Throbbyさんのレビュー一覧

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!

There's basically only one minigame you play for 95% of the game, and it's boring as hell. You sit... and watch a little bar slowly creep toward full. For thirty seconds. The action, such as it is, comes at roughly ten-second intervals, where you have a brief moment of interactivity where you try and click the mouse when a pointer is in the sweet spot of a bar. You get one try per action sequence.

It's exactly as fun as it sounds. The girls are okay, but their voices can be annoying, and the animations are exactly the same for each of them. There are certain things that differentiate them, beyond their hair and whatever, but there's just... nothing really gripping. There are a million games out there with just as much - and often more, and higher-quality - H-content, plus good gameplay to boot. I really *want* to have something nicer to say about this, but I can't come up with anything really meaningful. At least the dev put some effort into it, and it's not terribly animated or ugly or anything. Now all it needs is a story, non-grindy gameplay, more interesting minigames, more women...

I'm going to be as charitable as I can, given that the game is eleven-years old. To that end, I'll note that the animations are smooth, there is a LOT of variation in the H-scenes, and the art is pretty decent.

Unfortunately... this game sucks as a *game*. The controls are amazingly unresponsive and horribly implemented; you can't turn around while crouching, but must stand up, face the other way, and then crouch again! They're sluggish, don't include combos or running or blocking, and the enemies' hitboxes are sometimes utterly incomprehensible. Your best bet is to power through the first half of the level, let yourself get killed by the boss, and then try again with full health. You're going to win by using your special attack; there's really no other easy way to do it. Unfortunately, re-doing the boss fights means listening to her entire spiel--and any reply by the enemy leader--every time you retry. It's annoying.

It's a damn shame, because I *want* to like it. The enemies are well implemented, and I really like games that actually make you feel like you're getting overwhelmed from all sides. If only this one were more playable, it would be a huge winner. I'm giving it two stars 'cause the art is good, the heroine doesn't have stupid-huge balloon-tits, and the death-cry the monsters do is goofy as hell. Without those saving graces, this game would be a total pass. :/