Taimamiko Monogatari

It is an okay rpgm turn based hentai game. Combat is standard turn based jrpg. HP, MP, TP. Status ailments, elemental weaknesses, magic vs physical, buffs vs debuffs. Boss fights are a decent back and forth. Bosses have heavy hitting finisher moves that you have to defend against. Most of them find a good balance between easy and hard. Lots of fights against 4+ enemies at once, but you also get attacks that strike multiple times or all enemies at once. The power scaling is good, you unlock new abilities by leveling up and by purchasing spells from the cat. The hentai is okay-ish. Satsuki and Kagura look good, their art isn't bad, but the enemies and everything around them isn't very hot. It is primarily scenes that play when you lose, but there is a gallery that unlocks the scenes when you defeat the area boss. (except for the hornet enemies, which don't appear in the gallery) The game neglects porn in favor of combat, story and character development. The story is cheesy and clichéd, but actually has some B-movie charm. The biggest drawbacks are the incomplete translation, random encounter spam and the final boss. The final boss is a massive difficulty spike and it happens after a point of no return with a bunch of other fights and story scenes in between, so if your build is shit then you're screwed.

The game is great despite its age and pretty much follows the general path the creator would continue to take. Lots of softcore sexual torture leading into a few instances of actual penetration, but the scenes themselves are still pretty great and the game actually tries to add its own twists to generic RPGM combat, especially for bosses. The main issue comes with the translation, which is a fantastic attempt but unfortunately still imperfect. This is a problem because what the series is probably best known for is the wit that comes from poking fun at tropes (h game, fantasy, and shrine maiden tropes). There's also a really entertaining rhythm between lighthearted comedy and some pretty serious (and even a few depressingly dark in the later games) meta plots that will hit your heart, and it balances them fairly well. For all this to work, you have to translate things pretty well, which has traditionally been a huge issue for the series and probably why it took so long for them get translations (that and there's a ton of text to translate). I don't think this one does a terrible job at all, but it just feels incomplete. A lot of text is cut off and/or a bit inconsistent especially with items, the UI isn't translated, etc. Still, the game is very playable and it's a game worth playing. Hopefully these issues can be ironed out eventually or who knows maybe Kagura/OtakuPLan will pick up the first two games in the distant future. It'd be really nice to finally have the full series completely translated (and uncensored, but that's another story) even if imperfectly. Thank you to the translator for this attempt. I genuinely appreciate it, and think it's quite good despite some quibbles, but still hope we can push a bit further one way or another. The game itself is easily a 4 or a 5 so far once its age is taken into account, but the translation's flaws IMO bring it down somewhat, so I feel somewhere in the middle was probably the best solution. Thanks.