Obscurite Magie: The City of Sin Reviews

yes fapable that's

Well... Not bad... I don't know... A litttttle bit boring.

Mid "plot" with lots of assets reused

Finished it already. Even explored a bit. It's short, but sweet. Very good.

​​I finished this game even before I started to enjoy it more seriously. I liked art (for me it was different from other Maker games), some story behind (for example why we are here, why this town is corrupted a bit), but fighting was way too easy. Or I've played too many games and I always try to overtrain the main hero, ​but ​beat quickly the last boss without losing one hp? Oh well, I'm getting old it seems. Anyway, good fun in those hectic times.

It's alright at best, very short and doesn't really have a pure route, with 2 unavoidable H scenes. So if that's a deal breaker, then please bear that in mind.

Pros -Great art, and lots of it -Reasonable gameplay Meh -Organization of gallery and in-game gallery unlock hints are somewhat confusing Cons -Wish there were more monsters and the dungeon area was larger -Corruption/lewdness mechanic is interesting, but not sufficiently developed Really great art and decent game mechanics. I do wish the game was a little longer and some of the mechanics (the dungeon grinding and corruption) were more developed. Lots of great CGs.

The art and UI are really pretty, but the gameplay is very lackluster. The story is quite simple and short so there isn't much to work resulting in underdeveloped characters. You can definitely feel it was designed around CG accessibility rather than implementing any rewarding progression system. The game is a cakewalk, and the consequences of losing? Absolutely nothing. 6/10 could use more polish, I'd value this experience at around $7-$10

Total spoilers below Two important things to note: First, if you're playing this game for the CG (and let's be honest, that's the ONLY reason you're playing this game), you need to download a patch from the developer's external site to unlock it. This not only restores the CG, but fixes a bunch of bugs and cutscene breaks that the base game forgot to fix/replace. Take this from personal experience: I spent 2 hours playing the unpatched game, wondering why everything seemed broken & unfinished, before finally realizing that the external patch was needed. There's literally 0 reason to play without it, so before starting up, be sure to visit the discussion threads and find the section with the patch links. Secondly... I don't actually hate this game. It's not very good, don't get me wrong: the writing's kinda terrible, the storyline is dull & the ending doesn't make sense, and the CG is passible, but you can look it up online. There are, however, a lot of lessons that can be learned from this game, both in terms of writing and balance. As they say with movies "you can still get entertained by a bad movie, but it's often hard to enjoy a boring one". City of Sin does admittedly fall a little bit into that last category, but it only lasts roughly 3-4 hours (with grinding, I might add). No, what gets me about this game is the price: for a game with only 3-4 hours of content, bad writing, and CG you can look up online for free, City of Sin should have been a $5 game, MAYBE $8 - $10 at the extreme outset. Not $18 on sale, and certainly not $22 off sale. As a general recap: your journey follows Louise, a famous bounty hunter, on a mission to recover a stolen dagger. After a city-spanning quest, tracking down leads and taking down criminals who become more and more debaucherous, your journey ends with a not-so-surprising final betrayal and boss fight, after which Louise leaves the city, dagger in hand. If this sounds overly simplistic, it's because it is; the main story only serves as the scantest of anchors to the multitude of explicit encounters along the way. Lust is rampant throughout every aspect of this game, and Louise naturally begins indulging in such endeavours, though to what extent is up to you. Combat is where the wheels of this game start falling off, and generally where my limited praise/tolerance starts wearing thin. It's your standard Final Fantasy style, turn-based combat setup: enemies take turns acting, special powers cost MP, encounters via overworld sprites. Problem is, it's insanely imbalanced. Most encounters are way too easy beyond the very early game, as the primary dungeon contains drastically varying enemies the farther you go in (meaning you can encounter lategame-equivalent enemies while you're still at level 1, if you go deep enough, and potentially grind them early on with enough patience). Combat essentially boils down to spamming multi-hit attacks for swarm enemies, and regular ones for single/weakened enemies, with basically no deviance from this formula beyond the final two bosses, where you need to defend against their very telegraphed charge attacks. You get gold, you go back to the stores to upgrade gear, and buy healing items if necessary... which appropriately scale up cost-wise until halfway throughout the game, when potions are introduced that heal 50% or 100% of both HP & MP for 1/10 of the cost of the next best healing items, and more or less invalidate any possible challenge for the rest of the game. In truth, combat only serves as a backdrop for most of the game's "encounters". Like I said, you could just look up the CG online for free and skip the game entirely, but I personally like some context whenever possible. Like in this case, Louise needs money to upgrade her gear before taking on the crime bosses and decides to go hunting in the monster cave, which explains why the slime monster is currently filling up her intestines. Indeed, the basic premise of combat is that monsters will occasionally launch "special" attacks that first remove Louise's clothing, afterwards each subsequent "special" attack will lead to a CG scene. This leads to the next teaching point: not triggering CG scenes with attacks. When I say "monsters occasionally launch special attacks", I mean "monsters FREQUENTLY launch special attacks", which initially sounds like it'd be fun, until you realize that the same cutscene can easily play a dozen or so times over if you encounter a large mob with your clothing already removed. Fortunately you can skip already watched scenes, but it still makes encounters more annoying than necessary. A better setup that other games have adopted is having CG scenes play on defeat. This not only prevents scene griefing by monsters, but allows more control as to whether the player wants to view scenes or not, while also giving a sense of "urgency/danger" to encounters. In truth, most of the boss fights do follow this formula, but why the random ones don't, I have no idea. Additionally, consistency is a bit of a problem with these scenes. Only the first cave has in-battle CG scenes, the later dungeons have no scenes whatsoever. Also, later on you gain an ability from a nudist to shed your clothing completely, which funny enough actually prevents in-battle CG from occurring, because there's neither a trigger saying that you are exposed, nor one allowing you to become exposed/have clothing ripped, so monsters will only use regular attacks despite you being in a more vulnerable state. A simple coding change could have easily fixed this. Additionally, while random NPCs will comment on your bareness, story-critical NPCs won't. So it's a little bit jarring having serious conversations about corruption and the end of the world while Louise's bits are all on full display. In terms of story... well putting it nicely, the story is really weak and only serves as the scantest of anchors for the CG. Putting it not so nicely, it's extremely uninteresting and poorly written, with a surprise betrayal that's very easy to spot, even at the beginning of the game. Additionally, a lot of the human encounters feature overly-misogynistic males with varying levels of degradation thrown towards to PC. Not entirely to throw shade on this... as they say "different strokes for different folks"... maybe others find these aspects more appealing. I personally didn't, which is why I enjoyed the monster scenes more, as they tended to have Louise actually enjoy it and (mostly) not get degraded for it, and also why I was a bit disappointed that the later dungeons didn't have CG scenes to them. As a final note on writing; the surprise villain's motivations make absolutely no sense. After being abused in a male-dominated society, and suddenly gaining immense magical powers from the stolen dagger, you'd think that their first act would be to get revenge on those that wronged them. But no, instead they go "this specific group has wronged me for years, so now that I have the power to fight back, I'm instead going to empower them further and actively make my own life even more miserable in the process, because it's 'fun' ". Again, even acknowledging that the main story is a backdrop for the CG, this kind of logic makes absolutely no sense. To conclude: City of Sin is deeply flawed, with unfinished content even after a patch, an extremely uninteresting main storyline, inconsistent combat, and CG scenes that may dip too far into misogyny/degradation for some players. There are, however, many useful design lessons that can be taken from this game, mostly regarding "what not to do if you're designing/writing a video game". It just isn't worth paying over $20 to learn these lessons. Again, City of Sin SHOULD have been a $5 game, maybe $8 - $10 at the offset. And until the price comes down substantially, and stays that way, I can't in good consciousness recommend it at this time.

Everything here can be found in other Kagura games with better naratives. The layout is pretty bland. Most of the places in the town will be visited eventually because the plot forces you there. It doesn't take much level grinding to become OP. The erotic scenes (with patch installed) leave a lot to be desired. And it's another one of the tiresome lose to see scene setup in most battle situations. This is sadly just another of the blander games out there. I can't see why at the time it had positive reviews. Heavy recommendation to look for a different game