Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Many-Eyed Hydra makes a Monster Girl Hentai Game: CYOA with Twine (part 1)

I’ve been saying for a while I’d like to make a monster girl hentai game.  Rather than just thinking and talking about it I thought I’d finally get my finger out of my ass and get around to creating something.  As I thought it might be an interesting topic to blog about you’re going to get the whole gory process right here.

I do have programming experience, but it’s mainly with generic languages such as Java and C#, and mainly making dull-but-functional desktop applications for manipulating probabilities and other maths.  One of the reasons why I’ve always thought about making games rather than getting down to actually making them is an unfortunate tendency to dream up projects that are stupidly complex and ambitious.  This time I’ll start with something small and simple.

My main strength lies in writing.  I’ve written a lot of stories featuring kinky sex scenes with succubi and other monster girls.  Because of this it makes sense for me to start with a text-heavy game.  Unfortunately text-heavy won’t attract as much attention as games with nice artwork of sexy monster girls, but it will give me something to start with (and I can always source artwork from other sources later).  Examples of popular text-heavy monster girl hentai games can be found over on Fenoxo’s site.  I’m sure most of you out there know of the existence of Corruption of Champions.

I won’t try to make anything as complex as CoC to start with.  First off I’ll start with a simple Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).  This will allow me to take the type of scene I normally fill my stories with and juice it up with a bit of interaction for the reader.

Next up is to look for tools.  In the past another of my weaknesses was to bang my head against a wall trying to build game engines from scratch.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already put a perfectly decent toolkit together.

Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.”  It was created by Chris Klimas in 2009.  I have no real experience of working with it.  People recommended giving it a look on the MGU forums and a quick check of the wiki revealed it has additional functionality should I want to move on to something more complex than a simple CYOA.  This is important as I do have some ideas for adding player stats and other variables.  From what I read, Twine should be more than sufficient in creating gamebooks along the lines of the classic Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series (Personally I always had a soft spot for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest).

That will be the next step.  For now I’ll keep to a vanilla CYOA.

Now I have a toolkit to play around with it’s time to think about what story I want to tell.  As I want to keep it simple this will be a single interactive encounter with a sexy monster girl.  Originally I thought it might be a slime girl similar to the one I wrote about in "Jackson in HRPG-World 3" (Japanese monster girl HRPGs always seem to have a blue slime girl as the first encounter – a nod to Dragon Quest, I think).  Then I remembered thinking about this before and the plan had been to base it on a short story of mine: “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.

Unfortunately, that story is exclusive to my last collection, A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales, so I can’t just link to it as I would to any of my other tales up on Literotica.  It’s a good story to use as a template as it has an ontological mystery-esque start and a clearly defined challenge.  In summary, the protagonist wakes up in a hotel room after being drugged and . . . actually, let’s go right to succubus involved.  Here's the gorgeous and charming Ceptophthorié with the full details.

Hi.

Now Ceptophthorié, you’re a princess of hell?

Yes, that’s correct.

That means you’re an extremely powerful succubus, right?

Yes.

And you know a lot of sexy tricks?

I know many ways to cause intense sexual pleasure.

Um . . . yes . . . interesting.  *adjusts collar.*  So can you tell us what this game will be?

It’s a really simple game.  The easiest possible.  All the player has to do is go the whole night without choosing to have sex with me.

Hmm.  Are you sure?  That does sound a little eas . . .

. .

. .

. .

Ceptophthorié, please don’t suck the soul out of this human.  We need him to spread our corruption through this world.

Okay.  As you wish.

. .

. .

Um yeah, where was I.  Right, yes.  “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1”.  This will form a nice template for my interactive story.  The player will be placed in a similar predicament to the unfortunate (fortunate?) Norris King.  And obviously we’ll give the lovely Ceptophthorié a few more tricks with which to tempt the reader.

It should be fun.  Keep an eye on this blog!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Many-Eyed Hydra's 2014 (It wasn't the best . . .)

2014 kind of sucked for me personally.

I had to scrap plans to put out a new collection in March as it wasn’t ready and then ended up not putting out any new books at all for the entire year.  While I did keep the Succubus Summoning series moving, I still fell short of my plan to make it a stable, monthly serial.

On the real life front the second half of the year was especially disastrous.  I lost most of August to stomach flu from hell and then September delivered a bigger whammy as I lost the job I’d held for the last seven years.  This was especially whammy-ish as I’d been working abroad.  No job meant no work permit and no work permit meant I had to leave the place I’d been living for the past five years and move back to grey old Britain.  If you’d been wondering why my #DailyWriting updates had dried up over the past couple of months then here’s your answer (unsurprisingly, losing your job tends to be bad for the self esteem regardless of how much money they give you to fuck off).

Tacking back to more positive waters, I did manage to get a fair bit of writing done in 2014.  While updates to Succubus Summoning were typically sporadic, I did get four new chapters out (208, 209, 210, 211).  I’ll look to complete the current arc early 2015 with the collected eBook version following soon after.  In 2014 I also put four brand new short stories up on Literotica: “A Real-Life Goo Girl”, “Busted Bankster”, “The High-School Sweetheart Removal Agency” and “What Kevin Did Last Summer”.  These weren’t the only short stories I wrote.  Currently I have another eight short stories waiting on my hard drive for suitable collections to include them in.

On the blog I tried out something new with some detailed playthroughs of monster girl hentai games like Violated Hero.  They didn’t help too much with book sales, but they did boost traffic to the blog, were fun to do and people seemed to like them.  I’ll be doing more of them next year, but I’ll be a little choosier over the games I pick as the Let’s Plays do soak up time and effort that could be devoted to writing as I mentioned here.  If Monmusu Quest: Paradox comes out next year I will be covering that for certain.

On the subject of time that is one thing I will have considerably more of next year.  While losing a regular source of income sucks dogs’ diseased dicks, I was at least sent on my way with a reasonable severance package.  Or Many-Eyed Hydra’s writing grant for 2015 as we like to call it.  At the moment my projects file is currently brimming with ideas for short stories, serials and novels.  I’ve been itching to get at it before those ideas go stale.  Next year will give me an opportunity to hammer out a lot of new material.  I’ve also got some other monster girl/succubus ideas I want to try out.  If the year works out and I’m able to balance the finances, I’ll keep going.  If not I’ll dust off the CV, re-enter the job market and be thankful I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to try out something as crazy as this.

Anyway, let’s hope 2015 will be a blinder of a year filled with plentiful sexy succubus smut!

Friday, December 26, 2014

Hentai Game Review - Vampire and Hunter

What do you get for 89 cents?  In Vampire and Hunter’s case a short mini-game and a longish H-scene with a sexy vampire.


The mini-game is a bit scrappy.  You run around a single hall trying to tag the vampire seductress while avoiding the various spells and flames flung in your direction.  The collision detection is a bit wonky and the text windows slow the pace down with frequent interruptions.  It’s an example of using the wrong tool for the job.  RPGMaker clones are designed to create RPGs – generally slower-paced games with turn-based combat and tons of stats – and this feels like it’s trying to be an action game.

Not sure RPGMaker-type tools were designed for this...

The H-scene isn’t bad.  For their previous game I though the text descriptions were imaginative but could have done with some art.  This time we get the art – an animated sequence of the big-titted vampire having sex with the hunter while drinking his blood.  The scales are a bit weird – either the vampire princess is disconcertingly large or the hero very short – but other than that the animation gives it a bit of life.  Unfortunately, it’s the only scene.

Double slurped...

The whole thing feels like a demo or proof of concept.  Then again it is only 89 cents.  If sexy blood- and semen-sucking vampiresses are your thang it might be worth a look.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Hentai Game Look - In the Castle of Succubi

Text, text and yet more text.  That’s the short summary of In the Castle of Succubi.


Like its predecessor, House of Monster Girls, In the Castle of Succubi is less a game and more a visual novel with the occasional choice (usually along the lines of ‘Would you like this particular succubus to bonk your brains out?’).  Also like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi is aimed squarely at fans of big breasts.  All of the succubi are blessed with super-ginormous norks and there is an emphasis on paizuri (titwank) scenes.

The plot has you play an adventurer of some description that falls foul of a trap in the demons’ castle.  This puts you at the mercy of a succession of lovely succubi who are all very keen to take good care of you.  Their idea of care seems to involve wrapping their soft mammaries around your dick and rubbing up and down until all that inconvenient tension floods right out.

Much much much rubbing up and down.

There are six succubi in total.  The first part of the visual novel goes through each giving you paizuri in turn.  The second part has some choices and a wider range of sex acts.

Unfortunately, like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi has an ungodly amount of text.  This is definitely not shying away from the novel part of visual novel.  Be prepared to do a lot of clicking, and clicking, and clicking, to move to the next juicy big-boobed succubus pic.  In the end I lost patience with trying to follow the machine-translated text and resorted to clicking through like mad just to get to the next scene.  To me it seemed like there was about four times as many lines of description as there needed to be.  I appreciate this is probably an unfair criticism.  If you were to take one of my stories and bung it in a visual novel framework with a couple of naughty pics to illustrate it, I’m sure it would be just as frustrating for a non-English-speaking Japanese person to attempt to read.

No matter how well endowed you are, she's still going to smother it.

One for big boob lovers, although the amount of text to wade through is daunting.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 3)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


Venus of the Red Lights

I’ve visited Amsterdam a few times and De Wallatjes (better known as the main red light district) is an evocative location for a horror story.  In fact this idea is a leftover from my days when I tried to write “normal” horror.  Most of the non-supernatural elements of this story are based on firsthand experience or stories I’d heard.


The Soul Worm

I have no idea where the monster girl from this one came from.  They bubble up from the depths of my imagination every so often and I think it’s best not to pry further.

At the end is a blink-and-you’ll miss appearance of a character you’ll see more of in the future.


Foam Shower

This is the follow-up to “Bubble Bath”.  The unusual succubus from that is just as pleasant to share a shower with as she is with sharing a bath.  Sadly, those pleasures are invariably fatal, but we can’t have everything.


A Summer Dance with a Succubus

One of the pleasures of writing is when a story comes together and all of the elements slot neatly into place.  I’d read a few articles about sex workers who provided services to disabled persons who would otherwise not experience the pleasures of sexual intercourse.  This was something I could see my “good” succubus escort character, Nicole, doing.  I also needed a story for a summer-themed contest and one of the things about summer is it’s ephemeral – all summers end to be swallowed by the dark and cold of winter.  Some lives are also tragically short and ephemeral.  But rather than obsess over the coming cold and dark, we enjoy the sunshine and long lazy days while they last.  And life is no different.  That’s how I pictured Terry – proud and defiantly making the best of an unfortunate hand.

This was the first of my stories to place in the Literotica contests and I used the money from that to buy a Kindle from Amazon.  It’s still one of my favourites to this day.


I hope you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how some of my stories came to be.  I'll do the same for A Succubus for Halloween at some point in the future.

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 2)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


The Spiders of Thomisoidus

I’m not entirely sure where this came from.  Spiders and silk work well with bondage fantasies and a planet full of sexy babes is a classic sci-fi fantasy.  Also the intro allowed me to have fun with a character bemoaning his lot after being suckered into taking a contract on a pleasure world that doesn’t really live up to expectations.  The teasing, stop-start nature of the sex scene was also highly pleasurable to write.


Delivery Special Soap

This is another story to indulge my fetish for soapland-style mat play.  It’s heavily influenced by Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City (anyone who’s seen the anime will know the scene).  I was starting to think about how my story universe worked and how the various monster girl demons interacted with each other.  As the demons are operating under a kind of masquerade, it made sense for them to have rules to prevent the sort of overt conflict that would attract the attention of the human authorities.  It also made sense that Inari would know how to work these rules to her advantage and by including a reference to her I could also hint at a larger story taking place beneath these short stories.


Knight vs. Succubus

This story has an interesting tale behind it.  I was asked by a developer working on a succubus game to write a story that would help publicise the finished game (sadly, I don’t think it was ever finished).  My first attempt was this story, which was rejected for being too dark.  I liked the story and then had an idea for another loosely connected series of “X vs Succubus”.  The connection is largely restricted to the title.  This is a much darker tale than the tongue-in-cheek “Slayer vs Succubus”.  It’s also one of the few times I’ve felt guilty about offing the protagonist.


Interrocution

I think the initial idea was a cocky criminal bound to a chair and at the mercy of a succubus.  I like blending gritty mob tropes with supernatural elements.  The story is also a fitting introduction to Koontz’s right hand “man” – Physalia.  She’s a much colder and fearsome succubus.  As Koontz’s enforcer she’s definitely not to be messed with.

The title is a mashup of interrogation and execution.


Crushed Between Her Breasts


This story came about through an impromptu challenge contest on the Literotica forums.  The theme was revenge stories if I remember correctly.  I had the idea of a chauvinistic IT manager annoying one of his female workers to the point where they seek external help to teach him a lesson.

Oddly, the double team of Eryx and Eunectis are also part of my recurring roster of characters, although readers wouldn’t know it as those stories are still waiting to be published.  Nancy’s debt is still outstanding . . .


I'll post the last part on the remaining stories tomorrow.

Monday, December 08, 2014

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 1)

This is another post where I go over where some of my stories come from.  Last time up I went through my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.  This time I'll run through A Succubus for Valentine's Day.

There might be a few spoilers for people that haven't already read the stories.


A Succubus for Valentine’s Day

When it comes to Valentine’s Day I’m a bit of a black-hearted curmudgeon.  Most of the stories I’ve entered into Literotica’s Valentine’s Day contests have been anti-Valentine’s Day tales of some description.  It was while trying to think of an entrant I hit upon the idea of re-using the nameless succubus from “A Succubus for Christmas”.  This then became an idea for a (semi) regular series featuring her, the succubus tablet and various themed days.  In this story she’s playing a similar role to before – the evil genie that gives her poor victim what they think they want . . . until they actually get it.

I did get some comments misinterpreting Kurtzberg as a ‘nice guy’.  Admittedly, I did set the story up to present him in a sympathetic light, and maybe fool the reader into thinking this might be one of those romcoms where the unfortunate slob ends up with the pretty girl after all.  Then the story takes a turn into murkier territory until it culminates in what I hope is a gut punch of an ending (as every good anti-Valentine’s Day story should have).  Kurtzberg is unfortunate and deserves some sympathy, but his actions take him far beyond the realm of nice.

Observant readers will have noticed the version in the collection, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day, differs from the version online.  When I first started out I used to seek feedback on the Literotica forums.  For this story someone made the suggestion that the ending would be nastier if Kurtzberg was left alive to let the horror of what he’d done sink in.  It was such a good suggestion I rewrote the ending to incorporate it.


Initial Infiltration

Aside from the usual asshole victims, a regular target of mine is the naive.  GRRM has it right with A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for TV watchers).  When one of his characters makes a poor choice politically, he doesn’t step in to bail them out.

There has been cultural pressure to move Science Fiction away from blasting the Other on sight to presenting stories where the only correct response is to attempt to resolve conflicts through discussion and understanding.  Personally I don’t like simple black and white certitudes.  When the motives of the Other are completely unknown, which approach is correct can only be ascertained with the benefit of hindsight.  In another story, another universe, Donaldson would have been the perfect protagonist to prevent inter-dimensional war.  Sadly for him, this is not that story and hell-space is not that universe.


Succubus Summoning 101

This story eventually ended up being the first chapter of the novel of the same name.  It was originally meant to be a short story about student warlocks making incorrect (and fatal) assumptions about which bits of succubi are dangerous to stick your cock in.  On the surface there is a twisted sense to the logic.  Succubi pervert the role of sexual intercourse to create new life by using it to take life.  Anal sex can’t create new life; therefore under the same logic succubi can’t use it to drain life.  Of course it doesn’t work out that way.

I neglected to kill Phil at the end of the story and since then he’s stubbornly just about managed to stay alive despite my best efforts.

The main reason I put the story in the collection was to protect myself from plagiarism.  Someone had already tried to pass off the Succubus Summoning 101 series as their own on another website.  Amazon’s kindle store was rife with plagiarists mining story sites like Literotica for material to rip off.  Having the original Succubus Summoning 101 story in here would give me some protection against that kind of shit while I was working on the ebook version.


Puffed Up

This is another superhero deconstruction story in the vein of “Squeezed”.  Sexy villainesses have always been a feature of comics even if they rarely get to fully show their stuff (generally speaking, the hero has to survive otherwise that’s the end of the comic book).  This story is a none-too subtle dig at the counterproductive aspects of the war on drugs in our own universe.  Reading it years later I think I might have been a little too cynical with the ending.

I stopped included the superhero stories in later collections because they didn’t fit in with the shared universe elements that were starting to emerge in the series as a whole.  I do have some ideas for other sexy super-villainesses.  At some point I might assemble them into a themed collection.


I'll go through the remaining stories over the next couple of days.

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Hentai Game Look - Succubus Nests

This is a Look rather than a Review because it’s for games I bought but didn’t get into for one reason or another.  This isn’t necessarily the game’s fault, which is why I don’t feel comfortable describing these as reviews for products I’ve only really skimmed the surface of.


Succubus Nests suckered me with the trial.  And the title.

Admittedly I probably suckered myself by making a hasty purchase without fully checking it out.  Either way it didn’t end up being the game I thought it would be.

The protagonists are three “magical” girls with specialities in gun, sword and magic cards respectively.  They’re trying to fight off the malign influence of a succubus and purify locations on an island.

When it comes to porn games my preference is for male player characters being sexually dominated by hot monster girls.  I’m also okay with the player character being female so long as the hot, sexy monster girls get plenty of opportunity to do their thang.  What doesn’t work for me is seeing hapless female player characters getting stripped and buggered by ugly male demons and non-anthro critters.

(As an aside, I should make it clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making their porn games follow these lines.  Fantasy is fantasy.  Be extremely wary of the people that try to argue otherwise, even if the target of their ire is something you personally find distasteful.  Give them that and they’ll come back for something you enjoy.  Sadly, given recent news, opposing these censorious, holier-than-thou types is more important than ever.)

Back to Succubus Nests.  The gameplay involves selecting a one- or two-person party and sending them off to purify an area.  There’s a screen focused on each party member where you can observe them walking, fighting, or having sexy snu-snu done to them without their consent.  The girls handle the encounters fairly autonomously.  The only player input is to order them to escape or fire off their special attacks.  At the start the girls flatten their opponents without much problem.  As they progress deeper into the area being purified their stamina drops and they become more susceptible to their opponents’ attacks.  At first it’s restraint, but if you don’t yank them out of there it becomes molestation followed by full-blown rape until the hapless lasses end up catatonic.

My guess is there is a strategy to figure out for when to hit certain “nests” and which of the three girls to bring on the mission (they have strengths and weaknesses vs. different monsters).  I never played long enough to figure it out and I found the fact that most of the game runs autonomously a little annoying.

Bondage in the woods with your friendly neighbourhood spider-woman

The most common encounter in the trial version are Arachne spider women that try and bind up the player in silk.  This, the title and the presence of a succubus in the cut scene made me think this was going to be a girl vs monster girl game.  Sadly, this isn’t the case.  In the full game the only monster girls I saw were the arachne and a futa succubus.  The other encounters consisted of ugly male demons and non-anthro critters such as maggots, slimes, scorpions, electric jellyfish and even dogs.  Standard ryona (female characters having their clothes ripped off before being abused) fare in other words.

This mission did not go well.

With the little windows onto the action, Succubus Nests reminded me of Pretty Warrior May Cry – another game featuring unmentionable things done to pretty female warriors.  That game had interesting enough mechanics and enough OTT humour to hold my attention even if most of the sexual content wasn’t to my taste.  Succubus Nests fell short for me.

I can’t really say if it’s a good or a bad game, only that it didn’t appeal to me personally.

(As I said with Pretty Warrior May Cry - would really love to see a sexy monster girl version with similar animated sex scenes.)

Saturday, December 06, 2014

Hentai Geme Review: Pendulum

Blimmin’ ‘eck, this is ‘ard (Disclaimer: Hydra skipped the golden era of Mario and Sonic games and is consequentially not very good at 2D platformers).


Pendulum is a 2D monster girl hentai platformer with pixel sex scenes along the same lines as Eroico and Monsters ‘n Girls.  The gameplay is straightforward.  You start at the bottom of a themed tower and jump your way up to the top and next level.  Getting in your way is an assortment of monster girls that slow you down by performing sex acts on you.  Slow up too much and you both get a dunk in nice hot lava.

The towers are procedurally generated from what I can tell, in that the positions of the platforms and monster girls vary each time you play the game.  This makes some runs easier and some very difficult depending on where things are positioned.  The difficulty ramps up considerably as the checkpoints get further apart.  The first two levels seemed straightforward (there are five in total), the third had me pulling out my teeth, and - after just about crawling through the third - the fourth ruthlessly pummelled my battered body into the dirt.  Thankfully, the developer(s) included a full save with the game, so even if you’re as inept as me you can still see all the content.


Gameplay-wise it’s pretty good.  The main character handles well and it all feels very fluid – and retro in a good way – as you bounce your way to the top.  Where it falls short is the hentai part.  It does have sex bits, but the crudeness of the sprites and tone leans more towards saucy humour than actual hawtness.  This is a pretty bad failing for a sex game, which is unfortunate as I quite liked the idiosyncrasies of the art design.

Not a bad little game, but possibly a little too quirky for its own good.

Friday, December 05, 2014

Musings on the Let's Plays and Hentai Game Reviews

I’m going to make a few changes to the Let’s Plays and how I blog about monster girl games.  Initially the detailed playthroughs of monster girl hentai games seemed a good way to generate material for this blog.  While they’re fun and give me an incentive to actually play all the way through a game, they do take up time that might be better spent on writing my own original fiction.

Also, the entertainment of the playthrough is dependent on how interesting the game is.  To be honest, DramaraQuest V didn’t give me a lot to work with other than an excuse to post pictures of semi-naked anime monster girls (not that bad of a thing, admittedly!).  I suspect there was also a lack of interest out there judging by the tail off in hits and number of comments.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be doing any more Let’s Plays.  I’m just going to be a little choosy with the games I do.  The other thing I want to do is get the reviews out faster.  Currently I tack them onto the end of the playthroughs as a more permanent summary of my thoughts on the game.  What I’ll aim to do is to switch it around and put the review out first so they’ll be a better resource for readers wondering whether they should purchase the game or not.  If I find the game sufficiently interesting/sexy/batshit crazy, or you out there want to see more of it, I’ll start a Let’s Play and go through in more detail.

If I really like the game I’ll probably throw Jackson into it for the shits and giggles.  It’s about time I got his adventures restarted again.

And yes, I will give Mon-musu Quest: Paradox the full Let’s Play treatment when it comes out (Ilias help me!).  That one will almost certainly be interesting/sexy/batshit craxy enough to merit a more detailed look.

Thursday, December 04, 2014

Hentai Game Review - DramaraQuest V

The confusingly named DramaraQuest V is actually the second entry in the DramaraQuest series of games.  The reason for V instead of II is because DramaraQuest is a hentai parody of Dragon Quest V.  It follows closely the plot of the first third of the latter game, replacing the normal monsters with sexy monster girl equivalents and switching the emphasis of the combat to sex rather than fighting.


DramaraQuest is a battlefuck game.  Battles are decided by the combatants attempting to fuck the other into submission.  If the player happens to be the one submitting (because their HP is reduced to 0), then the game will offer up an additional sexy Bad End.  Outside of the battlefucks it’s the standard JRPG skeleton – you, as the main protagonist, wander through dungeons, villages and the outside world map in search of the trigger events that will advance the story along.  If you want a more detailed look I blogged a full playthrough, starting here.

The artwork is good and has a consistent style across the whole game.  The monster girls are converted versions of classic monsters from the Dragon Quest series and it’s fun trying to guess what they were originally (with the hammerhood being the most creative transformation).  The encounters have some limited animation achieved through simple distortions of the base sprites.  This is reasonably effective in some places.

One of DramaraQuest's more imaginative conversions

There are a couple of positives over the previous DramaraQuest game.  Rather than abstract portraits/clouds of black smoke, the monster girls are represented on the map as little chibi sprites.  Also, while there is some palette swapping to bulk up the monsterpedia, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it was in the first game.  The game has about twenty-odd monster types, with some having variants in hair and skin colour.


On the negative side the battlefucks and Bad Ends are a little generic and bland.  There’s not much variety to the monster girls’ attacks and the strategy is very simple.  On the plus side, experience progression is fast enough that the player won’t need to resort to grinding to advance further into the game.

Yep, you did see it right.  It was a sex toy.

I mentioned above that DramaraQuest V is a porn parody of Dragon Quest V.  What I should add is that it is a weirdly accurate following of the Dragon Quest V game.  Personally I find it a little odd when named characters are “borrowed” and thrust into porn scenarios.  This didn’t trigger for DramaraQuest V as I’m not very familiar with the game it’s based on, but it might for some.  If you loved the game in the past it might be a little off to see the innkeeper’s daughter getting up to things the innkeeper definitely wouldn’t approve of.

Or very arousing.  Everyone is different in this regard.

Sticking so faithfully to the original also creates a jarring disconnect between the conventional JRPG bits, where a legendary hero is dragging his young son around from place to place, and the battlefuck bits, where the young son suddenly morphs into Casanova++ and bonks the whole countryside into submission.  I don’t think the makers needed to follow the plot of the original Dragon Quest V quite so slavishly.  Although there’s a possibility I might be missing the point of the whole project here.

Sadly, not many of DramaraQuest's monster girls have additional attacks as detailed as this.

Overall DramaraQuest V is an okay monster girl hentai game without being an exceptional one.  The game’s biggest problem is it doesn’t really excel at anything enough to distinguish it from its competitors.  The Violated Hero series has prettier art and more imaginative designs.  Monster Girl Quest has a much more involved story.  ROBF has more complex combat mechanics and handles the battlefucks much better.  If you’re on a tight budget, you’re better off checking out those games first.  If you already have and are twiddling your thumbs waiting for Mon-musu Quest: Paradox to come out, then DramaraQuest will at least give you some sexy distractions for a few nights.

Monday, December 01, 2014

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 13

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

Last up we busted Prince Green-Haired Kid out of jail.  Now all we need to do is hightail it across the bridge and back to . . .


Who’s that?

It’s the End Boss.  Her name is Gema and I’m guessing she’s some kind of evil sorceress.  This being a battlefuck universe her elaborate red cloak is swiftly discarded and it’s onto business.


She has a nice special attack where she winks, hearts appear and Luka-clone is charmed.  In this state our attacks do damage to us instead of her.  Of course I make Luka-clone keep on attacking, for . . . um . . . reasons.

I found this battle a lot more hawt than most of the rest of the game.  Probably because that charm attack makes Gema appear more succubus-y while the other monster girls seemed a little too generic.

Oh, the fight is also unwinnable.  After reducing Gema’s health to zero she plonked a huge fireball on my ass for the grand total of this-will-definitely-defeat you 999 damage.  That’s how the game represents it visually.  In the description it sounds like a very special trick she does with her pussy and the fireball is really going off in Luka-clone’s blown brain.

In the Bad End scene she does a lot more special tricks with her pussy while taunting us we never had a chance of defeating her.  Give that she can propel fireballs out of her pussy I think she has a valid point.

This is so powerful it even defeats the rest of the party (who weren’t even involved in the fight) because . . . reasons.  Pops shows up to save the day and Gema summons two helpers – Jami and Gonzu – to take care of him.

That doesn’t work out too well as Pops spanks them right to the floor.  At this point Gema threatens to do the deadly dirty with the helpless Luka-clone.  This means that Pops has to stay quiet and let Jami and Gonzu do their special attack on him.  Obviously this is sexual in nature.

And . . . sex scene!


Pops gets double death paizuri from the stupendously well-endowed Jami and Gonzu.

(Hey, we’re the star of this game.  Why don’t we get to stick our dick between the giant boobies.)

The theme music is rather familiar here.  I think this is maybe the 3rd or 4th game I’ve heard it crop in.  Time to retire this piece of open source soundtrack methinks.  (That I’ve been around enough to hear this from multiple sources is better not dwelled upon.)

After much globular rubbing Pops spatters Jami and Gonzu’s faces and promptly expires.  Having your sprite fall over, flash a bit and then vanish is usually an indication you’ve just departed the JRPG world.  As I said – double death paizuri.  There are worse ways to go I suppose.  RIP Pops.

Hey wait.  Who’s going to save us now?

Maybe this is what propels our heroic Luka-clone to go all limit-breaky and trigger the real End Boss battle.

Nope.  We’re carted off into slavery to build a big temple somewhere.

The End.

What!?  That’s it.  That sucks.

Hmm.  Another check of the Dragon Quest V wikipedia page reveals DramaraQuest is continuing to slavishly follow the plot.  Apparently the hero is abducted into slavery after about a 3rd of the game and there’s a time skip of about 10 years followed by his continuing adventures after he escapes.  Ah, so DramaraQuest V is a fairly accurate (weirdly slavishly accurate as some of you have pointed out to me) porn parody of Dragon Quest V.  The downer ending makes sense in that context.  I wonder if that means there will be a DramaraQuest V: parts 2 & 3?

And where the hell were the puff-puff attacks?  Come on, this is Dragon Quest we’re talking about here.  No self-respecting porn parodist can miss that opportunity.

Overall not a bad little monster girl battlefuck game, but not an exceptional one either.

All that remains is to go over some extras.

The NPC I was missing was Baby Panther.  As someone kindly pointed out in the comments you get her scene by selecting the new option that pops up beneath the ‘masturbate’ option from the first menu option while wandering around.  This heals you back to full health.  Hey, sex is good for you.


A later version of the game (which can be downloaded from dlsite if you purchased the original) includes an additional 6 monster girls.  Or rather just girls in this case.  I think they’re supposed to represent various character classes from the game.  They can be found by returning to the fairy realm (the fairy is still in the inn basement) after the end credits play out.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 12

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

Last time we found the kidnapper’s hideout up in the northeast (it was not very well hidden).  To enter it we cross a bridge across some water.  Inside we can see Pops battling out with a bunch of monster girls on a lower level.  I’m guessing the goal is to make our way through the maze to him.


This was where the first DramaraQuest was thoroughly anti-climactic.  All the monsters in the final dungeon were palette-swapped versions of previously seen encounters.  Thankfully, the follow-up avoids this with four brand new wandering encounters to enjoy.

You know I said DramaraQuest was relatively tame and it was mostly ‘animal ears’ monster girls rather than the full monstery monster girls of Monster Girl Quest and the like.


WTF!

I wonder if Dark Eye failed an audition for Violated Hero on account of being too creepy even for them.

Oh wait.  The weird eye goes away if you use the clothing break magic spell on her.  Or you could bonk her like she is.  Some people might be into that sort of thing.

The Bad End isn’t quite as weird.  Like all the others she tells us how comfortable her pussy is, how thick and dark our semen is, and how she’s going to keep going until we’re empty.

Deeper into the maze there’s a loli in the bag.  That’s one place to keep them I suppose.


A little further along we have that fantasy staple – a skeleton.  Only skeletons are a little difficult to incorporate in a hentai game on account of being defined by their lack of soft fleshy bits.  DramaraQuest gets around this by giving us a petite little maiden in an old-fashioned costume and a skull for a mask (this comes off when half her HP is knocked off).


She also seems a little juicy for a skeleton, given how her Bad End has her ecstatically announce how her pussy is overflowing with love juices.

The kidnappers, or rather the henchman, are located in a room near bony.  They’re sitting around a table and talking about selling Prince Henry into slavery.  They don’t do anything about us as they appear to be inexplicably frightened by the decidedly-not-threatening Baby Panther.  We don’t fight them because of . . . well you know how fights work in this universe.  That’s fine by me.  I’m still recovering from Dark Eye.  The last thing I need to see is pixellated pork sausage sliding between hairy bum cheeks.

Further north is the last of the wandering mooks (at least according to the recollection room).  She’s a girl in brown stockings with what appears to be a brass tap on her head.


As an aside, I actually curious to play the original Dragon Quest to see what the hell these monster girls were in their original non-monster-girl-arized forms.

Prince Henry is locked in a cell we can’t reach without a boat.  This means going to Pops first.  We arrive just as he defeats the group of enemies before him.  Given how enemies are ‘defeated’ in this universe I suspect Luka-clone will need several years of therapy after walking in on that.  Wallow in it, Luka-clone buddy.  You’ve been doing the same all game.

Pops temporarily joins the party for his single role of kicking down the cell door and then holding off a horde of sexy green-skinned babes while we escape.

Hey, can we switch roles?  I’m totally fine with heroically giving up my body to hold off the hordes of sexy green-skinned babes.  Really.

Oh well.  Guess we have to go and fight the hot end-boss instead.  That’s up next.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 11

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

After saving the fairy world from eternal winter it’s back to the basement of the inn and Pops shows up to drag our ass off to the next location.  We get there through a tunnel under a river that was closed off earlier and the destination is a big royal palace.  Pops is famous and we’re ushered right into the presence of the king.  While they’re chatting we’re told to bugger off and find Prince Henry, whoever that is.


Yep, it’s more of that talking to everyone to try and hit the trigger event to move the story along.

When I was rushing through without really reading the text the castle section was a complete nightmare.  It took me a while to figure things out.  I don’t think I was the only one as someone asked the same question in the MGU forums.

As it happens it’s fairly straightforward.  Talk to the green-haired kid in the east room.  He asks if you’ll be his friend.  Then go and open the empty chest in the room south of him.  When you come back Prince Henry will be gone and underneath the stool he was sitting on is a stairway to the room below.  Going down there will trigger the next story event – Prince Henry is kidnapped by some rogues and you leave the castle to chase after them.  This puts us back out on the world map with – hopefully – some new naughty girls to play with.


First up we do get a new girl and I recognise her as a monster-girl-arized version of Dragon Quest’s slime knight.  She’s very bouncy and possibly quite mad.  I guess bouncing around all day on a googly-eyed blob of protoplasm will do that to a gal.


Then we hit more palette swaps.

There’s a version of the bug (mole cricket?) girl with blue hair.  The encounter plays out pretty much as it did before.


The bouncing cactus girl comes back in a shade of red.  The Bad End is a little toned down this time and has no mention of her spiky bits.  Given the risk of impalement I guess she’s one for the masochists and danger lovers.


The mad plant comes back and the red incarnation isn’t quite so loopy.  She also has the same switch-to-cowgirl attack.  It looks good but it’s very much blink and you’ll miss it and they don’t use it in the Bad End, sadly.  The Bad End is longer for red plant girl, but – like most of them in DramaraQuest V – it’s easily forgotten.


Then we get a new girl – a ghost mouse/rat.  Despite her mousey appearance, once the Bad End gets rolling she’s very keen on Luka-clone being ‘obedient’ while his sperm tank is drained.


You’d think, given how close we are to the royal castle, they’d have cleared the local territory of monster girl bandits.  Maybe not.  Maybe they treat it as a tourist attraction.  Here’s a slime rider – boing boing boing.

You’d go.  Admit it.

Anyway, after Luka-clone bonks his way through the whole countryside it’s time to head up to the northeast where the not-so-secret villain hideaway is located.  As for what devilish delights are contained within . . . come back next time.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Let's Play DramaraQuest V! part 10

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

Currently we’re off to the ice palace to find a flute that will end the permanent winter and bring about spring in the fairy realm.  That’s the official line.  Really we’re looking for excuses to be screwed by lusty succubi and other monster girls.

Hey, at least I’m honest about my flaws.


The ice palace ends up being a sort of inverse TARDIS (i.e smaller on the inside).  It’s a fairly short section.

There are three wandering mooks on the first floor.  The only new one amongst them is a blonde version of the succubus that cropped up on the second level of the first dungeon.  If you liked that succubus but would have preferred it if she was blonde, the game doth provide.


There are a couple of slippy-slidey ice rooms and then we’re right into the throne room with the ice queen boss sitting on a throne.


Yes, she has the flute.  No, she isn’t going to give it up as she likes winter too much.  So . . . fight!

Or rather . . . fuck!


Unlike the other fights this one doesn’t require too much effort to throw.  It’s actually reasonably challenging to win.  The ice queen has some kind of ice attack that annihilates Luka-clone's defence stat.  After that she starts hitting like a truck.  A truck covered in pretty lace and silk and with a fresh coat of glossy lipstick on the grille, but still a truck.

How easy the fight is depends on how long it takes her to get off that first ice debuff.  After that I’m forced to alternate between attack and heal, and hope my MP doesn’t run out before her HP.

Again the Bad End is sadly not too memorable, being more of the same moves from the fight.  This is a game more focused on putting the sexiness into the battle-fuck part, which is fair enough for a battle-fuck game.  It’s also possible I’m missing a lot from the language barrier.  Machine translation not being the most accurate of things.

After we win the fight the ice queen, fully satisfied I guess (This is a battle-fuck game after all!), hands over the flute.  Then there’s a joke as either Luka-clone or the queen tries to use a chimera wing (the teleport-back-to-town item of choice for the Dragon Quest series) and Luka-clone is sent crashing into the ceiling.  The same joke crops up in the dungeons of Dragon Quest if I remember right.  After much jolly hilarity and possible skull fractures the ice queen reveals a teleporter that takes us right back to the fairy village.

Hey, I had no problem traipsing through the land of snow and boobies.  No problem at all.

Back at the fairy village we hand the flute over to the fairy queen and lo, spring arrives.  And for our reward the fairy queen . . .


. . . jumps our bones.  This shouldn’t have been much of a surprise given what kind of game this is.  The artwork looks very similar to the queen from the last DramaraQuest game.  It’s set up as a fight, but is really a H-scene in disguise.  It doesn’t matter if you win or lose and the fairy queen appears in the NPC section of the recollection room afterwards.

After that it's back to the basement of the inn, where we'll carry on next time.

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.