Pursuit of Mana

Art: 3/5 It's good, not much to say. Gameplay: 3/5 Your average H-RPG. H-scenes: 2/5 They're okay, but the lack of any sound is a big down for me. Story: 3.5/5 It's nothing new, but it works for NTR fans.

Really torn between 1 and 2 stars for this game. It had weirdly a lot of effort put into the writing that was there compared to the entirety of the game. But even then, the writing is leaning more "VN style" rather than "RPGM style" and railroads you all the up until the end pretty much. Art is okay, but sometimes doesn't really match the text. e.g. Feena gives a blowjob but art just shows her with her tongue out and face in front of the cock. Kissing is similarly done weirdly distanced from the target in the art. Story is well written for what is there. But you have little choice. I don't mind being railroaded....assuming the intent is only ever to have one ending the devs care about as I'd far rather have 1 solid story start to finish, than 2 routes but with one basically being "well, we wanted you to feel like you had a choice, but we didn't actually want to spend time on more than one route." The problem with the story comes in play when....you have 3 endings (4 if you count a game-over defeat early on), but basically no control over the story until deciding the ending. Which feels weird and wrong. But at least what is there was decently written despite clearly feeling the absence of choice. The game is...rough. Very unpolished. Worthless combat. Not even worth playing. There's a crafting system that lets you upgrade your gear that you'd think you need as you can't level up....but no. Just buy the best gear as it becomes available (generally easy enough if you just kill every monster on the map as you travel...though you really don't need to) The combat is basically just there to offer you gold and to a lesser extent materials to upgrade your gear that you don't really need to do. You essentially just need to walk from place to place, watch the story unfolded, while occasionally getting interrupted by combat or the need to slay monsters to get gold to buy better gear to get through the boss fights that are necessary just to progress to the next scene. You can branch to 3 different endings at the end. But it's a slog to get there. The good news is: The recollection room is open from the start. The bad news is: The art is just decent. You don't get any of the surrounding story which is the only kind of good things about the game even if it's not worth playing the game for. Annnnd the recollection room is bugged so you can enter but you can't exit. There's what looks like it's supposed to be an exit. But nothing happens walking into it. So save before you enter. Or really... If you want to slog through the game to read through the okay story, 2/5 stars. If you don't really care about the story or would really like your choices to matter, 1/5 stars. In either case, my recommendation is to not waste your time on this.