Original Release: Cs Ware, 1997, PC
Train three maids to do their jobs by day, and provide “special service” by night.
The Maid’s Story (PC, Cs Ware, 1997)
Where to Buy: eBay
Review by: Master-B
The Maid’s Story / 3 Maids Story is an old H-Game from the mid-90s, released for the Japanese PC market. I’m not sure but I think the English version is a fan translation. Also not sure if it can actually be purchased legally any more – publisher Cs Ware seems to have gone out of business a long time ago.
Anyway, like most Japanese H-games, it’s a little obnoxious to start playing, making a registry entry and copying a .DLL to windows/system, but once that’s done the game runs smoothly without crashing. Once you get going, it turns out the game is about training three women for maid service / sex slavery.
As with most H-games you’re a 20-something unemployed nobody who stumbles into this weird job that involves pressuring women for sex. In this case, your rich friend invites you to spend three months at his uncle’s mansion training these three wannabe maids to do household chores well by day, and please the master with “night service” after hours.
So the game is broken up into 90 days, with four time segments each day. During morning, afternoon, and evening, you schedule each of the maids to do some household chore – cooking, cleaning, laundry, or grocery shopping. Then at night, you can visit one of the maids, and instruct her in the fine art of sexy time.
The maids have levels in each of their chores that increase with experience, and they also have levels of proficiency in each of the sexual tasks you assign them which get increased each time you do them. The only issue is, they also have a limited energy bar. Each chore and sex task they do decreases their energy and they only get a portion of their bar back overnight. If you wear their energy too far down, they have to take a full day off in which they do nothing at all to recover. The girls also have an affection level for you based on how you treat them and how much attention you pay to them, if it’s low they work more poorly and level-up more slowly. And finally, you have money you need to manage. The game only requires you to use it to buy groceries, but it disappears pretty quickly and chances to replenish it aren’t often.
Each week some random merchant will also come by, either a guy who sells gifts and sex toys, or a guy selling upgrades to the mansion that make chores easier and please the guests more. Each week you also get a guest on a certain day, but the identity of the guest is randomized with each new game.
It’s basically a time/resource management game in the style of other H-games like True Love ’95 and the Princess Maker series. Scheduling gets complex since you need a girl cooking during each of the three daytime periods to ensure stamina recovery for everyone, and if you neglect a task for too long, the dirt and grime piles up and you’ll have to have multiple girls work on it in a day to get on top of it. The weekly visitors also rate the service of the girl that you assign to take care of them, and each of the three male visitors you can get takes a fancy to one of the maids and will demand sex from them if you send them to serve that guy. This is where their progress in the “night lessons” comes in, each guy has a certain randomized sequence of sex positions he wants the girl to do, if she can do them all to satisfaction you might get some extra money out of them.
The graphics are the very definition of “average” and “mediocre.” This is the typical H-game manga style where the sex action is drip-fed to you as still screenshots with the junk blurred out in accordance with pointless Japanese law of the time. Everything is competently drawn but nothing is really impressive. The little “super-deformed” graphics and character portraits during the actual gameplay are also about as minimal as it gets. I’m guessing they didn’t want to spend a lot of money on art for this one.
It’s funny how you can take a game with really dark subject matter, like training women into abuse and slavery, and then add bouncy River City Ransom ragtime music and “kawaii” graphics and it all comes off as adorable. Anyway, the music is the typical hentai game MIDI stuff, but it’s pretty listenable here. The main song that plays during the daily cleaning will probably grow to get on your nerves but I actually liked some of the tunes that you hear less frequently. There are no sound effects that I know of but there is a “voice” menu option, so I think the game might have been a CD rip that originally had voice acting or something. Probably just the typical Japanese girls shrieking obnoxiously, I doubt we’re missing out on much there.
Maid’s Story actually starts off seeming complex, playable and interesting, but ultimately it’s kind of a kick in the grapes. At the beginning when the maids suck at everything, it’s a challenge to keep the daily chores under control while also getting their levels up and getting in enough quality sexy time. As the game wears on, however, you soon learn there’s really little difficulty.
First off the 90 day time limit to get all the maids trained up is more than generous. Also, when they gain skill in something, they never lose it even if they completely stop doing it forever from that point on. And as the skill goes up, the chores get done more effectively and don’t pile up as easily. Also, running out of money seems to have no negative effect whatsoever — you can still shop for groceries and feed everyone. If you do run out of money, or start to come close, this random businessman appears for a visit and gives you $2000 regardless of whether you give him good “service” or not (though you can get $500 extra out of him for satisfying his pervy desires.)
The preferences of the visiting men also never seem to change, so once you’ve seen them once you know what to focus on training during the “night service” with the girls to get the cash out of them each time. As far as I can tell, there’s no way at all to “lose” the game – maids never get fed up and quit, going broke has no real effect, failing to please a guest doesn’t really seem to matter.
There’s no gallery of saved scenes that you’ve unlocked like in many other H games, you’d have to like restore a saved game or something to see whatever you want to see, making it a bit of a pain in the ass.
At first the game seems fun to play but eventually it degenerates into kind of a tiresome click fest. The “H” scenes are particularly repetitive as you keep seeing the same pictures and dialogue over and over and over and over and over as you do the “training” … and then you get them yet again when the guests come by for their “service.” And there seems to be no way to skip all the dialogue and just go to the next pic. And once the maids are all at like level 3 or so in everything, the maid training aspect basically goes on auto-pilot and becomes almost equally repetitive.
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FAQ
MIDI soundtrack – One of the lesser-known soundtracks of Ryu Umemoto, a famed chiptunes composer better known for Gundam games and CAVE’s arcade shooters
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