STORY
This fantasy story focuses on a guy in an extremely enviable situation. He's the new eligible bachelor in a town full of hot women. To top it off even the goddesses themselves are rooting for him to get with the ladies. While I do like the central location and good samaritanism you get into over the course of play, I never like it when an adult story features gods and demons pushing the horny protagonist along his destined journey.
The stories of the women in the game vary in quality, and some feel more complete than others. Akane's are the most central to the goings on of the plot, while Haru feels a bit tacked onto her plot, and Raylene really doesn't have much going on besides her relationship to the main character.
My biggest gripe is that while there is very much is a climax to the story, it's more of a roman candle than a fireworks show. The game's conclusion is a bit lacking, and only one of the main character's relationships in the game has a truly satisfying conclusion.
Normally I'm not a big fan of fantasy in adult entertainment. I don't think pointy ears are a turn on, the characters and worlds are far removed from our usual experiences, and things like lore dumps or combat tend to get away from the main point of the experience. Town of Passion avoids most of these problems by rooting the world in more familiar domestic experiences rather than those of knights and wizards, and there's not a huge focus on combat or violence.
The story is pretty corny, but it serves its purpose. My biggest disappointment is how shallow most non-story interactions with the characters are. Though we see the characters move around town as the day progresses, their inner lives are a bit more simplistic. Once you've progressed through a characters stories they're pretty much stuck going through the motions with nothing new to do, until you get costumes involved anyhow.
GAMEPLAY
Many of the common adult RPG Maker foibles are avoided in Town of Passion. First off the core RPG Maker combat system is nowhere to be seen, thank goodness. The game doesn't feel like a visual novel that was forced into RPG Maker. The maps in the game are some of the better ones I've seen in RPG Maker games. There's a reasonable amount of interaction per tile in the game. Dungeons which you're only expected to traverse once might be a bit more bland and simple, but locations you see regularly aren't overly large, and over the course of the game you'll be doing something worthwhile nearly everywhere.
No game is perfect though, and Town of Passion is no exception. There's a stat system in play here that has more in common with dating sims than it does RPGs. Combined with the day/night cycle in play it's abundantly clear the game was inspired by the genre, directly or not, but the implementation here is half baked to say the least. In a good dating sim you're making decisions about what you want to work on based on the various characters and stories going on, and you have to weigh your options carefully. While there's some optimization to be done in ToP in order to see as much as possible as soon as possible, the stakes at play are incredibly low. For those wanting to just see dirty pictures and read the story that's not a problem, but for those who want an interesting game the stat system just feels like a tedious grind. Thankfully your stats max out far before the end of the game and they stop mattering entirely, but that just goes to highly how pointless and shallow the system is. They serve as more of a key to the game's progress rather than a central component of gameplay, and most of the time any particular step unlocks a single "door" of progress. There's a whole menu to show you your stats, and for most of the game you won't need to check it because you know they're maxed out. If this entire system had been excesized and you had to spend that time finding or earning the money for items instead there would be no difference.
Exploration and puzzle solving fare a bit better. None of it will blow your mind or anything, but ToP does a good job of not harping on any one particular kind of challenge for too long, at least without introducing some new gimmick to keep it fresh. You can really see the limits of RPG Maker in the more action oriented challenges unfortunately, but luckily none of them are frustrating at least.
PRESENTATION
The map tiles and character sprites all do their job. There's not an overaching vision to the style at play, but it doesn't feel like a horrible mishmash of assets at least.
The character designs are nice and cartoony. There's obvious anime influence at work here, but the characters don't look like someone just badly imitating a particular well known art style. If there's any problem with designs it's that some characters look like they were designed by someone else, or after the developer's style had changed during the course of production. The main women all seem to belong to the same world, but some of the lesser NPCs in town don't quite fit with them.
While each character does get a set of portraits that change based on their current costume, most of the drawings are saved for, what else, the sex scenes. These are rendered decently, but the animation is rather remedial. I would have honestly preferred several unique drawings per scene rather than the one pose with basic animation, but oh well.
The style of the characters is fine, as is the way the sex scenes are presented, but I just don't think they're very sexy unfortnately. This is a pretty big flaw for an adult game. None of its horrible or offputting, but most of the time the game doesn't quite reach the finish line visually. I have to give the game its dues, at least it doesn't make use of stock models from Poser of Daz, or worse, art assets ripped from another game.
The music is mostly fine, but the track that plays in most (all?) sex scenes is a bit odd. There's a menacing tone to it that doesn't quite match the events that go along with them.
OVERALL
Town of Passion does a lot of things right, but it also does quite a few core things wrong. There's a decent dirty fantasy story in here with a good setting, well designed maps, and cute art. The pointless and bare bones dating sim inspired mechanics are a waste of time though, and the presentation never quite makes the jump from appealing to sexy. The individual story progressions are fine, but a few characters seem like they were left out cold when it comes to receiving attention from the writer. A stronger conclusion for the main story as well as the main relationships could have helped a lot, as could giving the characters a bit more to do around town to make things feel lively instead of stuck in a rut by the end of the game.
This fantasy story focuses on a guy in an extremely enviable situation. He's the new eligible bachelor in a town full of hot women. To top it off even the goddesses themselves are rooting for him to get with the ladies. While I do like the central location and good samaritanism you get into over the course of play, I never like it when an adult story features gods and demons pushing the horny protagonist along his destined journey.
The stories of the women in the game vary in quality, and some feel more complete than others. Akane's are the most central to the goings on of the plot, while Haru feels a bit tacked onto her plot, and Raylene really doesn't have much going on besides her relationship to the main character.
My biggest gripe is that while there is very much is a climax to the story, it's more of a roman candle than a fireworks show. The game's conclusion is a bit lacking, and only one of the main character's relationships in the game has a truly satisfying conclusion.
Normally I'm not a big fan of fantasy in adult entertainment. I don't think pointy ears are a turn on, the characters and worlds are far removed from our usual experiences, and things like lore dumps or combat tend to get away from the main point of the experience. Town of Passion avoids most of these problems by rooting the world in more familiar domestic experiences rather than those of knights and wizards, and there's not a huge focus on combat or violence.
The story is pretty corny, but it serves its purpose. My biggest disappointment is how shallow most non-story interactions with the characters are. Though we see the characters move around town as the day progresses, their inner lives are a bit more simplistic. Once you've progressed through a characters stories they're pretty much stuck going through the motions with nothing new to do, until you get costumes involved anyhow.
GAMEPLAY
Many of the common adult RPG Maker foibles are avoided in Town of Passion. First off the core RPG Maker combat system is nowhere to be seen, thank goodness. The game doesn't feel like a visual novel that was forced into RPG Maker. The maps in the game are some of the better ones I've seen in RPG Maker games. There's a reasonable amount of interaction per tile in the game. Dungeons which you're only expected to traverse once might be a bit more bland and simple, but locations you see regularly aren't overly large, and over the course of the game you'll be doing something worthwhile nearly everywhere.
No game is perfect though, and Town of Passion is no exception. There's a stat system in play here that has more in common with dating sims than it does RPGs. Combined with the day/night cycle in play it's abundantly clear the game was inspired by the genre, directly or not, but the implementation here is half baked to say the least. In a good dating sim you're making decisions about what you want to work on based on the various characters and stories going on, and you have to weigh your options carefully. While there's some optimization to be done in ToP in order to see as much as possible as soon as possible, the stakes at play are incredibly low. For those wanting to just see dirty pictures and read the story that's not a problem, but for those who want an interesting game the stat system just feels like a tedious grind. Thankfully your stats max out far before the end of the game and they stop mattering entirely, but that just goes to highly how pointless and shallow the system is. They serve as more of a key to the game's progress rather than a central component of gameplay, and most of the time any particular step unlocks a single "door" of progress. There's a whole menu to show you your stats, and for most of the game you won't need to check it because you know they're maxed out. If this entire system had been excesized and you had to spend that time finding or earning the money for items instead there would be no difference.
Exploration and puzzle solving fare a bit better. None of it will blow your mind or anything, but ToP does a good job of not harping on any one particular kind of challenge for too long, at least without introducing some new gimmick to keep it fresh. You can really see the limits of RPG Maker in the more action oriented challenges unfortunately, but luckily none of them are frustrating at least.
PRESENTATION
The map tiles and character sprites all do their job. There's not an overaching vision to the style at play, but it doesn't feel like a horrible mishmash of assets at least.
The character designs are nice and cartoony. There's obvious anime influence at work here, but the characters don't look like someone just badly imitating a particular well known art style. If there's any problem with designs it's that some characters look like they were designed by someone else, or after the developer's style had changed during the course of production. The main women all seem to belong to the same world, but some of the lesser NPCs in town don't quite fit with them.
While each character does get a set of portraits that change based on their current costume, most of the drawings are saved for, what else, the sex scenes. These are rendered decently, but the animation is rather remedial. I would have honestly preferred several unique drawings per scene rather than the one pose with basic animation, but oh well.
The style of the characters is fine, as is the way the sex scenes are presented, but I just don't think they're very sexy unfortnately. This is a pretty big flaw for an adult game. None of its horrible or offputting, but most of the time the game doesn't quite reach the finish line visually. I have to give the game its dues, at least it doesn't make use of stock models from Poser of Daz, or worse, art assets ripped from another game.
The music is mostly fine, but the track that plays in most (all?) sex scenes is a bit odd. There's a menacing tone to it that doesn't quite match the events that go along with them.
OVERALL
Town of Passion does a lot of things right, but it also does quite a few core things wrong. There's a decent dirty fantasy story in here with a good setting, well designed maps, and cute art. The pointless and bare bones dating sim inspired mechanics are a waste of time though, and the presentation never quite makes the jump from appealing to sexy. The individual story progressions are fine, but a few characters seem like they were left out cold when it comes to receiving attention from the writer. A stronger conclusion for the main story as well as the main relationships could have helped a lot, as could giving the characters a bit more to do around town to make things feel lively instead of stuck in a rut by the end of the game.
