Original Release: Elf Co., Sharp X68000/FM Towns/PC-98, 1992
Other Releases: PC Engine CD (Elf, 1994), MS-DOS (as Knights of Xentar) (Megatech, 1995)
Young knight Desmond bumbles into a world-saving, sex-filled quest in this fantasy RPG.
Knights of Xentar (PC, Megatech, 1995)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Hentai games sell like hotcakes over in Japan, but due to America being more uptight about sex (and possibly less perverted) they were untested here as of the mid-90s. So Megatech was formed as an experiment, to see if hentai games could penetrate the Western market and rack up anywhere near the numbers they did in Nippon. Well … the experiment pretty much failed, as Megatech folded up after a couple of years and only about five titles. But Knights of Xentar was the one that did the best, or at least got the most press, probably due to it having more gameplay than the usual H-game.
It’s a full-fledged console-style RPG, if a simplistic one. This guy Desmond starts out the game just wandering around in typical Japanime hero style, but he gets mugged by some bandits who steal the pouch of jewels he always carries. Turns out the jewels have some mysterious connection to Desmond’s past and it all leads to some drawn-out quest where you fight against demons, and also lay every slutty chick you happen to come across.
You can play the game with the keyboard, but I don’t recommend it as it’s stiff and clunky. Instead, you can steer Desmond around with the mouse as well as access all the menus. Combat is handled automatically – Desmond and the enemies just rush each other right away, and all you can do is tell him whether to focus on attack or defense, as well as cast spells, use items or run away. It might seem crappy at first but really, it’s fundamentally not much different from the average console RPG battle system and it actually moves a lot faster.
Due to the auto-combat, there’s a really high emphasis on stats in this one. I refer to it as the “perverted Dragon Warrior” specifically because it requires so much level-grinding. The game quickly falls into a pattern of town-grind for 20 minutes-dungeon-repeat, broken up only by random H scenes that come out of nowhere.
For the time period the graphics actually weren’t bad, but they really haven’t aged well. Everything is grainy and the colors are kind of muted in the gameplay, the only time you get decent color and art is during the cutscenes and the sex scenes. The sprites are all tiny and barely have any animation, and in battle each character just does some ridiculous three-frame twitch over and over and over again (although it’s kind of funny to see some big menacing demon hulking over you in the cutscenes, and then you go into battle and there he is just doing some crotch-thrust dance repetitively).
Sound – basically your typical Japanese anime-style MIDI music used in their computer games … if you’ve played one before you’ll know what I mean. Not horrible, but totally generic and forgettable. The one exception in the music is the tune that plays during the sex scenes, it stands out because it sounds like that one generic song from the early ’90s that people always use for sex … I have no idea what the name is, but it’s that one that has like a Gregorian chant and a French girl mumbling set to a porn beat, and there’s that synthesizer that goes “Urr urr urr urrrrr!”. Anyway the sex music sounds like that and it was so out of left field it gave me a chuckle.
There are some digitized sound effects apparently, but they made the game freeze for me under DOSBox so I had to turn ’em off. Apparently there’s also a CD-ROM version of this game that had voice acting, but it’s super rare and I couldn’t track down a copy so I have no idea what the voices are like.
By ’90s hentai game standards this game is a miracle of gameplay, but by RPG standards it’s fairly crappy. As mentioned, there is tons of level-grinding required and you usually don’t do much in combat but sit there and watch. Random enemies tend to be very hard and carry a pharmacy worth of healing potions which they automatically use when their life drops to a certain point, so the battles tend to be tough and drawn out. Moving with the keyboard is annoying as it’s too stiff, and moving with the mouse gets annoying as Desmond will choose his own path from point A to point B and if he hits a person or object you can interact with along the way he automatically will with no prompting from you.
It’s a little better than the average hentai game, but that’s a pretty low bar. I finished this one years ago when I was younger and dumber, but on this replay I couldn’t take more than a few hours of it before I was sick of it.
Links
Walkthrough
Videos
Gameplay Video