Chain

He stands around and smokes a lot. Oh yeah, and I guess he's a detective too.

Game Plot: Chain has a heck of a lot going for it, at least for a Hentai game, yet it all fails to gel into anything but a boring mess and the cherry on top of it is the rape/snuff scene I mentioned in the introduction. You take on the role of Takeshi, a Private Detective who stands around out in the rain chain smoking for no reason, has an office that looks like a health clinic, and conducts all of his investigations by repeatedly asking vague questions and then repeatedly thinking about the same person. He's like Magnum minus the sun-drenched setting, Higgins, TC and his helicopter, masculinity, and a nice car. So basically he is the polar opposite of Magnum. He's an effeminate dullard with no friends other than his big-breasted assistant and the plodding investigatory skills of an MIT experimental robot's collision detection program.

The game starts with Takeshi PI doing what he does best; namely standing outside in the rain smoking cigarettes and striking dramatic poses. Some little girl in a schoolgirl uniform is sitting in the rain and watching a kitten when she is abruptly accosted by two drunks, one of whom sounds suspiciously like Dr. Zoidberg from "Futurama". Takeshi rescues her from their rape activities and gives her a cab ride back to her house. The next day he gets a call from a girl he had a crush on in highschool and it turns out that the wet schoolgirl is her younger sister! What's better is she invites Takeshi over to look at a spooling list of random items in her house and talk about shit so boring I would pass out if I tried to describe it. The gist of the conversation is that she wants Takeshi to apply his many talents to finding out if her husband is cheating on her.

Sometimes you get to play as your assistantTakeshi immediately sets to work standing around outside the guy's office chain smoking and striking poses. An epic and boring search to determine whether or not the husband is cheating ensues, even though Takeshi and his assistant verify almost immediately that he is cheating they keep incessantly asking around about whether or not he is. This is played out in a series of sequences that are both incredibly boring and gratingly awkward to read. Look at the room. Think about the room. Think about the room. Look at the dresser. Look at the dresser. Talk to the dresser. It's this kind of hard-hitting investigative work that makes for great gameplay. About the only remarkable thing about this portion of the game is that the perspective will occasionally switch from Takeshi to his assistant Hitomi. Not surprisingly she has the same "leave no stone un-thought about four times" methodology as her boss. After countless encounters with such exciting locales as "room" and "office" and riveting conversations with people like "janitor" Takeshi at last catches the philandering husband red-handed in any alleyway. He snaps some pictures, shows them to the wife, and that's the end of that. Or is it?!

The next day some old guy stops by just when Takeshi and his secretary were starting to get unduly flirtatious. He hires Takeshi to find the daughter of his boss and make her come home. His boss is some big politician and his daughter is the girl from the beginning of the game whose older sister's marriage you just helped ruin. Apparently Takeshi PI gets all of his business from the same family in Japantown. Takeshi uses his proven methods of making me want to slit my wrists with his ploddingly slow and counter-intuitive investigative abilities to discover a bunch of shit that he mostly already knew. Through no fault of his own inept bumbling Takeshi ends up involved in a drug controversy that's sweeping through Japan's schools. This vaguely dangerous drug is apparently real trouble because he pawns the job of watching the girl off on Hitomi and goes looking for some "drug" (which looks like a cookie) at this place called Club Rose. Luckily the only person he actually sees is the person he's looking for there, a "drug" user who avoids all of his pathetic attempts to interrogate her and then forces him to submit to a blowjob. At points like these you can really appreciate the writing quality of the game as you get descriptive and romantic lines like "her saliva glows mysteriously in the dim restroom" or "it's so erotic, yet I calmly observe the sight".

And sometimes you get to fuck her!Over the course of the investigation Takeshi reveals some stupid conspiracy about the drugs. There's murder, there's multiple instances of sex with druggies, attempted kidnapping, and it goes without saying that there's rape. To be honest after sinking about four hours into this piece of shit after the snuff porn I just put it on high-speed so I only read about one in ten sentences. I don't doubt that I might have missed some important detail about the poison cookies or who shot who while raping them but I think I got the gist. Basically Takeshi changes his mode of investigation after the murder to include "fuck everything with a vagina" and proceeds to search for clues inside the uterus of every female character in the game. Hell, when the body of the dead girl turned up I was honestly surprised he didn't immediately mount it in lieu of an autopsy.

Even after Hitomi gets raped she can't help but go home and masturbate in the shower. For Christ's sake even the woman who is raped and shot in the head has a fucking orgasm during sex. Since I don't want to do a grave injustice to this wonderful piece of software with my apathy towards its plot I've pieced together a diagram to assist you in the goings on. You see, it's not actually interactive in any sense, no more so than scrolling through a PDF file or Word document anyway. It's complicated and it makes you click stuff a lot but the plot is completely mapped out, just waiting for you to look and think and talk enough to reveal its grandeur. Then you get to have all kinds of crazy sex, fuck schoolgirls, and watch as a woman is shot in the back of the head during sex. Honestly it's the most offensive pile of garbage burned onto a CD since some neo-Nazi history revisionist pervert compiled a CDR entitled "Fake Holocaust Documents and Pictures of Me Fucking My Mom's Dead Body While Children Watch".

Yes, you are the most worthless gumshoe ever.As mentioned the game isn't just appallingly immoral, it's also so boring that by the time most of the characters get into trouble you're honestly hoping they get shot in the back of the head, just not while they're having orgasms. I have read dictionaries less boring than the text of this game and dictionaries repeat themselves a lot less. You see the game doesn't just make you look at and think about stuff multiple times, it also throws you a curveball by waiting a half hour and then making you remember the same shit that you wish you could forget. Literally, it will have a scene where you have to click through a whole list of options remembering how much fun you didn't have twenty minutes ago while "looking for clues".

I would rather stick a test tube full of boric acid into my urethra and then have a bolder fall on my dick than ever play this game again. The game should seriously be called "Chain: Proof That a Merciful God Does Not Exist".

The only redeeming quality of the game, if you can even call it that at this point, is the fact that the graphics are above average for Hentai games and are even occasionally crudely animated. They're still your standard "giant eyes and freakishly tiny mouths" of most hentai but they've got extra detail and cool Photoshop filters applied to them! Thrill at the fact that you can almost see individual sperm cells in the clot of semen discharged from that corpse's vagina! Hooray! HOO-RAY!

She has no mouth and I must scream.Difficulty: It's my job to play these games and review them and I nearly killed myself by sticking my head in the oven. It took me at least six hours to play through the whole thing and that was with the second half or so of the game on turbo-text. Think of what you could do with six or more hours of free time. You could watch three good movies, play half of a normal video game, have sex with your girlfriend almost three hundred times, travel back to the Civil War and have both legs amputated by a hatchet, or even swallow a sizzling block pure cesium. These are all things that are easier and more enjoyable than playing through Chain. If you are absolutely in love with Hentai games I would have to seriously recommend that you play Water Closet before this. It won't receive quite as bad of a rating as that game just because the graphics were better, but it is actually worse.

Defining Moment: The snuff porn and the "finding the body" parts of the game both rank right up there, but while obviously the worst parts they were not all that indicative of the overall game. Probably the best defining moment took place roughly three-fourths of the way through the game. After a particularly hot night on the town of fucking druggies and finding corpses our faithful hero Takeshi has a nice sit down to contemplate no less than seven different things. It was like a monument to how boring and annoying Chain is. Like the designers were laughing at you for playing the game. "Haha, didn't get enough of our crappy repetitious dialogue?! Try this on for size tough guy!"

Final Thoughts: I believe in karma, or at least something similar to it and somewhere soon every single person involved in the making of this game is going to wind up the victims of freak accidents like being trapped in concrete, sliced in half by a helicopter rotor, or killed by falling space debris. There simply has to be a sort of cosmic justice that regulates this shit. Some spiritual censor made out of energy and light and maybe crystals that sits on top of Mount Olympus all day playing Hentai games and meting out punishment where it's due. The folks behind Water Closet are all severe burn victims and paraplegics; the creative force that drove Chain will soon be dead. Either that or I'm going to bong paint thinner until my eyes shoot out of my skull on fountains of blood. Yeah, probably the latter.