H Scene Count- 89 + 6 alternate versions

Created by Alicesoft, translated by Shirvavune

Length- 30 hours or so

Finally finished this. Dohna Dohna is Alicesoft’s 30th year celebration game. It’s a mix turn based and management sim. It’s probably most well known for it’s art style. It’s one of the more recommended games for me to play, so I did it. I… didn’t care for it.

Story

It’s basically a cyperpunk story. You are one of three anti big corpo groups. The only way to make a living in this company owned town is to be a bad guy and sell women as product, so that’s what Kuma, our male lead, does for Nayuta, his group. You join in on his group watching anime and getting mad about a news add about the founder of the big company. You go to work, sell some sex, and reveal the group needs a new place. You are saving for a trailer. This is basically only referenced in an extra, despite being the closest thing to a goal you get for most of the story.

Real quick, Kuma is a unique protag. He looks like an insomniac. He talks about doing things logically and does have a decent reason for being in Nayuta. Sadly, I don’t think he’s a good lead. He has one of the weaker personalities of his crew. If he wasn’t the lead, he’d be forgotten. His design is his most interesting part.

The core progression is your group hear a rumor about a way to do some damage to big corpo, and that goes belly up but you come out usually better off. You get in trouble with one of the other two anti big corpor groups and deal with that. Or reacting to the conflict with big corpo and the outside company big corpo who keeps edging into town with some big guns. Basically the story is almost entirely reactionary and is actually just character driven. Nayuta ends up with 10 members, and honestly the best part of the game is this group just slacking off and having fun. Or dealing with their drama. I’m not going to spoil anything, but really the group is what kept me going in this. Normal ending was the best by the way, the romance was mostly disappointing for me and Kuma can’t really carry the story on his own.

Gameplay

A mix of things. The core game is split into hustling and hunting with hunting being the RPG stuff and hustling being the get money for girls stuff and is the only way to get money. They feed into each other and you can’t ignore hustling entirely as the game will force you to do it to progress the story pretty often. I’ll start with hustling then talk about hunting.

So you have a roster of girls(talent) you have dohna’ed, or captured. Each has 3 stats, looks is their ability to get a customer, technique is how much they earn, and mental is basically their HP as once it hits D- they make basically nothing and can’t get more mental. You use Tp to interact with your talent per day to fix up their stats using items or actions. Talent also have up to 3 traits that affect stat gain/lose and customers also have traits, if they match you get more money.

At the end of the day you get to pick hustle or hunt, hustle will then give you a list of customers. You then match your girls to them on a timer versus girls from the other two groups in town. You can use items to screw with them or force your girls to get picked. Customers give different profits based on rank and can give traits so you want to mix and match and sometimes dodge certain customers to avoid giving bad traits to your girls. Finally there is pregnancy, you have to keep up to date with keeping the girls on pills or they get a kid in them and this jumps their mental lost per customer. At the end of a round you get money based on chain and girls stats and that’s it.

There’s a couple of special talent who get h scenes. They get sidequests which mostly boil down to set them up with certain customers or make x amount of money then set them with certain customers. Matching is also brought in later, where you pick a girl and depending on how many of 5 things the customer wants you get paid. If nothing matches you lose money.

Hunting is what will actually take the majority of your time. When you pick it you get a map of the town and select your dungeon. You enter and get a node based interface. Dungeons are left to right, pick nodes to advance with nodes having items, enemies, locked doors, and story scenes on them. When you enter a fight you get an interface reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon. Four on the left, four on the right and you are the left side. Each character’s skill has a range based on placement so each is best in specific spots, units can move freely and switching units out is a free action. Each unit also has MP, which is a weird system. When you run out you can go into the negatives. If you reach your max in the negatives your damage goes to basically nothing. I think reaching the negatives lowers crit rate. You can freely use healing items between fights and honestly, a dungeon trip is a short affair. Usually like 2-4 fights.

The main goals of hunting is either item farming or capturing. Certain fights are represented by girl icons, and in these fights you have a 10 HP girl you want to defeat last to capture. Early on this can be annoying as your range options on your units are pretty bad and units have to do something on their turn, eventually it’s pretty easy to juggle. As for item hunting, this game’s gear systems are just odd.

Dohna Dohna has two gear systems. Badges are your accessories and you get badge slots from the feeling mechanics which is not worth spending a paragraph going through, it decides route at the end of chapter 22. Badges either up speed, HP, or power up a specific part of 1 move on a character like increasing buff length or lowering the MP cost. Weapons are much more odd. You find weapon improvements in specific big item boxes while hunting, who’s you get are random. You then can buy a version of that weapon rank. Versions are pure power, balanced, pure technique, and sometimes a cheap option with bad hybrid stats. Power is damage and technique is I think crit rate and for some unit passive skills it affects activation rate. This system means you need to just stop progressing the story to farm gear with random chance to catch up with the enemies huge power spikes with no control on who gets better stuff. I saw a guide recommend using 4 specific units, but the MP system and free swapping makes the idea of using only 4 of the 10 units weird to me. The game wants you to swap around a lot.

Gameloop is usually just doing the todo the game gives you, which is usually hustling at the start of a chapter then has you go through a new dungeon. You just go until you find a weapon upgrade or need to farm some money, then you just hustle or farm pills/items/girls until you are ready. I never really liked the flow of the game as it’s actually pretty grindy and repetitive.

H and Other stuff

You can split the h into 3 groups. The bad end stuff for the heroines, the prostitution stuff, and the “happy” scenes with the heroines. Each heroine has two torture scenes, a late save and a bad end. These are them being broken and are pretty easy to avoid. They also all have 6-8 “romance” scenes in which they range from dumb training stuff(Kiku, Porno and Medico) to weird teasing(Kira and Antenna) to guilt tripping(Alyce). Romance isn’t really a thing until like event 7 or 8 of each girls events, until then the sex is for weird reasons like Kiku wanting a job in the group and then just being bullheaded, or Medico wanting to be hurt for being a bad girl and using sex as an outlet for that feeling. I… didn’t care for any of this. Alyce was basically the only heroine I actually liked since the sex was always about enjoying it and not… whatever excuse they needed for sex to happen.

The prostitution stuff is a big mixed bag. It’s basically any prostitute trope you can think of being used for the wide variety of unique girls they threw in their. You have the cocky girl who thought she knew what sex was, and then a dangerous man shows her what for. You have a girl finding love and the boy dealing with her being a product only to end up saving her. The mind broken girl looking for her dad. The actual normal girls being put in this situation. A mother and wife being tricked into being caught and her father in law taking full advantage. There’s a lot, and each girl has two scenes.

Scenes are what I’d call medium length. A vast majority of them don’t include the male lead, none of the prostitution ones do. Only the “romance” ones do, and he’s whatever in those. He’s mostly a push over just doing whatever the girl wants. You would never think he’s sexually training girls with how weak willed he is with the core cast.

One of the biggest appeals of Dohna Dohna is the art style. It’s this bubblegum candy coloring with a… I’ll call it punk vibe. I didn’t care much for it? It stands out, but Alicesoft has always stuck on more normal proportions so only three of the heroines were visually attractive to me, and like I said I only really cared for Alyce’s romance stuff. Basically the h was a big miss for me. I think I only read like 9 scenes in the entire game.

I should point out the B variant stuff real quick. If you hit the late save sex stuff for the girls, the game will keep going. If you don’t do their romance stuff until after the late save you get variant scenes. The gallery doesn’t really indicate this until you click a scene you unlocked a variant for, and it’s only like 6 total scenes. Kiku has the most. This is mostly dialogue changes based on them not being virgins or referencing the stuff that happened to them. Cool that these exist at all, kind of wish they were more obvious in the gallery. I guess I should be happy they are in it at all considering how often Alicesoft misses putting scenes in their galleries when it comes to variants.

Verdict

If it’s not obvious, I didn’t really enjoy this much. My favorite part was when the group was just hanging out, so the romance events which mostly cut out most of the group weren’t that interesting. The actual story is fine, even if it doesn’t really have a point a lot of the time. It really does feel like a lot of barely connected events that kind of crescendo into the ending. Almost everything brought up early on is used or has meaning, but the through line of the story is just reacting to a rumor or trying to earn money. It never felt like the goal of destroying the big mega corp was ever close or getting closer.

I didn’t care of the h, and the artstyle doesn’t fix what is mostly a theme I don’t care much for. The whiplash of tone doesn’t help. Pretty sure I brought this up when I talked about the Beat Blades games, but these mixed romance and assault titles do not feel great for me to play. They are Alicesoft’s bread and butter but I’ve lost interest in a porn games where I only like 20-30% of the content. Hard to justify paying top dollar for this for me.

Gameplay is fine, but to stop and go for me to actually play. This is a game I should have finished in 2 weeks, not 2.5 months. I just never wanted to keep playing it. Not because it’s bad, the actual combat stuff and hustling is fine. But the stop and start style where you do a thing then go back to base and do the same prep stuff then go out and repeat never clicked with me. Leading to snail progress.

Despite my opinions though, Dohan Dohna is well liked. So my opinion really doesn’t match up with most people’s on this. I won’t say anyone else should skip this, but I kind of wish I did.

Save for Dohna Dohna

Contains- All cgs and alternate scenes. The game over achievements weren’t triggering for me, and I wasn’t farming capture for the S+ capture achievements, so I don’t have 100 NG+ points to buy everything. Sorry but I’m done with this game, I just don’t care that much.

Has a save at the end to route split into the different endings, normal and Mistress endings aren’t in the gallery.