Violated Hero Review

Title: Violated Hero -I Wanted to Chivalrously Save the World- (犯され勇者～凛々しく世界を救うハズだったボク)
Release date: 2011-12-16 (2012-02-29 in English)
Developer: Dieselmine
English publisher: Dargoth (as a fan-patch)

"Violated Hero" is a monster girl femdom dungeon crawling RPG nukige. My... that was a lot of big worlds for such a small game. I wonder if the game can live up to them. Short answer - no; long answer - read below.

So, "Violated Hero" was obviously created to cash in on the hype surrounding "Monster Girl Quest", but cannot reach even a sliver of its greatness. We follow our luckless protagonist named Seed (get it?), who goes to ancient ruins to defeat a mighty dragoness living there. How he ever got such a silly idea is anyone's guess as at the very beginning we are treated to a scene that portrays how weak he is. Seed fails to defeat a simple undead and has to be rescued from his peril by a Magical Knight Relia. It becomes clear, that the ruins are supposed to serve as a training ground to snatch some experience and level up for the final encounter. It's just that the game has a very strange way of going about it.

Fight mechanics.

VH is about 80% dungeon crawler and 20% nukige, so the gameplay is pretty important here. Now, let me get the most important thing out of the way - the game encourages you to die in fights... Yes, you read that right - there is no way to beat both floors of the ruins and face Dragona in one go. Your death brings you to the beginning of the floor you are at with all the stat upgrades that you netted though you will have to fight the enemies you defeated again. There is no XP as such in VH - various enemies give you different stat upgrades upon defeat with bosses giving the most benefits.

Your goal is to defeat a certain number of bosses in order to advance. The first floor has six of them (Thief, Fairies, Mimic, Slime, Witch and Mandragora), the second has five (Spider, Angel, Elf, Werecat, Lamia); you only have to kick asses to four on them in every location, though note, that which bosses you K.O. on the second floor influences your ending.

Some QUALITY sprites for some bosses. What is this - SNES?

I personally disliked the gameplay mechanics. Kill a few enemies, die, kill a few more, die, kill one boss, die, kill two bosses, die and repeat ad nauseam. I somehow do not consider it fun, the only saving grace is the shortness of this endeavour. The other mechanic I felt miffed about was related to your movements. For some reason the authors decided that it's a fucking good idea for Seed to move in the direction he's facing when you press the forward arrow. In other words, the movement arrows are relative to Seed's position and not to your perspective. That might have worked in the first three "Resident Evil" games, but here it's just damn confusing and you will spend majority of the start going somewhere you had no intention to tread.

You will see such a view a lot.

I won't even talk about the plot as there isn't one and I didn't expect any, but the fact that neither Seed nor his adversaries have any personalities or character developments hurts the game more than the authors might have surmised. In "Monster Girl Quest" the four generals of the Monster Lord were developing nicely along the way and will probably continue to do so in the sequels. Here not even Relia or Dragona are anything more than one dimensional drawings.

It would be bearable if sex was any good, but for a femdom oriented VN, the scenes were kind of lousy. Sure, the graphics were sort of nice, but there was no real passion and the sexual acts themselves were uninspiring. Another downside was that majority of the time only one CG illustrated H-content and only the final scenes showed more. Moreover, it sometimes didn't feel like Seed was dominated by the female monsters (which is sort of the main point of femdom), but rather was just meanly abused.

I somehow find this incredibly hot.

The ending of the game is no better, or maybe I should say endings. There are three of them: be defeated by Dragona, defeat Dragona and have Relia's help in defeating her. The first two are straightforward and in order to acquire Relia for the final fight you need to K.O. an angel and an elf on the previous floor. Actually, there were more requirements for that ending originally, but Dargoth the translator removed them in addition to fixing a crapload of bugs. Apparently the game was released in a half-arsed state... and with half-arsed endings as there is not a single one good for our unlucky protagonist. In fact, defeating Dragona by yourself nets you the worst ending (YMMV). Additionally, there is one more scene that you can access from the main menu pressing "Extra" after finishing with the main endings. The scene portrays what would happen if instead of dueling with weapons Dragona and Relia would fight with their sexual prowess.

You will have to satisfy them all.

All in all, there is not much to say about this game and so this review will be on the short side. There is just not much incentive to play the game. The only reason I bothered was because of the femdom and even then there are much better games catering to those particular tastes, e.g. MGQ and its upcoming sequel.

Links of Interest

Visual Novel Database
Official Japanese site
Buy the game on DLsite
Get the English patch on Dargoth's website or go to Hongfire translation thread

Final Verdict: 54%