Or Genkai Tokki Moero Chronicle, the first entry in Compile Heart/Idea Factory’s monster girl rubbing series of what apparently were considered some of the lewdest games ever, according to reviewers at the time. This entry is a dungeon crawler where the rub mechanic is necessary to recruit girls and beat bosses.

Barely made it in time for Halloween… This game stretched on for a good while. This is a rare occasion of both cosplay = class change and monster girls, so it’s kind of a perfect month of cosplay game.

Before I start, I just want to mention my first attempt at this game had me quit at the end of the first dungeon. I got to the 4th and last floor, unsure if I should move on to the second area or not. I was tired of the encounter rate, the main character yelling in combat, and none of the girls designs had really hit me as good yet. I died to the loli on that floor and just gave up. Going back now, the next two monsters after the loli were a shortstack and the orc, both with designs I actually liked. Turns out if I had went maybe another ten minutes into the game I would have at least found one monster I liked.

Story-5

So the timing as the game shows it doesn’t match up with the actual events that happened to make the story work. It’s a really weird thing. Basically, one day a youth is the town of Sekfrend(yes, that’s the town name. If you don’t get it say it to yourself) is filled with too much pervy desire towards the women around him. In a last ditch effort to purify himself and become able to talk to women without pervy thoughts he runs from the town. Eventually he collapses and is found by his childhood friend, a monster girl by the name of Lilia who is the only girl the youth never feels unable to talk to. Time passes.

Now the world is in a perilous state. Monster girls who once were at peace with humans have become hostile and apparently started attacking humans and sometimes turning them into H monsters, the basic monsters of the world. No one knows why this has happened, but for the youth of Sekfrend, named Io, none of this really matters.

His desire had returned and he has once again become unable to talk to girls without pervy thoughts locking him up. None of the monster girls in this town are acting strange, so to him this world crisis is nothing compared to his teen angst. One day, after running from the squirrel girl shopkeeper(so sad she doesn’t join the party, she’s probably the cutest girl in the game), the mayor comes up to Io. It is Sekfrend’s turn to send a hero out to solve the world crisis. Io, a boy who contributes nothing to the town, is the who had been chosen to be sent away. He refuses, but his parent’s had already agreed. With nowhere to go, Io is forced out of town and is joined by Lilia who is worried for their shared friends in area 1 of the monster girl territories. So the two set off, though saying Io is going by his own will would be a massive stretch.

Soon the two meet their friend who has a strange symbol floating above their head. After some banter and some appeals to the power of friendship, which does nothing, Otton finally makes his appearance. This pink baby seal is a traveler who is obsessed with the fabric usually found between a girl’s legs and wants peace to return so… he can perv more? After some more back and forth Otton releases some magic and after getting the girl off using Io’s feelings of desire(I think that’s what he is doing) the girl is saved. Naming the strange state Dark History(they basically call it being chuuni) for how embarrassed by their actions the girl was the four now set out to save the world so Io can go back to his parent’s house.

Io is the kind of protagonist I both find annoying with how often they complain but also like because he fits. He’s a pervert in a pervy game learning that his desire can be a good thing, which is what the plot seems to want to say. Like they eventually find a ruin to an ancient group that believed desire was positive and it’s his desire that lets them cure the girls. That is not the plot. It’s what you think the plot is until the 5th dungeon, when it becomes about not letting your evil desires run rampant I guess. Accepting yourself? Something like that. It kind of falls apart when you learn about the true villain. If I had to come up with some lesson Io learns, it’s that being called a pervert should not be a tragic enough event to warp your personality and make you hate yourself for 10+ years.

So this is basically a Dragon Quest Monsters kind of game, and each girl does get a short little romance story with Io. Each girl has around 6-8 scenes about their relationship with Io and 2-4 about how they interact with other monster girls. I think this stuff is a nice extra as it gives the girls something as far as personality, which is the biggest thing Monster Monpiece failed to do. Literal cardboard art versus simple characters, I’m going to pick the characters as lewder most of the time. Emotional connections can do a lot for porn/ecchi after all.

I do wish the world building was a bit less empty though. You recruit a leader from each of the monster girl regions, and none of them know each other. Monsters on the same floor don’t know each other. I think a grand total of like 3 pairs of the non story recruits are sisters/friends before you recruit them. It’s weird. Like the leader of a region should know who lives their when it only has like 6 people there, but they don’t. Hell, why don’t the leaders know each other? Why do none of the girls recognize the actual Legendary Monster Girl, who is supposedly their God and the source of the problem who can only be cured by the holy fabric which turns out to be panties(because of course).

All in all, I like the story for the most part, as a lewd RPG having desire and pervertness as part of its plot is a nice change of pace and makes sense with all the lewd stuff going on. The weird turns at the end to justify Io being important to the plot and how that messes with the messages to that point definitely weaken the overall thing. I also wish that if they were going to end a 1 on 1 vanilla romance they would have committed a bit harder to it. As is, it just feels like Lilia gets shipped harder rather then actually is in a relationship with Io at the end.

Lewd-4

So like I said at the start, the Moero Chronicle was considered one of the most lewd games ever when it came out with only it’s sequel(Monster Monpiece) winning the title from it, according to reviews at the time at least. Way back when I played Monpiece I mentioned that I actually found it very tame personally, and that holds true for this as well though I think in innuendo and general lewdness this does win out, though not by much.

The main lewdness is in the rubbing minigame, which is the exact same as Monpiece’s with the exact same cheat. If you play on PC, click both mouse buttons down and just move around the body. When she reacts just rub that spot and you win. Anyway, if you do well you enter ecstasy mode which is where the girl goes naked with giant hearts blocking her spots. I honestly don’t consider ecstasy mode worthwhile since you see more in their normal outfits. Or their underwear which makes up 75% of the girls outfits. Note that this minigame is mandatory to recruit new girls and actually defeat bosses.

Every recruit-able monster girl has 4 outfits. Their normal base outfit, their standard underwear you see when you fight them, and two more usually “unique” sets. Like cotton candy. Or snakes glomping their boobs. Or just tape. These are really the main real lewdness in the game to me since some of these pairs really do make the girls far more sexy. It would help a lot though if the girls were posing for sex appeal though as most girls stand pretty standard, and since the only image most girls have is that single pose with the different outfits you better hope the girl with the body you like bothers to stand in a decent pose. Or is a main story girl who actually get unique poses in the minigame, allowing them to be taken seriously in the plot and still try to be sexy. To bad the cgs don’t bother trying that at all.

Just like Monpiece, the cgs here seem to think they can be sexy but just fail either do to lack of curves, or the shot being to safe. I don’t mind most of the cgs being used for actual plot reasons really, I just wish the game deserved it’s over the top lewd title. Which it kinda does, but it’s not from things that are actually arousing.

See, of the 6 dungeons you go through, the first four are sex themed in some way. Area 1 is a mushroom forest where the top of the mushrooms are boobs. Area 2 is a water filled ruin where the water is very semen looking lotion. Area 3 apparently has trees that look like naked women. Area 4 is basically Edo’s Red Light District. Then you get time space realm and winter for the last two, which really don’t fit.

Beyond that you have the common enemy designs. Either sex or innuendo, every common enemy is a reference to sex in some way. From the first enemy in the game being a cow with four teats covered in star pasties, to the Boob UFO piloted by the alien with a pair of boobs for a head that is also surrounded by boob satellites, every common enemy is pervy. There’s actual sex toys, enemies themed over underwear, I think a pair of bananas that are either suppose to be twincest or dick jousting… It is constant. It’s also one of the more silly things the game has going for it.

The final thing of note is the relationship conversation to unlock the outfit changing, which for each girl sounds like they are giving up their virginity to Io. A few do make it clear that that’s not what it is, but apparently letting a guy choose their outfits is unlocking their true power and so when they offer this up it just sounds like that kind of conversation. The first few times it is kinda funny in how awkward it is, after 20 it’s annoying, and at around 50 it’s just silly again.

The gallery sucks to. After beating the game you unlock a gallery mode to look at the girls in the different outfits up close, but it has no zoom controls so you are constantly seeing maybe 2/3’s of the girls body at best. No idea why they thought it needed to be zoomed in and not just a poser or a mode where you get the dress up options but can remove the UI. Not even the artbook gives each outfit a full page. I don’t get why a proper body shot of these girls is so hard for the devs to design.

Gameplay-5

Okay, so general opinion on the gameplay is I actually enjoyed it, for weird reasons. It is going to sound like I hate the game, but I like broken mechanics when they work as nonsensical as that sounds. I usually dislike dungeon crawlers. They are my most disliked type of RPG, because a lot of them feel really empty and samey. Mary Skelter for example, I did the same tactic in every fight because it worked and loot was randomized so treasure chests felt pointless outside of the three with the plot items in them. I never felt like filling out the maps was worth it, though I did it anyway because that’s how I play these games. The sequel made fights a bit better, but the loot was still garbage.

Moero Chronicle has a similar loot issue as Skelter, but fixes a big issue with Skelter’s combat in a very weird way. It makes AOE’s a bad idea. It does this via aura chaining, or hitting multiple elemental weak points in a row. While this is not a crucial mechanic to the way the game works, it offers enough benefits to be used a lot. How does chaining weak points make AOE’s a bad idea? If the next attack hits any enemy that is not elementally weak to that attack it breaks the chain. So even if you hit with a water spell and hit 7/8 enemies weak to water, that last enemy makes the chain break. Normal attacks also break the chain unless they use elements for some reason(passive skills and accessories). On top of that, most fights have enemies that are way more threatening then others and AOE’s don’t scale amazingly well, so late game it is more HP efficient to kill enemies 1 by 1 to kill the big threats then it is to spam AOE’s and kill everything over time. You can, and it would work, but it’s not a good idea. At least in my experience. I do see ways to do it, but they require far more setup and getting beat down then my way, yet every guide and tip to the game is about using those other ways so I guess whatever floats your boat?

So aura chaining/comboing benefits. The biggest one is the bonus xp and increased item drops you get based on the highest bonus in a fight. This just makes every individual fight worth more and more items can help with crafting and saving money for affection items. Otton, the panty seal familiar that follows your around, also does bonus attacks and effects based on the combo number. Then you have passive abilities, with some pretty big bonuses based on hit count. The first one I remember is getting a 50% attack bonus with a 3 combo. This is one of the ways to make AOE’s work, you set up a combo to unleash a big hit like that, though it requires a party with the right turn setup or guarding to waste turns that don’t reset the combo. Or you could just keep attacking I guess?

Other things… affection? Each girl has an eight point affection meter, with only the first point really mattering. It’s what allows the clothes/class change mechanic. The girls all have more scenes and a rare item they give out at affection 8, but this is mostly fluff that I chose to start ignoring so the save had more value by the end. I actually regret reading the few I did beyond the 2 required for clothes changing. The only other effect affection has that I found out is it affects crafting chances.

Crafting is a very messy system in this game. After fights monsters can join your party as basically an extra accessory slot for a character. These monsters are also used as fodder in the crafting system. You take a ranked item, a monster girl, and a monster to craft an item. The girl affects the extra stats on the item and her affection affects success rate, the item decides kind of item and success rate, and the monster decides the actual items. Generally, stronger monsters equals better items. There’s two real problems with the system. One, the list of monsters is badly sorted so its hard to tell which monster is which unless you memorize all their names. Second is that the rate of success plummets rapidly with stronger monsters and the crafting items needed to actually succeed in that crafting is basically late post game only. For an example, I couldn’t craft using a monster from area 5 of 6 with a mid tier ranked item(items have three ranks) and max affection at all. I’d estimate a 5% chance of success at best, though that could just be me. By the time you are getting the final tier of crafting items you are at end of post game and need them badly, but good luck knowing which makes something good. Looking at the chart on a guide site and I have no idea what’s worth it. Equipment names mean nothing to me and there is no consistent system of what’s better then what that I figured out. I ended up only using crafting 4 times outside of the other use for it.

Which is rebuilding the inn. One of the crafting item(the Strawberry one) exists solely to be used to upgrade the monster girl’s rooms. This does two stated things and one hidden thing. The big one is raise the passive xp they gain, from 30% to 70%. The hidden one is is it makes skill learning faster. It also states something about affection which doesn’t seem to do anything.

So I’ve mentioned clothes changing in the lewd part of the review, but I didn’t mention what it was for. It’s basically a class system. Each girl has 4 different stats/roles they can be, though they are not even nor particularly well designed. For most girls its healer, attacker, caster, and a weaker version of one of the others with more health though there is more variety to this. Each class comes with 8 skills you gain as you win battles. Any battle works and are weighted the same. Skills are not shared between outfits though, which I think is a shame even if I get why.

As for how to get outfits, each girl has three you must get. One will be in a chest in that region you found the girl. The second is in a gather spot, respawning panty icons that have all the girls in the ares second option inside them given at random. The final one is from a monster with a floating h above their head, which are rare floor based encounters that will always drop the pair you need from them if you can get them to spawn.

Now the other big thing about the outfits leads into the last bullshit thing about the game until postgame nonsense. Levels are random, and outfits influence your increases. This probably won’t effect people who play favorites as much, but for people like me who don’t like losing skill xp to nothing this means ruining a girls stat growths. You can reset a girl to level 1 to fix their growths in the class you like the most, but really 95% of players are not going to do that. It’s a bad decision to connect the growths to the clothes when it really should have been character based. It does mean you can raise anyone to be one of four different things, but in actual gameplay most girls only have one or two actually decent sets while the others are basically stat traps. Early girls also get made redundant when later girls just have better move sets do to having tier 2 skills, which isn’t really great in a waifu raising RPG.

Okay, a few final things. Boss fights are all monster girls, and these involve breaking their outfits, not them, and then rubbing them to recruit them. This is another reason just a bunch of AOE users isn’t great, since AOE’s can’t target girls clothing. You can beat them up, which knocks them unconscious, but your main goal is their clothes. Dungeons are aesthetically very different but there is barely any gimmicks. Area 5 of 6 has the first actual dungeon gimmick, and I think there’s a grand total of 3 in the entire game. One of which is post game only. The encounter rate is way to damn high, which does help with panty hunting and skill learning but really I shouldn’t be able to take a single step and get into another fight.

Io’s role in combat is basically Jack’s from Mary Skelter. Use items, which is why Io was my only healer for the entire main game. He can also build up sexual energy and shoot it onto a girl for a damage bonus, though if he misfires as he charges he loses turns. And yes, that entire mechanic is about him masturbating or getting turned on in combat. This game is stupid. Make sure to turn Io’s animations off though, hearing him scream like he’s DBZ powering up is one of the biggest issues I had on my first attempt at this game. It’s just really annoying.

Now I went on above about how I liked the game, but that only accounts for the core game. Post game everything is the exact opposite. First problem is it’s going through the same 6 dungeons with 4 new floors each with just enemy recolors and 1 new monster girl per dungeon. Second problem is the story that helped break up the combat is basically gone outside of the introduction of the post game plot, a hot spring scene, and the new ending. Third is everything is so strong/dangerous even on low difficulties that the multiple strategies and using who you want which is really important to this kind of game kind of gets thrown out the window. You kind of get shifted into using Spirit Up/Berserk turn 1 then Blow Away(physical AOE) every fight because nothing else is strong enough. You might have a caster or two do the magical version and a healer, but every other fighter is using the same strat. Bad spawns can 1 turn your team. I ended up rushing all these which didn’t help, but honestly a couple of levels wouldn’t change how under powered I felt.

Verdict

I enjoyed it for its botched mechanics and silly plot and world. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a solid game at really any time. You would have to love the art style or monster girls to really get anything out of this. I feel Monster Monpiece actually has the better art but I find this game more erotic do to the general monsters, constant innuendo, and the girls having personalities and not just being cardboard you fight with.

For a lewd RPG that embraces that role it stands out. Few pervy games actually admit that’s what they are, which does elevate my respect for the game and the fact the story deals with sexual desire but is not a porn game puts it into a fairly unique spot. It’s not great but for an unbalanced mess it’s a decent dungeon crawler with some cute mons you can play some dress up with. Just don’t bother with postgame unless you like grinding.

So I have been getting into the habit of looking for official art for these kind of games beyond what is in the game. Artbooks and posters and such, and boy did this game have more winners in those then in the game itself. I guess it’s cause artbooks and such have looser rules but the images in those are way more almost porn then anything the games I’ve found have them. Something that I thought while playing Moero was that the deluxe edition came with an artbook, so did that artbook make unlocking all the gallery content pointless since everything visual is in there. It isn’t, or more like the artbook on steam feels like it was designed to not be lewd at all. Finding basically the same book somewhere else though and it just doesn’t give every character with all the clothes a full screen shot, so I guess it is worth having the save file and game if you want to see everything in it. Also, the guy who drew Agarest 1 did Moero Chornicle and Crystal. They don’t look alike at all…



PC save for Moero Chonricle

Save has all extras in the extra menu unlocked, which is cgs, music, and the worthless sprite viewer that is way too zoomed in. Save 1 is to the final boss the first time, save 3(I skipped a slot) is before the final post game dungeon for achievements, and save 4 is the have everyone for rubbing, ready for true end and a bunch of the relationship scenes.

I kind of wish I had only done the intro and clothes unlock ones leaving the actual silly girl falling in love storylines ready for anyone who wants to see them for their favorite, but I didn’t decide to do that until I finished Lilia and had realized they weren’t in the gallery. A majority of those scenes are still available though and everyone is at full relationship and room upgrades except Zit, the final girl, for achievements.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 5/10 Story: 4/10

Completion-

Recruit every monster girl and get all their panties, which requires grinding mostly for the unique monsters to spawn. I also went out of my way to set up the all affection and all room upgrades achievements, which I think with cheating money still took an extra hour or two.

Also beat the post game to get the last cg. It’s mostly a straightforward completion outside of the monster grind.