The Spirit Master of Retarnia -Conqueror of the Labyrinth- Reviews

It was a pretty average game that I really wanted to give a thumbs up... Until I reached the last dungeon, which was a few hours of grinding and boredom, and then the last part with pretty lousy and non-sensical plot twist followed by rather poor ending. I won't spoil it, but it was rather disappointing and made me feel that I just wasted over 12 hours for nothing. It was pretty much tl;dr version right there. If you want a longer version, keep reading. The story is very simple and uninventive, dialogues aren't very interesting too, but thankfully there's not too many of them so at least they won't annoy you too much. I guess, the main reason for small amount of dialogues is that nothing really happens through the whole game, the plot is not evolving at all. It could be okay for the budget game like this, but they ruined it with an ending that was pretty big let down for me. Graphics looks fine for this type of game, though 1080p limit is not very good if you have a higher resolution monitor. Artwork is probably the only thing that was done pretty good, for both characters and enemies. Music is bland and forgettable, but not exactly bad and doesn't make you want to turn it off. Gameplay is your average dungeon crawler, nothing stand out too much, but still - not bad and pretty much passable as a whole. Many aspects of the game feels unnecessary or unfinished, like crafting and weapons improvement. Some other aspects feels irritating like absence of auto-combat which leads to tons of mindless clicking during the battles. There's also no controller support which leaves you with only keyboard and mouse. The game looks like it could run on any hardware, but in reality it has pretty bad optimization, everything feels slow. And after 2-3 hours of playing it becomes slower and slower, and start freezing for a few seconds all the time. It can only be fixed by restarting the game, but why the developers didn't fix this apparent bug is beyond me. As an H-game, in the other hand, this game is actually pretty bad - it has just a few dosens of H-scenes, most of which you'll get only if you lose boss fights (or win and unlock them in the gallery) or move your Affection path with the Spirits, but even that is broken: you can fully finish this path with only one of the Spirits and after you do that - all the H-scenes (not counting loosing scenes) will be gone and you just won't see any H-content until the end of the game. And this happens at about 1/3 of playthrough. So, 2/3 of the game has little to no H-content whatsoever. And if you want to get a different (and pretty lousy) ending with some other girl - you have to play all over again, no cheap and quick way around it. That's pretty lame and stupid way to add replayability. I was bored the first time, why would I even think about doing it from scratch 4 more times? To get a slightly different 3-4 dialogue messages at the end? Ridiculous. So, not recommended for a full price and for those who looks for good amount of H-content and good story.

Before I write this review , I would like to remind people that every individual has their own taste in games and gaming. I find in most cases the negative reviews of a games is contrary how others view because of their lack of research of a game before purchasing it. That said and to each their own (respectfully), I only write positive reviews and write negative reviews which is (Hardly ever) when I feel developers can possibly improve more on their games. I am giving The Spirit Master of Retarnia-Conqueror of the Labyrinth a thumbs up for reasons below: 1. The story : Well thought out and more elaborate than many I have. I give Kudos to the game's mechanics which helps a great deal with the flow of the game. I hope the developer keeps up the good work in which encourages me to research more games created by them.

Despite having a story, this is very much a dungeon-crawler style RPG. Despite being a serious dungeon crawler, it seems the target audience is not fans of dungeon crawlers, but rather fans of ecchi games who may not have much experience with dungeon crawlers. I say this because it REALLY tries to ease you into the experience. During the game's intro, we're presented with the story, as well as a guided tour of each area of town, with tutorials about what you can do in town. This is skippable, but we're not told how to skip through until after the story parts of the intro (which seems reasonable). There are 4 difficulties, but initially we only have access to 2: easy and normal. We're basically told we'll have 6 characters, but to start with, we only have 2... the main character, who specializes in improving the party's growth in various ways, and the white spirit, who is the tank. Why start with the tank? Because if the main character dies, it's game over, so the tank has her first skill point pre-allocated into a taunt skill, and we're told to have her use it to protect the main character. But, even on normal difficulty, the most common enemy on the first floor of the dungeon is so easy that if both characters just attack, it'll usually die before it can do anything. It REALLY seems like they're trying to ease people into the experience. This is the first time I've ever wanted to write a review for a game without giving a recommendation. I don't think it's a bad game, per se, and it might even be a good gateway drug to get fans of ecchi games to try out dedicated dungeon crawlers like the Etrian Odyssey series, but at least from my perspective as a veteran dungeon crawl player, the experience of playing this game, at least initally, feels somewhat... lacking. I kind of want to keep playing to see what interesting strategic and tactical decisions become available once more characters are unlocked and when the enemies (hopefully) start to present more serious and varied threats, but as it is now, I'm just not enjoying the experience enough to feel motivated to continue. It would be easier to accept the lack of tactical challenge in the early game if there were more ecchi content to spice it up, but despite the girls being cute, I haven't seen a single exciting ecchi image, even after encountering a random ecchi event in the dungeon. On top of that, the dungeon itself so far is just drab, grey stone... which may be great in terms of realism, but doesn't make the exprience of exploring it any more interesting. I feel like the developers got pretty close to crafting an engaging experience, but didn't quite manage to get there. Maybe if there's a future update that adds a bit more art content, I'll be able to enjoy the game enough to feel comfortable recommending it, but as it stands now, I just can't.

I don't even care for hentai, I just like Wizardry style dungeon crawlers, and this delivers adequately. The girls are cute.

[strike]Two hours in, what I've seen so far is pretty good. It's a genuinely fun game with some neat features. Characters are likeable (particualrly the Queen), voice acting is good, art is wonderful, girls are diverse (and mercifully un-bitchy, which is weirdly rare in these games). The only issue I've encountered so far is loading times. Specifically the menu's loading time. It takes about 8 or 9 seconds for the menu to load. That's not good. This is the main menu we're talking about. Leveled up and need to allocate your new skill point? Nine second wait. Need to use an item? Nine second wait. Need to check the map? Nine second wait. Need to save or load your game? Nine second wait. Need to fiddle with the options? Nine second wait. Upgrading your gear in town? Oh boy. Prepare to spend a collective a minute or longer just staring at a black screen. And that's assuming you're very efficient and don't make any mistakes or forget anything.[/strike] Yeah, so after three months there hasn't been even any acknowledgement of the game's issues (inexcusably long load times, memory leaks, broken functions, etc), much less anything done about them. Just advertisements for the next thing they push out. Time to change my recommendation, I suppose. I should have known better than to give a developer the benefit of the doubt. Now if only I could get my money back..

I am having trouble deciding on whether I like it or not. On one hand, it tries to be a decent, if basic, dungeon crawler and rpg with a bit of plot. However it also kind of fails on both points due to the same problem; your faceless self insert. I understand that part of the appeal of this psuedo dating sim thing is to get to pretend to be the protagonist, but the game doesn't even let you name the thing. He is both important enough that him alone being defeated in combat is enough to trigger a loss, but not important enough to have more than a literal black silhouette. They also gave him lines. Really generic lines. So he's basically a mushy, faceless, and null-personality stand-in that actually detracts from the goal of letting the player insert themselves into the story because you're stuck managing him as well as the other party members. Except they get art and a personality. Something as simple as not having him directly involved in combat would make a world of difference. But then maybe the developers wanted to actually have a character in place and then figured that players would rather someone they could roleplay. If only he didn't feel like a flavorless ghost of a character whos existence was just a hamfisted attempt to direct the girl's attention somewhere specific. So yeah, I don't really know. I'm already not a fan of the kinda-sorta VN games but frankly I need a bit more, uh, maturity in my rpgs lately. Hopefully the dev's refine their approach because they are obviously at least decent at making these. Maybe it's the difference between the American and Japanese market, but please make up your minds on whether to have a player-insert or a specifc character that the story focuses on. Trying to mix them together is not working.

The Spirit Master of Retarnia is a retro dungeon-crawler RPG hentai game that I enjoyed to a point but can't recommend. First, it will appeal to a rather limited audience and even to that audience, it is a bit bland. The real weak point of this game is the dungeon crawling. The environments are bland and empty and there is nothing to do in there but to map the place. In any given area, everything looks the same, just an arrangement of square tiles that forms rooms and corridors. Apart from combat, there's no challenge and no reward in exploring those places. Combat is ok, but too little variety of enemies means it gets repetitive and so the combat is acceptable in itself, but it fails to carry the empty dungeon crawling. So with all that in mind, I can`t recommend the game even though it some qualities that may make it interesting to some people. The sex scenes, which are not censored, between the protagonist and his allies are cute and loving. I tend to prefer non-consensual sex but despite being not quite my thing, I genuinely enjoyed them. The variety of available romance options is nice. There is non-con sex scenes for failing to beat a boss and they're unlocked in the gallery if you beat the boss so you dont have to do the "lose the first time then win the second" to see everything. And yet I watched only the first one because it turned too violent, leaving a victim *dead*. We dont get to see the horror graphically, but you get a textual representation. I suspect the others end just as violently. The story is ok but totally linear, you have no control on it. As I was prgressing through the story, I started catching whiffs of an upcoming plot twist. I had a few hypotheses of what the reveal would be like but no certainty. One of my hypothesis turned out right but I still had the surprised of "oh, so it's that one and not that other one". So, if you aren't a fan of retro dungeon-crawling RPG hentai games, there really is nothing for you in this game. If you are into such a thing, the question is, are you starved for such a title? Because while it's not awful, it's not so good either.

As I've finished Idea Factory's Moero Chronicle long ago, I was in a desperate search of galge dungeon crawler, as I've come across this game. Technically, this game matches the description. This is indeed a dungeon crawler with 5 girl characters, which you build your relations with, and as you do, you could eventually become intimate with one of the girls. However, the implementation is rather poor. While the combat system appears fine with a first glance, it is balanced poorly, and as you progress, you extremely quickly move toward 'conserve mp' tactics. You would avoid using any skills unless your girl is equipped with a mana-recovery stuff, and even then you would prefer physical attacks. One of your girls skill tree is even focused on using normal attacks instead of skills. Which brings us to the second issues, skills. There is a skill tree, and most skills have several levels, usually, 10. However, the leveling is not balanced to the scale of number of skillpoints you need, and eventually I ended up leveling just passive skills. Not to say you couldn't win without using skills, in fact, I was perfectly fine. As for the relation component of the game, you build up intimacy with character through random events, which are divided in two parts - randomly falling on a girl's breast in a dungeon, and some meaningful interaction in a town. However, there are only one of each scene for an intimacy level, and as you need to encounter them several times before intimacy levels up, these scenes quickly become repetitive. You would unlock hentai content, by reaching certain intimacy level (one scene), and by losing battles. There are more hentai scenes if you mess up then if you do things right, which is quite meaningless for me. I mean, you need to have a very special set of mind if you want to watch a girl you somewhat care about being raped and killed afterward. There is a token plot, which tells us that monster portals appear in the country, and you move into portals to progressively fight an evil and destroy its root. There are 5 girl characters, one available from the start, 3 more unlocked after the second portal, and the last one unlocked after the third portal - a tank, damage dealer, support caster, healer and a mage. Characters are associated with different elements and given very good distinctive personality and are probably the best part of the game. Voice acting really varies, with Vesta and Melissa, playable characters, being the best, and Sylvia, the NPC which send you on your mission, being the worst (and annoying). The problem with the game is not that it didn't meet my expectation set rather high after Moero, but that it doesn't really have any value or fun. There is not much character development for girls, non-rape hentai scenes are unlocked very early on, the plot is not really deep to keep you going on, and the combat is rather repetitive.

Before we begin, I wish I could click a "Maybe" button on whether I recommend this game or not. Also, at the time of writing, I have completed the game once, and am midway through Nightmare Mode. Anyway, here's the review. [h1][b]The Spirit Master of Retarnia - Labyrinth of Memory Leaks[/b][/h1] The Spirit Master of Retarnia is a First-person, dungeon crawling RPG where you take control of Leonard, a generic, faceless Chickentai protagonist who leads a group of [strike]women[/strike] spirits into(not-so)perilous dungeons with the task of sealing portals to stop demons from invading Retarnia. That's it, really. [b]Absolutely nothing about this game stands out[/b]. That being said, Spirit Master of Retarnia isn't bad, but it isn't good, either. It's strictly "okay". The story isn't anything to write home about-- it's as generic as they come, and the plot twist isn't surprising at all. Everything about this game is painfully generic. However, one thing about this game that stands out are the bad ends. Most H-RPGs or RPGs in general refrain from describing the fate of your party upon a wipe, and instead take you to a game over screen, where you either get sent back to the title screen, or can select to load a save, or retry the last battle. This game describes what happens to the party, while showing some "cave exploration", if you catch my drift. Aside from that, The Spirit Master of Retarnia is a game I can't exactly recommend postively or negatively. This game also suffers from horrible memory leaks. About one hour of playing, and it'll be consuming twice as much memory as it did when it opened, and it starts to stutter. A quick restart of the game will fix this issue, but it's still annoying to deal with. Make sure to save often. [h1][b]GAME PROGRESSION AND MECHANICS[/b][/h1] The game's progression is extremely simple. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to the player's discretion. This is basically what the player does in between Dungeon Excursions: [list][b]General Progression[/b] [*]1) Check market for presents, purchase, and give to spirits(optional) [*]2) Check Plaza for Suspicious Man. If he is present, spend money on Yellow or Orange-grade items, based on money earned in dungeon excursions. [*]3) Visit Smithy to repair gear, appraise gear found in dungeons or purchased at the Suspicious Man, disassemble gear, or enhance gear. [*]4) Enter Dungeon and grind or proceed down floors. Farm monsters until inventory is half filled, or completely filled, or if party is low on health. [*]5) Return to town [*]6) Rinse-repeat [*]OPTIONAL: If a spirit has reached an appropriate affection level, a cutscene will play out back in town if the player chooses. [/list] There isn't a whole lot to do in this game, and once the player starts stacking "Deal Additional Fire/Ice/Lightning Damage upon attacking", damage quickly snowballs, and the party becomes an unstoppable force. It's literally impossible to get a game over in this game until Nightmare/Hell mode, where monster HP is so bloated that status ailments are what wins battles. Upon beating the final boss, the game immediately throws the player into New Game+, allowing the player to play through the game on a higher(or lower) difficulty. Increasing the difficulty allows the player to obtain stronger equipment than the previous difficulty, and the Status Values of monsters are much higher than they were before. An example of the stat increase is between Normal to Nightmare, a first-floor Goblin has 30 HP on Normal, and 300 HP on Nightmare. The game also lacks three distinct features that other games of similar construct have, such as Auto Battling, Cursor memory, and Dungeon Hotkeys (for things like encounter reduction), so the game is rather... primitive. [h1][b]MUSIC AND SOUND[/b][/h1] Not much to say here, Everything is practically commonly-provided assets, with the exclusion of the Spirits. I don't know how it is for some people, but I got annoyed by the voices at some point, so I muted voices. The soundtrack isn't memorable, and the SFX are all royalty-free stuff anyone can get online. [h1][b]VISUALS/GRAPHICS[/b][/h1] I'm not one who usually cares about graphics, but Spirit Master of Retarnia suffers from a severe case of "EVERYTHING BUT THE CHARACTER ART LOOKS LIKE HOT GARBAGE!!!". Not much else to say here, either... [h1][b]MY PERSONAL ENJOYMENT[/b][/h1] Honestly, the only reason i've dumped more than five hours on this game is because I have a soft spot for dungeon crawlers. I've played a lot of them, namely the entirety of Etrian Series(starting in 2006). [h1][b]THE "H" CONTENT[/b][/h1] Alright, so this is the part that most people who read this review will probably care about. Let's just say it's tame. The "H" Content includes things such as: [spoiler]Paizuri, Nakadashi, Footsies, "Group play", Cowgirl,[/spoiler] and other such common tags. Nothing special, but at least the art is okay. [h1][b]OVERALL VERDICT[/b][/h1] [h1]4/10, Skip this unless it's on sale for 50% or more.[/h1] Paying $15 for this mediocrity is insulting, and unless you are a dungeon crawler fan like I am, don't bother with this game. If you're looking for a quick fap, just go to "the hub", if you know what I mean. I will be playing more after writing this review, as i'd like to see the game's difficulty on Hell Mode, which is the hardest difficulty. Aside from that, there is nothing left to be said about this "game". And yes, I do play Chickentai Games seriously.

The Spirit Master of Retarnia -Conqueror of the Labyrinth- is one part filibuster and one part hack job asset flip with a few slivers of original content to try and amass the amalgamation of the final product into something resembling a playable game. At its core, Spirit Master is a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler in the style of Etrian Odyssey with about a tenth of the talent and none of the art design. Battles are fought in first-person with everyone queuing up their actions before the round starts and hitting one another once it begins. Despite a myriad of status effects and enemy types within the game, none of these normal combats ever managed to become remotely interesting, and once your team starts snowballing in power, very few of them will even last beyond the first round. The combat also lacks a lot of quality of life features that one might expect from a game in this genre, such as a lack of an auto-attack feature or cursor memory, and instead of a 'target' cursor, the game awkwardly zooms in on the enemy you're selecting. It also tends to lag quite a bit, especially when the game has to load in large 'action' menus for particular characters. That said, it's usually customary to give games like these a soft pass on their 'gameplay' since the thing most everyone is interested in are the girls, the H-scenes, and maybe the story at a stretch. Unfortunately, all of those aspects have their own problems. Everything that isn't directly related to the girls in the game is taken from other sources, which leaves a lot of the artwork looking awkward, out of place, or stylistically jarring. The dungeons get it the worst, making your field of view in the first-person camera extremely limited with darkness obscuring nearly everything that isn't right in front of you. The girls themselves fit the usual tropes one would expect from a game like this. Big-chested glasses wearing smart type, pure and innocent princess type, tomboy fighter type, seductive goth type, and 'legal-age' loli type. With few exceptions, their character beats fit their tropes and their relationship paths are exactly what you'd expect from them, such as the young legal-loli type constantly referring to you as 'big brother' and the tomboy being interested in extreme physical activity. On the flip side of the artwork, there are also 'defeat' scenes when you lose to particular boss monsters in the labyrinth. The game makes no secret that there are non-consensual sex scenes that occur when you lose, though they do tend to hide the fact that all of them basically end with a brutal death of some kind, while also taking pains to explain what nasty death occurred to the main protagonist and his companions. In no particular order, these scenes include things such as being ripped in half and eaten, stabbed repeatedly and left to bleed out slowly, digested in acidic slime, torn limb from limb, beheading, and being mind-raped by a mind flayer to the point where the brain explodes inside the skull. The tolerance for these sorts of scenes is going to vary from person to person, but the 'dark and edgy' feeling that they strive for feels as fake and manufactured as the girls personality types, and the style of the scenes are a very sharp contrast to the tone the rest of the scenes set. Thankfully, all of them are entirely avoidable, though the game will drop off the replays in your 'gallery' when you beat the bosses too. The story is probably the least offensive part of this game. It's a simple revenge tale with at least one twist that can come as a mild surprise, but veers off the deep end into nonsensical crazy-person territory right near the finish, and the motivation of the primary evil never manages to coalesce into something sensible. Revenge gets discarded for megalomania and the conclusion to the villain's arc ends with a weak sputter. So, were there any redeeming qualities about this game? Only a few. Leonard is one of them. He's irritating at first because he's a faceless protagonist who doesn't even have a character portrait, but they do some unique things mechanically with his character. He doesn't have combat abilities, but rather is a 'support' type whose abilities are all about building relationships with his team members, getting better prices at shops, and doing utilitarian things like portaling out of the dungeon or increasing/decreasing the encounter rate. He can't equip the best gear in the game and is inferior to the spirits that he summons to fight on his behalf, and that fits the 'everyman trying to do the best he can' niche nicely. The combat abilities he learns come solely from his bonds with the spirits he summons. Build your relationship with one and you start to learn their abilities and you can level those up alongside your support ones. He never becomes anything more than an inferior version of the spirit he's 'learning' from, but it's an interesting idea and could have been fun to explore further if the game had bothered. The artwork of the characters and the H-scenes themselves are also not terrible. The girls are well drawn, and outside of the monster scenes there are some tasteful 'romantic encounters', but even there they reuse some of the scenes with slightly adjusted narrative and dialogue, and there isn't really an 'epilogue' to the relationship path with any girl so much as there is an abrupt end tacked on at the game's completion. In conclusion, this game is not worth your time or your money. It's a slog to get through, the level design makes every dungeon a tedious crawl, and while there are a handful of decent H-scenes, it's not worth putting up with the gameplay to unlock them all.