Brave Soul

My hero!Game Concept: Playing Brave Soul is best approximated by filling the vagina of a Real Doll with a broken wine bottle, inserting your penis, and humping yourself to death while pausing periodically to put cigarettes out on your corneas.

Before I tell you any of the details about this game let me get one thing out of the way; people who make hentai games should be forever banned from attempting more complicated games. This is one of the most bug riddled titles I have ever played, and that's coming from someone who looked at a copy of Pool of Radiance in EB and was nearly struck dead by it. Before I had even installed the game I had an e-mail in my inbox telling me there was a patch to download. I appreciate that they were on the ball with that patch, but I'd probably appreciate it a little more if it had done anything. The game was constantly giving me error messages, which I fixed by turning off the background music. Having escaped that problem the game showed its moxy by repeatedly and seemingly randomly hard locking my system.

It is one thing to play a game and have it crash all the time, that's frustrating but I'm somewhat used to it. It's another to attempt to review a game you pretty much dread playing from the outset and have it shit all over your efforts to take screenshots of its horrible little Asian goblin sprites. It's like the game didn't want me to review it, and with good reason, because this is the biggest steaming loaf of shit since they had a "baked too much" sale at the sewer. Finally I did get it to stop crashing by lowering the number of colors my desktop was using. Luckily, this had the side effect of reducing frame rates in the game to around five per second. Joy!

Shut it peepers, I'll save you, okay?After a silly introduction about what it means to be an adventurer interspersed with some nudity, the game begins with your character - in my case named Asshol (the game only allows six letters for your name) - tied up in a grassy field. A small purple dragon named Shell flies forward and frees him with a burst of fire. Be sure to turn your speakers down immediately before that fucking purple son of a bitch appears on the screen. Every time it talks gibberish the nonsense is accompanied by a shrill screeching sound that I believe is supposed to be cute. I had my headphones on and the volume cranked way too high and I am fairly certain I was not only rendered deaf but also sterile. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow to find out so pray for me you worthless heathens.

Asshol and Shell became friends forever, because what else are a busty male hero and a squealing purple dragon going to do with themselves? If you answer that I will hunt you down and take your teeth as a trophy. Asshol and Shell adventured around a little killing goblins that looked like stereotypical shopkeepers from old kung fu movies. Combat in Brave Soul consists of clicking on an enemy and watching the two frames of attack animation repeat over and over as number float out of the enemy's head. Sometimes you'll get boxed in by enemies and you can use your special power, which shoots blue smoke out in all directions. Shell and any other malingerers you may have picked up will run around like dipshits and steal experience from you with their fruity projectile attacks.

The first encounter in the game was a brutal gang grumbling by goblins. Shell and Asshol happened upon a fine blue haired maiden named Alicia who was surrounded by Hong Kong shopkeepers who were grunting. I did the right thing and refused to come to her aid, but that nagging harpy Shell insisted with some eardrum shattering screeches and I fought off the lecherous goblin horde. Alicia joined my party and reminded Asshol repeatedly of the naked woman seen in the introduction. I escaped the forest with Shell and Alicia in tow and made for the nearest town to join up with my old buddy Jim at the Hunter's Guild. Jim introduced me to one of the quirks of the game, which is that everyone appears to be standing on furniture. When I entered Jim's guild he was prancing around like a bald shyster on top of the counter.

Oh good, more shopkeepers! Just what mammy always wanted.Jim informed me that to make it into the guild I had to pass a series of tests. The first of these tests was to go help a merchant who was beset by goblins. This unpleasant task involved clicking my way through about a thousand shopkeepers to some more powerful red shopkeepers. Just as Asshol was about to put the finishing touches on the last of the red shopkeepers the game decided to subject me to a long character introduction about as amusing as feeding pinworms up your urethra. The tests to get into "Jim's exclusive club of Jim and you" basically serve as an episodic method of introducing various characters and then having them run off the screen. I'm sure those same characters join your party later in the game, but I'll never know with absolute certainty.

The second quest Jim gave me was to go kill some cat monster. When I arrived on the scene I found that a couple of gay looking sailors had lassoed themselves a furry and put her in a cage. In an exchange positively coated with kawaii stank the cat girl somehow talked Asshol - without my consent - into using catnip to catch the real cat monster. A catnip purchase later I was face to face with a really lame looking cat creature that was almost as tough as two shopkeepers tied to a red shopkeeper. I killed it and cat girl got freed from the clink to go have drinks with her sailor buddies. I know she told me her name, but I even more know that I don't fucking care what her dumbfuck name was. Hell, maybe this was the third quest, I don't remember for sure; it's all just an agonized blur of self-hatred and depression.

The third or second quest involved a dungeon crawl through a dungeon packed to the gills with the sinister red shopkeepers and nefarious puzzles. The action sucked, the puzzles sucked, and meeting up with another stupid character that runs off to go bake a cake or find adventure in a better game sucked. Something about a scroll maybe, I don't know, when I came out of the stupor I had a white-knuckle grip on a combat knife and enough self-inflicted gashes on my arm to scan "sorrow" at a checkout line.

The fourth and final test was to find some pirate's treasure. Too bad for me that good old Jim had no idea where the treasure was and told me to "ask around" and get a good fix on it. Asshol and his cuttin' crew hit every tavern in every town in the game looking for information and the only lead a got was to go buy some stupid musical instrument in a flea market. One guess on what kind of instrument it was. Correct! It was a motherfucking ocarina. What the hell is with the Japanese and their obsession with ocarinas? The only assholes to ever play an ocarina are retarded Zelda and/or anime fans with too much time and money on their hands. Do you see an ocarina seat at a concerto? Does the hottest new ocarina artist to ever come out of Philly have a new duet with Puffy? No, of course not, because ocarinas are the equivalent of kazoos for pasty-faced white virgins who want to be Japanese and have fucking anime wallpaper on their Lain sticker covered laptop.

This is as hot and heavy as I saw it get.I spent close to six hours playing this shitbox of a game and the closest thing to an invisible dick in a vagina I got was an ocarina conjuring a super shopkeeper. Admittedly over two hours of that time was spent replaying the delightful first 15 minutes of the game repeatedly, but even if you take that away that's almost four hours without sex in a hentai game. That would be fine and dandy if this game were at all enjoyable or entertaining, but it's a hideously bad role playing game with "romance" and "hardcore sex" tacked on to sell a lackluster title.

Difficulty: If you experience half of the problems I do trying to get this game to work than I would have to rate it as impossible. I battled my way through them because I have to review hentai games. Left with the option of uninstalling Brave Soul and firing the CD out of a cannon aimed at the sun I would have to go with that. Should you be "lucky" and have a trouble free gaming experience you can look forward to the most repetitious and uninspired gameplay since that nightmare you had about Diablo.

Defining Moment: Much of what I saw of the game was just so arbitrary and…well…stupid, that the defining moment has to be when I just randomly went to a location and found that fucking pirate's treasure. I spent over half an hour or so going to taverns repeatedly, following lame clues, and then I just decided "well, I haven't been to the mountains". Sure enough, there was the pirate's grave, and a little toot on my otaku flute and I was whisked away to a land of further suffering.

Final Thoughts: I want to be nice with this game, because I give modest props to any hentai developer who strays from the status quo. I just can't though. From the hardware problems, to the plodding pace of the game, to the one-dimensional characters, to the terrible gameplay and meaningless leveling, it was all awful. Since I didn't actually get to any of the hardcore sex scenes I can't credit or fault it for being perverse. The graphics are awful, but it does have well done anime-style drawings and the character portraits are good I guess. Not exactly something to sell someone on a game. "OUR CHARACTER PORTRAITS WILL BLOW YOU AWAY!" or "COME CHECK OUT OUR PERIODIC DRAWINGS OF WOMEN IN TIGHT CLOTHING". No, Brave Soul is sold on the idea of sex, a concept that I don't even want to think about if it means looking at just one more red shopkeeper.