What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
I open up with a relevant Paarthurnax quotation because this, at the heart of everything, is what Pronant Symphony is summarized into.
Pronant Symphony is a WolfRPG HJRPG Metroidvania that's actually a well-done JRPG in and of itself, with many systems being well-thought of and boasting a meaningful morality system that's rather difficult to maintain.
In this game, you are Julius, an Alv pretending to be a powerful Demon Lord. In reality, barring the ability of Pronant, Alvs are even weaker than humans. To this end, you 'involuntarily enlist' the help of four sisters, reputed and skilled adventurers whose help you will use to power yourself up and defeat the Archdemon Ishtaroth, the creator of the domination spell Pronant.
Very early on, the game emphasizes you sticking to a moral path of your own preference. The Good path has one or two unavoidable H-Scenes (This is an H JRPG after all), and the Evil path has the brunt of the scenes. Despite this disparity, the game does not have a drought of content for both paths, and your character's motivations either way is well-justified, a rarity in games where morality feels like an afterthought.
The actual gameplay itself is a standard JRPG in the format of SMT and Pokémon, with both skills being learned from weapons and having to be trained in order to increase their charges. Interestingly, MP becomes a secondary HP resource; running out of MP or HP will cause your characters to faint.
Status effects are mildly useful, and weaknesses to status effects are defined by creature race. There are rare interactions where an enemy mob may not actually attack you, but will ask to be spared or perhaps they will sell items to you.
It's also possible to stack status buffs to incredible effect.
On the map, navigation is done inside Pandemonium, a curious dungeon of various locales with towns sporadically distributed on the floors. The game rewards back-tracking and paying attention, since there are many hint items or additional dungeons you can visit, on top of using your psychic powers to either steal, glean information, or just spend untold hours talking until time passes.
The story itself leans more closely to character interactions than the overall lore or plot; there is mention of an old war between the divinities and the demons that don't factor in much to your current predicament except providing some background why the entire dungeon exists.
In your party is of course the four sisters that were mentioned:
- Jueli, the Ranger that for all intents and purposes is a thief that doesn't steal, and who likes to drink;
- Serafina, the Saint that plays the role of healer and holy-offensive magic caster obsessed with beauty and make-up;
- Irito, the Demonslayer far too committed to heroics and training, somehow still seeing the goodness inside our hero's soul and depending on the route may be right,
- Niva, the Witch and youngest of the four, who wants nothing more but to laze around, but also study the darkest arts.
Much ado is discussed about how your power is controlling them and how they feel about you is basically fake. Still, despite this, you can opt to do right by them, despite the fact that you're manipulating them to kill the Archdemon for you.
Whether or not this bears fruit depends on the path you walk, and the good path is very precarious with one potential mistake breaking your run.
Keep in mind that it's not only important to simply be virtuous; you must do whatever you can to ensure the girls aren't scarred by your actions. Or, you can throw this away and just do whatever you want; the game doesn't particularly judge you for it as you're given adequate options on how you want to play the game.
In terms of cons, the game can be a bit grindy, with the initial grind for Archdemon Crystals and skill charges being the most prominent, but there's auto mode and coins of blessing to alleviate most issues.
The game also vastly prefers Irito, to which I have no objections with, but this means that everyone else barring the MC is basically a secondary character.
In terms of HCG quality, Tefun's art is high-quality, but there are no uncensors of the art even on the English release, and the HCG is static with no moans (only squelches), and vastly relegated to the Evil route. Even then, the variety is a bit too low for a game being advertised primarily as a porn game on DLSite.
Still, if you're anything like me, you probably stopped tickling your pickle around 1/3rd through the game.
If you like your JRPGs mildly-grindy but with wonderful character interaction, this is a worthy visit. Bonus points for being practically being developed by 1 person (2 or 3 if you count the artists and the royalty-free music).
It's thanks to the story's format that it can actually deliver on what it sets out to do.
I open up with a relevant Paarthurnax quotation because this, at the heart of everything, is what Pronant Symphony is summarized into.
Pronant Symphony is a WolfRPG HJRPG Metroidvania that's actually a well-done JRPG in and of itself, with many systems being well-thought of and boasting a meaningful morality system that's rather difficult to maintain.
In this game, you are Julius, an Alv pretending to be a powerful Demon Lord. In reality, barring the ability of Pronant, Alvs are even weaker than humans. To this end, you 'involuntarily enlist' the help of four sisters, reputed and skilled adventurers whose help you will use to power yourself up and defeat the Archdemon Ishtaroth, the creator of the domination spell Pronant.
Very early on, the game emphasizes you sticking to a moral path of your own preference. The Good path has one or two unavoidable H-Scenes (This is an H JRPG after all), and the Evil path has the brunt of the scenes. Despite this disparity, the game does not have a drought of content for both paths, and your character's motivations either way is well-justified, a rarity in games where morality feels like an afterthought.
The actual gameplay itself is a standard JRPG in the format of SMT and Pokémon, with both skills being learned from weapons and having to be trained in order to increase their charges. Interestingly, MP becomes a secondary HP resource; running out of MP or HP will cause your characters to faint.
Status effects are mildly useful, and weaknesses to status effects are defined by creature race. There are rare interactions where an enemy mob may not actually attack you, but will ask to be spared or perhaps they will sell items to you.
It's also possible to stack status buffs to incredible effect.
On the map, navigation is done inside Pandemonium, a curious dungeon of various locales with towns sporadically distributed on the floors. The game rewards back-tracking and paying attention, since there are many hint items or additional dungeons you can visit, on top of using your psychic powers to either steal, glean information, or just spend untold hours talking until time passes.
The story itself leans more closely to character interactions than the overall lore or plot; there is mention of an old war between the divinities and the demons that don't factor in much to your current predicament except providing some background why the entire dungeon exists.
In your party is of course the four sisters that were mentioned:
- Jueli, the Ranger that for all intents and purposes is a thief that doesn't steal, and who likes to drink;
- Serafina, the Saint that plays the role of healer and holy-offensive magic caster obsessed with beauty and make-up;
- Irito, the Demonslayer far too committed to heroics and training, somehow still seeing the goodness inside our hero's soul and depending on the route may be right,
- Niva, the Witch and youngest of the four, who wants nothing more but to laze around, but also study the darkest arts.
Much ado is discussed about how your power is controlling them and how they feel about you is basically fake. Still, despite this, you can opt to do right by them, despite the fact that you're manipulating them to kill the Archdemon for you.
Whether or not this bears fruit depends on the path you walk, and the good path is very precarious with one potential mistake breaking your run.
Keep in mind that it's not only important to simply be virtuous; you must do whatever you can to ensure the girls aren't scarred by your actions. Or, you can throw this away and just do whatever you want; the game doesn't particularly judge you for it as you're given adequate options on how you want to play the game.
In terms of cons, the game can be a bit grindy, with the initial grind for Archdemon Crystals and skill charges being the most prominent, but there's auto mode and coins of blessing to alleviate most issues.
The game also vastly prefers Irito, to which I have no objections with, but this means that everyone else barring the MC is basically a secondary character.
In terms of HCG quality, Tefun's art is high-quality, but there are no uncensors of the art even on the English release, and the HCG is static with no moans (only squelches), and vastly relegated to the Evil route. Even then, the variety is a bit too low for a game being advertised primarily as a porn game on DLSite.
Still, if you're anything like me, you probably stopped tickling your pickle around 1/3rd through the game.
If you like your JRPGs mildly-grindy but with wonderful character interaction, this is a worthy visit. Bonus points for being practically being developed by 1 person (2 or 3 if you count the artists and the royalty-free music).
It's thanks to the story's format that it can actually deliver on what it sets out to do.
An RPG in which you can hypnotize people with the power of a demon, but that consumes your life. You hypnotize a bunch of girls who are got at dungeoning and go into the "mouth of hell" aka there is a fucking cave in this world which you can go in and go directly to hell, which is wild and adventureous honestly.
So there is a moral system and it works as in you go in and exhaust as many of your sources as you can to get to the next checkpoint or gather materials for your upgrades and then go back home to prepare for the next raid inside the cave.
The cave has his own populations and lore and everything and it's pretty nice.
Also this is a porn game, although you can skip all porn if you want.
So there is a moral system and it works as in you go in and exhaust as many of your sources as you can to get to the next checkpoint or gather materials for your upgrades and then go back home to prepare for the next raid inside the cave.
The cave has his own populations and lore and everything and it's pretty nice.
Also this is a porn game, although you can skip all porn if you want.
Beautiful JRPG. Terrible eroge.