Chaotic Reviews

[MiscChaos]

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.

[Thisfag]

Link to the game or just search in web, in hopes that it will show as the first found't thing in browser? Anyways, it's impressive that you're the first person doing this so far, making reviews on games. But you know, you could do reviews on non-porn games too, or you plan to do reviews only on mature (+18) porno games? But don't get me wrong by asking that, it's just a question.

[MiscChaos]

I really just plan on reviewing whatever catches my fancy. It could be Visual Novels, old school games I'm playing through (which can range from Genesis games, though that's exceedingly unlikely, to last gen games and the gen before that. I don't have enough to be buying the current gen), H-games, whatever. The title is no lie, the reviews truly are a bit chaotic! It just so happens that H-games are a bit easier to get a hold of so that's what I've done so far. I didn't include a link before because the website's in Japanese and it was already in the H-link thread. I'll be throwing it up now though and I guess this is a good time to say I won't link to pirated versions. Site rules and all that. I think I'll rehash a game I've already done and do a review on Girl vs Girl next.

[OmegaScales]

I really just plan on reviewing whatever catches my fancy. It could be Visual Novels

Then have I got one for you!
Frozen Essence is Fantasy/Otome/VN with several different endings. IT IS AWESOME!

[MiscChaos]

Huh. Color me interested, Omega. I'll definitely check it out! On to the review.

I played Girl vs Girl some time ago. I was impressed with the general concept since it reminds me of a game I used to play all the time in my childhood called Trap Gunner, so I gave it a shot. I didn't get very far though. Before I get into the gameplay, I guess I'll give the basic plot synopsis: You, Guri, go to a Island looking for treasure and meet girls doing much the same. The all of you decide no, you won't just cooperate and split the treasure you find, so things devolve into an all-out war between the two of you.

Moving on to Gameplay, things are split into two sections: Planning and Action (or so I like to call them). Planning involves you buying traps and switching in the traps you want and looking over the map you're gonna be playing in. Action involves actually going toe-to-toe with your enemy, laying traps and attacking each other in a race for 5 items hidden throughout the map. The first person to gather all 5 and make it to the exit wins! The opponent, who's AI is pretty excellent let me tell ya, will fight you every step of the way though. You fight each other either through the use of traps or direct combat, manipulating one or two of the three meters: the Health Meter, the Armor Meter and the Passion Meter. Health, obviously, tells you how much punishment you can take before you die. If you die, you lose all of the items you were holding, basically starting the round all over for you. You revive in a few seconds with full Armor and Health though. Armor, however, increases the amount of damage you can take, but has three levels. The bar empties once and you lose a bit of armor. Empty it again, and you lose a bit more (usually your top). Empty it again and you're naked and eating full damage. Each time it empties, HP gets refilled, so the danger really only starts once you lose all your armor. Then there's the passion meter. Some traps are meant to turn your character on instead of do damage. Past a certain point, they stop and masturbate randomly instead of doing what you want them to do. The traps basically come in 3 varieties: Room, Furniture, and Monster.
Room traps, you place in a room and get the hell out (because you CAN get hurt by your own traps, especially if you're accidentally in the same room as your opponent) and it activates when someone else enters the room. You can evade this trap in one of two ways: 1) Since your play screen shows your opponent at all times, simply keep an eye on them and note whenever they leave a trap or 2) When your character starts freaking out, get out of the room quick before the trap goes off. You can chain room traps together if you do it right, leaving the enemy feeling maximum damage!
Furniture traps are placed in the furniture (obviously) you're supposed to be searching to find the Treasure. As such, these are the more dangerous traps between this and room in my opinion. The trap goes off when someone searches the furniture the trap is hidden in. My personal favorite is the spring trap since I can launch the enemy into a room trap using it if I do it right. Once again there are 2 ways to avoid them: 1) Same as the above or 2) Use your lockpick set. It's time consuming and gives your enemy time to stab you or something, but it's better than being blown up, especially since the Furniture category is the only one that has instantly fatal Traps. Stuff like a Decapitating Sickle or Impaling Needle that make it right obvious that yup, you're dead as fuck.
Monsters aren't really traps, but you can use them as such by navigating the enemy into one. Monsters are all about rape and are where the mass majority of the H content comes from. Avoiding them and keeping your Passion Meter from building is essential in the later stages.
Each time a trap knocks you down, you have to mash buttons to fill your Vital Meter back up so you can get back in the game and you want to do it quickly since the enemy can stab you while you're down. That's the gameplay in a nutshell!

As for the H-content, it's very, very little. A few of the traps are perverted, but the mass majority of the H comes from the monsters, like I said earlier, of which there are very few (like 4, 3 with 2 scenes). You can either play through the game and see without the hassle in the gallery mode. Everything's unlocked from the beginning, though you may have to deal with the sadistic dungeon master (who looks and sounds a lot like the item shop keeper) making comments about how turned on she is about the character's suffering. Pro or con depends on the person.

And that's Girl vs Girl. What I've covered is only the basics because... well, I didn't get very far. Like, not past the first level. And I played for like 30 minutes. I'm not sure whether this is a personal failing or if this is just the difficulty of the game, but to me it seems like each stage would take WAY too long to get through to be worth it. But this is just my opinion. Besides that and the general lack of H-content, the game seems solid to me. I would rate it lower than Unholy Sanctuary, but I'd still give it a solid rating. (Note to self: Create rating system!)

I think next I'll re-do my Final Fuck review. After that, I might take a look at Frozen Essence or I may pull a Visual Novel out of my own stash. Who knows!

[MiscChaos]

Time to wrap up my re-dos of my reviews!

So this time I'm reviewing Final Fuck from Nonki, the same guys who created the game Queen's Axe (something I REALLY wanna play at some point!). Final Fuck is a Streets of Rage-style side scrolling beat'em up with the obvious H-elements. I could go into plot, but as far as I know there isn't one really. The dlsite gives you a basic background, but the game itself doesn't give you anything. According to the site though, a woman named Mega Saturn invaded Astro city, bringing her gang with her. They start shit with the entire city and are winning, so the Lady Warriors step up to shut her down. The Lady Warriors, your playable characters, consist of Azukina the Kunoichi, Miruku (or Milk depending on the source) the Clumsy Sailor Fuku Warrior, Berry the Wrestler, and Cherry the Martial Artist. And that's it for plot, though in addition to The Lady Warriors, you can play as watered down versions of some of the bosses, such as Yuzukina the Boss Kunoichi, Pine the Boss Wrestler, and Naked Milk the [insert spoiler here].

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Which means it's time to move onto gameplay. Like I said before, Final Fuck is your standard Beat'em Up with an H-twist. Or not since there's two modes to play through: Standard, which allows enemies to fuck you, or Hard, which doesn't. You'll understand why that makes the game harder in a bit. You have 2 bars to really worry about: Your Health Bar and your Super Bar. Health Bar is the usual go down to zero and it's game over. That's right, there are no lives, just straight game over. Fortunately that doesn't mean much since you've got infinite continues. You can recover Health in the usual way: Pick up food off of the floor, usually dropped by enemies, though you also recover a bit whenever you move from one part of the stage to another. The second bar, your Super Bar, depletes as you do Super Moves which differ from character to character, though Lady Warriors and their boss counterparts do share some slight similarities. Not enough to call them a palate switch though. You recover Super Bar by beating the shit out of your enemies, picking up porn usually dropped by enemies, or by having your enemies fuck you. Yes, getting raped by your enemies helps you in the long run, especially since you don't lose any health as they do so. In Standard Mode, the game pretty much expects you to get violated every once in a while since the enemies will NEED you to bust out Super Moves to clear the stage and the porn gets dropped less and less frequently. In Hard, you need to conserve Super Bar like your life depends on it cause it frequently does. Yet you also need it to get through most of the stages, making things way more difficult than Standard where if you needed more, you'd just let your character spread her legs.

Thankfully you have Special Moves to help even the odds a bit. In addition to your standard attacks, you can input commands to use Special Moves which vary from character to character. For example, Cherry, my favorite character, has more than a few: → + A (A being attack) causes her to whip her hair accessories at her enemies while moving forward while ↓→ + A causes her to unleash a barrage of fists across the screen. Hitting the Super Move Button powers the move up further, making it do more damage and go all the way across the screen, turning it into one of those Super Moves I was talking about earlier that eats up your Super Bar. Each character has different Specials, some with odd inputs, so you'd have to experiment, figure out what move does what and when you want to use it and when do you need to Super it. You know, the basics of a Beat'em Up.

You only have need of 3 buttons for this game: A (Attack), you've got B (Guard/Grab), and C (Super). That's right, you can block an enemies attack and in Standard Mode that's an excellent way to get raped. In Standard Mode, you don't really need to block all that often and I never really grabbed all that often since I primarily used Cherry, but in Hard Mode, you NEED TO BLOCK. Like, it's a minimum requirement in the later stages if you don't want to die over and over again. Grabbing is probably essential to the Wrestler women's game too, so find the character you like and play them in your style. That's about all I can give you for gameplay.

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Which means it's time for the H-content section! Like I've suggested above, in Standard mode being raped is an essential part of the gameplay and each enemy has his/her own rape animations. Even better, you can see all of them, plus the game over CG screens, in the gallery mode available from the beginning. Just select your character, pick your Mode (useless in this case since you're not gonna use it), then pick CharaGallery instead of Go Fight! The rapes themselves are fairly straightforward, nothing to write home about, which is kind of a shame since you're gonna have to see them often if you're playing Standard Mode. It goes from eh to downright unbearable because of some of the character's voices though. I won't play Berry on Standard because her voice when being violated grates on my nerves to the point of unplayability, so you'd have to watch out for things like that. That about does it for the H.

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Overall, I very much like this game, though I will admit to being biased since I was raised on Beat'em Up games. The gameplay is solid and nicely varied throughout the characters, the music is pretty nice, and the game actually becomes a lot more challenging the further you go in. It hit a minor sour note with the H-content, but, like I said, I'm biased to Beat'em Ups so I'm willing to over look that. I've got a rough draft for my rating system up and running, so I'm gonna run it this time around and try to fine tune it as I go along.

Story: D. Almost none to speak of
Gameplay: A. Love Beat'em Ups and Final Fuck does it well
H-content: D. Average, though has the risk of quickly becoming irritating
Replaybility: A. I wasn't really content until I'd played through with every character on each mode, just to see how differently they handled things
Fun: A. Even with the H-content lacking, Final Fuck kept me entertained for hours on end!
Final Grade: C+ Despite the flaws, almost all in the H-content, I found the game enjoyable! If you like Beat'em Ups, I definitely recommend it!

My next game was going to be Paradise Fortress Repure Aria, also known as Magic Castle Repure Aria Paradise, but I quickly ran into a critical problem: It's entirely in Japanese! I don't know what's going on in the story besides what the site tells me, I don't know where to go next, I don't know what stats do what, nothing! So until an English translation comes through, I don't think I'll touch that one again. I might just play through Frozen Essence, maybe reviewing Project X in the meantime if it takes a while.

[BenshowSly]

Good idea, those reviews. It gives us more stuff to look at that we don't necessarily know Thank you!

[Zeus Kabob]

I agree! It's quite nice to see some reviews for games that we have been thinking of playing or those we've never even heard of!

One suggestion: two factors I pay a lot of attention to are the length of the game as well as the accessibility of the H-scenes. If you think those are possible to grade, I'd recommend them as metrics.

[MiscChaos]

I think I'll incorporate game length into my gameplay section and make sure to talk about the accessibility of H-scenes in my H-content section. I think I've touched on accessibility briefly in each of my reviews thus far, but it was mostly an afterthought for the content value itself. Keep more suggestions coming! I'd like my reviews to be as well rounded as possible! Also, if you have a game you'd like reviewed, bring it up! If I find it interesting (and can understand it as Repure showed me), I'll give it a shot!

[MiscChaos]

I still haven't found the time to play through Frozen Essence, so instead of a big review, here's 3 Chaotic Mini-Reviews! All the flavor you've come to enjoy in tiny bite sized packages! The 3 games are all non-H, 2 being Wii games I was playing around with while waiting for family earlier today and 1 being an MMO.

Doing the odd-man out, let's do the MMO first, Town of Salem, introduced to me by Taria. I've been told it's like your stereotypical Werewolf game: Someone(s) trying to kill the towns people and you need to either stop them or successfully kill them all based on your side. There's three main factions: The townspeople (with classes running from Sheriff to Investigator to Doctor), Mafia (Godfather, Mafioso, Framer), and Serial Killers (nothing to put here!) with a few neutral classes sprinkled in. Mafia and Serial Killers get to kill people at night and in the morning, everyone tries to guess who the killers are and lynch them. Last ground standing wins! Now, I could go into a lot more detail, but as this is a mini, I'm trying to keep it to basics. That doesn't change the fact that I freakin' fell in love with this game. With the right set of players, it becomes a game of intrigue that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end wondering if you're gonna get caught or if you'll catch the killers in time. It's a lot less fun with a bad set of players, but it's still grand fun. The game's still in alpha though, so it's missing features like the ability to find friends and join the games their in or the ability to kick people shouting about Nazi's or some such bull. Still, I found it a marvelous time and me, Taria, and That_One_Guy sunk quite a few hours into it.

Overall Grade: B+ Highly recommended! Though you may wanna wait until it's developed a bit more...

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Next is a game called Pandora's Tower for the Wii. The basic premise of the game is you're playing as a near silent protagonist named Aeron. Your friend, Elena, was the Maiden of the Harvest for a festival and was giving a performance when suddenly she got slapped with a curse then transformed into a monster and attacked the festival. There were no causalities, but now the army are hunting you and a somehow reverted Elena down because her curse will eventually turn her into a monster permanently. You run into a mysterious shop keeper named Mavda who leads you to the Thirteen Towers and tells you of a cure: Elena must eat the flesh of the twelve Masters, elite monsters within the Towers. Of course, there are two big problems with that: 1) The Masters aren't exactly willing to part with vital pieces of their flesh and, being big monsters, things are going to get a little violent. Guess who's gotta deal with that? Problem #2 is with Elena herself: Because of the religion that permeates the land, she's forbidden to eat meat. When Mavda points out she can either eat the flesh of beasts or become a beast herself, Elena's quickly convinced to put her beliefs aside for now. Mavda hands you the Oraclos Chain to better rip the flesh off beasts and binds it to Elena so you can tell how close she is to transforming and off you go!

Gameplay's pretty simple, but the uses of the chain are pretty excellent both in and out of combat. I didn't play much because, like I said, I was merely waiting for family to get done so we could do stuff, but what I did play would have me come back for more next time I can. Of course, "didn't play much" is subjective since I logged at least an hour or two into it and beat the first boss, but hey, that's short to me. An essential non-combat part of gameplay is your relationship with Elena. It's significance doesn't show much, but I've been told how friendly the two of you are effects the possible endings you can get. You can raise her affection by talking to her, relying on her help for certain things, and giving her gifts and her affection can absolutely plummet if you let her draw too close to becoming a monster.

Overall Grade: C+ Camera needed work and the first boss battle was almost pitifully easy, but it's definitely captured my attention and I may end up doing a full review for it at some point.

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The last game is The Last Story. A better title in my opinion would have been The Dull Story, but hey, I'm not the title guy. So what I could piece together before it bored me into trying Pandora's Tower was that you play as Zael, part of a mercenary group, who captures the attention of a spirit girl. The spirit girl, sensing his loneliness and pain, decides to help him by granting him magical powers in his hand. With this, he can draw the enemy's attention to himself, heal his party (but only after they've been nearly killed and he can't use it on himself), and power up his friends. I didn't get much further than the first chapter, so that's pretty much all I know. I've heard good things about it, so I may try it again in the future, but one strong point against it is it utterly failed to capture my attention within 30 to 50 minutes of playtime and that was with action up the ass like an enema. That's never a good sign in my opinion, but maybe I just gave it up too quickly. I guess I'll find out if I pick it up again.

Gameplay's basic: You have an attack button (hold it to guard), a crossbow attack (hold to aim, attack to shoot, cover to zoom), cover button, Gathering (the magic hand thing) and camera reset. Use Gathering then mash attack until you kill something, rinse and repeat unless the enemy's at a distance. In that case, Use Gathering then shoot it into oblivion, rinse and repeat. What I'm saying is you're going to be abusing Gathering a lot since it allows you to convert damage into infinitesimal bits of health for friends and sometimes they really need it. Because the AI for them is a little dull except for the mage. He generally knows to stay behind you and blast crap into chunky salsa.

Overall Grade: D Like I said, it didn't manage to capture my interest with almost an hour of gameplay and the combat system itself isn't really anything to write home about. Whenever I give this another shot, maybe it'll score higher.