Throbbyさんのレビュー一覧

The story is top-notch, and the translation is very good. Madness is THE theme; even after finishing the game, I'm not entirely sure what was going on--in a good way!--and it keeps you guessing all the way through. Most importantly, it's got genuine emotion in it, if you let yourself feel it, and it's written with such solid characters. The dialogue is good (aside from a few weird translations, like "Wandering around like a fly in ointment"), and I like that the MC has a face. There are great bits where he loses his shit, and even in the moment, he's thinking "Why am I being such a tool!?" The way the Infinite Loop wears him down is spot-on. He's trapped in a nightmare from the start, and his fuzzy-headedness and reactions make sense in context.

Furthermore, the sex and horror are perfectly Cthulhu-esque. You could use all kinds of tags; there's incest, for instance, but it's used for horror effect rather than titillation, mostly. You'll still get off if you're into that, but it's not the driver of the game. The scenes are hot, and do a great job describing how the MC is conflicted, confused, turned-on, and scared, all at once. The mood is incredible, and I really got drawn in, wondering what was going on--and fearing what the answers would be!

The art is great, too. Not perfect: Almost every sex frame is animated, even if it doesn't need it, which can be distracting; sometimes Erisa's boobs seem to change size, and at one point, her face is too small for her head. More consistency would have been good, and maybe smaller boobs, but it's great overall, and the scenes themselves have good variety and are very well-written. The sound design is good too, without the egregious squishing noises of some games, and the voice-acting was spot-on.

Just enough time for one more thumbs-up. Bought the game, and the story path I was on just... soft-locked. I managed to contact the makers, and just when I was about to give up... they got back to me! It took almost a month for them to respond, but once we were corresponding, they squashed the bug in less than a week, and directly sent me the updated file to boot. Really solid customer service, there! (The game has since been updated too!)

I took it slow, really enjoyed it, and give it five stars.

There's so much to like here. Solid story, characters with some depth, a good combat system, and choices that actually matter.

Sengoku Slave is a vengeance story; a princess is enslaved as her lands are invaded, and you have to re-gather your companions and free your people.

Simple set-up, but better than it sounds. For an H-RPG, the game does a great job of showing the consequences of your actions and making the NPCs feel real. Every time I started to wince, the game surprised me; Yotaro is a great example. At first glance, he looks like a borderline-racist caricature; he wound up being one of my favorite PCs, with a good story and some fantastic lines: "I am sad as a hole in the butt that I will not be able to see you." Awesome!

The story is solid; while it gets predictable toward the end, most of the game keeps things morally ambiguous enough to keep you guessing. Moreover, the choices matter; dialogue and events can change based on what you do - and it's neat to see how the after-game reflects that. I was a little disappointed in the ending, but only because I was hoping for something fresher from this stellar game.

There are some bugs - if an NPC moves when you speak to them, do NOT talk to them again; if they try to move into a blocked square, the game soft-locks. And don't flee from spider-ambushes! Translation is mostly good, with a few pronoun mis-cues or slightly off wording; the meaning is always clear. Unfortunately, there are some untranslated things - mostly "examine" text.

Gameplay is good; the abilities ramp up at a good rate, and you can examine a lot of things, which I appreciate. A low point is the lack of danger; fights aren't easy, but there are healing spots everywhere, and it rarely feels like you're in danger. But it's not grindy, and I didn't get bored. Also, bonus points for changing dialogue for NPCs as the game progresses.

H-stuff: Animation is a little amateurish, but the art is decent, and the writing is very good. Music is awesome. Voice-acting isn't great; it sounds so familiar that I'm pretty sure it's the same stock squeaks and moans that have been in various low-budget games since 2012.

Last thing: I *really* like how you're not forced into slutty or pure routes. After the first act, you have total control over your characters' actions, and it's all well-written enough to sound plausible.

It's a winner. P.S. Prostitute Migoro. Hilarious.

This game is huge, well-made, and genuinely interesting. There are a ridiculous number of plots and side-quests and branching paths, and the maker did an incredible job (mostly) keeping you from breaking the game or closing off plot avenues unwittingly.

So, the game: Good mechanics. You have health, mana, and energy, all of which need to be managed. No energy means no attacking, no mana means no spells, no health means slow movement.

You mostly travel by yourself, but occasionally have a companion; there's a cool mechanic where your buddy doesn't fight independently, but rather boosts your stats in specific ways and gives access to certain abilities. The choices you make and people you meet determine which paths are available to you, and which "endings" you can reach - more on that later!

Good stufF: Tons of enemies, a fun gallery system (the in-game arena), decent translation, adequate-or-better story, and lots to do. The game is complex enough that you really need to explore, but not so byzantine that you *need* a walkthrough. Just wandering around, paying attention to what people say, and exploring will find you most of the goodies. You can also play pure or not, as you like; there's a fun curse that you can only break by being slutty, but you can power through and stay virginal if you want.

H-stuff is really, really good; the more "experience" you get, the more you're affected by those types of attacks. Great animations, too!

Problems: The magic hitbox is often terrible. The animation will appear in one place, but actually hit farther away than is indicated; this means a lot of trial-and-error work when you get new spells. Also, there are a number of "endings" that aren't actually ENDS, which confused the hell out of me the first time through. The only mutually-exclusive endings I can recall are the main quest ones; other ones let you keep playing - but some of those aren't "persistent," making changes in the game world, which is a bummer. Also, it's possible to lock yourself out of one of the endings early on (which I did); there ARE a few things that you may want a walkthrough for.

And quibbles: Time passes too quickly between bouts in the arena, and double-penetration anal/mouth attacks aren't counted properly for experience or stats.

All in all, this is an amazing game. I keep going back to it, both to play and to "play."

Way, way back, I bought this through a guest log-in; at some point, I lost the file, and since I had an account by then, I went ahead and bought it again. It's that good.

Almost every aspect of this game is spectacular. The gameplay is challenging and interesting enough that it'd be fun even without hentai; there are a number of difficulty modes, ramping up from super-easy to extremely hard. Certain enemy attacks damage Iris's clothes, destroying her blouse, skirt, or panties, and you can see her increasing embarrassment as she's stripped, shown by her expression in an on-screen portrait. When you run out of life, on-screen enemies will ravish Iris until you choose to continue or view the game-over animation--and every one of those is detailed, varied, and beautiful. One nice touch is that there are up to six possible animations for (almost) every enemy, reflecting Iris's state of undress when you lost. What's particularly nice is that the animations aren't just the same loop with different clothes; some are significantly different depending on what Iris is wearing. Even better, they're not just a simple repeating loop, but have random voice-acting and motion cycles incorporated. There are a couple of ryona options, too; if you let her get pummeled before viewing the game-over screen, some enemies have a second, beat-up-Iris set of animations.

Literally the only legit complaint I have is that the tall grass in Stage II obscures some of the on-screen action after you've lost; I would gripe that there's no English translation, but that's just icing on the cake for a game like this.

Bottom line is that if you like side-scrollers, some ryona, tentacle/monster/zombie/ghost/weirdo/devil-dog/plant/insect rape, and good gameplay, this is a 100% winner. Buy it at full price, just to give the maker his due!

I'm not going to write a terribly detailed review, 'cause I'm late to this party, and my blurb is gonna be buried behind pages of others, and likely never read.

But in the off-chance that someone DOES find this and read it, I have to sing the praises of this game!

First off, the game is now fully translated--and pretty well. There are a few bobbles with the translation, but nothing that keeps you from completing--or enjoying!--the game. The ONLY thing that I'd caution is that there are a couple of descriptions in peoples' papers that don't match the portrait; in particular, there's a man with green hair who is described as having "blond wavy hair" on his ID. Just a heads-up; until you know all the particulars, there are going to be a few times where you look at the person, look at the ID, and the two just don't match, yet the computer thinks they do.

Story is good, or at least serviceable. Dialogue is nice, art is good, and you can play out your power fantasy to your heart's content. You have a chance to make a few meaningful choices (always a bonus, in linear games like this!), and have essentially unlimited time, so you can perv out as much as you like without worrying about getting fired. :P

It's a good price, well-made, and damn fun to play. I only wish the game were longer!

I'll cop to it: I love nipples. I like playing with 'em, and I like having my own played with. So this was right up my alley. :D

The woman is definitely in charge, but she's not topping the guy, just taking the dominant role. They're both into what they're doing, and it's hot, to put it plainly.

I'm not a native Japanese-speaker, so it's going to take a couple readings before I'm confident enough to say I understand the whole thing. That being said, I appreciate that there aren't a lot of difficult kanji in this work; I knew most of them already, and the others are pretty easy to look up.

The art is good, the writing is solid (and again, easy to follow for those of us who aren't fluent!), and I honestly look forward to picking up more of Pride Beans' work.

This is a gem of a game. It's production value is way, way higher than you'd expect for the price, and you get a solid three-plus hours out of it.

To begin with, gameplay. It's primarily a ninja-style game, where you sneak around and try to ambush enemies rather than confronting everything head-on, but you can also choose to go the seductress route. Either way provides a good challenge; the game has an excellent mechanic where enemies get more edgy and alert as time goes on. The ramp-up in difficulty is just about right, and there's no point in the game where you're too under- or over-powered. The difficulty levels are really dialled-in, although I found the character customization--which a lot of other reviewers seemed to enjoy--was fairly underwhelming. One nice touch is that it's pretty difficult to actually get to one of the bad ends; if you're defeated, you're raped and thrown in jail, which gives you a chance to escape and seize victory from defeat. Game-overs only come from catastrophic repeated failures--but it *can* happen.

I will say that the game seems to be optimized for a playthrough where you don't necessarily try to exterminate all the enemies. Judicious use of consumables is a big part of the game, but it's easy to overstock in the last couple of levels. And I hate to say it, but the boss battle is really kind of a letdown. Which is a damn shame, because the game-over scene for that last level is stellar.

As for the H-stuff, I was definitely satisfied. There's lots of orgasms in store for our heroine, which isn't too bad. I'm not a huge fan of "Don't! Stop!" turning into "don't stop!" but this game does all right by it. Combat sexy-time is handled fairly well, and you have a couple of chances to trigger cutscenes, depending on how you handle certain areas. The graphics are good, the writing is pretty well-translated, and there's no pooping, which is a godsend. There's a fair bit of exceedingly well-done mind-control content in the last half of the game, and if that even vaguely piques your interest, you should definitely check this out.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It played well as a game, it delivered the hentai content, and it was a nice price. If it had a better last level, and a touch more content, this would be a five-star game for sure; as it is, I can give it a solid four--and to me, that's the mark of an excellent game.

I love this game. It's got a great sense of humor, the writing and translation are very good, and it's a nice length--without feeling grindy.

A party of female adventurers, out trying to make a name for themselves, laboring on the cusp of... mediocrity? Yeah, the heroines aren't all that successful, but they're plucky and likeable and are slowly edging their way up out of the "novice adventurer" category. Following a crushing defeat, they decide it's time to up their game, and they head to the Adventurers' Town of "Gemini Fort." There, they figure, they can get some better gear and hopefully jumpstart their meteoric rise to fame.

They get to town, they go shopping, they... black out and wake up with amnesia and a variety of weird, perverted curses. Over the course of a madcap day, they have to solve a number of mysteries--not least, what the heck HAPPENED last night!

The good: Almost everything. Translation is excellent, art is good, sexy-time scenes are varied but don't venture too far into, ah, more-specialized territory. If you're looking for a game set in a world where people shrug off casual minor sexual assault, this is the one for you. The heroines keep getting molested and raped by just about everything, but hey, that's par for the course. As one of their side conversations notes, at least some female adventurers must kinda like tentacle monsters, since they keep taking eradication quests that put them in moral peril!

The bad: Not a whole lot! There are four or five annoying lines that somehow escape the text box, so you can't read the last few words in 'em. The second act gets pretty over-the-top, but if you enjoyed the first half, you'll probably like the last part too. And there are a couple of places where the translation does not *quite* work well; normal stuff, like "pants" instead of "panties" or the disturbingly ubiquitous "meat pole/stick" or "meaty" pussy. Remind me to never get oral sex from a native Japanese speaker... ;P

Anyway, it was well worth the money; I laughed a bunch, got engaged with the story, and did indeed engage in some satisfying fappery. Pick this one up!

I don't think I could recommend this game too highly. The production values are very high, the gameplay is challenging without being frustrating, and the variety of H-content is impressive.

First, let's look at the game as, well, a game. The controls are responsive, there are a variety of attacks and special abilities you can choose from, and the enemies are varied. There are enough baddies with unique attacks to keep you on your toes, but you'll rarely feel like the combat is unfair. Enemies have a variety of attacks and counters that initiate grapples or combo animations, and you don't have to wait for a Game Over to get to the H-content. Bosses are tough, but beatable; I managed to beat some on the first try, but most took a couple of attempts. Every boss-fight, though, felt like I *could* win it, and I pulled out some very satisfying victories after taking a beating in the early part of the battle. The translation is pretty good, and you won't have any trouble figuring out what to do or where to go, yet there are still a few places where you'll have to puzzle out how to get to the bonus area or acquire unique items. The only complaint I have is that some of the equipment you can buy is pretty much useless--but there aren't any surprises, so you can easily avoid wasting your resources on crap gear. All in all, this is one of those awesome H-games where you can play the game on its own merits, rather than just using it for the sexy bits. Best of all, this is *not* one of those short, two-to-three-hour titles. Expect to put in a good ten hours or so, just beating the main game.

And speaking of sexy bits, this game has some very, very good ones. I'm personally a fan of ryona, and this game hits the sweet spot where the monsters are brutal without going too far into the gory guro realm. As mentioned before, the enemies have a variety of attacks they'll use on the unfortunate heroine, and you can use the enemy info page to see what triggers each one. Some grapples require more than one mob to trigger, which leads to some great variety. The gallery--set up like an arena--is an excellent place to play with all the attacks you didn't get to see during the game. There are a wide array of situations, from face- and belly-punches, to multiple-penetration gangbangs, to forced orgasm. And thank the gods, no scat!

All-in-all, this is one of my very favorites. I'm looking forward to Act II!

"Inn my Wife" is a visual novel built with RPG Maker, telling the story of a young couple who keep an inn, but who are falling behind on their debt payments. In order to try and catch up, the husband broaches the idea of having the wife sleep with one of their regulars in exchange for some much-needed funds.

The weakest part of the game is the setup; it's basically a game version of the five-minute scenario exposition at the beginning of a porno. A little more buildup before getting into the action would have been appreciated, but fortunately, once you're over the hump (ha, ha), the story carries itself pretty well.

It's very well-written, and the translation is pretty solid. There's some good tension--both husband and wife are kind of on-board with the whole thing, and kind of uncomfortable too--and the way that plays out is very, very satisfying.

There are a couple of extraneous elements: you have to clean the inn every day; it keeps track--poorly!--of your gold, even though there's never any spending or way to reach financial solvency; there's a brief daily scene where you're serving the night-time crowd in the dining area. If those had been expanded a little more, it would have been nice; alternatively, they could have just cut that content and spent a bit more time working on fleshing out the already-solid story.

Personally, I wouldn't have minded if the game were longer, or had more options for potential partners; that being said, incorporating more sexy-time with other guests would also have changed the impact of the game, and I'm not sure it would have been for the better.

As it is, this is an excellent, eminently fappable short story about a couple who decide to try something taboo to try and save their inn, and the way that affects their relationship with each other.

Thoroughly enjoyed it; got it for half-price and feel like I got my money's worth.

Elven Knightess is a pretty solid game. It's difficult (in a mostly good way), there's a variety of enemies, and the gallery is well implemented.

Basically, you control the one mobile piece on a board that you'll fill with towers. Spacing the towers is the most frustrating thing about the game; in particular, to get a full row of ice towers requires extremely fine adjustment--there's JUST enough room to fit seven in, but if you're even a pixel off, they won't fit. You can upgrade the towers to do more damage, shoot farther/hit more targets, shoot faster, etc. And just so you know, only the wind and lightning towers can hit flying enemies, which is important in the later stages.

Enemies move relentlessly, with two exceptions: when the knight hits baddies, they're locked in place as long as you're beating on them; also, the lightning towers stun their targets briefly. Slaughtering enemies gives you points, as does fucking them. Banging baddies gets you more xp than killing does--and more on that in just a sec. Unfortunately, the damage numbers are so big that when there's a horde of baddies, you often can't see what's actually going on.

And if they beat you, there's a game-over fucktrain that happens; mobs line up to have their way with you. It's fun to watch--and better still, you get xp from each encounter, as long as you let it run. This is pretty vital, since, as far as I can tell, it is mathematically impossible to win without sexing the mobs. That's a bit of a bummer, in my opinion.

Now, the last thing I have to mention is that this is essentially exactly the same game as lyricbox's other "Night of..." tower defense. This one came out a couple months earlier, so the other is slightly more polished, but other than that, there's little difference between 'em. The first stage is identical, down to the number of enemies in each wave. The two games share many mobs, like the goblins and spoon-wielding orcs, and those mobs have very similar animations in the two games. It's not that one is really better than the other, but I felt I should mention it, in case it affects your purchasing decisions. Whichever one(s) you get, they're good values and solid fun.

All in all, it's a fine game, both as a tower-defense title and in terms of H-content. For the price, you could do a lot worse!

Crystal Defenders is a straightforward puzzle game with a nice mix of strategy and random elements. It uses a 6x6 board divided into two parts: an inner 4x4 grid and an outer ring. The inner area is where the action takes place; waves of enemy tokens appear in random locations, and try to attack your piece. Every turn, you roll three dice, which are used to move the four crystals located in the outer ring. The object is to line those crystals up so that the enemies are between them.

It's pretty simple, but engaging. Whenever the crystals line up, they zap whatever's between them--including your piece! You only get three actions per round, divided between the crystals and the player token (which can move a single space, and not diagonally). Some monsters can move multiple spaces, or go through the obstacles, but typically show which direction they're moving in, so you can plan ahead. (Plus, if they collide, one of them is damaged, so you can use that to your advantage.)

There are options for re-rolling or using magic, but I never really had to use them. Every turn, you get a charge token; three of them lets you re-roll, and five unlocks the magic. Magical options are, from left-to-right: freeze enemies in a 2x2 cross for three turns; do something to a crystal (not sure what that one does!); eliminate one enemy.

The animations happen when monsters attack; the first hit damages your clothes, and subsequent ones start the H-attacks. The animations are nice enough and move well, and I liked 'em overall.

All told, it takes about ten minutes or so to play through a game, so it's a nice quickie. You'll probably win every time, but clearing the game unlocks the gallery, so don't worry about trying to throw a match. I waffled over whether I'd give this one three or four stars, because it's often easy to win and pretty short for the price. Ultimately, though, the replayability factor wins out, and I give it 4/5.

Space is limited, so I'll keep most of this brief. The first thing to note is that the production value is awesome. Music is adequate, voice-acting is good, gameplay is smooth. The writing is pretty decent, too.

The game is difficult, but not too much so, and the difficulty levels scale up nicely. Enemies are varied and challenging, and mostly well done. The only thing I don't like is how guys with lasers hit you instantly; the beam shoots across the screen, but you get hit long before it reaches you. The Queen fight is particularly difficult because her laser buddies shoot very fast, fly, and regenerate. If she gets a bead on you early, you can lose a ton of health without even being able to get close.

Scenes are well-written, generally involving pleasure corruption, and the voice-acting is pretty solid. Many of them are VERY long, though, and the game-over scenes are just interminable. It's not uncommon for there to be ~150 text boxes to click through, although most of those are short. Mind you, it's not that the scenes are bad; if anything, it's more like too much of a good thing. And they do a good job of avoiding too much use of "meat spear" or the like, although I gotta say that "Pew pewwing" is a ridiculous way to translate cumming on/in someone.

There's also a certain amount of that unique Japanese tendency to "broaden" the appeal of a work by including as many damn fetishes as possible. This one's got family stuff, peeing, stinky disgusting unwashed penis... And then pregnancy fucking, more peeing, cum-guzzling, more peeing... There's also a lot of sis-con; fortunately, not as much as I would have figured, based on the intro.

Most of those... more "niche" fetishes don't get a lot of airtime. Almost every CG scene has peeing in it, but at least it's not all "I'm having sex or an orgasm so my bladder just randomly explodes." It does make me wish, though, that game designers understood better how squirting and bladder-control actually work. It's extremely difficult to avoid the content entirely, and need it to complete all the extras and galleries.

All told, I've played this thing through at least five or six times on different difficulties. It's *fun*, and the galleries/scenes do their job nicely. It's well worth the money to pick this one up!

Don't get me wrong - it's not awesome. But for the price, you get a pretty good deal. The game is super-linear, not particularly challenging, and has adequate art. (The music's pretty good, though!)

The basic storyline is fairly easy to follow, even if you know exactly zero Japanese: a knight is taking a bath, her stuff gets stolen/scattered, and she's gotta beat up some monsters and bandits to get it all back. Beyond that, you're going to need a better grasp of the language than I have; it's not crazy-hard, but you probably won't know all the kanji from taking classes in school.

There's really not much more to say about it. There's no real penalty for losing, and the entire gallery unlocks when you beat the game. Recovery items are pretty straightforward, with a number and "MP" or "HP" or "TP" in the description; ones that have a really low number are recover-over-time items, and they're actually pretty useful. Spells are, from top to bottom and left to right: heal, def up, atk up, evade up, weaken enemy. When you get new weapons, your techniques change some, but it's pretty easy to figure out which ones are worthwhile.

It wasn't the best thing I ever played, but it kept me interested for an hour or two, and I don't regret buying it.

If you're going to title your game "Cthulhu Mythos," you're setting up a lot of expectations. Fortunately, they did a good job of meeting them, mostly.

Character creation is decent; you raise or lower attributes (but you don't get extra points for lowering them) and buy skills. Some skills are definitely better than others. Most skills are useful, but some barely so; a lot depends on which route you take. Early in the game, you choose whom to travel with - but then you're stuck with that group for the rest of the game. If you want to play around with different parties, you'll have to play the game through more than once.

The game itself is alright. The perspective is weird: it's always a front view, just pointed in different directions; when the game started, I thought everybody was lying on the floor, looking up. You can interact with almost everything, but there's little worth looking at, and almost nothing to find that isn't out in the open, sparkling. Navigating the manor is confusing at first, since nothing is marked, but you'll eventually figure it out.

At first, it seems like the game is going to miss the point of the mythos. Cthulhu games are rooted in the terror of the unknown; high-schoolers shouldn't easily get used to fighting zombies, although I guess if you fight enough creepy dolls and soul orbs it's old hat. Random encounters and basic puzzles started to bore me, and the story seemed so thin that I forgot where I was going at one point. Didn't matter, though, 'cause I knew I'd eventually stumble on whatever was supposed to happen next. I was bored, and didn't have enough inventory space... and then the REAL monsters started to show up.

And that's when the game got satisfying. I won't spoil anything, other than mentioning that there's a very incongruous and implausible fetch-quest near the end of the game; it's worth playing through to the end. The late game is difficult and rewarding, and the ending is pretty decent.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite grip me enough to start a second playthrough right away. There are multiple endings, and things you unlock after beating the game, but ultimately, the gameplay was just flat enough that I didn't finish the next run. Still glad I bought it, though!

(Ah, one last thing. When opening a safe, it'll let you put in numbers forever; enter the combination, and then push "A".)

Escape Dungeon II does just about everything it should. It's got challenging but-not-frustrating gameplay, good art, a solid translation, and satisfying H-scenes. There are no major issues, although the advancement screen can be a little squirrelly.

It's a standard get-stronger Roguelike: enter dungeon, fight stuff, get stronger, probably die. Level some stuff up, re-enter, and try again until you win. There's a good balance between costs and benefits, and you don't get too strong too fast. All of the abilities are useful - with one caveat - and you can use 'em in a variety of effective builds. You can focus on putting distance between you and the baddies, on hitting as hard as you can, on nerfing their damage... There are scads of different ways to beat the game, and it adds some nice replayability. The one outlier is Hawkeye, which is of limited use; it's trash at level one, but can be effective at higher levels, especially for builds with a good base attack stat.

The enemies are nicely done; there are eight different monsters (plus the boss and his final form), and each has several subtypes. It would have been nice to have a bit more variety, but it's good enough. Each has a series of 3 to 6 H-scenes unlocked when you're captured by a particular enemy, all of which are well animated and (very) slightly interactive, showing a corruption progression. While I'm not particularly into pleasure corruption, the scenes are well-written and effective, and I wish some mobs had more scenes, with better pacing. One glitch I noticed was that if you lose to poison, if no mobs are on-screen, it unlocks a second random scene when you die.

The art is really nice. Shunral has bigger boobs than she needs to, but they're not grotesque or anything, and everybody's drawn really well. Scenes are 2-D illustrated, while the game itself is kind of a cute, chunky 3-D chibi style. Both look good, and I've no complaints.

The translation is solid. Occasionally, there are typos or weird punctuation, but it's readable, and close to the original Japanese.

The only negative thing I have to say is that you have to be careful when buying abilities. It doesn't always show your new level after buying, so just exit the screen and come back so it updates. Don't keep clicking the buy button 'til you go negative, like I did!

All in all, I really like this one. Good replayability and nice art makes it a winner!

...namely, people who are really into "high-school girl somewhat passively goes along with sex acts often involving disgusting men with terrible hygiene or unpleasantly presented old people."

It's not quite as bad as that sounds, but those themes definitely put a real damper on my enjoyment of this work. There are three major storylines you can pursue at the beginning of the game, and one of them was just so gross that I basically had to ignore it. I have no idea if it led to more options later, like the other routes did, and I'm honestly not even slightly interested in finding out. There's a limit to how much I want to read about how utterly filthy a hobo's dick is, and how stomach-turningly terrible it smells; it's even more egregious since this isn't really presented as a degradation game.

Then there's the ancient janitor at the school, who has an unpleasant "old-man smell" and is missing most of his teeth. His story is actually pretty good, if you can get past the artwork. He's drawn like some kind of space-alien cancer spawn, and it's just... not good.

The damnable thing is, most of the writing is pretty okay. There are a few hiccups with the translation, which I suspect make Kotoko sound a little more passive or disinterested than she actually is, but the storylines for the janitor and the train guy are good. You can sorta wrap your head around how Kotoko gets lewder and more adventurous as she goes along.

Unfortunately, at some point you have to choose whether you're going to pursue one route to the end or not. And once you do, you're kind of on rails. It's a damn shame, because you can have her experiment with each of the different male characters, until all of a sudden she's locked in with one.

Some of the writing makes me want to give it four stars, some of the art and scenarios make me want to give it two, so I'll settle on three. If your thing is slightly muddled narratives involving gross dudes and a big-boobed high-schooler, this is your game. Otherwise... Maybe give this one a pass.

Okay, this one pretty much gets an unqualified thumbs-up from me. The obvious caveat is that you NEED to understand Japanese; even if you try and run this through a translator, you're going to have to have a basic grasp of how the language works, or you'll get very confused. Japanese doesn't use pronouns most of the time, so you have to infer whom or what the speaker is talking about from context; if you don't speak Japanese, or have a buddy who does handy, you're going to get confused. A lot.

And that's a problem, because in this game, the choices you make actually matter. There aren't many of them, but they do drive the story, and the different endings can be pretty involved, so if you don't know what's going on, you're missing out on a lot of the best stuff.

Each scenario is set up very well, the voice-acting is good, and the action is pretty hot. One thing that didn't quite do it for me was how the game kept hyping one dude's dick over the other's; obviously, part of the story is supposed to be the tension that rises when you swap partners, but the one guy gets dumped on a little too much. The story implies that he's a perfectly fine lover, but none of that comes out on-screen; it's all about how his girlfriend gets super-thirsty for other guy's cock, which is both enormous and can orgasm seventeen times in a row. Everybody gets to have fun in the end, but it would have been nice if they hadn't gone quite so overboard with the disparity between the male MCs.

Anyway! The game's a winner; the voice-acting is good and animations are lovely, and the writing is great--aside from the heavy-handed way they handle the jealousy/curiosity/dickmastery thing. I don't know that I'd pay FULL price for it, but it *does* have choices that matter, and that's a big plus for VN-type games. If you're able to comprehend what's going on, there's no good reason NOT to get Swapping Party!

This is one of the first hentai games I ever encountered. I'm glad it still holds up today; the graphics are perfectly fine, fairly smooth and nicely detailed. The story has a solid plot, the H-scenes are well-written and -executed, and the voice-acting is excellent.

There are a couple of hiccups, though, trying to run this on a modern set-up. I could never get the volume to work quite right; no matter which slider I moved, it seemed to change the voice and music levels together. That's a real problem, because the music too-often drowns out the actors--which is a shame, 'cause they do such a good job.

Also, be aware that this is basically a VN, but with lots of choices. If your Japanese isn't up to par, you'll have a hard time figuring out what to do to advance the game--and you'll miss out on all the good story bits, too. There never was an English translation released, although you can find synopses that will help you follow the plot.

For a game this old, the price is a little high; still, I think it's worth it to pick up on sale. If you can read Japanese well enough to navigate the choices, if you like Sogna games, and if you enjoy the kinds of scenarios F40 has to offer, pick this one up!

...but ultimately, there are just too many little things left incomplete or poorly implemented. Don't get me wrong: there are LOTS of things to like about this game. There's a good variety of enemies, and scads of different abilities you can put on your equipment. The traps are good; the monsters are well-designed, the story is... serviceably translated, and good enough to do what it needs to.

But game balance is terrilbly off. It's far too easy to make your equipment crazy strong, to the point where most of the game just doesn't seem challenging. Worse, when playing on hard mode, there's a weird glitch (?) with the monsters in the first few levels; as you get stronger, the enemies do, too--exponentially so. On your first delve into the dungeon, you can probably kill six to eight bats. On the second one, you might manage three. After that, I mostly ran from fights, trying to grab some good equipment before leaving. The result is that by the time you get out of the first area, you're level twenty-something, and kitted out like a god of war.

There are other little hiccups, too. When you're running along, the game sometimes blends your inputs together, and you wind up running diagonally through walls a bit when you change direction. A bigger problem is that moving diagonally (at least with a keyboard) is hit-or-miss; if you don't hit the keys just right, you wind up just sidestepping, which can leave you in a bad tactical situation.

The worst is a game-crashing event that happens when you're playing in English. When turning the Ominous Thorn into a potion, you need to set the language to Japanese, and keep it that way until AFTER you drink that potion.

Looking back at all that, it seems a little harsher than I mean it to be. I *do* really like this game; the H-animations are pretty good, and all the different spells and status effects are awesome. If it were a little bit harder in the easy spots, if it had a gallery feature, and if the code were polished a bit more, this would be a definite winner. As it is, it's still a dang good Roguelike game, and I keep finding myself playing--it must do *something* right!