Random VN: Venus Blood Brave
Entry posted by Clephas
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After almost three months of playing it about a half hour a day (usually right before I sleep), I finally finished this one... I didn't have the time to devote to this all at once, so I've been inching forward to victory since it came out back in October.
First, this is the latest Venus Blood game in the 'monster birth' side of the series (except for Hypno, all Venus Blood games fall into the 'Goddess Corruption' or 'monster birth' types in a general sense). Unlike Gaia and Abyss, which required you to use some of your rather limited turns (there was an absolute turn limit) and were essentially dungeon defense (and occasionally invasion) sims, this one doesn't use turns for the monster birth aspect of the game, has unlimited turns, and is an on-rails dungeon crawler.
I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the game's system. It would take five or fix posts to get all the details out, so I'm just going to touch lightly on things.
First, monster birth in this game, like the others, has the heroines acting as 'mothers' for the monsters they birth. However, monsters don't fight directly in this game. Rather, they have two separate roles... providing passive skills and stat boosts to the heroines, and providing special skill cards that are drawn randomly each turn. As in all Venus Blood games, the former is the place where the game places most of the importance. Passive skills, such as the ones that determine the likelihood of critical hits, give boosts to stats, and others, normally make Venus Blood games the most customizable ones out there...
Unfortunately, this game went kind of casual. There is no real complexity to the birth system, your access to the higher levels of monster is nonexistent on the first playthrough, and the game encourages grinding, rather than encouraging you to blow through things as fast as possible to get bonuses.
Like all Venus Blood games, this game has tentacles... lots of tentacles. However, the story's approach to them is frequently hilarious (outside the actual h-scenes). The protagonist's attitude, the way the heroines change as the story goes on, and the disparity between the high aspirations of the heroines and the way they begin to act later in the game all make for some seriously hilarious moments. Uzume, in particular, is about as hilarious as a heroine can get, especially if you get her ending (which I did, along with all the Law route endings and regular heroine endings... and the true/harem ending).
This game's story is reasonably interesting... but like all the Venus Blood games I've played, it suffers from the lack of a truly great antagonist. For better or worse, Lagar is a distant figure throughout most of the game and only comes to life on the Law route apparently. Isabella is slightly more interesting, but the way she steps out is kind of anticlimactic. Also, the writers left too many hints in the story about the true antagonist for me to actually be surprised when I ran into her. Her motivations are petty and narcissistic, without the psychosis and flair that made Kefka in FFVI interesting. As a result, the last part of the game mostly just felt like a rehashing of the battle against Lagar.
The endings... are mostly hilarious. Oh, there are cool and touching aspects... but true to Venus Blood tradition, the fall of the heroines into the aftermath of their corruption at the protagonist's hands (and their seeming happiness there) is the true attraction, lol. You know you have been playing too many games like this when a final scene of nine heroines delighted to have sex with tentacles feels humorous to you....
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