X-Change 2

It should be noted that Takuya's face does not change one bit after he is turned into a girl.Game Concept: Over a year ago I had the task of choosing a Hentai game to feature for my second review of SA's then formative Hentai Game reviews section. At that time I had no idea what to expect as I was both fairly new to Hentai games and relying on the title of a zip file to provide me with information about the content of the games. I selected "xchange.zip" as the second of our reviews and set to work. Much to my surprise and horror X-Change was about a boy who washes a lot of glassware repeatedly, gets turned into a girl, and learns to love being raped. Despite several attempts on my life here I am over a year later, preparing to review this wonderful game's sequel, cleverly titled "X-Change 2".

First off, calling it a sequel is being generous. While the game is definitely different and "better" than the first one, it also includes the exact same plot of your main character being transformed into a girl from an experiment gone wrong in the chemistry lab. Several sequences like "the rape bus" are also duplicated from the first game and really the only thing plot wise that distinguishes it from the original are the references it frequently makes to the events in the first game.

Asuka is Takuya's domineering, bitchy, and physically abusive girlfriend. Way to go champ, you landed a real winner.In X-Change 2 you are Takuya, your average wimpy and effeminate Hentai Game protagonist who is attending Miyanomori Private School for mega eyed freaks. Despite the fact that a year or two ago he got turned into a girl and rutted with anything that had genitals or a mouth his girlfriend is still Asuka from the first game. In the intervening time since X-Change she has been taking "annoying bitch" pills and she waffles back and forth between over-the-top aggression including physical abuse and being mysteriously brooding. In the opening conversation with Takuya she hits him no less than five times, a good sign of a dumb bitch I would throw down a flight of stairs the first chance I could find. Since the game features no stairs and only minimal use of the "throw" option I just did my best throughout the course of the game to spend as little time with her as possible.

Takuya is the president of his school's chemistry club, a fact that seems a bit surprising given that he almost entirely lacks leadership ability and knowledge about chemistry. The star attraction of the chemistry club is mad-scientist and female student Chisato, an excitable girl prone to talking endlessly about the dubious scientific backing for any projects she is working on. The other member of the chemistry club is Kouji, a boy who had sex with Takuya when he was a girl in the last game and still has an underhanded affection for him. Those must be some pretty fucking uncomfortable chemistry club meetings to attend. The game doesn't take long getting to the point and before you know it Takuya has agreed to be strapped into a machine Chisato has devises that is supposed to make him smarter and taller. Instead it turns him into a woman, which I'm sure would make it still very marketable if it weren't for the fact that the machine explodes.

Oh no I look exactly the same only I have breasts and a vagina. Well I guess that means it's time to fuck a bunch of guys!!!!Much like the first game once Takuya gets turned into a girl things start getting really creepy, starting with Takuya's longtime friend Daisuke immediately writing him love letters and begging for sex. I can say with absolute certainty that if any of my friends ever got transformed into women in a chemistry accident my first move wouldn't be to try to woo them. The all-female drama club also comes out of the woodwork, drafting Takuya into a production they are doing about androgyny. Apparently in Japan "androgyny" means lesbian sex, because that's what the play seems to be about. Naturally Kouji, who still has a taste for Takuya after their fling in the first game, does everything he can to sabotage your efforts to turn back into a man. On top of that he rapes you in the storage room, a scene that Asuka walks in on dramatically, but apparently not dramatically enough to stop the raping.

The plot is overly convoluted and fairly branching, with some weird shit going down with an evil rapist substitute teacher molesting Asuka (and Takuya eventually) which causes her to become even more withdrawn. There's also some stupid crap going on with one of Asuka's female friends trying to make a move on her but I never really figured that one out entirely.

The best part of the story - and I use the term "best" very loosely - is the portion where you have to raise money to buy material to cure Takuya's womanthropy. There are three different jobs you can take and to fully explore the options in X-Change 2 I saved my game before picking a job and did all three.

Being a TutorUgh.To earn money for buying materials to cure Takuya your helpful nemesis Chisato says she has lined up tutoring a young boy and working at a karaoke bar for you. You also have the option of foregoing either of her recommendations and looking for a job on your own, but let's focus on the tutor position first. The kid lives right next door to Takuya but for some reason instead of going straight over he always changes into one of his sisters slutty 1980s looking dresses. The kid looks like he's about eight and all he cares about is video games. Each time you tutor him he makes you play him in a video game before he will agree to study. If you lose you get creepy scenes of him fondling Takuya until his dad walks in and throws you out.

The game you have to beat him in is actually a fairly involved (not to mention stupid and boring) game. You pick a paladin, sorcerer, or cat woman thing, and then fight each other. The interface is a simplistic RPG interface with hit points and various special attacks and spells you can use. I managed to plow my way through him two days in a row but on the third day he beat me. This resulted in him feeling Takuya up and then his dad walked in, but instead of throwing me out like he did every other day he joined in like any good father would if he found his ten year old son having sex with a teenage boy that got turned into a girl. I had to load the game and retry this to get the money for tutoring, if you don't you end up falling in love with the father because he rocks your world and then the game ends.

Working as a Karaoke Waitress

You know something is amiss when a double rape sequence is the least disturbing of the three.On her first night as a waitress at the karaoke bar Takuya takes it upon herself to agree to a "karaoke strip-off" with two drunken businessmen. This is done by randomly choosing from a list of songs I've mostly never heard of and then finding out your computer-calculated singing score. I'm pretty sure the game is set up for you to lose no matter what because in quick succession Takuya was bombing and down to her panties. When she lost again she refused to take them off and the drunken businessmen dished out some Japanese-style justice by violently DPing her while holding a microphone up to her face. Those kooky goofballs! What will they think of next?! Since Takuya is a female employee it's obviously all her fault and she is fired for having sex with the customers. Normally I would be outraged but it's pretty goddamn stupid to get involved in a strip karaoke match with two drunken guys in a Hentai game so I say she deserved it.

The Creepy Old Man

Welcome to the world of scary and perverted high fashion toots!The third option available to you is to ignore Chisato's suggestions and cruise for jobs on your own. This is done by sitting on a park bench until an old man approaches you and offers to pay you to take non-nude photographs. Always the bright one, Takuya follows him to a hotel and dons a weird little girl custom to pose for his photographs. As if this weren't creepy enough he soon asks her to move to the bed and spread her legs, a request that would throw up red flags at even the kinkiest Cat Fancy photo shoot. Instead Takuya rubs her crotch and brand new breasts while the creepy old man snaps photos aplenty. Fucking forget getting paid for all this debauchery, you still get shorted thanks to the old man's annoying daughter who bursts into the room in a rage and drags him off. At least she wasn't ten and they didn't high five and double team Takuya like the tutor job.

With money for a cure my journey was almost over, but one score remained to be settled; the creepy substitute teacher with rape on his mind. In the closing hour or so of the game the teacher not only rapes Takuya in the phys-ed shed, but also gets caught attempting to rape Asuka. I intervened and saved the day by throwing crap at him and enjoyed a happy ending with Asuka in which she revealed the bizarre parasitic worms infesting her vagina.BAM bitch!Difficulty: Xchange 2 brings a number of features to the Hentai Game table that don't exactly liven things up all that much but are certainly welcome additions. My personal favorite was a super fast mouse-wheel text navigation that allowed me to skip over inane conversations at will and scroll back in case I missed anything. It also has an impressive number of option branches giving it a much less linear feel that most other Hentai games. While this does make it a fairly difficult game, I would say it's a huge leap forward for Hentai gaming if it weren't for the fact that these games are at best like a creepy porno "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel.

Defining Moment: The first X-Change got me used to the idea of a teenage boy turning into a teenage girl and having sex with anything he/she makes eye contact with, so I have to rule that out as this title's defining moment. Instead I would like to focus on the three jobs, and more specifically on the tutoring job. While the versus games against the young boy were an interesting if tedious diversion, the fact that losing results in either creepy reverse-molesting sequences or a father and son tag team makes this hands down number one. Now the makers can say that the kid was over 18 all they want, but I know in my blackened cynical heart that in the Japanese version that kid is like ten or twelve and I am not happy about it.

God it sucks to be a woman. I never knew you ladies got raped so much.Final Thoughts: When I was a freshman in high school my friend Pat and I shared a study hall that was held in the school library. On a number of days we would head to the stacks and pick out strangely out of place medical books that detailed injuries and diseases complete with color photographs. The books probably dated back to the early seventies but even then they weren't shy about having close up photos of Sally's rotten crotch, which added a sneaky sense of enjoyment as we went back and forth trying to one-up each other with horrid imagery. One day I discovered a book with a full color photo for every single female venereal disease and with glee I shared the images, one after another, with my friend. Horror begat horror and each image seemed somehow twice as bad as the last. With only one image left we awaited that final picture with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. It was sure to be the key that would unlock the Pandora's box of our nightmares, a bacteriological aberration like no other visited upon the fragile and flower-like reproductive organs of an anonymous woman with poor taste in lovers.

Stage one genital herpes, labia retracted by physician. I still remember the image's caption, not because it was horrible but because it was so…disappointing. All of the build up was for two red sores on the inside of a woman's vagina. Where were the suppurating lesions? What happened to the impacted bolus of worms and the critically herniated birth canal? At the time we felt let down, but looking back at that vagina in my mind's eye I'm glad I have it instead of whatever horror could have awaited me. So it is that after more than a year of playing these Hentai games, after suffering through increasingly shitty interfaces, stories, and graphics, I come to X-Change 2. After playing through the likes of Water Closet, Possession, and Chain it turns out that X-Change 2 only has the first red sores of herpes simplex starting to show. It brings a number of welcome features to the genre, is genuinely well done as far as these things go, but it's the same old horrible pussy.