Reviewed Version of the Game: V2.12b + DLC
The first thing that needs to be established about this game is that this is a clone of the PvZ Tower Defense style games. Only instead of plants, you're using cute youkai girls for the most part. The chibis are pretty cute in my opinion. Aside from that, the Hentai part is mostly tacked on and not a part of the direct gameplay beyond needing to first unlock each girl (by defeating their boss-fights) and then raising their bond-level to 3 (by bringing them in battle and performing certain actions, or by feeding them food).
As such, it's not an exaggeration to say that this is a game with Hentai in it, rather than a proper hentai game. You can literally play it from start to finish and not watch a single scene unless you click the pulsing hearts at the top right corner of each girl's image, or visit the gallery once the scenes are unlocked.
Moving on, the game doesn't have much of a story, and because of that, the girls don't have much of an established personality. The devs tried to give them some flavor, like how the fox-girl has some more top vibes and whatnot... but there's not much of it. Which is actually great because the translation quality is weak. It's not MTL or anything like that, but it was clearly done by someone with a weak grasp of the English language. Instead of issues with he/she or whatnot, you instead have stuff like your/you're and other such lovely things.
Luckily, it never gets bad enough to be a problem when it comes to things like skill or unit descriptions, so it doesn't affect the gameplay. Also, as I said, there's not much of a story, and the dialog in the H-scenes is pretty generic porn plot stuff that loosely references the context of what's going on.
Beyond that, the art is gorgeous, though obviously, mileage will vary based on personal tastes here. More importantly, all the scenes are animated, and they're decently long. Each girl has a single scene, and they're all pretty vanilla, but there's enough variation in position and whatnot that it's pretty entertaining to go through them all. 10/10 in this category.
Moving on. The gameplay is what you'd expect from this type of game. You have stages, each with multiple waves of enemies, and all of them are standard with 5 lanes that head towards the protagonist. You deploy units on the field to attack and/or block the enemy from approaching and you win by defeating all enemy units, or beating the boss in the final wave in the case of boss stages. Unlike PvZ games, there are basically no special gimmicks on the stages like water-lanes or whatnot, so don't expect any variety in the gameplay from that.
Aside from the units you use, the MC can also case some spells, using a resource called souls, which accumulates by 1per second, plus you get some when your units defeat enemy units. Spells also have cooldowns of various lengths, depending on the spells, and while two spells are locked and have specific functions, two can be changed into whatever you want once you unlock more spells. Sadly, there's only 6 spells to choose from, and one of them is an extremely overpowered, decently cheap, wide-AoE healing spell that also removes debuffs from your units. You'll be hard pressed to want to use anything else once you get this one... at least on Normal. though you do get it stupidly late in the game.
Getting back to the units, they're deployed with a resource called Fragments. You get a starting amount of fragments, and then you get fragments for every unit you kill and a bonus of increasing size after each Wave you complete in a stage. This resource is also what you use to upgrade your units in a stage, because said units do not start at their full potential, especially the youkai girls themselves. There's only one late game unit that can gain fragments from attacks, which I personally haven't tested... but her attack speed as well as her cost and damage indicate that she's less than stellar to use even beyond the issue of needing to hit stuff to generate fragments in the first place.
This leads us to the first and biggest flaw of the game that keeps it from being a genuinely really great game. You get upgrades in batches of 3 cards. At the start of each wave, you get one batch of free upgrades, and you can only select one of them. You have to pay fragments for anything else. Fragment costs increase for almost all upgrades, each time you get a paid upgrade. The only exception is the evolution from Form 1 to Form 2 for youkai girls, which always has a fixed cost. Furthermore, each girl has 3 sets of upgrades beyond the evolution, each are Attack, Attack Speed and Health (and these have 5 levels). On top of that, there's a special upgrade for one of the fixed powers that reduces cooldown from 50s to 40s that's also added in the mix.
The minimal number of units you can have is free, the maximum is 6.
The problem with all this is that with three units, and assuming you took three girls with you and skipped on the barrier unit, then you will have 4 upgrades for each girl and the power upgrade, for a total 13... while you only get 3 per batch, and reshuffling costs fragments outside of the bonus free upgrades for New Waves.
Nothing is more painful than getting 3 health upgrade cards in a row when you seriously need more damage, and of course, if you can't evolve your main DPS into form 2, you can end up in serious shit, at least in the later stages and most boss stages...
What this means is that the most efficient strategy is to focus on just three units, so you maximize the chances of getting the upgrades you actually need. To get the best results, one of those free units should be the Barrier, which only gets HP upgrades and is the only unit you seriously want those upgrades on. This thing is cheap, but takes tons of punishment and you'll absolutely want it in boss fights. You can easily plop it in front of most bosses to block them, and then you only have to worry about their special moves.
This also means that, unless you're playing on casual, and possibly even there since I didn't try that difficulty myself, you're only ever going to bring 2 of the aforementioned youkai girls in stage.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. Beyond the in-stage upgrades, which reset with every stage, you also have out-of stage upgrades for units and one set that's exclusive to the girls. The first is traits, which can be unlocked with the in-game currency. The first set of traits is generally pretty basic, in the form of basic stat bonuses. Each unit has at least three tiers of traits, though the girls, with the exception of two, get 4. Each tier costs more currency to unlock, with the 4th costing a massive 15k... and you definitely want that tier because that tier can completely redefine how a unit plays to an extent.
As an example, the basic archer wolf-girl's Tier 4 traits either give her a massive attack increase with some physical resistance penetration... or, they give her a good attack speed increase, 15% crit-chance, and change her damage type from physical to lightning... and this seems underwhelming at first... but there's a reason why it's not.
Anyway, in total, it takes almost 30k currency to unlock a single girl's tiers, and you will not know in advance if they're any good or not...
On top of that, the girls specifically also get love bonuses, which are % based stat bonuses to health, attack and attack speed, which are based on their bond level. Maximum bond-level is 10, and it gives 50% HP, 20% attack and 10% attack speed. I've only unlocked this for two girls, and it seems to be universal.
How do you increase bond level? Well, either by evolving a girl to form 2, and then using one of the fixed spells to push one copy to tier 3. Only one unit per type can receive this upgrade, and this gives you +5 love points. Then, if you use the second fixed spell, the power stone, on a tier 3 girl, you can unleash her ultimate skill. The first girl in a stage to do that, and only that girl, gets a +10 bonus of love points. So one girl can get 15 points per stage, and all others, if any, will only get 5 at best.
The other method is food, which gives +15 with the worst options, +35 with the medium options, and +70 with a couple of special recipes that you need to unlock and which can only be made with special ingredients that drop from special stages. Luckily, you'll want to grind those special stages a bit anyway because that's how you unlock extra spells and the shops related to them also give you some options of getting normal currency out of them if you want to speed things up.
Btw food? It requires ingredients. Ingredients drop very infrequently, so outside of grinding the aforementioned special dungeons, you'll need to buy them... with the same currency you use to unlock traits. So even more grind.
All in all, this system encourages you to focus on only 3 units and stick to them, because getting a new unit up to speed is very grindy, and on top of that, you can't really use more than 3 units effectively anyway.
This is further made worse by formations. Formations are a thing you unlock later in game, and they give bonuses based on how you place units of a certain element. Lightning formations, for example, give a bonus to attack speed. Now. Here's the thing... Formations can ALSO be upgraded and also take a ton of money to reach max potential. On top of that, they come with a special ability once upgraded enough. The lightning formation drops lightning bolts semi-randomly every 25 seconds, which are decently AoE, can hit air units (there's only one, and only 2 units can hit it outside of the formation bonus, or one of the spells)... and most importantly, can AoE stun everything except bosses... and it has decent chance TO stun.
Now, remember what I mentioned about the basic wolf-girl? The one you get by default? Yep. She can go lightning. Formations can also overlap. The bonuses you get for them don't stack, as far as I can tell... but their powers do. So if you make 4 columns of wolf-girls with that one trait, you get 6 lightning formations, and each has its own cooldown for the lightning, so you get a LOT of stuns...
Quite frankly, the ONLY units I used were these wolf-girls, the sword girl you unlock after the first real boss fight in stage 1-5 and the barriers which you really can't live without. That's it. You can possibly replace the sword girl with some other girl if you really want too... but it'll be tricky since by the time you get the next girl, you'll have had several opportunities to increase the sword girl's bond levels and traits... so you'd have to grind all over again.
This wouldn't be so bad if the in-stage upgrades weren't absolutely essential. You can't go without evolutions and increase the units traits. Which means that you need to guarantee essential upgrades. This makes bringing 4+ units extremely inefficient... and that's a shame because you could have some fun combos with some of the other girls and these ones.
Even with these flaws, I think the game was genuinely fun to play through. I genuinely think that it's pretty good, though the real score, if I could put it like that, would be more around 3.5 rather than full on 4.
If they solved the way in-stage upgrades work in a way that lets you use 4+ girls and allows for more fun shenanigans than just "spam ALL the archers and some barriers and sword-girls to deal with the few things the archers can't easily kill"... then it'd be a really great game even with the barely there story and the relatively weak translation.
