Throbbyさんのレビュー一覧

I really like this one; it's got a great eerie feel to it, and it's fairly challenging without being frustrating or feeling unfair. I'm going to keep it short and focus just on the best and worst aspects.

We'll start with the things that aren't great, 'cause there ain't that many of 'em. It's occasionally less-than-clear what you need to do; fortunately, as a side-scroller, you'll figure it out pretty soon if you just walk in the other direction. :P Volume sliders are off; sound effects, music, and the voice are all almost inaudible until you take them close to their maximum values. And there are a few times where you've gotta remember that Rabiane doesn't jump quite as far as you think she will, so you gotta get closer to the edge and hold the button down longer.

Good stuff: Atmosphere, for sure; the visuals and music are excellent. Voice-acting is pretty solid, too, and this is one of those games that hits the ryona/guro/hentai sweet spot, where there's not so much gore to turn most people off, but enough to attract fans of the genre. It gives the voice-actress a range of situations to play with, and she does a good job. The game is, as I said, challenging, and it would take a *lot* of practice to be able to run through the whole thing without dying--but I think it would be possible! Gallery is adequate, but it would be nice if you could replay certain sequences, like your second-chance prison break scenes.

All told, I really liked this one, and a second play-through a year or so later was still a good time, although it didn't take me very long to cruise through it, even after such a long break. One way or another, if you think the art looks attractive, you won't be let down by the gameplay, and it's a solid value for the price.

Seriously. I keep thinking, "Oh, well, yeah, there's some guro in here, but maybe there will be other content, too! And hey, the art looks pretty good, right? Go ahead, give it a try! Use points, so it's like it's free!"

Sweet bippity, but I need to stop listening to that voice!

The art is okay, as stills. When animated, there are all kinds of problems. Body parts don't quite stay together right, the rhythm is wrong, and the animation is not well-synced to the voices.

Voice-acting isn't all that great, either--which really tanks this title, since I think it was built around some fair-to-middling animation in hopes that you'd be satisfied listening to the groaning and pleading. It's... not really worth it. Sound quality is poor, volume levels are all over the place, and two of the characters sound far too young for my tastes.

Oh, and there's a couple rounds of tag you have to play to catch the girls, so I guess there's gameplay.

Horrible. I was gonna give it two stars, but by the time I finished this review, I'd thought about it a little more and am giving it one. *Sigh* There haven't been many times that I genuinely feel like my time and money was stolen by something I bought here, but this is one of them.

So, it's been months since I played this, and I gotta say, if I hadn't taken notes, I wouldn't remember enough about it to write anything meaningful.

It's not that the game is HORRIBLE. I get a kick out of the heroine, and there's a ton of good writing. The problem is that this game has multiple personalities. On one hand, it's about a plucky treasure-hunter who has all kinds of adventures with interesting people, filled with funny and engaging dialogue. And then there's the sordid story of a pervy loan shark who uses debts to force women into sexual slavery, who teams up with a random isekai who gets telepathy. But then the story has you get crazy strong, letting you monkey-stomp all over the bad guys by the mid-game.

These three faces do not play well together. You effortlessly crush some bad guys, after which the heroine is like, "Pant, pant, gasp... so tough!" The game doesn't seem to realize--or care--when you're winning or losing; one bit of dialogue is written assuming that you've lost a fight, even though it's almost impossible not to win. And the debt storyline just doesn't work. No matter how much actual money you have, there's never an option to save your friends. Despite having something like 300k gold on hand, there was no option for me to stop a girl from whoring herself out for a gangbang in exchange for a grand total of $60k. Goddamn it, Mai, just give the poor girl some cash and kick the skeevy scumbags to the curb! By the end of the game, I was sitting on a mountain of gold that would have paid 2/3 of the debt easily, but the game still acted like I should jump at the chance to whore myself out for 10 grand. I wanted to grab the dude and be like, "Bitch, I have literally eighty times that much money jingling in my pockets right now."

Finally, there are a couple of minor issues that bugged me. First, you never have a choice regarding the heroine's feelings; she's gonna love Kenichi no matter what. Second, there were a few too many stupid --and not funny-stupid-- gay jokes. "Haha! We won't execute you, we'll just put you in gay prison!" Laaame. And finally, the art was a little inconsistent, with a couple times where nipples were grotesquely huge.

All in all, I really want to like this game more than I do. The writing really is good, and if it were consistent, I'd give this one four or five stars. Unfortunately, it's just kind of a mess. :/

This game is one of my favorites. It's difficult, has an excellent gallery with good animations, and is long enough to give you your money's worth.

The mechanics take a while to master (you have to stun enemies before you can hurt them, and do a third action to gather the XP), but they're pretty rewarding once you do. Enemies can easily surround you--rare in a 2-D side-scroller!--and are only vulnerable part of the time, requiring you to time your attacks carefully. Getting hit or grappled damages your clothing, then your stamina; get hurt enough, and the screen flashes yellow, then red, then you're KO-ed. The grapple mechanic is good, too; instead of a simple button-mash, you have a arrows that appear, one at a time, for a split second. Match them, and you shake off the attack, but miss or take too long, and the rape initiates. At that point, you need to shake off the attack by toggling left and right--but a nice element is that you heal during the attack; if you time it right, you can keep the enemy from finishing and avoid escape, letting you recover from a red- or yellow-flashing screen.

The worst part of the gameplay is the map, which is convoluted and sprawling, and there is a lot of backtracking and map-checking involved. Because enemies can be easily evaded, and elements of the map do change over time, it's not that tedious, but it can be confusing until you figure out how to navigate. 'Twould be better if there were some indicator of where you have and haven't been yet.

The gameplay is the main strength of GHV, but the enemy animations are a big draw, too. Most enemies have at least one H-attack, while many have two, and one even has a tag-team, and all of them are very well drawn and animated. Honestly, the gallery implementation and animations are excellent, and great for a quickie when you don't want to get sucked into playing the game. My only quibble is that Vosmug has moved toward gigantits, which is a bit of a bummer; some of the ladies are just over-endowed.

The only weakness, really, is the story. It's honestly borderline ridiculous, and the characters do some pretty outrageous things. Once you get into the back-story of the mansion, things get better, but there is a LOT of text to skip after the first playthrough. It definitely would have benefitted from some tightening up, and needs to focus a little more on either being funny or serious. Still, 100% worth getting!

Fantasy Tavern Sextet - Volume 2 is still appealing, but it feels a bit like it's going through the motions. Whereas the first installment really worked for it (especially with making Daisy appealing), this one just kind of feels like a "Harem Game (tm)."

Part of it are some minor quibbles that add up. There are more typos in this part, things like "at" instead of "as" or words split between two lines; Dahlia wears her sword when she first starts out as a barmaid, then says she's going to put it on to make her feel more comfortable; and the almost-cartoony "I'ma kill you!" attitude that Dahlia puts on a little too often. One fight has Dahlia go charging in, and it's just not believable; another battle, with a molesty tree-monster, just ends super-abruptly with no transition. Also, the MC mentions the "customer service rule of 'letting things go'" in regard to some kind of sexual harassment, and it's really kind of gross.

That would be forgivable, but the pacing is really off, too. Everything feels rushed; in Volume 1, you spent weeks or months getting to know the girls, while here, it's a matter of days. And yet, while they're cramming "I know we just met but oh, how I love you!" down your throat, they're also being ridiculously coy about sex; the first game literally FORCES you to do it with Lupine and Daisy both, yet somehow, the MC remains scandalized that those women would *gasp!* want to GET HUGS! The audacity!

The final nail in the coffin, for me, is how the makers kinda shoehorned everything into the Harem Eroge Formula. The first game, I felt, strongly suggested that Veronica and Dahlia were lovers, and I thought that was a great set-up. "How are we going to get from Point A to Point B?" Well, by throwing all that in the trash. Everybody is a virgin, with super-traditional morals (right up until they join the harem), and they waste all the story and romance potential that would have come from a lesbian couple with a shy woman and an experienced Veronica.

In the end, the best way I can sum it up is this: The only reason to pursue the girls in this game is because they're girls in a harem game. If you want to play the game just to see MC bang everybody, this will be perfect for you. But I don't want that. I want something more like the first game, where I was given enough time and interaction with Daisy that when the choice came up, I was genuinely interested. Sadly, this one doesn't deliver.

I can't quite give this five stars, but it comes pretty close. The game is a sink-or-swim, figure-it-out top-down game in the vein of Bomberman, etc. You play as Alice, a cross-dressing boy with fabulous hair, who is trapped in some kind of lewd-dream Wonderland. Enemies are generated from red mushrooms, and most take a specific kind of ammunition to defeat. The basic enemy is Evil You, who can be killed with any kind of shot, or converted into an ally by picking up a potion. Other baddies are knocked down when you hit them with the appropriate kind of attack, and are left helpless to be ravished by either you or your team of Converted Alices. Plundering the KO-ed baddies eventually fills a heart-shaped meter; when that happens, a rabbit hole opens up to let you into the next level.

Sounds pretty basic, but the game is actually fairly difficult. To change your shot-type, you have to pick up an item from the field; there are a limited number of each kind of ammo, so when you're out of one variety, that sucks for you! You either have to carefully manage your weapon until you defeat all the enemies, or knock down enough of them that your team of allies can fill the meter for you. And there's a timer, too; you have to get the meter filled, and then FIND the exit before you run out of time.

All in all, it's a fun game, and a good combination of quick thinking and careful planning is necessary to win. I'd give it a higher rating, but I'd want more levels, enemies, and a story for that. :P As it is, I enjoyed it quite a bit, although the sprites are juuust pixellated enough that I can't tell how many of them are male and how many are female. Either way, Alice, you go and nut 'em!

First eleven seconds are great, even if the art style is still the more-cartoony newer one first seen in Part Three. After that, though, it's 1:26 of essentially the same thing repeating endlessly: One guy in her mouth with the dental gag, the other plowing her pussy. At one point, the guy at her head comes and tags out for somebody else, and toward the end of the video, the second guy raping her face pinches her nose closed. Oh, and when the other guy blows his load, you can see her belly bump up and get weird every time he shoots. It's totally unrealistic, even for a series that has had our three stalwart rapists shooting out enough jizz to fill a swimming pool.

That's all the time I'm going to waste on reviewing this. Art that doesn't mesh with the way Pridot's looked up 'til now, super-repetitive animation, and no sign of the creativity that marked the action in the first couple installments. Sad.

I cannot recommend this, not even on sale. Part Three suffers from a lot of serious problems, including repetitive animation, strikingly uneven art quality and styles, and poor pacing.

This one consists of two "combined" videos. The first one starts pormisingly; the guy dunking Pridot doesn't look like a 'roid-raging freak, unlike in Part Two, and Pridot looks attractive enough.

And then they leave the bathroom, and it's horrible. The guys are back to Conan physiques (but fairly well drawn), and there are these close-ups of Pridot's face that just look awful--nothing like the art style in previous installments, and it even clashes with most of Part Three! I will give them credit for some good positions and creative use of restraints, but even this first video starts to feel like it's repeating itself before the big climax. After the money-shot, the last 23 seconds are literally just a shot of her asshole burbling out one guy's cumshot. A little slo-mo replay, some bubbles, some geysering... Whee?

The second video is really where I kinda gave up on the Pretty Pridot series. It's basically three scenes, and the first minute-and-a-half-long one is VERY disappointing. It really is like a loop; the audio isn't repetitive, but the animation is a super-huge letdown. You could have built the first 90 seconds of the video out of three or four five-to-ten second GIFs, and the whole thing is just a view of penises going in and out of Pridot's holes from below, in mediocre new-style art. The last minute is better, but again, it's basically two clips that could be looping GIFs for all the variety in action they show. The final insult is that the last six seconds is just white screen.

I was horribly disappointed in this installment; Pretty Pridot had started out SO promisingly, but at this point, I was literally just waiting for it to be over.

Don't get me wrong; this is still pretty solid. But my complaints are the same as the ones I had for Part One, namely:
1) Ridiculous amounts of semen flooding everywhere from three dudes.
2) No subtitles except in the "combined" version.

Not much bad to say, right? Welllllll... except that this time, there is a LOT of penis-cam action. For some incomprehensible reason, the maker thought we'd want to watch over 50 seconds of blurry pink tube accompanied by squishing sounds. In fairness, I'm not especially turned on by watching close-ups of genitals smashing into each other, so it's entirely possible that lots and lots of people will be super-titillated getting a dick's-eye view of a vagina. For me, not so great.

The first "combined" film has 20 seconds of dick-cam and about 12 of slo-mo replay out of 2:46 total playtime; the second has about the same out of 2:11; the third has ~10 seconds of pink tube out of 2:57. It was enough that I wanted to cut those sequences and make a playlist just showing the rest... which is when I found out that if you go to the "separate" folder, every single one of the penis-cam clips is 20-seconds long. Each. I culled them out, and then had to watch these videos without subtitles.

That sucked, but I could deal with it. The bigger problem is that much of the second and third videos are almost-loops. While each frame may still be individually drawn, the characters' motions are repetitious, and it's not nearly as visually interesting as what came before.

One thing I *will* say I appreciate is that there are alternate scenes for the third clip, which cut out the weird "peeing through a catheter into Pridot's bladder" scene. Again though--you lose the subtitles if you do that.

Finally, the art style is beginning to change. Pridot still looks pretty much like she did in the first two episodes, but the dudes are starting to look pretty weird. Kind of like they're supposed to be professional bodybuilders, but drawn... just not quite right.

Anyway. It's not bad, and if you super liked the first parts, you'll probably like this one, too. But it doesn't give me confidence about how good the next scenes will be.

Yeah, the title says it all. Part One is technically standalone, but the scenes from the introduction and that installment are interpolated, so neither one quite works perfectly without the other.

That being said, if you get the two of them on sale, it's well worth it. They're the best installments in the bunch, in my opinion, and if you're at all interested in the subject matter--woman goes to a love hotel to film some softcore porn, and gets rather more than she agreed to or wants--they'll entertain you.

A word of warning, though: My opinion is that the introduction and Part One are the best, which may leave you a little unsatisfied.