VenusBlood RAGNAROK International

At the time of writing this review, the latest available version of the game was 1.04b, though I started playing on 1.03a. Most of the fixes were bug fixes, rebalances and a couple of additional Deus stages, and didn't address some of the things I'll be commenting below. Keep that in mind when reading this if more patches pop up later. Now, before getting into the nitty gritty of things, we need to establish some facts about VB Ragnarok, to better understand the situation with the International version. The 1st fact is that the original game came out at the tail end of 2016, which means that a little over 9 years passed before the International version was made. At the time, it was Dual Tail's 1st attempt to make a VB game in Unity, supposedly because the VN engine they were using until then didn't cut it anymore. Regardless of the exact reasons for the change, the fact is that they knew that they had no experience with the new engine, so they kept things simpler with a more Frontier-esque gameplay, thus removing the Legion System that was introduced in Hypno(Hollow). As disappointing as that may seem, it's actually a good thing that they did, because Ragnarok suffered from the most spaghetti coding issues of any VB game, and from what I've been seeing, it sounds like no other game after it surpassed it. The other thing that needs to be established is that Ragnarok is the sequel of Frontier, specifically involving a certain part of the ending sets of Frontier (to be exact, the Fena high affection ending ). As everyone knows, sequels can be a tricky thing to handle, but in this specific case, it was made worse by a couple of facts. One of them is that Frontier was not designed to have a sequel in terms of world building and ending structures. It did not have a True Ending or anything of that sort, and a big selling point of VB up until that point is that any ending is as canon as any of the others and players could pick whatever they enjoyed the most. The other major issue can be seen from the description of the game. After a mere 200 years (which is very little time for the long-lived Gods and Demons of Frontier), Loki and most of his bitches disappear, and then 300 years later, Odin dies too. Basically, the second major issue is that when they made the sequel, they fucked over the previous game's cast of characters, in the non-fun way, which, as you may imagine, led to... issues... with those that were specifically fans of Loki and/or his bitches. The list of questionable decisions continued after that in various ways, with the end result being that Ragnarok is in many ways, not what most Frontier fans wanted from a sequel. Which leads us to the International Version, VBRI, and what they did when they localized it. Story-wise, they did what they did in previous International releases, which is to add a new character into the mix to make things smoother. In Hollow and Gaia, they were nice to have, but not absolutely necessary, and they had fairly low presence and barely any scenes. In Ragnarok, Vidar, the new character, has a very large presence and a very important role. She's not a minor side-character, she's in many ways one of the most important Main Characters... and the sad thing is that she was really needed to plug up a good number of plot holes and to help some events make more sense than they did originally. The even more sad thing is that she's not enough to fix the mess that is Ragnarok, but it's definitely true that VBRI is better than the original release, story-wise. Gameplay-wise, they didn't change much, they likely couldn't do much without breaking the game with the state it was in. Mostly, they did the usual of adding bunches of guest units and whatnot, plus rebalancing things here and there, but they didn't try to really change the gameplay in any real way. The end result of that is that, in the overall sense, VBRI is genuinely the easiest VB game out of all the ones to get an International release. It's tutorial and presentation of information is still bad, but it's much easier to learn than any of the others. Part of this is because it plays a lot like Frontier, but without Frontier's jank. Lastly, H-scene-wise, while it's still Venus Blood, VBRI is the most tame of all International releases in an overall sense, and even the original Ragnarok was quite frankly the most tame VB. The usage of tentacles is lower than average, and more importantly, the way they're used is more tame than what happens in plenty of other titles. This is especially painful in the corruption stuff, which feels overall the weakest it's ever been in a VB game. It's still better than a lot of other games I could name, but by VB standards, it's very low. I'll go into the full details below, with breakdowns and spoilers and whatnot... but here's the TL;DR : VBRI is something of a 3.75 stars game, maybe 4, maybe 4.25 if you want to be really generous. However, it's definitely not in the "I really wanted to give it 5 stars" category that Hollow was in when I reviewed it. Now, let's get into the nitty gritty of things, starting with... VBRI's Story : The story of VBRI suffers from the fact that it's Frontier's direct sequel. While comparisons between different titles can and will happen, the fact that they're in different worlds and situations means that they don't matter as much. In this case though, everyone can and will directly compare Vali with Loki... and Vali will always be found wanting. He's not as smart, he's not as strong, he's not as charismatic... About the only thing you can say that's better, sort of, is that he's a bigger pervert than Loki in the sense of enjoying the depravity and its results more, but even that's undercut by the fact that VBRI's H-scenes are overall more tame than Frontier's. This continues on with every other character that has a direct comparison with someone from before. Brunhilde, most often referred too as Hilde, is not a match for Tyrca. Fana is not a match for Thor. Flora is not as good as Freya. Nanna is definitely not as good or interesting as Odin. About the only one that stands out is Ullr, if only because she's very different from Rigret, and that automatically makes her more interesting than the others. The problems continue with the fact that various details and bits of lore from Frontier are contradicted in various ways by bits of lore and world-building in Ragnarok, to the point where it can hurt one's brain if they think about things too hard. Character motivations feel a lot more shallow at times, and that's with Vidar thrown into the mix to plug in holes in the narrative. A big problem is also the Law/Chaos split. For obvious reasons, no matter the game, one is likely going to be better than the other in some ways, there's limits to writing things like these. However, in previous games, where, for example, Chaos was better than Law for Hollow, that didn't mean that Hollow's law route was inherently bad, just that it was not as good as its Chaos route. Well, that's not really the case here. VBRI's Chaos route is, quite frankly, a disaster. Without getting into spoilers, I can say that Vali's decisions to get into the Chaos route are just not properly built up. It's also a fact that from the start, Vali is very... Law-coded so to speak. Many have noted that the Law choices and what leads into True Law actually flows together as naturally as it can with Ragnarok's issues, but the choices and story flows for Chaos and True Chaos are pretty much nonsense in a lot of ways. It's made all the worse for their choice of an antagonist for the Chaos route... Also, this is the 1st time in VB where the Chaos route doesn't address the elephant in the room, which is to say, the Final Boss of the True Law route. In previous games, this was always properly addressed and you didn't have a major plot-hole caused by it. That might have been tolerable if the Law route was genuinely very good, but that's not really the case either. Due to various choices, while Vali does grow and develop in some ways during said route, it doesn't really feel like it's because of him, and more because he's been guided on the right path and he didn't question it much. You can say that the True Law Route is "ok", but it's not really amazing and just not that notable. This is where I'll address one of the big issues for VBRI... and that's the translation. VBRI's translation is the weakest it's ever been for an International release. Typos. Inconsistencies with names. Dubious choices in wording... There's oodles of issues all over the place, and at the time of writing this, none of them have been addressed. (Maybe some were fixed in the b version of 1.04, but nothing was mentioned in the patch notes and I was already done with 90% of story and scenes at that point.) It's quite frankly very disappointing. I'd have preferred if they delayed it another couple of months than this, especially since any semi-competent QA effort should have seen all of these, reported them, and got most of them fixed. After all, I'm not talking about issues with skills on hard to get units or rarely seen lines or whatnot, I'm talking about main story stuff and H-scenes that are easy to access. It doesn't stop you from understanding things and so on, but it's definitely below the level of quality one might expect from a product like this, especially after how well the Kickstarter went. That said, more in... Spoiler: Spoilery Musings While I've talked about all sorts of big issues with VBRI's story, one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue is the fact that not only did they choose to fuck over Loki and his bitches... but then they decided to bring him back as a mini-version of himself, along with some of his girls. Specifically, Norn, who's the reincarnated Fena from Frontier from that one specific ending addition, then Rigret, renamed as "Heimdall" for whatever reason, and Jorm. Everyone else died, but Tyrca, Thor and Freya make something of an appearance at the end, and even Odin chimes in a bit in True Law as apparently her soul hitched a ride with Nanna. (Which is another thing that isn't really addressed in Chaos.) Loki being in the story at all, after he got fucked up the ass by the narrative, causes a lot of problems by sheer dint of the fact that it invites direct comparison between him and Vali. This is made worse by the fact that he's made into the Man with the Plan, the Strategist as they call it in game. This unfortunately further emphasizes the fact that Vali is more of a thug and brawler rather than a big name military commander. It gets worse as the split between Law and Chaos is more about whether Vali and Loki trust each other than anything else. In Law, Vali basically follows Loki's script and is essentially guided into becoming a successor to the title of Overlord. Then they deal with what screwed over Loki 300 years ago and Loki and his bitches can retire knowing that the Empire is in good hands. It's not necessarily a terrible story on its own, but it's bad for a game when the protagonist doesn't properly feel like one. True Law also features Nidhog, the "End Dragon" or whatever, which is supposed to be the ultimate Final boss, and who, once defeated, turns into a living space-ship (for reasons), and Loki and his bitches leave with it into SPAAAAACE to be reborn and face new adventures and yada yada.... Chaos is basically Vali going off-script and Loki deciding to deal with him. So Loki kills one dude and steals his powah, returns to his days of glory or close to it, screws up the plans of the enemies, the Children of Virgiz, then screws them up after they couldn't gather all the power they needed. Then Vali rolls in and they duke it out. It's notable that this whole thing does not address Nidhog in any way whatsoever, which leaves it as an issue floating around in the narrative. It's also the first time in the history of ever where there are quite a few fans of the ending where Vali loses to Loki. I genuinely can't remember seeing so many "Best Ending" comments to the ending where the Chaos protagonist gets screwed over. I'll address Vidar at this point. Vidar, the added character of VBRI, is Loki's daughter with Odin who was kept in stasis because of Fimbulwinter whatever diseases up until around when Odin died. Then she was exiled from the palace for showing demonic traits (specifically the same style of horns as Loki), and during that exile she met and lived with Vali for a bit. Vali who didn't really give a damn about who she was, treated her well and tried to save her when assassins came after her. The two get separated and for a long time, Vali thought that she'd been killed, which, in VBRI, acts as further fuel for his desire to become stronger and fix up this divine/demon divide that's tearing their world apart. Vidar, with her presence, makes the actions of other characters like Berg and Sieg make more sense, as she gives legitimacy to their attempts to take the throne of Overlord on account of being an actual child of Loki and his most powerful servant deity and the former Chief Goddess, Odin. They also tried to set her up so that she distrusted Loki because of his seeming abandonment of her, with the goal of making the Chaos route work better... but... uh... It doesn't really work well. Still, the story flows much better with her addition... but it's still not really all that great. There's all sorts of other head-aches, like the whole "Spirituality" thing that didn't exist in Frontier in the way it's described in Ragnarok. Or the re-working of how Divine/Dark/True Gear works. Or the whole "Servant Deity" bond thingamabob that wasn't a thing in Frontier. Or the fact that they don't do anything do address why Fena was reincarnated into Norn, or why there's a second World Tree or anything related to this. Or the fact that they don't address Loki figuring out Transcendence back in Frontier and then wanting us to believe that there's anything that could have possibly threatened him after 200 years during which he'd have totally mastered that stuff after no-selling Transcendent Surtr... Or... It's a long list basically, and the more you look into the details between Frontier and Ragnarok, the more it hurts one's brain, and at the end of the day, it boils down to the fact that Frontier was not meant to have a sequel in any way, shape or form, and they just didn't properly account for that when making Ragnarok. One other thing that's worth addressing is... corruption impact, so to speak. That is to say, the differences induced by having a goddess corrupted or not. This has always been a mixed bag in Venus Blood, that's kind of inevitable... but it's by far the worst in Ragnarok where there's barely any impact on the story at all. You don't really feel much of a difference if you have a corrupt goddess on the Law route, the lines barely change. It's also jarring before the branching point where you have stuff like corrupt Hilde/Ullr/Fana still giving a damn about the serf situation in Gimle in the same way as when they're not corrupt, which feels really jarring considering their supposed attitude and priority shift. So yeah, personally, I treat Ragnarok as a weird future AU, rather than a direct sequel to Frontier. Then you don't have to worry about the plot-holes and whatnot, at least, the ones related to being a sequel. Moving on. VBRI's Gameplay : Like in other International releases, I will emphasize one important thing. You do not have to be proficient at the game to enjoy it. You can absolutely play on Easy, you can absolutely use the auto-win buttons in either battles or for entire missions and you can absolutely focus on enjoying just the story and essentially playing the whole thing like a VN. Being good at this game is not mandatory, and you do not have to worry about min-maxing and whatnot unless you want to get into the higher difficulties and all that jazz. That said, VBRI is definitely the easiest International release to date. A lot of it boils down to the fact that it's like Frontier, but without Frontier's jank. The fact that you can manually control every battle, deploy multiple times per turn, benefit from the (at the time) new assist skill system, benefit from passive healing even when deploying, the investments system from Hypno/Hollow and various tweaks and additions to skills means that it's just way easier. That said, it may not seem that way if VBRI is the 1st VB you play, as the tutorial systems are still ass and the game is fairly bad at explaining various things. Still, the core of the gameplay is still the same. Still 6 units per division, still no duplicate units, you still need a tank, some DPS, some support, you still need to understand what the AI will target and you still need barriers. Some of the big changes to note, aside from not having the Legion system, are the fact that Ragnarok has more damage multipliers than previous titles, a cap on stats of 999 that applies to enemies too and the existence of Group Attack. Group Attack is basically All Attack, but it ignores Nulls, and instead gets reduced by 50% when Surround Null is present. In addition to that, it also uses only 50% of the unit's attack, so when Surround null is present, damage is basically reduced to 25%. Doesn't sound so bad... except there's a couple of bosses in the game, one of which is the boss of True Chaos on Very Hard and Nightmare, who have so much going through them that they hit like 2-ton truck on steroids and can solo-wipe entire divisions unless they're specifically designed to deal with them. Aside from a small number of units, Group Attack is mostly an enemy gimmick that annoys the player in various ways. The other thing to note is that recruitment was changed to "Research", and while it still uses medals (Medallions in Ragnarok), unlocking new medallions doesn't show you what you can recruit with them. Instead, you have to open up the Research "Tree" to get more and more units, and this means that you need to pick up a lot of units to get to the ones you really want. This is obviously a problem when trying to jump into the higher difficulties as quickly as possible, but not much of one if you're not rushing. The bloat of units is not a problem, because Ragnarok also has the Barracks, where you can throw in units so they don't show up in the regular searches or the equipment section. One good part is that Day/Night and Moon Phase doesn't have any impact on recruiting. One bad part, at times, is that titles for non-commander units work via a new system called "Merits", which are earned in battle in parallel with Morale, the renamed Loyalty, which means you can't put titles right when you recruit a unit and need to build them up to it, on top of the fact that you then want to max out Merits, because they work like Triumph in the previous games, aka they give extra stats when maxed out. Oh, and there's a limit break system. Once a unit reaches max level, it can be limit broken, and then again a second time once it reaches the new limit. This makes for 50 extra levels, and each break costs Merits, with more merits being consumed for lower level of growth. (Ex, S units cost 100 Merits on both Limit breaks, while D costs 300 on the 1st break alone...) The way it's set-up doesn't make sense to me, since the lower growth units get less out of their limit breaks than higher growth units that have really busted titles at S+ and S++... but whatever. Another thing to note is that you have a limit of 10 active divisions, which means 60 active units at any given time, out of, uh... ~500? I think it's around that much. I got literally everything, but I didn't check the numbers, so I'm not 100% sure, but it's definitely close to 500 units in total. So the fact that you can only use 60 of them is... kind of eh. It's also worth noting that the Ore and Gear Grind is as stupid as ever. The Assist skill system, which allows a division that wasn't deployed to lend a skill to a division that is being deployed makes it easier in some aspects. This is because you can make a dedicated TH division, and you don't need to deploy it, instead, you just lend its accumulated TH skill to the division(s) you DO deploy. How many times you can do that a turn depends on how you set things up and on how much min-maxing you want to do. On the other hand, the game now has 14 tiers of equipment, up from 12, so the amount of grind is even more crazy than before. Quite frankly, like in other games, I recommend that once you unlock various tiers, you just Cheat Engine Ore amounts and whatnot, because otherwise, it'll take quite a while to get all the stuff. This is made worse by the fact that Ragnarok made some... really dubious choices when it comes to gear, where there's pieces of gear in T14 that are outright useless in every sense of the word. On T14. Seriously. The Tier where you'd expect to have trouble deciding where to use all of the gear, not whether you'll use it at all... All in all, Ragnarok's gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. For newer players, I'd say it's really good, much easier to get into than other entries of the series, to the point where I'd genuinely recommend playing Ragnarok before Hollow or Gaia to get used to VB's weirdness, and then going to those ones and their specific head-aches. For veterans of the series and people looking for a challenge, it's by far the weakest release. Moving on once more! VBRI's H-scenes : As I said before, Ragnarok's smut is, in many ways, the most tame it's ever been in a VB series. Sure, there's a couple of scat scenes between Heimdall and Nanna, but that's really the most extreme/disgusting this entry gets. Cumflation, stomach bulging, ear-fucking and just plain general fucked up context is much lower than previous titles (and possibly later titles if what I've seen in some CG sets is any indication). That's not to say that Ragnarok is tame in the real sense of the word, and it's definitely not vanilla or recommended to vanilla fans, but it's definitely under average in terms of intensity for VB. Even the focus on tentacles feels under average. Personally, I've enjoyed it well enough, but it didn't really wow me the same way other International releases did, and it doesn't help that some of its best scenes, for me, were International Release additions. The game just didn't have as much intensity in its original release. It's also worth noting that Ragnarok is the game where they tried to deviate from VB's usual art and character design style the most, with mixed results depending on preferences. Bestla and Flora in particular are outliers with how... hairy... they are... and in some parts, Flora also seems downright chubby, which I personally don't enjoy, but hey, it might appeal to someone, I suppose. Overall, much like the rest of Ragnarok, the H-stuff is a mixed bag. Though the worst bit is honestly the weak feeling of the corruption for the various goddesses. It's just... not as well made as what Frontier and Hollow had, which is obviously not a good thing for a title that's supposedly dedicated to such things. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To conclude this overly long wall of text, I'll reiterate what I said earlier. Ragnarok is much more on the "actual 4 stars" side of things than previous release. At times, I genuinely feel like it'd be as low as 3.5 and at times I feel like it'd be 4.25, but definitely not the "5-stars, if only it had a little bit extra" like with Hollow. It's by far the weakest International release, and in general, from what I've seen, it's seen as the weakest VB in general, surpassed only by Brave due to other reasons. Is it still worth playing and is it still enjoyable? Yes. I do believe so. There's a lot worse stuff out there by H-game standards no matter how you look at it. By that same token, if there's a VB International that's no huge loss skipping, it's definitely Ragnarok.

Played through both chaos route and True Law route on hard berserk 1 and VH berserk3. took like 120h to play through both. I quite enjoyed it though the end for the chaos route felt a bit lacking compared to the end of true law route. If you like venus blood strategy games then youll probs like this one aswell. Plenty of varied scenes for everyone. chaos route has sharing and heavier focus on corruption. Law route obv focused more on being loveydovey. good mix of loli chars and thicc chars.

To be honest, no matter what shortcomings the game might have, I don't think I can rate it lower than 4* if you enjoy the iconic gameplay like I do. Venus Blood games are at its core... basically a spreadsheet tetris. The point of the gameplay is to form the best divisions you can. All teams require some key skills and positions to be filled (Nulls, spell barrier, self-d barrier, some heal, absolute cure, good tank, decoy, sweeper, dps, supports, boost/commands/saps, etc etc.). The idea is to form as many teams as you can that has all the bases covered. It's surprisingly addictive. Betweeen equipment, new units, and titles, you can feel the teams coming together and getting better as the difficulty ramps up. Once you are done with the story, you can keep playing higher difficulties to chase ever stronger team setups and challenges. Well, that's the idea. If you don't like the gameplay, there is easy mode that you can skip all battles... but at that point, I honestly wonder what's the point. For people that enjoy this gameplay, this is certainly still entertaining and worthy of 4*. However, there are definite weakpoints to this title. While the gameplay is great, the UI tends to be pretty cancer. Previous games had UI mods that made it much better, but this one doesn't have one yet. Also, there is no 3v3 or even the auto defense system from Frontier. You literally have to click each team and individually fight each battle. It's a SLOG on NG+ when early chapters regardless of difficulty are simply full of weak enemies. Secondly, I will talk a little about the story. The chaos route for this game is extremely half baked and underwhelming. First of all, the game lacks a proper antagonist. VB games generally have a "big boss" woman (the boss before the reveal of the actual real boss) that is extremely satisfying to take down due to her role in the story. This game doesn't have one. The woman that kind of fills that story role is actually just the servant of a little goddess. There are barely any scenes with corrupted goddesses, let alone maddened ones. And the endings in the chaos route are all pretty much just lovey dovey vanilla. I looked at the summary and thumbnails and didn't even want to watch all of the goddess endings. But fundamentally, what I can say is that being a sequel with a different protagonist, the game comes with too much baggage. Without spoiling too much, Loki's (previous game protagonist) role in the story really puts a hamper on Vali's (the protagonist of this game) narrative. Spoiler: Spoilers about the story and endings On the chaos route, Loki literally becomes the hero, and Vali is just a deranged fucktard. To be fair, VB chaos routes generally feature a deranged fucktard MC, but the forces that are opposed to him tend to be shitty assholes themselves and it feels nice to destroy them and become the big bad evil. But in this game, Loki (who is the final boss on chaos route) was completely honorable, noble, reasonable, and good. There is nothing really that makes it feel good to thwart his plans and usher in some crazy nonsense world Vali wants. So much so that one of the two ending variations on the chaos route is literally Vali dying and Loki winning, bringing to fruition his goal of a peaceful world. And although I don't have issues about other dudes banging in VB games, a decent chunk of scenes are about Loki with his girls (his harem from previous game, which is off-limits to Vali). But just having a lot of scenes dedicated to a secondary protagonist, with women that the MC can never have, would be rather annoying to a lot of people I presume. I think the VB story formula is too formulaic to allow for the baggage from a previous game. It works much better as a standalone with its own set of characters and story even if it were to take place in the same universe.

Overall a good game but not the best Venusblood game. As every venusblood fans know, they only really make two kinds of games, corruption and egg. This is their corruption game. And as always, plenty of tentacles. The story is really good, but it is similar to other Venusblood games in the broad strokes. The characters are still very good and likable however. The translation is good like 99% of the time, but there's just like 3-4 random typos and one very odd pronounce issue. Which is annoying but not a dealbreaker. Gameplay is... worse than other VB games, but not terrible. This was their first unity game from what I understand, and it kinda shows. It has the same basic gameplay of all the other games with some updated units and ideas, but it feels kinda slow. But if you don't want any of that, just set the game to easy and abuse that autowin button. You're not missing any story if you do. The game also has a "action point" system so you can only do a certain amount of actions between missions for side events and H-Scenes. Instead of the old system of just gaining passive corruption/affection between missions. The AP system is honestly just annoying but by the end doesn't really change anything. In the end, if you want a decent story, good character and plenty of scenes then give it a try.