Chaotic Reviews
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 6:06 am
Since I've been sort reviewing various H-games on the H-links forum, I decided to just make this instead of taking up more room over there. I'll probably move my previous reviews over here at some point.
So I played through UnHoly SaNctuarY (game's spelling, not mine) today while I was waiting to go in to work and I gotta say, I'm kinda impressed. It's your typical Castlevania-like game with the usual H-twist. Well, first off, lemme get the cons out of the way since one of them is the reason why I won't go into the plot too much. 1) While the pause menu and continue options are in English, the main menu and all of the story dialogue is in Japanese meaning I have no idea what the overall plot is. You can figure some things out as you play, but overall, I'm in the dark. 2) the relay was sometimes kinda slow, meaning I could hit jump and the character not respond for another split second. That's usually not a problem, but with some of the endgame bosses, it kinda really makes a difference. I can't really blame the game though since I don't know whether it's Unholy's fault or my computer. 3) I haven't found a gallery mode quite yet. I dunno if I need to play through more in order to find it, but it isn't there even though I've played through the story. 4) It's kinda short. Replay value more than makes up for it though.
Well, that's about it for that. Now that I have the cons out of the way, I can get into the plot. Since you've just read that I couldn't read most of the story, I hope you'll understand why it's gonna be brief. From what I've gathered and what I've read on the website itself, there's been a rash of disappears recently all pointing to the castle. The church sends Marianne, your character, and her childhood friend Constance to infiltrate and stop this happening, though having a friend go missing near that castle doesn't hurt. Only, things immediately go FUBAR as Constance gets separated from Marianne before she even enters the castle. Thus, you end up with 3 objectives: Find and end the cause of the castle's evil, find your lost friend and Constance, and make it out a virgin. Or at least I assume virginity's important because getting raped is an instant game over.
Gameplay-wise, it's like your standard Castlevania game, only much more brief. You have a chain whip for a weapon and 4 subweapons: Fire that acts like Castlevania's Holy Water, an Icicle that flies into the air and then strikes diagonally into the ground, a 2-part Cross spell where you hit the subweapon button once to throw it (indicated by a sparkly) then hit it again when it gets to where you want it to make it explode into a cross, and this game's version of Grand Cross though it does have a bit of start up time before it hits anything and you're vulnerable IMMEDIATELY after it ends. You fight your way through hordes of enemies to reach the boss, fight through that, and make your way to the big bad. In addition to those, you have a backdash where Marianne moves so fast she disappears briefly, able to bypass enemies and move to their other side if you do it right (and in some places you'll NEED to do it right).
You have 3 big things to worry about: Your health (no brainer), your crystals (You use those to use subweapons. All except Grand Cross cost one crystal and Grand Cross costs 7), and something I like to call Seeds of Life. Every time you go down (and the attack that KO'd you wasn't insta-Game Over), Marianne lies on the ground until you hit a button to revive her using the Seed of Life with either 5 less Crystals than you had before or 5 Crystals period if you had none. Run out of Seeds and go down again, and that's it, Virgin Game Over. I call it Virgin Game Over because, like I said earlier, ANY rape you suffer is an instant Game Over despite how many Seeds of Life you have left. Probably to make the game beatable, you regain Seeds of Life and Crystals whenever you pray at a checkpoint. There are no actual save points since there's only 6 levels in the game (8 if you count alternate routes) and when you Game Over, you're given the option of starting at the last checkpoint and if you have to exit out of the game you start at the last checkpoint as well. The good thing about Game Overs is that rack up enough of them, and you'll be able to start off with more and more Crystals and Seeds of Life, making the game a bit easier from then on. I didn't know about that while I was playing through, so I played the game through with 3 Seeds of Life and either 10 or 15 Crystals, I forget. Much, MUCH harder than it needed to be.
Now we move on to the H-content. Like I've said so many times already, getting raped is an Instant Game Over, so I preferred not to do it while I was playing through the story. Once I beat that though, I went nuts. Almost every enemy has their own rape scene, and each are pretty different from another enemy's, and some enemies even have multiple continuous ones, meaning they'll rape you one way then immediately go on to rape you in another. Mostly that's the bosses, but a few mooks have those as well. With each Game Over, you get a picture representative of that Game Over. So, say you got a Virgin Game Over. All that you'd see is Marianne knocked out with her panties showing. But say you got raped by the first enemy, a zombie. The picture would show the zed going at it, Marianne in tears at the loss of her virginity. Since I've beaten the story, I'm still looking around for all of them, but it's a fairly nice spread so far, only one Instant Game Over not having a picture at all (That one just kinda hangs and you have to quit to the main menu in order to go anywhere) and only 2 enemies sharing the same picture so far (a dog and I think a sub-boss). Marianne is fully voiced so if you're into the auditory aspects of things, that'll be great for ya.
I'm not sure if I'mma do ratings yet, but if I do, UnHoly SaNctuarY wouldn't get full marks because, like it said before, it's really short and it's lacking that gallery mode. But for entertaining gameplay and challenging bosses (You wouldn't believe how many times I Game Over'd, Virgin and Instant, before I beat the final boss) I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't played. Just don't go into it looking for easy H, cause you won't get it unless you lose to everything around you and give no fucks as to the actual gameplay.
EDIT: I've played through the game in it's entirely now, finding each enemy in game and seeing the animations for them. The quality of the rapes themselves are fairly good and, like I said, there are no repeats and there's only 1 repeat for the pictures. The problem, however, is there aren't all that many enemies in game since the levels have a tendency to reuse old enemies instead of introducing new ones. So the selection isn't all that great, but what it does have is pretty good. Also, I've gotta get rid of one of my cons. After getting the Good Ending, I found the Gallery mode. It's a bit hidden, but it's there! As such, UnHoly gets a much better grade than before.
So I played through UnHoly SaNctuarY (game's spelling, not mine) today while I was waiting to go in to work and I gotta say, I'm kinda impressed. It's your typical Castlevania-like game with the usual H-twist. Well, first off, lemme get the cons out of the way since one of them is the reason why I won't go into the plot too much. 1) While the pause menu and continue options are in English, the main menu and all of the story dialogue is in Japanese meaning I have no idea what the overall plot is. You can figure some things out as you play, but overall, I'm in the dark. 2) the relay was sometimes kinda slow, meaning I could hit jump and the character not respond for another split second. That's usually not a problem, but with some of the endgame bosses, it kinda really makes a difference. I can't really blame the game though since I don't know whether it's Unholy's fault or my computer. 3) I haven't found a gallery mode quite yet. I dunno if I need to play through more in order to find it, but it isn't there even though I've played through the story. 4) It's kinda short. Replay value more than makes up for it though.
Well, that's about it for that. Now that I have the cons out of the way, I can get into the plot. Since you've just read that I couldn't read most of the story, I hope you'll understand why it's gonna be brief. From what I've gathered and what I've read on the website itself, there's been a rash of disappears recently all pointing to the castle. The church sends Marianne, your character, and her childhood friend Constance to infiltrate and stop this happening, though having a friend go missing near that castle doesn't hurt. Only, things immediately go FUBAR as Constance gets separated from Marianne before she even enters the castle. Thus, you end up with 3 objectives: Find and end the cause of the castle's evil, find your lost friend and Constance, and make it out a virgin. Or at least I assume virginity's important because getting raped is an instant game over.
Gameplay-wise, it's like your standard Castlevania game, only much more brief. You have a chain whip for a weapon and 4 subweapons: Fire that acts like Castlevania's Holy Water, an Icicle that flies into the air and then strikes diagonally into the ground, a 2-part Cross spell where you hit the subweapon button once to throw it (indicated by a sparkly) then hit it again when it gets to where you want it to make it explode into a cross, and this game's version of Grand Cross though it does have a bit of start up time before it hits anything and you're vulnerable IMMEDIATELY after it ends. You fight your way through hordes of enemies to reach the boss, fight through that, and make your way to the big bad. In addition to those, you have a backdash where Marianne moves so fast she disappears briefly, able to bypass enemies and move to their other side if you do it right (and in some places you'll NEED to do it right).
You have 3 big things to worry about: Your health (no brainer), your crystals (You use those to use subweapons. All except Grand Cross cost one crystal and Grand Cross costs 7), and something I like to call Seeds of Life. Every time you go down (and the attack that KO'd you wasn't insta-Game Over), Marianne lies on the ground until you hit a button to revive her using the Seed of Life with either 5 less Crystals than you had before or 5 Crystals period if you had none. Run out of Seeds and go down again, and that's it, Virgin Game Over. I call it Virgin Game Over because, like I said earlier, ANY rape you suffer is an instant Game Over despite how many Seeds of Life you have left. Probably to make the game beatable, you regain Seeds of Life and Crystals whenever you pray at a checkpoint. There are no actual save points since there's only 6 levels in the game (8 if you count alternate routes) and when you Game Over, you're given the option of starting at the last checkpoint and if you have to exit out of the game you start at the last checkpoint as well. The good thing about Game Overs is that rack up enough of them, and you'll be able to start off with more and more Crystals and Seeds of Life, making the game a bit easier from then on. I didn't know about that while I was playing through, so I played the game through with 3 Seeds of Life and either 10 or 15 Crystals, I forget. Much, MUCH harder than it needed to be.
Now we move on to the H-content. Like I've said so many times already, getting raped is an Instant Game Over, so I preferred not to do it while I was playing through the story. Once I beat that though, I went nuts. Almost every enemy has their own rape scene, and each are pretty different from another enemy's, and some enemies even have multiple continuous ones, meaning they'll rape you one way then immediately go on to rape you in another. Mostly that's the bosses, but a few mooks have those as well. With each Game Over, you get a picture representative of that Game Over. So, say you got a Virgin Game Over. All that you'd see is Marianne knocked out with her panties showing. But say you got raped by the first enemy, a zombie. The picture would show the zed going at it, Marianne in tears at the loss of her virginity. Since I've beaten the story, I'm still looking around for all of them, but it's a fairly nice spread so far, only one Instant Game Over not having a picture at all (That one just kinda hangs and you have to quit to the main menu in order to go anywhere) and only 2 enemies sharing the same picture so far (a dog and I think a sub-boss). Marianne is fully voiced so if you're into the auditory aspects of things, that'll be great for ya.
I'm not sure if I'mma do ratings yet, but if I do, UnHoly SaNctuarY wouldn't get full marks because, like it said before, it's really short and it's lacking that gallery mode. But for entertaining gameplay and challenging bosses (You wouldn't believe how many times I Game Over'd, Virgin and Instant, before I beat the final boss) I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't played. Just don't go into it looking for easy H, cause you won't get it unless you lose to everything around you and give no fucks as to the actual gameplay.
EDIT: I've played through the game in it's entirely now, finding each enemy in game and seeing the animations for them. The quality of the rapes themselves are fairly good and, like I said, there are no repeats and there's only 1 repeat for the pictures. The problem, however, is there aren't all that many enemies in game since the levels have a tendency to reuse old enemies instead of introducing new ones. So the selection isn't all that great, but what it does have is pretty good. Also, I've gotta get rid of one of my cons. After getting the Good Ending, I found the Gallery mode. It's a bit hidden, but it's there! As such, UnHoly gets a much better grade than before.