Jewel Knights Crusaders

At a Glance: I have been receiving a lot of complaints that, damn it, I just don't put myself through enough hell for our readers and I need to review more hentai games. Well, here you fucking go you assholes; I have thanklessly endured another hentai game just so you don't have to. This time around it's Jewel Knights Crusaders, a Sailor Moon like title that blends a heavy dose of humor with rape and bloody deflowering. Right now the hentai industry is riding a red tide of success thanks to the copious devirginizing segments that have been appearing in pretty much every game. Blood doesn't really have a place in a comedy sex game like Jewel Knights Crusaders, but neither do seemingly ten year old girls, and that has never stopped the hentai industry. Language: Japanese audio, English text, and a disconcerting number of "stretching orifice" sound effects. Sexual Content: Uncensored sexual bloodletting. Available From: J-List!

This one's going in the yearbook!

Game Concept: The satirical comedy throughout Jewel Knights Crusaders provides laughter similar to what you would get out of someone telling knock-knock jokes right after unearthing a mass grave. The game tries to emulate the episodic nature and wise cracking heroines of recent non-pornographic Japanese games like Disgaea, but fails miserably thanks to the relentlessly offensive sexual content of the game. It's a decent attempt, and some of the jokes are slightly amusing, but retreads from the chuckle-hut just aren't going to cut it right after you see a three foot tall waif shoot blood out of her vagina. Did I mention that JKC also features one of hentai's most stunningly underdeveloped sex objects? I'm getting ahead of myself though. I'll get back to her in a bit.

In Jewel Knights Crusaders you put on the big britches of Ginji Takada, a street-fighting punk kid who thinks he's the toughest thing since Machoman Randy Savage. The game begins with Ginji prowling the seedy streets looking for someone to beat into a red paste. He spends several minutes talking about how much of a badass he is in case you get any false impressions that some guy wandering around looking to pick fights might be a complete pussy. He is about to give up in his search when he hears a strange sound emanating from a nearby alleyway. When Ginji rounds the corner cruisin' for his desired bruisin' he finds three women in weird quasi-religious costumes going toe-to-toe with some sort of bondage queen. Poor Ginji mistakes the JKC and their arch nemesis Arshura for the cast of a kid's TV show and gets knocked unconscious by a misplaced magical blast.

I admit, some of the humor in the game is actually funny.

When Ginji comes to he is in the hospital receiving treatment from a giant-breasted and pink haired nurse named Meno who looks suspiciously like one of the women from the fight the night before. Ginji is gradually introduced to the cast of characters in the game from the vantage point of his hospital bed and learns that the Jewel Knights Crusaders have magical powers but need his help since he is such a tough street fighter. Ginji agrees because he loves to fight, but his stipulation is that he gets to have sex with the JKC team whenever he wants. Thus the story and action of JKC unfold along these lines rather predictably, with only a few twists and turns along the way. The twists and turns do manage to make up for it by being extremely unpleasant.

The game is designed as a sort of TV show about the Jewel Knights Crusaders, likely a reference to the Sailor Moon origins of the game. It is divided into episodes with a brief introduction, a commercial break title halfway through, and a "on the next episode" sequence at the end. Each episode encompasses around 15 minutes of play time and there are a total of seven or eight episodes. Obviously that means the game is not very long and I managed to beat it and successfully pursue the affections of all four main characters. The device of framing the game like a TV show works fairly well I guess, but more than half of the "episodes" lack any sort of interactivity. You just click through the dialog and watch in slight horror as Ginji makes one of the various JKCs bleed from her vagina.

The interactivity in the game is limited to two types of choices. Four of the middle episodes allow you to pick a portrait of a girl at the beginning and you then begin the episode by going out on patrol with this girl. These choices are the only ones that alter the story in any significant way. The other choices are during the episodes and allow you to select from two options and then watch the unimportant event that transpires (usually sex). This latter type of interaction does not impact the outcome of your "romance" in the game and is pretty much there to keep you from becoming catatonic while reading stacks of bad dialog. Most of the "good" jokes in the game come during the "next time on Jewel Knights Crusaders" sequences and, though I am loathe to admit it, a handful did make me chuckle.

Now that you know what the general story arc is in this game let's discuss the characters.

Pick your poison!

Asako (AKA Arshura)

Asako is Ginji's neighbor and she considers Ginji to be her younger brother, although she gets pretty frisky with someone she thinks of as a sibling. Asako, despite her coquettish demeanor, is actually the mastermind behind "Ragnarokkr", a really poorly named secret organization that consists of her and a single henchwoman. In her bondage gear Asako becomes Arshura and uses her hypnotic powers to turn average women into her obedient slaves. She only seems to be able to accomplish this one at a time, but that suits Asako's needs just fine. Her evil scheme is to use her henchwomen to have orgasms and harvest sperm that they then turn into magical floating gems that fly out of their womb through their stomachs. Asako harvests the gems like Tiberium and uses them to fuel and expand her own magical abilities. You can romance Asako just as you would any of the Jewel Knights Crusaders and turn her from her life of crime and into a member of the JKCs.

Meno (AKA Onyx)

Meno is probably the least notable of the characters in JKC. She's a pink-haired dumbass and represents the mega-titted and perpetually cheery demographic that must be present in every hentai game ever made. I don't even remember what her ending was. I'm sure it's something romantic and happy and completely forgettable. It is worth mentioning that even though Meno behaves like a complete cock magnet throughout the entire game she is also a virgin when Ginji first storms her castle.

Hisui transforms into an adult with mysterious nipples.

Ruri (AKA Lapis Lazuli)

Ruri is the brains and the mature guiding force behind JKC. Unlike the other members of JKC the more experienced Ruri is not a virgin, but she is very protective of her vagina. Instead she allows Ginji unrestricted access to her ass, including her "anal deflowering" where he tastefully gloats over the ripping sounds and gushing blood that result. In her ending she is transformed into one of Arshura's henchwomen but with Ginji's help she manages to overcome her hypnotic state and help defeat Ragnadokken once and for all. Then you consummate your new partnership with Ruri by finally having vaginal sex with her. Oh my god, the secret taboo!

Hisui (AKA Jade)

Hisui is my least favorite character from any hentai game I have yet played. She is innocent but sometimes sassy, easily coerced into sex, and armed with a giant pistol. What makes her so detestable is that she has no sexual development whatsoever. She is about half as tall as the other characters, has absolutely no secondary sexual organs, and sports a soon-to-be-abused case of infantile genitalia. Even more disconcerting than all of that is that she looks like a board crossed with Billy from Family Circus. I kept waiting for dotted lines to shoot out of her eyes and aim at the gigantic penises poised to violate her or hear a hilarious mispronunciation of a word like ejacumalate. Hisui also has the most confusing ending, wherein she gets possessed by some sort of magical entity that makes her physically mature and then she get exorcised with the help of Ginji and the other JKCs. The resulting sex sequence is nauseating to put it mildly.

I'm going to have to go with "yes" on this one.

Difficulty: Jewel Knights Crusaders is extremely easy. Since you make so few choices and the plot branches so little there is little mystery involved in determining the outcome. This simplicity coupled with the overall shortness of the game allowed me to play through it four times with little pain. One look told me that Hisui's plot would be the most horrific so I tackled it first, making the other three seem almost pleasant by comparison.

Defining Moment: The tearful deflowering of Hisui was bad enough to make me a little bit queasy, but it still managed to be trumped by the colon-shredding Ruri receives. Anal sex in pornography is never particularly enticing to me, but seeing blood cascading out of someone's ass - even a cartoon - is downright hideous. The fact that good old Ginji took great pleasure in the tearing sounds her ass made did not help one bit.

Final Thoughts: I spend a lot of time making fun of the dubiously over 18 characters in hentai games and Peter from J-List often sends me unhappy emails when I point them out. Well, unfortunately, Peter will not be happy to read that Hisui is the most ridiculously underage character I have ever seen in a hentai title. She doesn't look 16 or 15, she couldn't pass for 18; she looks 9 fucking years old. Ironically Jewel Knights Crusaders really wouldn't be that bad of a game to me if it weren't for Hisui. The interactivity sucks and the humor is soured by all of the blood, but it's quick and the art is good and at times even genuinely creative. With Hisui the game strays uncomfortably close to cartoon child porn. It's probably not close enough to satisfy actual pedophiles, but it's still horrifying to me. The character is clearly defined in the narrative as 18 but that's about as believable as a baby with a fake ID trying to talk its way into a fetish bar.

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

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– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)