Re: SD Quest -chibi hentai rpg (NOW ON SALE FOR 8usd on itch.io)
I was mostly interested in Princess Ren but since I also got a copy of SD Quest from the package I figured I might as well play it despite having no love for SD in general. Despite preferring the art style in Princess Ren, I enjoyed SD Quest more. Comments time!
Positives:
- The two characters format added a lot to the game. Their interactions were pretty fun, and yay yuri! It also gives some flexibility to the combat system.
- Comedy was actually pretty good and present throughout the entire game. Kudos!
- The two illusionist battles were great. They are both puzzle-y with some variations and tricks and were really fun. It's the highlight of the game from a gameplay perspective in my opinion.
- As usual, it's appreciated that the gallery is unlocked and complete upon finishing the game. No need to intentionally lose to view the scenes.
- Puzzles were nice.
- You have a nice skill selection even from the start of the game, including a bondage skill that actually shows up on a few enemies.
Negatives:
- The first area (before the first boss) has a variety of enemies that keep you on your toes. You have to be careful about the status of your clothes, various status effects, spells, enemies that can be bound and those that are not... And then the second area has only mages that are basically neutralized by silence skill. And after... there's no enemies remaining for the rest of the game, just 4 bosses. It felt that the game ended before I could actually make use of the tools I got.
- Enemy design consistency. All enemies in the game are made with your art, except for the slimes (who don't really clash) and two male regular human enemy types. They REALLY clash visually compared to everything else, especially since all the other enemies are made in an SD style. Also, your battles have the enemies on the left, and your characters on the right. Yet, those enemies are facing forward, not toward your characters (like all the other enemies) so it makes it even more jarring and gives a really lazy/unfinished feel.
- It's great that status effects are actually effective in a game... But Silence completely shuts down everything except the Dominatrix boss, and it felt like the no-brainer, perfect option in every single fight starting from the first boss onward. When you get access to it, Poison utterly destroys every remaining boss in short order. Final boss? Silence her and poison her on the first turn. Win a few turns later after losing maybe 500HP. Is she supposed to present any challenge?
- It kind of felt like half a game. When I saw "Happy ending" on my screen, I was wondering if I had missed something. 1 hour 30 minutes on my save when I had been going very leasurely. No trying to take down the slaver's place or trying to save anyone? No actual confession between the Lili and Kenzie? No real usage for Lili's Incite skill to learn new spells? Skill shop for 20000 gold spells when you aren't going to be anywhere close to that (and not sure if they'd serve any purpose)?
Basically, after the illusionist fights I was feeling like it was great. Storyline progression, great fights using some good mechanisms. The two versus two fight afterward was a non-factor (Use poison cloud once, spam silence), some puzzles, easiest final boss I've ever seen, and bam, game's done. It finished when I thought it was starting to get going. I appreciate that there's an happy ending, but I felt it came quite a bit too early.
Anyway, overall I did enjoy the game but I felt that there should have been more to it...
Random questions: Is there any use for the vibrator you can pick up? It's in the regular item inventory, but it's not usable out of fight and in fight it doesn't appear in the list. Also, is that canonically the "real" Ren or was that just a cameo of similarly named character that also happens to have wings?