Original Release: Telenet, 2006, PC
It’s a sad thing that Valis’s adventures have to end here! In a final bid to pay down a few million USD’s worth of debt and stay afloat, Telenet sent Yuko and co out to the streets with corns on their feets
Valis X (PC, Telenet, 2006)
Where to Buy: eBay
The final and worst chapter in the sad tale of the downfall of Telenet Japan, Valis X saw the company literally whore out its most popular property in the face of a one billion yen debt. This would be its last release before closing its doors for good in 2007 (with most of its IP now owned by Sunsoft, save the Tales Of series which had been bought by Namco well before it went out of business).
Telenet brought in a relatively new hentai development house called Eants to have its way with their women. On the surface, it kinda sorta makes sense, at least for a company that was clearly dying and had nothing left to lose. Valis was always decidedly on the titillating side anyway, with the revealing fantasy armor and occasional gratuitous nudity in the original Japanese releases, so why not lean in to an obvious market? The thing is, Eants grabbed a dial that was at like “2” and cranked it immediately up to “10” on the degeneracy scale.
It also changes format, from the side-scrolling action with quality pixel art that made the series popular, to a more generic and text-heavy visual novel with minimal interaction. The art is OK and the product is adequately polished for a commercial release, but entirely static and not particularly reminiscent of the original games. The original design of the gals was basically lithe schoolgirls with some variety in their body types, the approach here is to basically turn them all into Xena characters with the same oversize boobies.
The highest-effort element is the full voice acting for all the game’s lines. Complete to include sometimes comical “sucking on oranges” and “slurping the bottom of a milkshake” sounds for the girl-girl scenes, and for some reason it always sounds like one of the girls gets her mouth pissed in at one point in the action (though it never actually shows this). The enemies and main villains all sound like a bunch of comical goobers too, the funniest part of the game is when Emperor Megas is all delighted and bemused in his corny voice when one girl pisses on another.
The plot loosely follows the first three Valis games, it’s basically a rewrite that brings in all the girls and some of the main villains sooner for more expedient and frequent H scenes. Yuko bumbles her way through a bunch of encounters with series enemies and bosses, occasionally defeating them handily but mostly getting detained and raept by them. Another retcon is that it seems to take sexual assault to bring out her latent Valis powers and give her the ability to kick ass. All of this is interspersed with random lezzing out by the campfire and such, as one would expect. In terms of turning the dial up to “10”, in addition to the assorted monster assaults (which kicks the game off in the Yuko chapter) there also seems to be quite a bit of gratuitous futa thrown into the mix here.
To be fair, the game is untranslated so I can’t give it a 100% fair shake. But from experimenting with reloads and reading other sources on the internet, the gameplay aspect is extremely minimal. Every once in a blue moon you get an A-B choice, which might unlock some different sex scenes, might stick you in a loop until you pick the “right” choice, or might just alter the dialogue a little bit. There are seriously only like six or seven of these choices in each chapter. A requisite gallery mode tracks all the scenes you’ve unlocked, which is how I verified there are some manner of branching paths after completing the game. But there doesn’t appear to be any sort of fail state or “game over.”
Making a side-scrolling sprite art Valis H game certainly would have been too expensive and time-consuming for a company in the state Telenet was in when this was released, I understand why they took the quickie VN approach here. But the game didn’t end up having much of a market. It turns out Valis fans weren’t as horny as expected, mostly decrying it for going too hardcore with the sex and sullying the series. And it didn’t offer much to more general hentai fans, who already had many similar choices in the decades-old fantasy booba armor genre. Also, if you’re not pirating the game it was released as four separate chapter packs that each feature one of the main playable characters (and last maybe an hour or two each), then a “final chapter” that includes all the girls and remaining villains, so you’ll have to either find the “Full Set Pack” collection or track down each of the five discs individually to get the full game.