Vic
Savant
so I've been playing VenusBlood GAIA International for the last week or so.
VenusBlood is an old franchise and they have lots of games, recently they have been doing kickstarters to localize the games into English, and a few weeks ago they successfully did one for a 4th game. They raised almost $250k (Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninetail/venusblood-ragnarok-english-localisation-project)
The 3 currently localized games are on Steam, GOG and JAST. GAIA is a dungeon defense game, whereas FRONTIER, HOLLOW and the soon to be released RAGNAROK are more traditional strategy with over-world attack. I have not played them, only GAIA.
While the games feature heavy use of hentai porn, there's an all-ages version that cuts all the tentacle rape and mind break. The units themselves aren't nude, albeit suggestive. I think you can play the games without any nudity, if you chose to do so.
Now, so much for the general introduction, let me tell you about why I've been so hooked on GAIA:
Let me preface that I'm not a fan of the story or characters, in fact I started skipping all story early on. It's long-winded and the characters are boring in my personal opinion. What really shines for me is the gameplay.
There are hundreds of unique units, which have a cute avatar, a description and some dialogue lines that they might say after combat. But I see them more of combinations of all the skills in the game. There are skills that buff certain unit types, nullify certain types of attacks, etc. etc. Really I have been learning how to play this game for a week now and I still suck.
Your units do level up when they win in combat, and you can customize them with 2 custom skills, and 2 equipment pieces for a total of 4 extra abilities and stat increases, seen in green font in the top right in the screen above, the orange font are the leader skills, each unit has different ones which activate only if it's set as the division leader.
I'm not going to write a review here, although there is one that I can recommend if you're interested (Link: https://sanahtlig.blogspot.com/2015/10/review-venus-blood-gaia.html), but the short of it is, you can create 12 divisions (squads) with 6 units each. Most of your playtime will be spent looking at the spreadsheet-like UI trying to pick out the right units to form a really strong team with good synergy.
Now let me say that this game is strategy. Throughout a run all of the stuff you do persists, so in a sense, every action you do counts, as you have to somewhat play optimally if you want to progress farther, but really, I'm just on normal difficulty right now and haven't even been able to beat it after a week, and there are still much harder difficulties to unlock, so what do I know of optimal play.
More units are unlocked as you progress through the game, at first you will only have weak units and get access to more powerful, and expensive ones, as you go:
Resource management is a big part of the game as units consume either food or magic, and you also need gold to build your dungeon. Gold is also used to heal your units, which for me is my biggest gold sink, but maybe I just suck at making good divisions that don't take a lot of damage from the many enemies the game throws at me. The fourth resource is Ether which you need to birth your units, yes I said birth as each unit is birthed from a mother, or heroine, which you acquire/conquer and mind-break throughout the campaign. You need to build production buildings in your dungeon to get resources, and if you place your divisions there and win a fight on them, you get a permanent increase in production. Or you can chose to build a trap instead and fight on top of that to get a bonus to damage.
There is a tutorial but it's really lacking, and there is no manual. So to learn how to play you have to experiment for yourself, or ask for help. I did enjoy my time with the game and am still trying to beat it on normal difficulty (currently at chapter 6 as seen in my screenshot above)
I know this post wasn't the most coherent but I don't have much time right now and just wanted to let people know about this great strategy series. yes, it's porn, but the porn is nothing special and I just press Enter to skip through it all (or ctrl to skip already read text).
If you want to read more you can read the much better review that I linked above. Also feel free to discuss other VenusBlood games, not just this dungeon defense ones, as the other games play differently.
VenusBlood is an old franchise and they have lots of games, recently they have been doing kickstarters to localize the games into English, and a few weeks ago they successfully did one for a 4th game. They raised almost $250k (Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninetail/venusblood-ragnarok-english-localisation-project)
The 3 currently localized games are on Steam, GOG and JAST. GAIA is a dungeon defense game, whereas FRONTIER, HOLLOW and the soon to be released RAGNAROK are more traditional strategy with over-world attack. I have not played them, only GAIA.
While the games feature heavy use of hentai porn, there's an all-ages version that cuts all the tentacle rape and mind break. The units themselves aren't nude, albeit suggestive. I think you can play the games without any nudity, if you chose to do so.
Now, so much for the general introduction, let me tell you about why I've been so hooked on GAIA:
Let me preface that I'm not a fan of the story or characters, in fact I started skipping all story early on. It's long-winded and the characters are boring in my personal opinion. What really shines for me is the gameplay.
There are hundreds of unique units, which have a cute avatar, a description and some dialogue lines that they might say after combat. But I see them more of combinations of all the skills in the game. There are skills that buff certain unit types, nullify certain types of attacks, etc. etc. Really I have been learning how to play this game for a week now and I still suck.
Your units do level up when they win in combat, and you can customize them with 2 custom skills, and 2 equipment pieces for a total of 4 extra abilities and stat increases, seen in green font in the top right in the screen above, the orange font are the leader skills, each unit has different ones which activate only if it's set as the division leader.
I'm not going to write a review here, although there is one that I can recommend if you're interested (Link: https://sanahtlig.blogspot.com/2015/10/review-venus-blood-gaia.html), but the short of it is, you can create 12 divisions (squads) with 6 units each. Most of your playtime will be spent looking at the spreadsheet-like UI trying to pick out the right units to form a really strong team with good synergy.
Now let me say that this game is strategy. Throughout a run all of the stuff you do persists, so in a sense, every action you do counts, as you have to somewhat play optimally if you want to progress farther, but really, I'm just on normal difficulty right now and haven't even been able to beat it after a week, and there are still much harder difficulties to unlock, so what do I know of optimal play.
More units are unlocked as you progress through the game, at first you will only have weak units and get access to more powerful, and expensive ones, as you go:
Resource management is a big part of the game as units consume either food or magic, and you also need gold to build your dungeon. Gold is also used to heal your units, which for me is my biggest gold sink, but maybe I just suck at making good divisions that don't take a lot of damage from the many enemies the game throws at me. The fourth resource is Ether which you need to birth your units, yes I said birth as each unit is birthed from a mother, or heroine, which you acquire/conquer and mind-break throughout the campaign. You need to build production buildings in your dungeon to get resources, and if you place your divisions there and win a fight on them, you get a permanent increase in production. Or you can chose to build a trap instead and fight on top of that to get a bonus to damage.
There is a tutorial but it's really lacking, and there is no manual. So to learn how to play you have to experiment for yourself, or ask for help. I did enjoy my time with the game and am still trying to beat it on normal difficulty (currently at chapter 6 as seen in my screenshot above)
I know this post wasn't the most coherent but I don't have much time right now and just wanted to let people know about this great strategy series. yes, it's porn, but the porn is nothing special and I just press Enter to skip through it all (or ctrl to skip already read text).
If you want to read more you can read the much better review that I linked above. Also feel free to discuss other VenusBlood games, not just this dungeon defense ones, as the other games play differently.
