Re: [Makura cover soft|SLG]Leane of Legitimate Crown
And the H-scenes don't actually make that much sense in a way, which is highly irritating. For example, at the beginning of the Harem a big deal is made about how the King will take away female generals and immediately fuck them. But any new girl in the Harem ends up having a multiple week wait before the King fucks them - why? It's a freaking harem. Girls get fucked in a harem. That's the entire point of it.. Of course there's the justification that this if for a player response, but why the immediacy of the initial scene then? Also the procedural NTR doesn't quite work either, because they changed the way they calculate who gets inducted to be based more on whether or not they're a war hero that if they're in love with Ares.
A similar criticism of the abduction mechanic: why does it take multiple months to get a girls clothes off? Surely they're not wearing the same underwear for months? And it doesn't take that long in some of the cutscenes, either. Also, why does capture have to be through defeat in battle? Wouldn't it have been more interesting to have enemy spies abduct the generals? Like the cutscenes in the game where that happens?
There's in-game justification for those two. The clothes are "magical" and so hard to break (I guess they also clean themselves, maybe), and Baroque is pretty big on consensual (for a certain definition of consensual) so he takes his time convincing the girls.
Their validity as excuses is debatable. On the higher difficulties, keeping the King happy can be pretty damn hard, and the only way I managed it was by deliberately sacrificing certain girls to his harem. I can easily see a more casual player who picks Gold difficulty for funsies getting his whole cast swallowed by the harem because he didn't take the necessary precautions. All in all, I like how the harem turned out, even if it's somewhat lacking in scenes in my opinion.
On the matter of abduction, I'm dissapointed. Rescuing the girls is too easy, and the only way for me to see those scenes is to deliberately play badly. I don't like that. More so since it could easily be avoided by making the AI make use of LV4 prison's ability to move prisoners. It would be pretty cool if after abducting one of your girls they then proceded to move her closer to the heart of their empire, making it harder for you to get her back. As it stands, I don't feel any pressure.
I don't remember anything about the first game so I can't really compare, but my objections aren't with the length and the mechanics, they are in the content. It's lengthy, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if it had random events or more storyline in it. Like, after defending the bridge and coming back to the city I was sort of expecting... more. Where the hell are all the girls? Two of them were in the harem, sure, but everybody else just dissapears to never be seen again until the end of the game. Or until you throw them into the enemy's hands to be raped, but that doesn't count.
The last part of the game is doubly guilty of this, since it doesn't even have any porn (that I've seen). You can still fuck your wife if you have one, but there's no scenes and not even a chance to make her pregnant so it's as exciting as a sleeping sloth.
The mechanics could easily be glossed over by making the story more entertaining. Not that I find them objectionable to begin with.
As a side note, I played in Gold and the AI was pretty adamant on building stuff. I don't think it built LV6 prisons and LV3 canons but that may be the case in Platinum. In any case, half of the time I checked on them they were building stuff.