Written by Otaku Apologist. Visit my website: http://hentaireviews.moe
Desecration of Wings, developed and published by Sierra Lee. A story-focused hentai RPG, released in February 15th, 2018. Available on Nutaku.net for $15.00. Up to 20 hours of gameplay.
One of the best hentai games I've ever played in my life, Desecration of Wings is a lovecraftian tale set in an all-original medieval fantasy world. The characters are compelling, the world sucks you in, like a wet vagina.
ABOUT THE DEVELOPER
Before we get into this review, I must mention, Sierra Lee has quickly become my favorite developer in the western hentai game industry. Her two previous games Ouroboros, and Crimson Gray, were amazing. Her characters are life-like, and the stories clever. This author is very mature. Even as the subject matters she explores are darkest of the darkest, she handles them with grace. She succeeds at pacing her stories such that you're always learning new things about the world, and characters, in intervals that you don't get bored. As a writer that never finished his novels, I can recognize an unaccountable number of great creative choices, and awesome dialog.
STORY
The first plot twist of the game, is that you're playing a female prostitute. The story begins with a sturdy male warrior entering a brothel. He fucks a sexy blue-haired woman, and leaves. I was fully expecting to play as him, when suddenly the game prompted me to write a name for the girl. I named her OTAKU.
OTAKU is a highly intelligent historian, with a deep knowledge of magic. You're immediately asking yourself, why is a woman of her abilities sucking dicks for money. You soon learn that the world is ruled by immortal kings and queens, who consider history their enemy - they actively declare ancient ruins of past civilizations to be destroyed, rather than studied. Meaning, the main character cannot make money with her scholarly, because her profession threatens the rule of the elite, which forces her to prostitute herself.
Something wiped out all the previous civilizations that lived before you. Terrifying rumors linger among the people, that once all the ruins are destroyed, a giant dragon will destroy the world. You don't take long to learn the truth of this paranoid rumor. The deeper you dig, the more the pieces start fitting together, painting an ever-darkening picture of the world's past, and future. In fact, most of the dead civilizations are described to have been more advanced than the surviving one. Whatever power is causing these mass extinctions, appears on a cyclical pattern, that's gone unbroken for countless millennia.
Monsters and undead terrors are emerging from every corner of the land, threatening settlements. For an unknown reason, the monsters are getting stronger. A gut-wrenching sense of dread lingers in the air.
More characters join your party later on. For shits and giggles, I named the prostitute's daughter Sinner, another girl I named ALEXJONES, and a certain noblewoman I named Sintan. There was also a blonde white guy, whom I named Trump. Shoutout to Sinner, and all the Sinnerfans visiting my site!
It took a long time for all the important characters to team up. The narrative tossed them around, the group was often only two girls strong. Everyone traveled to the strangest of places, uncovering secrets of the world.
Desecration of Wings has a deep background story. The most interesting is the lore around the afterlife; what happens to people that die, is an important question. Another great mystery is the source of the world's magic, a crystal named soulstone. Most of the world's soulstone has been collected and stored by the immortal kings and queens of the Endless Court. Whoever has more stone, has more power.
GRAPHICS
The visuals are good for a game striving for a retro aesthetic. When walking in towns, and the world map, the visuals are fine 16-bit pixel art. The pixels are super cute, and everything looks easy to make sense of. I especially enjoyed the dark ghostly monster sprites, a visual often reserved for boss monsters. The visual is fucking creepy, and when the battle encounter begins, you see exactly what kind of abominable monstrosity you're facing.
Speaking of monster designs, Desecration of Wings has great-looking enemies. The rotting zombies for example looked hideous to the point of triggering my vomit reaction. Drakes, and dragons looked psychotic, like ready to rip you limb from limb. The first monsters you kill are lowly imps, slimes, and insects. Later you're facing werewolves, zombies, elephants. The endgame has dragons, demons, and gods.
The game forces a small aspect ratio. You can full-size the game by pressing ALT+Enter.
The art in the sex scene CGs varies in style and quality. The game had tons of artists contribute to it, unfortunately creating a patchwork look. The faces and body proportions change a lot between pictures.
Backgrounds change depending on the environment you're in. There's backgrounds for forests, deserts, cities, etc, all great-looking atmosphere-setters. I suspect some of the BG art is RPG Maker stock material.
GAMEPLAY
Desecration of Wings is a turn-based RPG. In combat sequences, with each character, you choose from a list of skills what to do each turn: Attack, defend, use items, use spells, etc. The spells generally cost peanuts to cast, and you're always stocked on cheap potions. The developer cut corners with balancing the resource system - you're never out of mana, and never out of potions. There's also no combos, or skill rotations. Each spell does what it does, and you're often spamming the same ability until you win. Some enemies are immune to a certain element, like dragons might be immune to fire spells. In reality, the immunities of enemies will surprise you.
The game has tons of debuffs. This system was actually really good, as the debuffs were often so debilitating, I had to adjust strategy mid-fight, in reaction to them. A character might get blinded, making her miss every shot. She can get knocked back, making her miss a turn. If knocked in the air, she can still attack but with greatly reduced damage (healing spells and debuff skills still work normally). I found myself using "defend" often, which in most RPGs I've played always went unused.
There's an interesting system for learning new skills. Items have skills embedded in them. You unlock them by killing enough monsters. The skills can be passive stat bonuses, or traits (immunity to silence, immunity to blind, new limit break, etc.), but you can also learn spells. These skills are very important. For example, there was a royal castle with demons downstairs. The demons were spam casting silence. My healer was never able to heal, I kept losing fights. But conveniently, I had looted an item several hours ago, that made her immune to absolutely everything. I don't believe I could have progressed without the item, as there was an unavoidable boss fight.
The combat felt balanced well enough that I was rarely breezing through. I always had to pay attention to dropping health bars, and surprising debuffs. The fighting was satisfying, but mechanically very basic.
There's no class system, no difference between melee and caster classes, no talent builds, no skill points. Character progression is virtually set in stone. The only customization options are your gear, and the skills.
You can theoretically skip most battles, as the enemy encounters don't trigger unless you walk into them. The stock enemies are marked as blue flames that move around on the map - collide into them, a fight breaks out. The game's difficulty curve doesn't assume you spend hours grinding levels in each new area, to update your power level to match the challenges. Normal monsters drop no gold, or items. You're still advised to take the time for occasional grinding: There's plenty of unavoidable encounters that test your strength.
There's a big world to explore, and multiple dungeons. There's special items, and things in the world you should collect, like "contorted stones", which become crucially important later on. Trust me, you'll regret it if you don't collect all the contorted stones you can get your hands on.
There's a surprising amount of content to explore. After finishing the game, I realized I had taken a shortcut to the bad ending that saw my favorite characters die gruesome deaths. There's many more challenges hidden inside of dark towers, and other locked areas, that you can only open by collecting contorted stones scattered across the world. I may write a playthrough guide to the good ending, because it's a lot of hours of work to explore this mysterious continent.
GLITCHES AND ISSUES
I discovered a couple of glitches, and annoyances. There's no "LOAD GAME" option. Whenever I wanted to load a save slot, I had to click ESC, scroll down to click SYSTEM, then click "RETURN TO TITLE", and load my game. More often I just rebooted the program. You also can't use your mouse in this game; all menus must be navigated with your keyboard arrow keys.
When any of your characters are poisoned, your screen flashes red at every step. I thought it's a glitch, because it looked so terrible. I don't recommend design like this, especially since the poison damage was never enough to kill characters. It was just annoying.
One funny glitch I discovered was in the capital city Kolis. There's a dock, surrounded by water, with a white-furred dog NPC. If you click the dog, you cannot move anymore. I tested the glitch multiple times with consistent results.
MUSIC
The soundtrack is full of memorable melodies for different moods, and themes. The songs are synthetic. Music that plays during travel sequences, towns, and even the battle music, is constantly changing. Many towns have a unique theme song. I can remember six different songs for battles. Even boss battles had several varieties of tracks instead of just one. Depending on the area you're in, the music that plays on the map, and battles, changes to fit the mood.
The opening theme is a dark, harrowing melody that goes through deep lows, and longing highs. I always feel saddened by that song. Even the opening theme has multiple variations that completely flip over the mood.
The soundtrack has only one significant lacking: there's no dedicated track for the sex scenes. Many times, you're listening to an energetic world map song while prostituting your holes to random strangers.
VOICE ACTING AND SOUND EFFECTS (SFX)
Desecration of Wings has no voice acting. However, the game has plenty of sweet sound effects. They're cartoony for sure, but add much to the experience. There's a sound for most things, like opening doors and chests, spell casts, sword swings. There's many digital bleeps and visceral "wooshes". When characters are sliced to pieces with blades, you feel their deaths in your gut. The audio isn't realistic at all, but fits the game's retro aesthetic.
HENTAI
Your income in the game is balanced around prostitution. Instead of grinding enemies for items and gold, you grind cocks in your pussy. You'll find clients around the world, ready to shower your whorish character in cum, and gold. The well-written highly descriptive sex scenes are a great way to reward the player for exploring. There's tens of sex scenes to discover, each unique in their way. The main character is a hardcore slut, completely okay with throating dicks, eating cum, talking dirty, creampies, tentacles, monster sex, gangbangs (there's a lot of gangbangs). These scenes are very well-written, it's like reading a good erotic novel.
The girls have tons of casual sex. Sometimes they just meet a character they want to fuck.
The CG imagery is patchwork: Many artists contributed to this project, so the art doesn't stay consistent between scenes. There's also no voice acting, or pussy-pounding sound effects.
CONCLUDING WORDS
Desecration of Wings is one of the best hentai games I've ever played. Its flaws are minor, while the story excels above all expectations. The sex scenes are great fap fodder, that treats the personable characters like living people with their quirks. The complexities of character building, and combat, are easy to learn without a manual. Among indie titles, this game should be rated above 10/10. I have the highest of hopes for Sierra Lee's future releases.
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