Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 9

This is a continuation of my playthrough of the DramaraQuest V hentai parody JRPG of Dragon Quest 5.  The first part is here.

After roaming the icy wastes, we found somewhere that might hold the key to the castle/ice palace in the north.

There’s not much on the first level on the dungeon other than a dodgy-looking dude in a furnished cave.  I think dodgy dude tells us that the key is here, but first we need to find the key to the two locked doors with chests behind them to the south.  There’s a staircase up in the northeast.  Time to go down and see what delights are waiting for us on the second floor.


First up is a new monster girl – some kind of gothic imp/succubus.


She moves her hips in a circular pattern like the stone stature girl.  Again a simple but effective use of limited sprite animation.  She also likes buffing herself with some sort of flame.  Hmm, hot stuff.  Can we take you outside with us for the trek through the snowy wastes?

After that the inevitable palette swaps begin as we get new thorn girl:


New weasel-snake girl:


New worm girl.


Now palette swaps are a feature of the game being parodied and are also a feature of the RPG genre in general.  It’s an easy way to bulk out the encounter list while keeping down memory size (important for old games) and/or art budgets (important for new games).  Personally I don’t think they work well in hentai games, especially monster girl hentai games, where the encounters are (and should be) far more important and detailed than they would be in a mainstream, “normal” RPG.

That’s just my opinion anyway.  For other people different hair or skin colour might turn an encounter they weren’t too fussed about into prime fap material.  Rule 34 is the one rule to rule all.

For a normal RPG a palette-swapped monster usually has different stats and movesets (because the player characters have ground up to significantly higher levels and need to be given fatter stats to battle against for the game to remain challenging (I could make a snarky comment here about JRPGs and “challenging” but then Etrian Odyssey came up to tap me on the shoulder and now I’m hunched up in the corner going wibble)).  The sprite is basically a coloured blob overlaying a list of stats and movesets.  I think a hentai game developer could get around this by giving the new monster girl different sexy moves or vary the Bad Ends.  Unfortunately in this case none of them appear to be significantly different to their original incarnations, so it feels a little like excess padding.

Welcome to the dungeon of the palette swaps.  They could have removed this whole section and the game wouldn’t have lost anything.

Sorry, hot gothic imp/succubus.  It’s not you it’s your friends.

There’s a stairway up into one of the treasure rooms.  The first chest contains the key to open the doors.  The second contains treasure book(?).  I’m assuming this is the key item to open the doors to the ice palace.

And speaking of ice palaces, that’s where we’ll be off next time.

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