Super Monsters N Girls is a 2D action platformer that has us play as Francis Marion, the grandson of our hero that saved the world in the last game. It takes place sometime in the 18th century and switches out the lances of yesteryear for muskets & other firearms in order to drive back the sudden demon invasion. Funnily enough, we don’t actually shoot the things. Instead, we throw the entire rifle at someone and do them in with the blunt damage. So it, for all intends and purposes, is just a reskinned lance. That, in combination with the strangely whimsical music, makes it hard to not grin in amusement as you go around yeeting your rifle at enemies.
Looking at its store page, it states the only supported language is Japanese. This is not the case. By pressing the combination of ‘Crtl’ & ‘Insert’ keys, it will translate the opening to English. It is the same case with the ending text. Just press that key combination. Everything else is either in English or has subtitles for us Westerners. This doesn’t have much text throughout, yet the translations are a very welcome addition that makes it more accessible. I likely wouldn’t even have known about being able to translate text if I didn’t make it a habit to always take a look at the Read Me files.
With the intro out of the way, we are tossed right into the game. The first thing we’ll notice is that it displays in the 16:9 aspect ratio now, and the pixel art is much more detailed in general. It also forgoes the life system and introduces a health bar that allows you to take multiple hits. While it fundamentally plays much the same, it now feels closer to something like Castlevania than the Ghouls N Ghosts series. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is debatable, yet it is now undeniably more accessible. That’s not to say this title is easy. It doesn’t reach the same difficulty highs as its predecessor, but it still packs a bite should you drop your guard for even a few seconds.
You’ll find that avoidance and positioning play a bigger role now, thanks to the increased verticality. There are many more slopes and uneven grounds that don’t let you get a shot off with your basic rifle or weapons that attacks go purely horizontally. This makes it more viable to use other weapons that are thrown in an arc instead of directly in front of you. The monster girls are fast and will not flinch from damage. They’ll charge at you until either being defeated or reaching you in a close-ranged situation. If you have the only melee weapon on hand (the shovel), that may be precisely what you want. For the rest of the time, you’ll have to make good use of your double jump and continue pelting her with your ranged attacks at a distance. It is fun and can lead to unforeseen consequences when you unwittingly alert another enemy and then it joins the hectic fight.
On the bottom left of the screen is where your life and arousement meter are. Your life-bar is pretty self-evident. It goes down when you take damage from either an environmental hazard or an attack. I typically found the real danger to be with the arousement meter. This ticks up whenever a monster girl catches you in close range and is able to get her mitts on you. It will render you temporarily defenseless as she gives you unwanted fellatio or other forms of foreplay to get you heated. If that arousement meter reaches its maximum, your character will just lose the will to fight on and give in to having full-on sex with the girl that causes you to peak. That, like losing your health, is a game over.
There are two ways to heal, each pertaining to your individual meter. For your health bar, you will need a red apple to restore it. When you are aroused, what you want is the green apple. The latter seems to be significantly more rare, leading to a dangerous situation if you keep letting monster girls get the drop on you in close range. It is uncommon that you will ever lose more than a minute’s worth of progress whichever way you die. There are checkpoints littered around everywhere, and there are no lives to take into account, giving you infinite chances. I would call this game forgiving, but as I stated previously, easy it is not. This still offers a decent challenge that will have the player paying full attention all throughout.
By my count, there are eight different zones. Each of them are split up into several sections. I suppose they could be called levels, but they flow so smoothly into one another that it feels more like one giant journey. This allows it to obscurely auto-save your game when you reach a new screen, which doubles as a new section on the overworld map. It never tells you it saves the game, though. That alongside needing to pick New Game in the main menu being how you access your last saved progress could have done with some explanation. It is easy for someone to think they need to get through it all in a single sitting without knowing that. Worth noting is that this is somewhat on the short side, lasting around an hour and a half if you seldom die.
I did enjoy how much more often it spices up the gameplay in comparison to its predecessor. There are ropes to swing off of, levers to repeatedly crank while trying to keep enemies off you, and even a non-linear area in the game. If I didn’t have to leave my desk as I played it, I very well may have beat it all in one sitting and not even noticed that auto-saving feature. From start to finish, it is always a gripping adventure that gives off that rare ‘five more minutes’ line of thinking few titles can achieve. When you get to the boss fights is where the phrase forgiving but challenging comes into full effect. Taking on a boss is by no means an easy affair, and the challenge of doing so makes victory rewarding. With the game’s ‘levels’ flowing so smoothly, it is not always clear what even awaits you until you blindly walk in as a massive battle of survival is about to commence.
We are this deep into the review, and I’ve barely mentioned the hentai aspects. It is all shown in pixel animation, yet it is hardly something you want happening as you play. Each of the 28 overall monster girls has both a foreplay and sex animation. That is a whole lot of H, but the more you let the foreplay continue, the higher your arousement meter rises. As much as it may pain you to do so, you need to shake them off by mashing the movement and attacks keys before it’s too late. Worry not though, your reward for successfully completing the game is a gallery mode where you can view every animation freely. All of the sex and foreplay is fairly vanilla. It is mainly centered around femdom as our short protagonist is completely dominated by monster girls. There is nothing extreme here, and all the animations are of pretty good quality. Better still is how well some of the foreplay and sex animations transition into each other.
If you’ve been wondering, yes, gamepads do work with this title. I’ve played through the majority of it with an Xbox controller and some with the keyboard. Both input methods worked without issue. About the only glitch I can remember having is in a later stage as a catgirl disappeared and suddenly materialized out of thin air to give our character the succ when I stepped over where she previously was. That was more funny than anything, and with how many checkpoints there are, it wouldn’t have been a big loss even if that killed me. The prior title known simply as ‘Monsters N Girls’ is not necessary to enjoy or understand this one. There is minimal crossover. I bring this up because if I had to levy one complaint against this title, it would have to be how easy this journey is in comparison. A hard mode after having beaten it would have gone a long way here.
So am I disappointed in Super Monster N Girls? Not at all. In its totality, it is a superior game with many of the same elements that made the original fun still being here. I’ve long considered the original as a gold standard for action-based H games, and this surpasses it. With the only controls being jump and attack, not counting the movement keys, this is a simple to pick-up title that anyone can enjoy. That includes people that don’t even care for hentai content. Super Monster N Girls is a great video game in its own right. The H content being the icing on the cake and implemented quite well with the new arousement system. I wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of the Action genre and those looking for an accessible title with old-school vibes.
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