Art Commission - Setouchi's Illustration of Volumpula

A while back I set aside some money for an art commission of Volumpula. That fell through unfortunately. Fast forward to about a week or so ago and one of my patrons (thanks Stephen!) pointed me in the direction of Skeb, a Japanese site that facilitates commissions of various artists, including some of the artists of Monster Girl Quest. I love Setouchi's work, especially his gooey slime girls, and put in a request. This is the result:

   

It's lovely. Volumpula does make for a nice soft comfortable bed while she gently drains away all that... tension. If you're not aware of who Volumpula is, she's a pink cushionblob. About a year or so ago, while first experimenting with Twine, I created a couple of monster girl CYOAs. One of which was "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly". That can be played here: Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly Setouchi did a great job here. I love his monster girls in Monster Girl Quest, so to be able commission him to draw one of mine is a dream come true. I'll talk a bit about Skeb.jp, in case any of you are interested in commissioning pieces for yourselves (which I highly recommend). It's an intermediary site. You put in a request. It's put to the artist. They say yay or nay, and then you get the piece within a certain time period. Setouchi was very very fast with both acceptance and delivery. Some things to note. You deal through the site and not with the artist directly (In fact it is frowned upon to contact them outside of the site). English requests are translated to Japanese with DeepL. As with all machine translation, it's a good idea to run the output Japanese through the translator to make sure you roughly get back to the original English. (I originally described Volumpula's colour as "cherry-blossom pink", which came out as "cherry red" - glad I caught that one!) Payment is taken on submission of request and then held until the artist delivers the piece, so make sure you have the money up front. The work is for personal rather than commercial use. I think that means it's okay to stick it up on a blog or social media site, but not okay to package it up in a game for sale without asking the artist for additional permissions beforehand. This means I'll need to find a different approach if House of Hellish Harlots progresses to the point of needing artwork. If you have a favourite monster girl from MGQ and would like to see more pieces of her in action, I'd recommend dropping in a request. As you can see from Setouchi's page, there are a lot of MGQ pieces requested by fans. There are also other MGQ artists on Skeb such as Shiki (although currently closed to commissions) and Xelvy. Overall I found it an easy and professional site to use. I think I might commission a few more pieces in the future. Never hurts to have more artwork of sexy monster girls and succubi floating around!

Hentai Game Review: Domination Quest

Bit later than intended on this one.  Chez Hydra is still fairly chaotic at the moment, unfortunately.

First, a disclosure.  I didn't make it all the way through this one, although I think I played enough (all but maybe the last one or two sections) to give a fair(ish) review.

With that out of the way, let's get onto the game.

Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls is the new hentai game from Kokage no Izumi.  This is the circle responsible for the Demon Angel Sakura series, and Domination Quest has similar themes and humour.  The main difference is the switch in genres from action platformer to JRPG.  Weirdly, rather than use RPGMaker like everyone else, they chose to build something resembling a RPGMaker game in Unity.  This might just be the most Japanese indie dev thing ever, but to be fair, later in the game they do make use of the 3D backdrop to do things not easily done in your typical RPGMaker game.

RPGMaker, in Unity...?

You play Kuro, an incubus-type creature with the ability to shrink opponents down and swallow them into his butt with his tail.

Yeah... um...

(Just roll with it.)

This doesn't consume the swallowees, but instead transports them to a mystical playground where you form contracts with them to add them to your team.  It might sound weird, but mechanically it's a pervier take on pokéballs.

The story has Kuro hitting adulthood and then heading off adventures with his succubus(?) companion, Shiro.  She gets abducted early on by another mysterious dominator and the quest is on to both get her back and stop this rogue group from stirring up tensions between monsters and humans.

Domination Quest is not really a battlefuck game.  Most monsters use regular attacks and you get a regular Game Over if the party wipes.  There are a few encounters where the monster girl grabs Kuro and the rest of the party has to break him free before the monster girl sexually slurps up all his energy.  I did enjoy those fights and wished the game had more of them.

Kuro getting slurped.  It's a shame more of the fights aren't like this.

The H-content is mostly gated behind an affection system.  As with Monmusu Quest: Paradox, scenes are unlocked by raising affection with your chosen waifu.  Also, as with MQ:P, not all of those scenes are good for Kuro…

Kuro's first date with Julie the goblin girl did not go well...

One of the ways to raise affection is through the game's skinship system.  This is sort of the equivalent of walking hand-in-hand with your waifu (where hand-in-cleavage might be the mildest version of it) and is shown as a little animation on the right of the screen while you're exploring dungeons.

Hand-in-...Boobies?

The H-content is pretty good and animated, but not quite to my taste.  As with Demon Angel Sakura, the themes lean heavily on vore, giantess and gross-out humour.

(the reveal of where the delicious pink slime comes from is both very funny and unspeakably unspeakably euwwww!)

As with the Demon Angel Sakura series, I found the various scenes funny rather than erotic, but I guess this is a YMMV thing.  They were still entertaining.

What killed the game for me were the bugs and too-frequent combat encounters.  The game was very unstable on release.  So much so that one of the paths in the first area was completely inaccessible because the entry and exit points were set to the same point, looping the player back to the screen they'd come from.  After that I didn't seem to have many problems until I hit the later forest area, and the game got very crash-happy.  The frequent combat encounters exacerbated this and made later exploration extremely tedious.  They trigger randomly as you walk through an area (like the old Final Fantasy games) and occur very very frequently.  Like, every few pixels frequently.  While this is a feature of this type of game, I really think the developers dialled the frequency too high.  The foggy area with the fox was the finisher for me.  Trying to explore a shifting maze with a combat encounter going off every couple of steps.  No thanks.

Hopefully this will be something the devs patch or fix in future versions.

Overall, despite the shift in genre, I think my recommendations are the same as for the Demon Angel Sakura series.  If you like Giantesses and Vore, this is worth checking out for the H-content (even if you have to grab a 100% save to avoid struggling through the later dungeons).  For general monster girl lovers, a maybe.  The H-content is nicely done, the humour is entertaining, but the game itself is wretchedly unfun to play, unfortunately.

A Shikibus plant girl?  Looks a similar style.

Despite the problems, there were a few monster girl designs I liked.  My favourite was probably the Carnivorous Plant Girl and she did give me inspiration for a new short story.  Even with all the other problems, if I can get a story idea out of a H-game I normally consider it a win.

Looking forward to getting erotically glooped by you, Mio.

Okay, second favourite design.  I really wanted to have some fun with this aphrodisiac goop flinging slime girl, but it looks like we're going to have to wait for a future Chapter 2 to get erotically glooped by her.

Closing thoughts on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - Plot & Characters

I’m off on other things for about half a week and as I was unable to prepare a week’s worth of new material in time to post here, I thought I’d have a quiet week wrapping up the Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] series with some thoughts on the game.

Yes, I know some of you are probably sick of this by now.  Don’t worry.  It’s done and I’ll be onto new stuff next week (hopefully back to some original fiction).

First up, we might as well take a gander at the story and characters.

Plot and story still seem pretty strong.  You could probably make an anime out of the game plot and it not be terrible.  This has always given the Monster Girl Quest series an edge over similar games featuring hapless (lucky?) heroes and nymphomaniac monster girls.

Part 2 threw up some answers for the weirdness in Luka’s paradox world.

The tartarus regions were caused by an experiment going wrong in Remina.  In the canon world, Ilias blew it up.  In this world their experiment summoned a Black Alice from the future.  This is the Black Alice from the original series right after her defeat at the hands of Luka.  Before that fight she’d devoured Ilias, but been unable to balance the forces of light and dark within her.  The version summoned to Remina does and ascends to godhood.

To be fought in part 3

The reason this is able to happen is because the Ilias of the original series stressed the laws of her universe by constantly rewinding time to pull Luka out of demonic vagina (all those Bad Ends were canon after all).  Then, when she was slain by Luka and friends, this poked holes all over the place and caused a bunch of bunch of alternate realities to bud off the main world, including the one where Black Alice was dragged back through time.

Paradox!Luka’s world was the first to bud off.  Black Alice ascending to godhood blew up Remina and spread the tartarus regions through the world (I think).  She also knocked a chunk of heaven out of the sky, which is how the snow continent came to be.

I think this is the Black Alice we saw in the mysterious tower back in part 1.  I would expect her to be one of the major antagonists if not the overall Big Bad of part 3.

We also got Lilith, Astaroth and Morrigan’s motivations.  Unsurprisingly they are sort of on our side.  Morrigan was recruited at the end of the part 2, and I’m guessing we’ll probably pick up Astaroth and Lilith at some point.  On the Alice route, anyway.  Those on the Ilias route will get their own exclusive angels.

The succubi are representative of a world where the monster girls came out on top.  Of those we’ve only seen an alternate version of Tamamo.  I expect we’ll see the other five legendary ancestors in part 3, as well as the other angel representatives from the world where Ilias reigns unimpeded.  These will likely be side factions we have to deal with about two thirds of the way through the final chapter.  (Not going to lie, looking forward to the monster girl ancestor scenes).

Also to be fought in part 3.  Who are you most looking forward to?

Sonya was revealed to be apoptosis, but is now back to normal (or a copy of normal if on the Ilias route).  I’m still not sure of the overall role of chaos.  They appear to be trying to fix causality by deleting all the deviating worlds.  Adramalech was better fleshed out as a world-ending abomination.  I expect we’ll see her again.  At this point I don’t know whether we’ll end up allying with this faction or fighting it as the over-arching enemy (over even Black Alice).  I could see it going either way.

Also, I’m not totally sure on this (machine translation etc etc), but I think paradox!Ilias might have been the source of the chaotization in paradox world.  There is some sense to this.  Black Alice arrived back in time with Ilias digesting in her stomach, creating a paradox of two Ilias’s being present at the same time in the same reality.  It’s a theory anyway.

Likely not appearing in part 3, this version anyway

That Ilias fell apart at the end of part 2.  We still have loli Ilias running around.  I’m not sure what part she’ll play in part 3 (or Alice if you picked Ilias at the start of the game).  She did sort of vanish from the plot after Grangold.  A more wayward prediction is you have to fight her (or Alice) at the end of part 3.

Nero and Neris’s role is still unclear.  Nero was keen to chase down the white rabbit and they did appear to oppose Tamamo.  I’m guessing most of these various factions will set aside their differences and unite versus either chaos or Black Alice in part 3.

Speaking of the White Rabbit, I wonder if we’ll see her again.  It was a little bit of a letdown that she turned out be nothing more than a creation of Ilias, and with paradox!Ilias gone, I wonder if that’s it for our annoyingly cryptic bunny girl.

Looking in doubt for part 3 unless she's something more than Ilias's tool

The one weakness I think the ending of part 2 had in comparison to other MGQ chapter endings is that it left the objectives rather muddy (unless I missed some nuance in translation).  Part 1 had us returning from a dying reality with the knowledge we had to do something awesome to save the universe.  The ending of part 2 feels a little aimless.  We were going to confront Alice 15th to prevent a war, but she’s dead, killed by Marcellus, and we find out the only reason she wanted that war in the first place was to try and save all worlds from being eroded away by chaos.

In the original series, chapter 2 ended with the twist of psycho Ilias and made it clear part 3 would be about stopping her.  As for the end of part 2 of MQ:P, we still appear to be heading to Helgondo, but at this point I don’t see a clear reason why.  Also, I really hope part 3 avoids the mistakes of MGQ and takes us off somewhere new.  I don’t want to be retreading the same path to pick up the elemental spirits again.

Going off in a new direction would also avoid what was the low point of part 2 for me—the repetition from the original series.  The monster girl queens were definitely less interesting because we’d already seen them before, including their Bad End scenes, in the original Monster Girl Quest games.

The high point was probably the tartarus version of Remina castle.  It’s hard to make RPGmaker creepy and skinned-alive people stuck in walls spouting random gibberish was definitely creepy (and again would make great scenes in an anime or more advanced game).

Creepier even than one of Delphinus's angel girls

Of the new characters, I liked Mephisto and Alicetroemeria.  Mephisto taking “to the letter” to extremes in order to aid us against Alice 15th while still being fanatically loyal to Alice 15th was nicely drawn.  Alicetroemeria, the past version of Black Alice, was also amusingly loopy.  She also seemed mischievous rather than malicious and I hope the plot makes use of her as we close in on her alternate reality counterpart.

For sexy smexy—Lilith.

More Lilith boobs for part 3 plz!

Oh yes, Lilith.  Yup.  I’m a sucker for big boobs.  Can’t wait for more Lilith in part 3.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 63: Final Side Quests and Recruiting Alma Elma

Beginning

<- Previous: The Final Boss

Wotcha doing Hydra?  Isn’t the game done?  Haven’t the final credits rolled?

Well yes.  But there are a couple of side quests that open up after the final credits.  Yes, I know side quests aren’t normally that interesting or important, but these add some juicy background info, so I thought I should cover them.

La Croix

La Croix’s circus of zombie monster girl queens has various pictures in the graphics folder, so I knew they’d show up at some point.  As we got further and further into the game I was wondering if they’d be the final boss to mirror alt!La Croix being the last NPC encountered in part 1.  Then with the snow continent and all the angels it became clear that the plot had moved past that point.

La Croix can be found in the mysterious ruins southeast of the Bird God Shrine.

Here, again

The first time we came here, Alice warned us that the monsters were too powerful for our current level and advised leaving well alone.  Return here after the credits and she’s happy for us to explore as we’ve already encountered and defeated plenty of the same chimera monster girls in the Ilias Temple Ruins.

We also now have a way of opening the door to the old research lab.  It uses the same keycard that we picked up while being sent back in time to the catastrophe at Remina.

(I suspect it also opens the locked door in the Remina castle tartarus region as well, but I didn’t get around to trying as I still haven’t levelled up enough to open the tier III chests.)

There are a few chests and plenty of gravestones in the ruins.  La Croix can be found on the top floor.  You walk in on her while she’s in the middle of an argument with the doll master girl from the mysterious tower in part 1.

Professional disagreements

La Croix is trying to persuade the doll master, unsuccessfully, to not follow Black Alice as she intends to destroy everything.  The argument being “you create, why follow someone hellbent on destroying everything?”

The doll master remains unpersuaded and teleports away, leaving us with La Croix.

Who immediately sics her zombie circus on us, despite Chrome’s best efforts to get through to her sister.

First wave of zombie monster girl queens

The circus attacks in two groups of three.

Second wave.  We also have too many Queen Harpy entries in the database.

There is the same group Bad End as the original series.  Each member also has their own separate scene that can be requested after they’re recruited.  I can’t remember if these are new or not.  Also, while checking the graphics folder of one of the more recent patches, I noticed TTR has added artwork of the circus members in their original non-zombified forms.

Former Queen Harpy when she was looking a little... fresher

I’m not sure what they’re doing there, but it’s cool to see the old monster girl queens in their original forms.  Maybe we’ll encounter them in part 3.

After we beat her zombies, La Croix acknowledges Chrome has found some strong companions.  She still possesses the same doomed fatalism her original series version had, but Chrome is able to knock her out of this by telling her about her alternate reality counterpart - the one that held on to document the end of a doomed world in the hope that one day her research could be used by someone wanting to prevent the same thing happening to their world.  The only one that could understand these notes is another La Croix, so this La Croix takes them on and leaves to research their contents.  She bequeaths her circus to us in order to continue the fight.  Six more new recruits to Luka’s harem army.

Another top-level job unlock item can be found on the table to the right.  At this point I think I have them all apart from the one (or more) that need to be won off Lazarus in the pocket castle casino.

Funnily enough, if you talk to Titania (the zombie fairy queen) back in the castle with Alicetroemeria, she’s the only one that recognises and dares to acknowledge Black Alice for who she really is.  She even asks her why she’s disguised herself as a wizard.

“Mischief,” Alicetroemeria replies.

I do like this incarnation of Black Alice.  I’m really curious to see how she features in the plot of part 3.

Overall, I thought the La Croix side quest felt a little tacked on.  As if TTR knew he needed to include it, but couldn’t quite fit it in cleanly.

Morrigan’s Side Quest

Morrigan’s side quest is worth doing as it gives a lot of interesting background info, an extremely powerful new party member, and leaves us with a nice post-credits stinger for the next part.

Her side quest pops up on the main notice board after she joins the party.  She wants to go to the underground research lab in Luddite Village.  Promestein also wants to come along.

The quest objective is again the machinery at the back of the lab where we first picked up Hild.

Back again.  The 3rd time now?

Once you get there Morrigan will go into more detail about the shikibi’s plan, and why they didn’t run when the world looked utterly destroyed.

The simple reason is they couldn’t.  They cannot travel between realities.  Only Luka, Marcellus and gods can do that.  They got here through the same method they’re using to transfer all the souls back to their world.  When the soul is transferred, it merges with its counterpart on the monster girl world and they sort of amalgamate back into a shared personality.  This is what Morrigan and sisters did.  They merged with their counterparts here and broke them out of whatever was sealing them away.

And yes, that does mean what you think it means.  Morrigan confirms it right after.  In order to do this, they had to kill themselves in the other world.  This becomes especially poignant when you realise that even if their plan succeeds, they themselves would be unable to go back.  That is some unexpected insight into their character and motives.

This does leave a slight plot hole around alt!Tamamo’s appearance in Grangold Castle, but the game even thinks of that, although with machine translation I found the explanation a little hard to parse.  I think it’s a projection, or related to how Tamamo can break her seal to manifest in her weaker loli-fox form.

Oh, and that new recruit?  She comes along right after.

There's our gal

This answers something I was wondering about.  I’d heard Alma Elma could be recruited post-credits, but didn’t know how.

Unsurprisingly, she’s not going to let us do this without a fight.  She feels Morrigan is owed a good kicking and will not be persuaded otherwise.  Yes, she is technically on our side, but she’s also the Queen Succubus and feels strongly that she should not allow other succubi to behave with such brutality.  Morrigan tries to explain they had “reasons” (and fuck those assholes in the Luddite Village anyway), but Alma Elma is not going to be swayed.  So, fight.

This is a proper fight as well.  Alma Elma isn’t going to hold anything back, so you’re probably going to need the same party you fought Sonya Chaos with, otherwise Alma Elma will seduce everyone and trigger a mass orgy pile-on for lucky poor Luka.

After you beat her, Alma Elma will join the party for good.

There is also a nice stinger to prep us for part 2.  Promestein copies the files and as she does so she mentions they're called the “the Laplace Protocols.”  Interesting...

And that seems an appropriate place to leave it.

I hope you've enjoyed this series.  It took quite a bit longer and was a lot more work than I anticipated, but was still fun to do.  I don’t use a Patreon or anything like that to fund this, but I do have various books available on Amazon (and other online bookstores - I write under the name M.E. Hydra).  If you’ve enjoyed this series and would like to show your appreciation, please feel free to pick up one (or more!) of my books.  They are also packed full of sexy Bad Ends given out by delectable succubi and other monster girls.  If you like the MGQ series, you’ll also enjoy my books.

Next week I’ll tag on a few lightweight posts with my overall thoughts on the series while I work out what to move onto next (I'm fully aware I've been neglecting my own fiction of late and want to take steps to correct this).

Before I go, the Alma Elma fight did finally answer one question I'd had since looking up her Bad End scene artwork in the graphics folder.  There was one picture that wasn't used in her request scenes and I did wonder whether it had been scratched out for being a little bit too far.

Nope, it's used here.

The nicest of gals... the worst of fates...

Yep, Luka buddy.  I’d highly recommend not losing this particular fight.

And that seems a perfect footnote to end things on.  Thanks for reading!

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 61: Ilias Temple Ruins II

Beginning

<- Previous: Ilias Temple Ruins I

Hang on to your hats.  Explanations are coming.  Plot twists.  Craziness.

There’s also going to be plenty of me mistranslating things and getting it wrong.  Thankfully, you all out there are great and quick to correct my blunders in the comments.  Please keep doing so.

Right.  We’re on the third floor (in game terms) of the Ilias Temple Ruins and chasing after the cryptic and annoying White Rabbit to try and get some explanation as to what the hell is happening.  Oh, and our world is dying.

We follow her up the steps.  Alice has already dropped strong hints that we’re likely to find a boss battle at the top of them.

We arrive at the top in time to see the White Rabbit get killed in surprisingly gruesome fashion by what appears to be a full-powered Ilias.  Uh oh.

Harsh...

Oh, it’s a chaotized Ilias.

You're not looking too well there, Ilias lass

This is the same Ilias that contacted us at the very beginning of the game.  She’s the one trying to contain the chaotization within the ruins (which also appears to have badly affected her).  She explains what broke the original world, and as White Rabbit hinted at earlier, it’s us.  Or rather, the original canon!Luka.  When he killed Ilias at the original series it destabilised everything, sending ripples back through time and budding off countless parallel universes.

(I think.  You’ll have to excuse my explanations for this last section.  Machine translation of the original Japanese only goes so far.  From what I can gather, the constant time rewinding to save Luka from sexy bad ends opened up various holes in time and space, and then killing Ilias removed the ability to fix things should something go horribly wrong, and something did indeed go horribly horribly wrong.)

This world was the first to spin off, but what was the calamity that caused all the craziness in this world—heaven to fall, the tartarus regions etc.?

It was Remina.  White Rabbit pops back into existence to tell us this.

Or rather show.  Ilias (or White Rabbit II) sends us back in time to see the exact cause.

Unsurprisingly, I’m rather confused at this point.

Remina in the past is quite advanced and we arrive in an experimental lab.  They’re in the middle of some kind of experiment.  It’s either some kind of fusion of magic and holy, or they’re trying to call up the spirit of Heinrich (or both—I’m clearly winging it on iffy translations and educated guesswork at this point).  This is the experiment that went horribly wrong—like skinned-alive people being stuck in walls wrong.

Remina used to be fairly hi-tech

The White Rabbit tells us she cannot intervene, and neither can we.  What we’re supposed to do is follow the corridor around to a room in the north.  There are a few NPCs.  One drops a keycard that is useful both here and later (or rather I think it’s an automatic trigger before entering the chamber at the end of the corridor).

And now the experiment, which appears to be using Heinrich’s sword as a catalyst to call up his spirit (or some energy his spirit contains, not entirely sure on this).  Seems harmless enough.

You probably don't want to do this... 

Except they get Black Alice instead.

Yup, did warn you.  Now you've gone and yanked Black Alice out of her time and space.

There are traces of Black Alice’s blood on the sword and it causes some kind of resonance that calls up her instead of Heinrich(‘s spirit?).  She looks the worst for wear, saying she’d just been defeated by a brave hero.  The experiment must have picked her up from the moment right after she was defeated by Heinr—

Oh wait.  This isn’t the Black Alice from the past.  This is the Black Alice from the future.

The Black Alice who was defeated by canon!Luka at the end of the original series.

The Black Alice who had just devoured Ilias.

The Black Alice who had devoured and taken on the powers of a god...

We are all fucked

In the original series Black Alice was unable to successfully balance the forces of dark and holy within her body before being defeated by Luka.  Here she has more time and...

Oh fuck

We are so fucked.

By successfully balancing the opposing forces within her body, Black Alice awakens to godhood.  This rips a hole in the space-time continuum and triggers the catastrophe of Remina.  I suspect this is what blasts a chunk of heaven out of the heavens and creates the various tartarus regions.

Beyond oh fuck

Rather interestingly, the game refers to Black Alice as the 3rd god to be created.  I thought Ilias was the only god.  My MGQ lore is rusty.  The only other god I can think of is the original monster lord and progenitor of Alice’s line.

God Alice ascends and looks around at her new playground.  Because of these events, all kinds of parallel worlds have bubbled off.  She (and we) see an alternate reality where the monster girls were not sealed and rule unopposed.  In another, the angels destroyed the monsters utterly and rule a world devoted solely to the worship of Ilias.

Our playmates for [part 3]

She also notices we’re here and observing her... which comes as a rather unpleasant shock to White Rabbit.  She nopes out of there and takes us with her back to Ilias...

...who promptly nukes her with lightning again, in case we’d forgotten she’s a complete psychopath.

Given that White Rabbit II is now a chunk of smouldering charcoal (alas poor Rabbit), it falls to Ilias to continue the explanations.  Out of all the parallel worlds she mentions there are two unique worlds where history diverged a lot and one side completely crushed the other.  It’s the representatives of these worlds that are running around trying to influence things on this world.

And speak of the devil, here are the shikibus sisters.

Speaking of the devil does indeed make them appear

Now what are they doing here?

-> Next: A final boss fight?

Here's what I hope is a more condensed explanation.  It's quite likely wrong, so please feel free to correct if you have better (i.e any) Japanese reading comprehension.

There is the canon!world of the original MGQ series.  In that canon!Luka did experience all the lovely sexy (and not so sexy) Bad Ends we chucked him into, but was saved by Ilias rewinding time.  This weakened the fabric of space/time, which was finally pushed over the edge by Luka and friends killing Ilias.  This opened up holes and created the potential for parallel universes to bud off.

(So Luka killing Ilias is the initial "catastrophe" event.)

Now to paradox!world.  Because of all the damage to the space/time continuum, an experiment caused the Black Alice fought at the end of MGQ to be pulled back in time to Remina.  There she was able to successfully absorb the powers of the Ilias she'd consumed to ascend to godhood, causing the catastrophe in paradox!world.

Other worlds were also budding off and multiplying all over the place.  In one, the monster girls beat Ilias and her angels.  In another, the angels eradicated the monster girls.  It's representatives of these worlds that have been running amok on paradox!world.

Right, so that's where we're at.  More to come (plus the inevitable final boss) next post.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 60: Ilias Temple Ruins I

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Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 54: Remina (alt)

Beginning

<- Previous: Recruiting the Queens II

Right, so with our harem forces bolstered by various powerful monster girl queens, it’s time to go and pluck the missing blue orb from Black Alice’s castle in an alternate reality.

Got that?

Ok, let’s go.

The stopping off point is the alternate succubus village.  If you’ll remember, there was a dude by the river standing next to a boat that looked like it might get used at some point.

Giz us yer boat

Well that point is now.

Or rather not.  The boatman won’t hand over the boat until we get permission from the mayor.

The mayor’s house is up in the north, just left of the path heading out of town.  If I remember right, it was blocked by a maid last time we passed through here.  The mayor looks like a loli, which is suspicious.  She’s grateful to us for driving off the succubus queen(s), but when Luka brings up the boat to Helgondo she refuses, saying it’s too dangerous.

At least until Black Alice... sorry Alicetroemeria... steps in.  They appear to know each other and the mayor changes her mind fairly sharpish.  Cue another line of suspicious “..........”s from our Alice.  Methinks shenanigans.  Methinks loli mayor is not as she appears and knows and recognises her demon lord.

Then it’s off to Helgondo.  Despite being in a different reality, the monsters in the ocean and on the land before the tunnel are the same ones we encountered in our world.

Once inside the tunnel we run into some new encounters.  Four new monster girls and none of them are repeats from the original series.  Obviously I wasn’t paying close enough attention when perusing the graphics folder, as I thought the game was nearly out of new encounters at this point.

Two are Setouchi’s, which I like as I like their artwork, even the weirder stuff.  One is Pile of Snakes Woman.

I think surrounding yourself with giant poisonous snakes definitely qualifies as playing hard to get

Not sure what’s going on here—whether she’s sitting on a pile of snakes, or is some kind of weird scylla/lamia crossover where the tentacles are replaced by snake heads.  Her temptation move is a snake bj, for which there is mercifully no artwork.

(I really hope I’m not inadvertently responsible for this whole snakejob thing after putting this story out.)

After that, her Bad End scene is rather restrained, or rather, we end up being restrained by snakes while she bounces away on top with what seems a perfectly normally human pussy.  (Of course, being part snake, that part of her anatomy does get rather tight when she gets around to properly milking us.)

Tight.  Very tight.

Next girl is called Master Shadow and she clearly has some sort of undead/ghost thing going on.

Ghost goo girl?

Maybe an iffy translation of lich?  I don’t know.  Her Bad End is rather undignified as she dunks Luka head first in spirit goo and drains first his cum and then all his life energy.

One of Luka's many undignified Ends

I skipped on the other two—Kirin and Enera.  I’m not a big fan of the loli/chubby chibi head shape and body type.

Nope...

...and nope

The artwork looks fine from what I saw in their respective temptation scenes, just doesn’t do anything for me.

On the other side of the tunnel is a rundown church.

What's a church doing all the way out here, and why is the priest acting so strangely?

The priest inside looks somewhere between distracted and completely blissed out.  The reason for that becomes clear as we bump into Lilim and Lilith (the other one) on the way out.  Ah, so that’s where those twins got to.

Ah, that'd be why

They recognise Alicetroemeria and nearly give out her real name before she cuts them off in a way that implies they came very very close to making a very bad mistake.  This is also where you can recruit the Lilim twins as Alicetroemeria talks them into joining.  I wonder what Black Alice is up to here.

Remina is over to the west.  The Helgondo monster girls are all taken from the original series—Wyvern, Behemoth and Kyoryuu.

Remina.  Come visit.  Ignore the poison pools and ravenous monster girls.

Unlike previous towns, Remina is more of a background dump than a quest gate.  There’s nothing stopping you from running straight past it to the demon castle, but that would mean missing out on some useful items, so it’s worth visiting.

Humans and monster girls are co-existing in Remina, but there are tensions.  Most of these appear to be caused by the Church of Ilias, which is also aggroing the science community as well.  An angry mob wants to burn down the main academy/lab.  It’s worth going in here as the scientist next to the blackboard has the Scientific Extremes item required to unlock some of the advanced jobs (Scholar?).

This guy has the book you want

There are also some nice call backs to the chaosised Remina we visited through Tartarus.  Going left takes you to a residential area that should look familiar (this is where we first emerged from the first tartarus region many many moons ago).  In the first building there is man with his scylla wife and daughter.  This is also the same house where we found [Nuruko] in part 1.  I did bring her along to see if it triggered any interactions, but there weren’t any, which seems like a missed opportunity.

Hmm, I have a feeling I’ve been here before...

There is a succubus prostitute hanging around at the end of a long alley.  Sonya is not going to let Luka have any fun with her even if you select ‘yes’.

The other side of the town is the commercial district.  You can find the battlefucker, Aurora, in the item shop.

Items with a bit of battlefucking on the side

Other than that there’s not much around.  Alicetroemeria enjoys herself going around incognito and we learn the pubs are segregated, mainly to avoid accidentally poisoning the squishy humans.

Things get a little more interesting in the castle.  You want to talk to the king anyway as he’ll gift you the Warrior God’s Soul needed to unlock more advanced jobs/races.  There is also plenty of talk about Edina, the king’s daughter, and some big whopping hints that Luka is the descendent of Heinrich and Edina.  This would mean he also has hidden royal blood to go along with his hidden angel blood.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the hidden king trope popular in fantasy stories, but then the recent Star Wars film tried the parents-are-nobodies angle and… it was not very well received.

I guess a Heinrich-Edina pairing might go some way to explaining why Black Alice went off the rails.  Although, to be honest, I’m not sure she was on any to start with.

That’s it for Remina.

-> Next: Black Alice’s Monster Lord Castle