Kinkmas: Battle the Three Sisters

Welcome back to Kinkmas, my holiday timed four part look at weird fetish games, from the guilty pleasures to the infinitely strange. I'm taking off the kids gloves from here on, so now it's time to talk about a very, very strange game about a very, very strange fetish. As I promised, it's time to look at a ryona game. What's ryona, you ask? Why, it's the fetish where you get excited by physical abuse, of course! It's guro's puritan cousin, and a popular sub-fetish among fans of anime titty. After all, why just have anime titty when you can have anime titty getting punched? We're a weird species. With that in mind, let me tell you about Battle the Three Sisters, which is certainly ...a thing.

This game comes from MZ Fist, a doujin group that mostly makes comics and image sets where anime girls get beat up. There is little else to say. They know what their audience wants and give it to them. All I can add is that their art is bad. Pretty, pretty bad. Most every design they come up with is incredibly generic, and the amount of sameface on female characters is somehow an even larger ratio than with the Stepford wives. Also, you can tell they only know the basics due to the heavy amounts of obvious photoshop and lack of detail in their ryona scenes. See, ryona is a fetish based around impact, and their art has very little of that because they're so constantly focused on keeping the anime girl faces cute. The end result is very awkward, even more awkward a proper “I have just been covered in barb wire and cannot stop the horrific pain” expression would be.

Battle the Three Sisters is also a last minute replacement. I was going to look at another ryona game before this one, but I didn't realize how text heavy it was, and how little happened in it (that I could understand without some sort of rough translation coder thing), so I had to change my plans (to a game that is also not translated because I am smart). But it took me longer than expected to get started with this weird thing because the controls make no sense. Get this; to make any progress in this game, you have to use not only the mouse to use menus and the arrow keys to move, you also have to use the spacebar to talk to towns people. It took me forever to realize this, and you have to talk with townspeople to make any progress. Now, I know you're thinking I'm an idiot, but here's the kicker. You know how most JRPGs like this have an action button to look at or interact with objects?

This game doesn't have that.

Oh, you do need to use the spacebar to talk to people when they have an exclamation point over their head, but objects are automatically examined by just walking into them. So I assumed that since this wasn't working with townspeople but did work with people running the shops and inn, that must mean these people had no dialog and were just there for no reason. Now that also seems like a dumb assumption, but this game is so poorly put together that the safer assumption seemed to be to accept that the team didn't understand how to make a videogame. Characters on the screen randomly appear and disappear at points, objects in the area sometimes appear over menus, borders, or the character portrait window, the character sprites and world are on separate layers that have to take a second to catch up with one another's positions when you move, and towns are littered with pointless objects and buildings. This is not the product of people who had a good grasp of game design or even the most basic technology.

But wait, it gets worse! The actual game proper is basic Dragon Quest stuff. Talk with tonwsfolk, buy stuff, wander around the world map, and grind baby grind. The random encounters rate is about the same as older JRPGs, which is to say far too high and very obnoxious. Monsters like appearing when you least want them to appear, not necessarily when you're weak, but when you just want to get somewhere and they won't let you. There's also not a whole lot around, so you start seeing the same few over and over every area. It gets old, especially with how boring the move sets for the three heroines in your party are. You hit things, and you have some basic buffs, heals, and a super move here and there, and none of them are visually interesting. It's a very boring game, and longer than I expected, so I got about to the halfway point, got bored, and just stopped because the endless pattern had become too obvious.

It's not a game worth the eight bucks it goes for, not even for the weird fetish factor. Now granted, the weird fetish game is strong here. Most enemies have their own ryona attacks, and they're magical. This is where the terrible photoshop work shines, as the team thought it was a good idea to add obvious and distracting effects to added items, like poorly made shadows under spider web threads, or the images added don't match their art style in the slightest. Outlines are all over the place, so it's easy to tell when something was made differently and added later, like how some things shown are actual things cropped and given lazy outlines to make it seem like it's apart of the art. Not a single filter! The biggest offender I noticed were some snakes, where a snake that was biting into one girl's anime titty had a very clear divide of the three images used to make its texture in three different spots. Come on, how do you not know how to use the clone stamp tool? That's photoshop 101!

These details just add to the scenes depicted, which are so painful and cruel that they become hilarious. My personal favorite is the cannonball one, in which one of your three anime girls gets a cannonball to the gut and there's no sense of motion or reaction in any part of the body, except for the face. That face. That face is just the most perfect expression. If the game had more stupidity like that, I'd be raving about it for ages, but it's sadly mostly filler. Anime girls getting electrocuted and being covered in spiders should be much more entertaining than this.

But thankfully, the final game I'll be looking at is an actually solid game with actual game design. Also, it's a vore game. We'll be going out not with a whimper or a bang, but with a gulp next week. Stay tuned, and don't pig out on holiday treats. Save your appetite for the monsters swallowing anime girls.