves in a folder, compress them or rename them; compression is recommended since the savedata format is easy to compress. Don't keep more than 2 or 3 saves active and you'll be fine, just make sure you can tell where the others are... and name them.
Replay value (100 out of 100)
Don't expect to breeze through this game, as mentioned above, it is not meant for speedruns but dedicated
masochists players
. Count a minimum of 20 hours as of 1.12.1 to unlock most content, which will still require you to replay a lot and still have fun. The battle ranking system adds to originality and you'll rarely run out of things to do (or avoid) with quests, traps, plot dead ends and whatnot.
Bugs (70 out of 100)
Software without bugs is like water without hydrogen, you're bound to find some no matter how good the devs are. While the two-man team tries their best to fix them fairly fast, there's still a lot to work on. Still, this doesn't ruin experience nor cause critical issues.
Overall rating: 5 stars (Excellent)
Dedication, update frequency and content quality (there's quantity on top) all make this game worthy of your time. Even if you don't like the genre, you might be in for some surprises... and maybe some serious all-nighters, so make sure you keep track of time.
Final call (review closure)
Only allowing bias here, I decided to rate this game a full 5 stars in spite of Ethan not being... a perverted goody two-shoes
heroine. We're still striving to find such games, but the audience isn't all that big. While many of us love strong girls - yes, this includes masochist girls - this isn't necessarily a big audience.
Thanks for taking the time to read this review, hopefully it was constructive enough!