Begin Rubbing
HIGH Ogre.
LOW Io.
WTF There’s a ‘Rub P’ currency. I’m not kidding.
These are curious times we live in. While Sony has apparently been taken over by a hyper-zealous cadre of nuns resolutely opposed to any sort of sexual content, Nintendo’s gone in the absolute opposite direction – as proven by the recent release of Moero Chronicle H, a perverted dungeon crawler with plenty of skin on display. What’s more, it’s set in the same universe as the excellent card-based title Monster Monpiece, so maybe it’s more than just a bit of lighthearted exploitation?
The story is absolute nonsense, but we take control of a man named Io and soon learn that he has a bit of a problem — he can’t talk to women because he’s apparently a horrendously oversexed pervert who wants to bone every single one of them. As luck would have it though, he’s going to have to conquer his fears and head out to save the world because a terrible curse is spreading across the land causing monster girls to develop an intense hatred for mankind.
Honestly, I’m totally on their side. Doubly so if their first contact with humanity is Io himself, since he makes for a terrible main character. He’s so insanely and instantly forgettable that I’m surprised my brain wasn’t actively erasing him from view in real time every time he appeared in a cutscene which, unfortunately, happens to be most of them. Moero tries to pass him off as a raging pervert, but only because it’s more marketable than what he really is — one of the blandest protagonists ever made.
Anyway, Io is soon banished from his village and sets out with a small party of monster girls who are immune to the curse to delve into some dungeons and see what he can do to make things right.
Anyone who’s ever played a 3D dungeon crawler will feel right at home here, as it’s a pretty standard entry for the genre, at least as far as gameplay. There’s a grid map which automatically fills in as players explore, the occasional trap, teleportation device or one way door, and a bunch of enemy encounters triggering every time the party walks more than a few steps in any given direction. The encounter rate in Moero Chronicle is fairly high.
Combat plays out in turn-based fashion, with players opting to use spells or melee attacks, attempting to flee from danger, or buff their party up during lulls in battle. Io’s the only character who can use items, but he also can’t attack. This means he spends most of his time on the sidelines ‘powering up’ by screaming like a complete asshole while the girls do the actual work. Once powered up enough, he can then transfer an attack bonus to any girl before he starts yelling again — thank God his battle cries and animations can be turned off.
While standard enemies tend to resemble a weird collection of normal-ish monsters, cutesy sex toys and phallic shaped abominations, there are also a bunch of monster girls in dungeons to hunt down and recruit. They’re initially afflicted by the curse that makes them hate humans, so they have to be brought to heel by… well, usually by destroying their clothes until a secondary party member called Otton goes into a sexual frenzy, spewing coins all over the place, and then having Io rub their unclothed bodies until they’re physically subdued.
As any true gentleman knows, however, simply feeling up a monster girl out of the blue isn’t enough to get them to leave their wicked ways behind — it has to feel good for them, otherwise they may attempt to flee from our hero’s inferior groping techniques. No, simply poking a finger in their ear or rubbing their eyeballs is unlikely to work. However, rub the right bits in the right order and not only will they not file a police report, they’ll hop into Io’s party and lend their talents to the cause without a moment’s hesitation.
Most of these new recruits can fill any role by swapping out their costume, which modifies out their stats and abilities. A monster girl recruit can, say, swap from a melee class to a healing one, though the characters also have inherent traits that synergize well with one another. Toss a few ‘clumsy’ characters into a party alongside one with a leadership trait, and the leader will double their health so long as they remain alive. It adds a little depth to proceedings, but it also means that parties should be formed based on these synergies rather than their personality and design.
So, is Moero Chronicle H actually good? Well… it’s moderately competent, but that’s about as far as it goes. The combat’s okay, but fairly simplistic with a bunch of enemies that generally require the same tactics over and over between various dungeons. Some of the monster girls have decent artwork, although that’s a must given the overall tone of the game. With a decent story and characters propelling it, Moero Chronicle could have provided a solid run at dungeon delving — and yet, this is another area where it falls short.
There’s just no other way to say this — the English translation is terrible. My guess is that someone’s either translated the game into English as a second language, or they’ve ran it through a machine translation tool and then had a non-native speaker proofread it. The best that can be said is that I could usually tell what was going on, but the attempts at jokes fall flat and the story has absolutely no energy. It also appears to lean heavily into certain nonsensical anime moe tropes, such as calling a character who appears to be in her early twenties a ‘granny’. Hilarious.
Moero Chronicle H generally gets the basics right, but that foundation is undercut by repetition, a lack of nuance in the combat, and a botched translation that makes it tough to care about anything that’s going on. It delivers a ton of fanservice, and the core is at least competent, but it doesn’t even attempt to reach beyond such an unambitious goal.
Disclosures: This game is developed by Silicon Studio and Compile Heart and published by Idea Factory. It is currently available on Nintendo Switch.This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Switch.Approximately 32 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Mature and contains Fantasy Violence, Partial Nudity and Sexual Themes. You wander around dungeons looking for women’s underwear and groping them into submission, fending off enemies that sometimes look like sex toys or bits of the human anatomy. It’s all done in a cutesy way, but yeah.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There’s not a lot to worry about here. All text is subtitled, at a reasonably sized font, and the gameplay never relies on audio cues.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.
The chance discovery of a muddy, burnt out copy of '50 Shades of Grey' in a hunting pit gave him an appreciation for complex plots, characters and overarching narrative, and the unexpected gift of a Spectrum 48k allowed him to indulge in these newfound sensibilities with intelligent, highbrow games such as 'flee from the badly animated spinning turquoise dolphins' or 'avoid the deadly glowing bricks of doom'.
The fusion of both these interests finally culminated with Darren teaching himself how to write by basically guessing at what words might look like when jotted down on paper as opposed to being howled inarticulately at the skies.
Now others occasionally get to read his scribblings. Lucky them.
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