H Scene Count- 30, around half as two cg scenes, the rest single

Created by Karin Project, translated by Shiravune

Length-15 hours

Hey look. The third Koihime game in English. We have the original, a fighting game with no porn, and this off brand Karin focused event finder dungeon builder game.

Story

Kazuto, our main male lead in this parallel world Koihime game, is a down on his luck adventurer with a love for dungeons, but no skill or party to adventure with anymore. After a fateful(calculated) recruitment by a follower of the Demon Queen of legend, he gets to run his own dungeon to get money and excavate the mountain where the Demon Queen(Karin) is sealed to unseal her, as it turns out she’s pretty chill and there’s some contract and money stuff that makes unsealing her really important for that follower.

Then you go. And go. And go. Until you win.

Gameplay

I wasn’t really kidding with that strike through at the top, I found this to be mostly about finding new scenes more then playing a game. It reminded me a lot of how I feel when I play idle gacha games, where setting things up is 95% of gameplay. So finding scenes was more active then the other things you do. Below is a decently long explanation for a round of gameplay with some stuff cutout as it didn’t matter much, but this all equates to like 2 minutes of not reading content at most a turn.

The core loop is you start by setting up your dungeon. You start with 4 rooms and eventually get 4 expansions of 3 more rooms each. Each room can have 1 thing built into it, which range from attack traps, buff rooms, extra payout rooms, and stall rooms. Then you have combat rooms where your 6 eventual main fighters go to fend off invaders with their squads, which are also the most important rooms.

After you set up your dungeon you select your current area to “promote,” which is really just advancing that places enemies and story content. Enemies attack based on the level of that place and your goal is to have them all defeated before they get to the end and steal from your hoard. The hoard can be taken from but if it hits 0 and is stolen from a few more times, that’s gameover. The only thing you can do during battle is active character skills based on SP, which you get like 3-5 per everyone moving. You can cast like 3 things per the longest fights.

The rest is out of your hands. You then get your results page, if you stopped anyone from getting to the hoard then the place levels up which makes the next set of enemies from there slightly stronger and lets you get more scenes from there. Your units also level up here based on how much fighting they did.

Then chances are you just go right back out to the next bit of content, as you only need to adjust your dungeon after an expansion or if you do really badly. You can also go level break your units if they hit the cap or use upgrade rocks to make them stronger. Each of the 6 total captains/leaders gets a set of minions, of which there are a lot that can be recruited. Based on the way the game is designed though, you basically just give everyone one minion at the start and ignore the rest which felt wasteful but whatever.

You can run out of turns or your hoard is destroyed or Kazuto marries a girl, any ending lets you save your runs stats and restart fresh. You keep all levels, upgrade rocks, and minions into that new run and you just go until you win. There is no justification for this, it’s just how the game works. So the only difficult things to do in the game are getting the stalled progression scenes, everything else will happen as you progress eventually.

H and Other stuff

Very vanilla, not nearly as many blowjobs as I expected. Fellatio in Koihime and its many extra entries is almost as common as penetration, in fact I think it’s at like a 2 to 3 ratio. I’m slightly exaggerating, but seriously it’s ridiculously common in the cg sets. This game has like 3 or 4 total and only for the last set of girls. Each girl gets around 4-5 cgs for h, usually spread out between 2-3 scenes. These can take a while to get to and most are completely optional, with the girls route/events for romance/sex being completely separate from game progression until fairly late and yet again, only for the last few girls.

Other then the two bonus girls(a succubi and a catgirl), the rest of the cast is from the Koihime. All the girls who join the party are Karin’s group(Wi), while Renfa(Go) has 4 members and are the late game girls I keep mentioning. The last group(Shi) is apparently dlc that has yet to be made English ready and who knows if that’ll ever happen.

Anyway, other the man hater, who’s scenes I compeltely skipped, the game is mostly vanilla and mostly straight penetration stuff. There’s 2 threesomes(the sisters and man hater with Karin for something), one of the later girls is into bondage and that’s about it for extra fetishes. Scenes are decently long, with almost every one pointing out the lead has to go at least 2 times or more. Karin, the main title character, only gets her h scenes near the very end of the game, outside of her inclusions in the threesome with the man hater and the generic harem end which is also the only harem ending, which isn’t a scene, just a cg and the statement he’s sleeping with the whole crew.

Verdict

It was nice seeing some of these characters again. Too bad the game itself is meh.

I don’t know enough about dungeon builders to really say anything sweeping about the genre, but if this game is a good example of that genre then it’s not for me. Maybe if the game was harder and switching combat positions and maybe throwing some rule changes at me were a thing I’d feel engaged with the gameplay. Instead it was a scene hunter with some okay comedy here and there. Easy pass outside of Koihime enthusiasts, of which I imagine there are not a lot of in the West with how long dead the IP has been here.

Save for Suzukuri Karin

Contains- Full event gallery and bestiary. Just hit new game and you can load with my endgame setup.