Legend of the Master Baiter Origins: Gills Gone Wild

Review of ver 1.01 after catching every variant of every fish and completing all post-game content Coming into this after the previous LoMB, I initially felt underwhelmed with how much smaller this game was in many respects. Then I checked the original dev's platforms and found this game was RELEASED first, but for whatever reason Kagura translated and published the sequel first. Blame it on background shenanigans courtesy of Kagura and co. Being the game that started this duology of fishing HRPGs, this one is of course smaller and lacks various QoL features found in the later release. But in turn, I can better enjoy that 2nd game because I now know where it all began. Tl;dr The Good A short and casual experience that can easily be beaten in an hour or so. Less if you use the QoL features for the fishing minigame, longer if you do what I did and catch EVERY variant of EVERY fish. This game has a lot of the features that would carry over into the next game (fish tank that acts as a gallery, variant fish, etc.) Comedy value in MC throwing hands with everything from beetles to bears in his quest to fuck fish. The Bad Slow walking speeds plus out of control encounter rates for random battles plus limited paths plus severe lack of fast travel makes getting anywhere in this game a slog, even discounting sub-areas like the inside of buildings. Which makes me appreciate the QoL features related to those things in the 2nd game. On a slightly petty note, this game appears to have been made before the dev figured out how to code diagonal movement. Hope you like 4-direction movement a la old RPGMaker Like the sequel that would later spawn, this game only has one save point. On the upside, the heal point and save point are the same in this one. The Debatable The QoL features for fishing (always get a bite, battles are easier) are permanently toggled on once you buy them, so they basically nix a lot of the grind and challenge. But you have to farm the money to buy them, and then go to a specific part of the shop, where the shopkeeper even warns you that these features cannot be turned off. The easiest way to handle this is to keep multiple saves, one for doing things with the QoL and one without. The post-game is more about the journey and side content than the actual finish, since all you get for clearing it is money, which at that point is redundant. Shota tag is there for a reason. MC looks awfully small in stature (though not dong size) Monster girl tag is there for a reason. There's only like 3 H scenes with regular women, and all of them are locked behind the post-game. And it's not like you can skip the fishgirl H scenes since one automatically triggers the first time you catch a fish, so if you're not a fishfucker, this game isn't for you. Incest tag is there for a reason, except it's kind of optional? There's one optional scene with the MC's older sister after clearing the story, and there's one scene with MC's aunt after defeating the optional post-game boss. Point is, there's not a lot of incest content, and it's all locked in the post-game. Though there's no loli tag, a lot of the girls (mostly fish, but 1 human) in this game look just a tad petite, bordering "cute and funny" IYKWIM. It might just be a result of the artist's particular aesthetic, but since you have no control over what fish bites the line, and H scenes upon first catch are unskippable, you may not like this game if you don't like your girls on the smaller end.

Short, Sweet, to the point. If you've come here from the other Legend of the Master Baiter Game, this one was the first game. It is not a prequal, it came first. We just unfortunately got the better game first Now I know what your thinking, why 4 stars for a game that's so much shorter than the one that. It's simple, cause the other one wouldn't have existed without this one. Yeah, it's short and the girls are in the sequel and handled better (The Whooper and the Pregnant have different dialouge until the repeating ones here, and if there is a different between whooper and normal in this game I didn't see it) but they were able to take the first game and then improve upon it. So I'd say give it a try since you can beat it in like an hour to three. It'll make you appreciate the sequel just to see how much it improved upon itself. ... That makes it sound like this is bad, it's not I just didn't have a better conclusion.