Viper V-16

I'm going to break from my normal reviewing format here and divide this review into two mini-reviews of "Rise" and "Imagine". Neither game is particularly long so separately they would not provide the material for two reviews.

Rise

Look out! Endless Waltz has been to Armani!This game was definitely the quirkier of the dual Viper powerhouse. You take on the role of Akira, a martial artist who is doubling as a waitress at some generic eatery you see for roughly five seconds. She and her friends Karin and Saki are kidnapped by big shouldered aliens that live underground. The alien leader looks like Sephiroth portraying a woman on 80's primetime soap Dynasty, not much of a stretch really, and the other two look like Gundam Wing robots in zoot suits.

Allow me to interject that the translation for "Rise" is the worst of any game I have ever played that actually had an English translation. Some of the dialogue makes absolutely no sense and that's pretty hard because my years of doing this have made me adept at translating terrible Engrish. I would put dollars to cream filled long johns that the makers of Rise just ran the game through Babelfish or a software equivalent.

Here are some breathtaking samples of the kind of dialogue you can expect from the game:

"If they have a prey in front of their eyes, they hunt. Now they are hunting for the big mission of preserving their sperm…and we are nothing but their preys…"

"We appoint you as maternal womb of our human kind of underground men."

"So, they thought to preserve their semen using women from human being as maternal womb, because we are genetically similar to them…isn't it a logical thinking?"

France Surrenders! Alien Underground Mans is not the father. Rape ensues.There is a lot of expository dialogue about the mysterious aliens and their plot to reproduce their species using kidnapped human women. Obviously the poor waitresses don't want to be their alien baby factories so they plot to escape, which is where the shoddily-done RPG and combat element of the game comes into play. You can make a handful of choices about which direction to go or when to attack, most of which lead to Akira and pals getting immediately raped and sentenced to an eternity of maternity. HA!

Occasionally you will run up against some competition that doesn't rape you immediately and you'll have to put Akira's martial arts skills to good use. Good use is a relative term. Her skills are being poorly used when she immediately submits to rapes, I suppose they're being used marginally better when she has an option of three "normale[sic]" attacks and three "continued" attacks with which to brutalize her opponent. The combat is straightforward. Each enemy has a set order of what you're supposed to do and in what order you need to do it. You can pick kick, punch, or chop and in a static order only one of these will work. If you pick the right one you see purple lines appear on the enemy and punching sounds are played. If you pick the wrong one the enemy punches you repeatedly and the screen flashes.

He abducted me for industrialized rape purposes so sweet I couldn't help but fall in love!Eventually either the enemy's hit points or your hit points will be reduced to zero and combat will end. If you won you can move on, if you lost then rape naturally follows. Needless to say the combat is roughly as exciting as reading a "Hi and Lois" comic collection about paint drying.

I actually played through the game every possible way to see every ending, the whole dreadful affair taking me a little over an hour. As you might have guessed most of the endings involve a lot of rape and even the two "good" endings involve one of the waitresses deciding that she feels sorry for the aliens and wants to stick around. Hooray for sympathy for rape aliens.

Imagine

You can expect this sort of screen for about half of the game.Imagine is a much more straightforward "Look and Think" Hentai game which thankfully eschews the forced looking and thinking of many games and allows you to skip over them if you are so inclined. Trust me when I let you know that you definitely will be so inclined. You play "lo", a nameless and generic narrator who is attending a part-time vocational school to study computers. For once the setting of the game does not come off as a hokey substitute for high school and the pumpkin head girls do appear to be over 18. I was also pleasantly surprised not to see any relatives attending the school.

There are three vapid and incredibly boring girls you can talk to at the vocational school. Their names are unimportant, but if you want a means of identifying them go with Dumb Bitch, Slutty, and General Burnside. Dumb Bitch is an aspiring actress or something and she is by far the most boring of the three girls. Slutty is prone to drinking and coming over unannounced to your apartment so she can sleep with you. If I had known girls like her in college I probably wouldn't be doing Hentai reviews for a web site, I'd be a normal and well-adjusted individual. One who would grow old with an aging trophy wife I cheat on while I desperately ply my trade on the used section of Titone's Chrysler. General Burnside is a lavender-haired freak with side-burns longer than my forearm. She also wants to be an actress or something, I don't know, I was mesmerized by the supple curl of her sideburns.

Nice trim there Elvis.Imagine is more heavily animated than Rise. Unfortunately, most of this animation time is devoted to close-ups of the faces of the girls as eyelashes flutter above eyes so huge I can almost hear a reptilian clicking sound every time they blink. When sex does finally enter the picture it is awkward and heavily censored. Rise chose to use the tried-and-true "invisible genitals" and "glowing cylinder cock" in equal measure, but Imagine relies entirely on mosaics to conceal the sinful loins of "lo". For their part, the women often feature the traditional "giant halo of light" obscuring their nether-regions.

The game goes for a realistic feel compared to most Hentai and in some ways I suppose it succeeds. First of all it does a laudable job of portraying the consequences for attempting to rape someone. No joke, people all hate you and stay away from you, which is the exact same thing that happened to me in real life when I kept trying to get those Japanese girls to climb inside my unmarked van. Also exactly like real life is that almost everyone you meet is extremely boring and wants to talk to you much more than you want to hear words fall out of their open heads.

Gorgeous, in this moonlight your hair spills out like a pool of third round enema juice.Choice is very limited in Imagine, with only a few relatively meaningless options early on and one very important choice (rape or not rape) to be made later in the game. For all of the non-fun I was non-enjoying while playing this game I think the very positive "rape is bad" message could have been better conveyed by a white screen with black bold text saying "RAPE IS BAD". Consequently this would have also fulfilled the other goal of Imagine much better by being at least five times as erotic as the game was.

Difficulty: Rise is extremely easy, even to get the good endings will take you no more than fifteen minutes if you're extremely fortunate and around an hour if you're like the rest of us mere mortals. The combat is just "paper, rock, scissors" until you have the pattern down so anyone with the knowledge of how to operate the save feature of the game should be able to rely on his fortitude to see him through the game rapidly. Imagine is much harder mostly because it's intolerably boring, much longer, and has damning choices that you will be prone to accidentally click because you're trying to make the text scroll by as fast as humanly possible.

Now kick! Punch! Chop! It's all in the "normale".Defining Moment: For Rise I'm going to have to go with the fact that the first choice, less than two minutes into the game, can result in one of about a dozen "you just got raped the fuck out" endings. While each of these is very slightly different the differences will quickly become academic as you almost invariably have to endure all of them to get the "good" endings. For Imagine the defining moment would have to be the "rape is bad" ending. It, like Imagine itself, has its heart in the right place, but it's just so drawn out and boring that you will probably be wishing for a quick shot of a semen covered corpse and the words "THE END" animated with cool Mortal Kombat style blood drops.

Final Thoughts: I was initially impressed by Rise and the fact that it did not follow the traditional Hentai formula. By the time I was done with it, however, I realized that it had all the trappings of a normal Hentai game crudely combined with a really simplistic interface from the worst Valusoft castoff title you can imagine. Imagine was a fairly moral Hentai game that was just so uninspired it came close to making me long for another Water Closet just so I could be excited about having something truly awful to mock.