Release date: 2020-11-14
Developer: Crazy Cactus Entertainment & Belgerum
Publisher: Crazy Cactus Entertainment & Critical Bliss
The developers of "Maid Mansion" released the first demo for their game back in 2016, gathered some feedback for the game... and then disappeared for four years, letting the people assume that the project simply didn't pan out. They returned in 2020 with a bang, first releasing an updated demo, and then the full game at the end of that year.
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| Who will win: blonde or brunette? |
The game is set in an authoritarian country somewhat based on post-war Japan (though the larger setting is not fully fleshed out, and we only get snippets of information about it), and stars one Yuu Kawajiri - a grandson of a war hero, who has recently died and left his grandson a mansion currently occupied by two maids, Takako and Narumi.
Takako is the head maid, and as per the old Kawajiri's orders cannot be fired. She takes her job very seriously, and immediately starts clashing with Yuu's personal assistant Umeko over how certain matters should be run. Apparently, there can not be two Queen Bitches in a mansion of a pretty enormous size, as they each need their Lebensraum to flourish. At the same time, Narumi is a cheerful genki girl, who is surprisingly not portrayed as airhead or clumsy. No, that particular cliche role has been reserved for Misaki - a soon to be hired new maid.
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| Don't expect anything else with this particular lady. |
As I have just hinted, Yuu and Takako immediately take it upon themselves to hire even more maids for the mansion, though majority of them are completely unimportant to the plot and don't have routes or even proper sex scenes, unless you count rampant sexual harassment as sex.
Oh, yes, for a visual novel which I thought would be a cute maid fetish moege, majority of the sex scenes are either non-con, or dubcon at best. Yuu is a letch and a gross pervert who constantly harasses his maids and forces himself on them, though admittedly, if you want to get one of the good endings you have to minimize your sexual assault on the main characters. Feel free to rape all the side characters though, they absolutely do not matter! And Yuu does it like a boss! It's no wonder that out of the existing 22 endings, only eight of them can be considered good. Yuu either dies, is arrested or becomes a sad loner in all of the other ends.
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| Can I interest you in some quality rape time? |
All this makes Yuu a very unlikable protagonist. Even on the good routes I couldn't shake the feeling that Yuu only forgot to 'mape the raids' that day due to the other things weighing on his mind and accidentally entered the path towards the good end. Well, I can only speculate, because Yuu and by extension all the other characters, are the flattest of two-dimensional caricatures with zero personality present. We get none of his feelings or motivations from Yuu's inner monologues, as those only focus on the amount of maids he has raped today and the profit he made for the mansion. None of the heroines show any emotion and just vapidly smile until the moment they shank you prison style if you had raped them one too many times.
At this point you probably ask yourselves if there is any actual plot other than 'maids+rape=?' in the game. Well, there sort of is... On the very first day, a Gestapo special police agent arrives to the mansion and proclaims that she has evidence a rebel group has an operative within the mansion, and asks for Yuu's help in finding the said operative. Then she returns two weeks later and asks if you have found anything, at which point the game ends. Okay, there are certain variations, and you may or may not actually find the rebel agent among your maids, but that doesn't matter, as the whole investigation plotline barely exists and only serves to introduce the hot Gestapo lady as yet another probable love interest for your raping pleasure.
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| That's what personal assistants are good for. |
And good luck finding the rebel operative or getting the good ending without using a walkthrough, as all the choices are super counterintuitive to the highest degree. There is no way to tell what any of the choices will result in, and without a guide you would be subjected to blindly trying every possible combination of choices until you got a desired or not so desired end.
There is a small surprise where a very specific combination of choices will suddenly introduce a new semi-secret character midway through the game, who is not seen in any other route and completely changes the game. A 'normal' maid rapege suddenly bludgeons you with fantasy, demons and magical contracts, and I was all for it, as it was undeniably the best route in the game. Not to mention, the sex scenes, which were strangely vanilla with every other girl, suddenly get a delicious femdom bent with this new character. Sadly, the game doesn't do enough with this route and it ends just as abruptly as every other one.
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| She's a full service maid. |
Some of the problems with the VN arise from its very short run, as a single playthrough takes just about two hours, which is why there is no time to flesh out the characters or craft a reasonably interesting plot. Most of the other time you will be spending with the guide hunting for all the missing endings and keeping the 'skip' button downpressed due to large amounts of repeated text in every playthrough. All in all, it took me about 8 hours to find all the 22 endings and finish the game.
On a positive note, the art was pretty nice looking, if slightly amateurish, and the game was short enough that it wasn't a torture to finish it. But if one of the greatest things you can say about the game is that it was better than being waterboarded with piss in a secret Gestapo prison, it means it has probably failed somewhere.
I honestly cannot recommend playing "Maid Mansion", as there are much better short VNs of under 10 hours out there than this mix of bland characters, nonexistent plot and rushed endings. There are probably even maid fetish games out there that fit this criterion, you just need to find them. Cheers!
Links of Interest
Final Verdict: 41%
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