Original Release: Sierra Lee, 2014, PC
An ambitious indie RPG that adds sex pics to complex politics and army management.
The Last Sovereign (PC, Sierra Lee, 2014)
Where to Buy: Freeware – Download here (official site) – has optional Patreon to get new releases a week early
Review by: Master-B
The Last Sovereign’s opening makes it look like some sort of coarse Rance knockoff with terrible scrawled “H” art and tryhard writing. Hang in there for about 10 minutes, however, as it’s just doing an extended bit. Once the parody opening is over, you’re deposited in what is a remarkably ambitious and complex indie RPG Maker project by any measure (not just in the field of porn games).
The Last Sovereign combines a world of detailed lore and Game of Thrones-ian political maneuvering with gratuitous sex and the gradual cobbling together of a harem. The setup is that the world is plagued by an Incubus King at the head of an army of monsters, most notably succubi that harvest humans for energy and capture them as playthings. We (eventually) play as a noble middle-ager war vet who becomes a dirty middle-ager imbued with demon power that has the potential to rival the Incubus King if built up.
The subtleties of the game’s story lie in the fact that our main character needs to hide his power level as he slowly builds himself up, lest he draw the attention of more powerful forces that could crush him immediately. This leads to plotting and getting involved with manipulating various kingdoms that are already in various stages of diplomatic entanglement and squabbling. The tone of the writing does a nice job of jumping back and forth from silly and funny (the current Incubus King is a slapnuts who is more interested in squandering resources on inventing bizarre fetishes than actually trying to stamp out his organized opposition) to serious and full of political intrigue.
Aside from being a free porn RPG that’s unusually well-written, The Last Sovereign’s thing is complexity. The actual path of the game’s story appears to be fairly linear, but there are an absolute ton of little changes and subquests and dialogue options that all substantially alter things in each scenario. You’re not guided by the nose to this stuff, which is both the game’s strength and weakness. I do love the idea of lots of little decisions and options making ripples in the future that you can’t necessarily predict or foresee, and requiring a proactive approach to swing things to your favor. What I don’t like so much is that this also applies to fundamentals of survival like your money stash and EXP. There is no way to grind in the game, each area has a fixed amount of enemy encounters and in many of them you have to suss out some well-hidden secrets to find all of them. Likewise, money is always tight and there are always many more appealing things to spend on than you can actually afford. After a point I felt like it could become too easy to be inadvertently too weak just from missing very non-obvious things along the way and be screwed after putting in double-digit gameplay hours.
The Last Sovereign’s downside is thus that it encourages a number of things that have been considered very poor design for a very long time now: save-scumming, opaque guesswork min-maxing, staying glued to a guide throughout so you don’t miss something that’s really important, making it possible to screw yourself after 20 hours of gameplay such that there’s no real option but restarting.
It’s also up there with Nightmare Sphere and some of AliceSoft’s output in the “this game might actually be very well-known if it didn’t have porn in it” category. The scenes are typical static one-screen art, and not particularly good or exciting; as of this writing the game is only at version 0.55 and after a few hours of gameplay, most of the scenes do not yet have illustrations. The main feature is actually long spates of writing (a la Rance) but in this case it’s more of a ladies romance novel style, basically Fifty Shades of Grey but more explicit. As with Rance, I found the sex scenes to be the least interesting bit of the game and was hammering the text skip button for every one. To me the best bits of the game were politicking with ambassadors by doing side quests / navigating conversation trees to try to influence important votes, and making strategic decisions about how to use your limited time and resources to prepare your army for war … the best of those segments had next-to-nothing for sex scenes in them.
As complex and good as it can be at times, eventually the cock of reality swings down and slaps you in the face to remind you that the actual game design bit is handled by a lone amateur with almost no budget. The game ran me off after about a dozen hours with obtuse quest progression flags I couldn’t find (and that the one sloppily-written online walkthrough is no help with) and too many bullshit “gotchas” if you miss one little thing you weren’t paranoically combing over old areas for. I also got fed up with the tedious, repetitive battles (a trip back to the SNES days but not in a good way).
I might give it another chance sometime after it hits version 1.0 (currently in the final chapter, but not complete and could be another year or more before it’s 100% end-to-end playable).
Links
Walkthrough – kinda helpful but has a lot of “ehhh just read this other linked page for this part” (linked page doesn’t actually cover that item adequately)
Thread by the creator with interesting insights
Another interesting analysis / discussion
Videos