RPGM [Translation Request] Holy Phantom Masked Princess Aurora Crystal and the Displaced Mechanical Paradise (RJ01496118) [Heiban no Sekai]

[Chefkiss]

A Simple review:
Having played it, I think the game overall didn't live up to expectations. All the actual gameplay aspects such as combat, progression and exploration are utterly bare-bones, but at least it's easy to avoid nearly all fights and just head straight for the next boss.

With the exception of the Hypno Visor and Interference Collar, there is virtually zero sexy content which occurs during combat. Not even combat restraint states. So this is definitely not a "battle-fuck" type of game.

The vast majority of the sexy stuff are game over scenes which requires the player to intentionally lose battles to access (thankfully there is a "surrender" type skill). However, this is mitigated by the recollection room having a feature to force unlock every event.

Illustration art is where the game shines, and I think this compensates for the lackluster gameplay. The scenarios are interesting, with most of them referencing popular fetish illustration tropes, and the writing/translation is worthwhile in spite of being machine translated.

I still recommend this game overall. Since this is the developer's first game, they're forgiven for not being more ambitious with the gameplay. My expectations remain high for the sequel which gets teased at the end of the playthrough.

 

[Idkmanman#]

any game like this that can wear the enemy clothes? cause no tags about it.

 

[azaa2]

A Simple review:

I agree with you, this is more or less my thoughts as well, although I might be a little more critical of it.
The gameplay is pretty much missing, to not call it padding.
As there is zero character progression, there is no point in fighting except if you plan to lose.
The game tells you at the start to not abuse your transformation (because it affects unlocking some scenes or something? I haven't checked if being transformed block the Brainwashing visor or Interference collar effects), but it merely makes the fights even more of a chore.
Or perhaps they intend you to lose by accident by not playing untransformed?
But the fights have also little difficulty. The sequence where you're in your restrained transformation is a good example, because you can still win fights with ease. It's also a shame the Combatant form or even the Brainwashing visor doesn't affect your battle prowess.
You can probably reach the good ending in 15 minutes or so, which then unlock the Crystal Burst skill in new game+, allowing you to one shot most undesired battles.
Or you could also just access the reminiscence room at the first occasion (after the second fight of the game) and unlock everything. You'll miss out on the playable bad end sequences, but aren't very good either (talk to some NPC and it's over).

The exploration is the same.
The mapping itself is what it is (it's supposed to be some sort of otherworldly dungeon, so it doesn't matter if it lacks cohesion a bit) but there is zero point in exploring. No chests outside of the first zone (and all those give currency which you can get in battle, currency which is also pointless considering the lack of character progression and difficulty) and some lore here and there, if you care enough.
Enemies don't react to you as you pass by them.
Special mention for the optional boss at the end: You need a password to access it, which is a 4-digit number found in some totally unrelated log (one about a mechanical combatant I believe). As you got no easy way to check the logs you've seen, you either have to bruteforce the password, cheat in some way (for example, the password is included in the game's readme, they most likely realised it was an issue) or pay attention in your next playthrough and search thoroughly (but do you really want to inflict it upon yourself?). And, in my opinion, despite all the logs teasing this boss, I found it to be a letdown (both the fight and the scene unlocked by losing).

There are more issues I have with this game, I won't go through everything or it won't end. The Metal Head enemy for example. Great scene. The heroine looks pretty much done for. The scene ends and... she is suddenly fine? She just happens to have grown a dick. It could have been done way better in my opinion.

Having played RJ01513554 not that long ago, I think this game would be way better if they went with a similar approach: Drop the RPG Maker combat entirely, slap an A-RPG plugin on it and call it a day. It would have made the game more interesting than going from point A to point B.

I also discussed it with my translation teammate: We suspect that the system they used to support Japanese and Chinese text is potentially a hassle to work with. It seems they developped their own instead of using an existing plugin to load text from an external CSV table or whatever.
So you got those big "Plot" text files in the CHI and JAP folders (in www/data), which also contains scripting code (to check if the heroine is futa or not for example), which was a pain to deal with during the translation, so I can't imagine during development (in fact, one of those dialog was missing in the base version and it caused the game to crash, it took us a while to figure it out).
It also results in the RPG Maker events to be pretty much full of script. They can't do a simple "Show Text" command to have a character speaking, instead they have to do something like "play this plot file, section 2". And for simple one liners, they have this kind of mess where they're forced to send both chinese and japanese strings via script commands at once.

Spoiler: Screenshot from some events of the first map, in our translation software

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Anyway, the problem is it's not flexible at all. If something breaks, you lose time figuring what broke. If they want to add support for a 3rd language (english for example?), you can't without manually editing all those commands to add the extra english line.

That's all for the rant.
I will still look forward to the next game, hopefully the dev team will get good feedback and learn from their mistake.

any game like this that can wear the enemy clothes? cause no tags about it.

I can't think of many off the top of my head. If someone has recommendations, I'm interested too.
I can only think of Bad Ends from ochigan, which has one sequence of this kind (Old and short game but great. Thread link with the translation further below).
There is Hasumi 2 (Mermaiden, RJ268920), sort of. A great game too. My friend also got reminded of Hasumi 1 (Tales of Undercrust, RJ212896) playing this game. I don't remember it having what you're asking for but it's still worth playing in my opinion.

 

[KuroYuuki21]

+1

 

[Chefkiss]

any game like this that can wear the enemy clothes? cause no tags about it.

First that comes to mind is

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(doesn't have its own F95 thread from what I can see, but since it's the same dev as Swan Song of the White Angels, it's discussed in that thread).

A far better example is Escape Fatal which I highly recommend in spite of its slightly lackluster gameplay. The thread does have an english MTL download, if you look in the replies.

 

[ranashadow]

Theres also the games done by NiceFlat. He does a fair few hypnosis/brainwash and evil fall games

 

[ShadowHunter69]

+1