A Compile Heart monster girl card game with tower defense gameplay. It has some cool ideas, but is really barred by bad decisions made do to NG+ and/or microtransactions and the lack of PC PVP doesn’t help.

The coolest thing this card game does is your cards and resources are not linked to your story save. You basically have an account save that has all those, so at any time you can restart with all your cards and crush the game.

How should I start… The story is very shounen like. So we have a world where monster girls and humans are getting along thanks to god. But the world is kinda bad off thanks to a disease/state known as Lost, where people go crazy and basically lose all the good traits they have. The few towns in the world all have a power stone that lets the monster girls use their special powers, and they form pairs with humans in academies. Each town has one. You play as May, in a knock off region of Japan, who gets assigned her first real partner, and is sent off on a town to a town training thing along with two friends.

After arriving, you find a creepy girl who ends up making your friend Lost, who then goes and steals all the power stones. Now it becomes shounen like, where you collect the mcguffins(or try to) and nothing of substance happens for 10 hours of card games.

You see, instead of the monster girls just duking it out, they get put in cards and used in a tower defense game. It’s weird and the story never tries to justify the game style, but does admit that the cards are an actual part of the world. Which means you are literally carrying your monster girl harem in your deck of cards. Anyway, things happen and you beat up god, as you tend to do in Japanese RPG’s.

The actual card game is interesting enough, though I’m pretty sure the format is very common. You get three mana to summon with a turn, and need to have usually 3 monster reach the enemy base. All monsters move forward 1 square a turn after their summoning turn, unless something is in front of them. The board is two 3*3’s with a line in the middle, you can summon anywhere on your side that’s empty. Cards all have color, which when summoned in a row grant bonuses, races, which lets you fuse them, and skills(which are almost always garbage, charging more mana for a summoning that can’t not do) and passives. The cards come in four classes, each with their own gimmick. Attackers just attack, range can attack at range, healers heal the unit right in front of them, and buffers grant their int as attack to whoever is in front of them and are basically worthless.

Each story chapter gets you new card packs you can buy, and each card has three forms. You do a rubbing minigame to get them to ascend, though don’t think they’ll actually get better. Usually an ascended girl lose clothes and her stats change to something of a different role rather then an upgrade. Sometimes they’ll gain skills or passives and have their cost shoot up, other times they’ll lose a huge chunk of stats but gain range or MP. You can have three of a single card in your deck, and each ascension counts as a different card. Each girl card also comes in normal, +1, and +2 forms(and sometimes -1), so you can technically make a deck of one girl. You need 30 cards minimum for a deck with a max of 40.

The rubbing and the card art is the only fanservice here. The main girls get cgs, but they’re mostly bland and the main cast aren’t exactly great looking. The cards all lose clothes when ascended, down to bikinis or lingerie at final level. Which means May is literally rubbing there clothes off to make them more “useful”. It’s really weird to think about how this is suppose to work in world.

As for the art’s quality, it’s kinda boring. When rubbing some parts of the girl will wiggle around, usually their breasts or ass, but other then that nothing here really. Few of the girls take anything close to erotic poses, so most of the fanservice is the rubbing itself and the body types on offer. There’s a lot of monster girls to choose from, around 100 total different girls. But again, a lot of them are just kinda standing there or taking a battle stance or something. Not exactly hot or anything.

Anyway, the problems. You can make interesting decks, though I feel synergies are far apart and require end game packs to really make anything better then a single race/color deck. Without PVP, the final few cards are pointless, and require opening hundreds of packs to get some honestly boring looking cards. The AI uses almost the same deck for every fight, only changing once in a while based on story progress. Difficulty is done via letting them get cards you can’t and adjusting their base health, with starting game having 1 to your 3 and end game having 4 + 10 starting mana. There’s also some challenges the game will randomly let you pick from that give multipliers to your won gold and rub points(which you use to rub your girls). These can change the game enough to be interesting, but usually its just unfair advantages and you get to see how weak the AI really is as you crush them regardless of handicap.

The real issue I have though is how the endgame is done. So you need these things called seal stones to ascend some of your monsters. These cost 45000. The true final boss is worth 30000 with all multipliers in play, if you fight her in story. In free battles it’s less then half of that, so you need a save right before you fight her. Win, save in a different slot, then reload and fight her again. It’s the best legitimate way to get gold for seal stones, or you can spend 50 cents to get one. Some monsters need a total of four. You could also just rerun the entire game, some of the final nodes on the maps give out seal stones. You just need to play the entire game to get them again because how items on the map are handled. You’ll also need that gold to get the 20 or so end game only cards that you’ll get one of maybe every 50 packs you open. I swear my last five hours of the game was just opening packs to see the same monsters endlessly. You can also spend money to skip this step which is both horrible, and kinda jerkish. I can’t tell if this was done to keep you playing or only to get you to spend more money. Both of those design goals are met like that, but both are kinda bad on the player end.

I enjoyed the game at the start, as I don’t play a lot of card games or tower defense stuff. This game is a good example of why I avoid card games. For completionists, they are horrible time sinks. And for me I only enjoyed the first 5 or so hours before the tedium of the amount of AI duels that played out exactly the same that they wanted plus how rarely I was getting new cards led the game to being a boring mess that never recovered. Still better then the other monster girl game Compile Heart did around the same time as this though.

PC Save for Monster Monpiece

Three saves for this. One before the final boss, one before the post game final boss and one after. Those don’t really matter though, as progress in cards is saved separate from story. As for that, all cgs and cards that don’t require money are unlocked. The only cards that do are just the +1 and +2 versions of cards that are stupid rare in the final few packs, so all card art available in the game are available to look at.

Also, two free rub coupons in the item list. These let you do the rub minigame with any girl’s card art. There’s also voice items that let you change which voice that card will use in the minigame. Should have one of all of those. Just recopy the save if you want to change a different girls.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 3/10 Story: 3/10

Completion:What it took-

The main goal here is to get all the cards you possibly can. Beating the story is part of that, and all the cgs will come with beating the story. Getting all the cards though is a huge pain.

Mostly because it’s random. Thankfully there are lists of which card pack gives what so you can track things and check when you’ve rolled everything. The problem comes from the last few packs where you will likely need to open 100’s of them to get a single new card out of 10. It’s really obvious they weighted the draws later in the game to encourage paying. Anyway, I could cheat money and the level up resources, which I did.  Opening the packs though? I could not find a way to automate that, so I did it by hand. For something like 8 hours total. That’s just the final few packs, the rest of the game took way to long because of doing this as well. It’s not worth it in any way. Like I say in the review, the card art is rarely really good, and while I do think a few of the final cards are great… most of them are actually boring. I think out of the final 20 some cards, I liked maybe 2 of them. 2 cards I was not ever going to use that took 8 hours to get. Yep, this game is just a wreck.