Original Release: MangaGamer, 2013, PC / Mac / Linux
A girl experiments with demon summoning and finds herself trapped in their world, and will have to learn to control them to escape in this fantasy RPG.
Demon Master Chris (PC, MangaGamer, 2013)
Where to Buy: MangaGamer
Review by: Master-B
Hentai games that incorporate actual gameplay have traditionally been something of a rare breed. They’ve become more common in the past few years, but before that they were pretty few and far between. There have been a whole lot of “half-measure” games over the years though, especially in terms of blending RPG mechanics with the perv content … stuff like Knights of Xentar, Cobra Mission, Brave Soul … welp, add Demon Master Chris to that not-entirely-illustrious list.
The English port was released in late 2013, so it runs under just about any flavor of Windows with little trouble and has a smoother menu system & better battle mechanics than most, but the core of the game is basically a tiny amount of content strung out by extremely repetitive grinding in featureless dungeon passages.
The premise is that our titular Chris is some sort of apprentice sorceress, and after successfully summoning a demon cat named Bel from the demon world she starts really feeling her oats and decides to summon the demon Leviathan. Of course, this totally backfires and she winds up drawn into the demon world instead where Leviathan (who turns out to actually be a kinky demoness named Levia) smacks her and Bel around for a bit before allowing them to run away.
Unfortunately for Chris, it seems the demon world is nothing but kinky demonesses, who seem to find it particularly hot to tie up and torture a human girl. Chris stumbles across the lone safe outpost of demon-kind, where they just joke about molesting her all the time instead of actually tying her down and doing it. From here she learns that only Levia, the overlord of the demon world, has the power to open a portal to send Chris home. So, despite the seemingly impossible odds, Chris sets out to subjugate Levia.
So here’s where the clothing damage comes in. Demonesses found in dungeons have monster names, but it’s really just some hot anime girl cosplaying as the monster of that name, like “Mouse” is a chick with a Mickey Mouse hat on and “Slime” is actually two girls with Jell-O smeared over strategic areas of their bodies. You fight it out in fairly standard RPG style, but certain blows may damage their clothing. Get them totally nekkid, and Chris can execute the Capture command, which adds them to your roster of playable characters.
The battle system is actually a little better than you might expect, with at least some mild strategic bent to it. In addition to HP, you have to consider AP, which is reduced by both attacking/casting spells and when you take hits. Sufficient AP is needed for your more powerful attacks and is also key to the whole clothing damage deal. The lower a character’s AP is, the more likely they are to take a critical hit from an attacker with higher HP. When there’s a huge AP imbalance, a critical that lands is all but guaranteed to damage clothes. When an outfit is totally blown apart, that not only weakens the character, but takes away some attacks too (since outfits are the only equippables and special attacks/spells are tied to them). So you can’t just mindlessly Fight your way through the game, you have to pay attention to both your and the enemies status and recover AP or guard when appropriate, and try to press the attack when the enemy is low on AP without giving them too many free shots on you. The battle engine actually works out pretty decently and is the strength of the game.
The big weakness is the dungeon design. It’s about as lazy as possible. First of all, dungeons are just these featureless cheap-looking corridor clip art pictures repeated over and over. They also tend to be really small, and all there really is to do is walk in circles fighting an extremely limited range of enemies over and over for an hour or so while you level enough to take on the cranked-up boss parked at the end. There’s a bit of challenge and strategy initially in capturing the couple of new enemy types in each area for your monster army, but after that it’s a solid hour or so of mindless mashing on the same mobs just to get to a state where you can hang with the boss. I persevered in this for review purposes up to the 4th dungeon or so, then there was this Succubus boss that dodged like every single one of my attacks, I realized I would have to grind like three more levels to be on par with her (at least a two hour proposition) and that was where I gave up on the game.
Animation is scrimped on as well. Every character just has three static pictures — clothed, damaged clothes, and nekkid. Chris gets a wide range of outfits that each have their own set of three pics, but no other character can change outfits. Each dungeon also has a more traditional “H-scene” where Chris usually gets ambushed early on by a common enemy group or the dungeon boss and Molestered, but this is the standard series of static slides that barely change.
The art isn’t bad (though barely animated) and the battle system is a potential winner, but even in 2013 they’re still in this pattern of making you tediously grind for hours in return for a few GIFs that are tamer than stuff you could probably just Google up using random words. Would have liked to have seen this concept done better. Oh well. At least it’s all lesbos who appear to be of age, so no worries about underage or any extreme grindhouse stuff in this one.
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