Foresia: The Cursed Oath is a top-down Action game in where we play as a recently freed slave elf girl called Foresia. She appears to have been rescued by a fairy-like creature named Priscilla, and they ultimately end up in the small town of Crossraven as they take to a life of adventuring. It serves as your hub-world in where you can listen to rumors, accept jobs, and prostitute yourself if you need the money or just to unlock its sex scenes. This will be your new home for the remainder of the game, but be wary as the housing is not free. The landlord will come by every day and ask for increasingly larger sums of money.
Something to get out into the open right away is that this isn’t a review. This title features a surprising amount of dialogue and mechanics that don’t relate to combat while being a title that’s solely in Japanese. I’m not 100% confident in the things I will talk about, so treat this more like a casual conversation with some weirdo talking about the latest hentai game he’s played. Right from the get-go, there are many conversations, and it mostly remains that way all throughout. I’d say it is as much a Visual Novel as an Action game. Some of the UI is in English, but not enough to be easily navigational for those that can’t read Japanese. You will be missing out on significant portions of the title, and this doesn’t work with the Textractor program to translate it.
That is not a flaw by any means. Just a language barrier worth mentioning. If anything, it makes me yearn for a translation all the more since despite skipping most of the dialogue, I had a blast nonetheless. Now allow me to take a step back and talk about the title itself. One of the most immediate features is a day and night cycle that locks off what you can do at any one time. During the daylight, you can go off into the wilderness to battle a multitude of foes in search of their boss, which has a large bounty if you manage to slay it. The night is a considerably more laid-back affair where you can order drinks to bribe some gossip out of the bartender, take up gambling with a good old-fashioned game of Blackjack, or work at the brothel for some additional profit.
Despite having a day and night cycle, time only moves as you progress the story missions. That decision is kind of odd, but it does allow you to make as much money as you want by replaying old levels if, say, you lost it all in a bad night of playing Blackjack. Thanks to each area having a unique character and background, the town feels very alive. Better yet is how good each character’s idle animation is, helping to create a feeling that it is more than just a static screen. It has subtle movement and swaying that masks the short yet smooth loop. I may not understand a thing anyone in this town says, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t grow attached to its cozy feel.
Out on the battlefield will be a stark contrast to being in Crossraven. There are no allies to be found here. If it moves, it will be after your blood. All of the action takes place on a single arena-like screen, and there is no exploration or things to find. Your only goal is to slay enough enemies until the boss monsters appears. The monster designs are what drew me to this title when I stumbled upon it. There are some absolute nightmare fuel beasts you’ll have to face, and it becomes dark fantasy despite the cutesy appearance everywhere else. There are ten levels overall. Each containing its own growingly gruesome-looking bosses waiting at its end.
The first stage has a slime. Well, a giant slime, to be exact. That might have gotten a grin out of you as it did me when I first encountered it, yet as it turns out, it is the most challenging boss in the game. It packs the densest barrage of projectiles out of any of them and is encountered at your weakest. The difficulty sharply drops off after that. It was an interesting balancing choice, to say the least, yet I think we all know who the true demon lord was now. Joking aside, if you die, you simply return to the start of one of the level’s many checkpoints. It saves after every wave of enemies and right before a boss, so not much progress will be lost.
As for the combat itself, it features two meters you need to keep track of. The first is your “Attack”. It drains every time you shoot with your bow, which is your basic attack. Next, you have the ability to fire three tracking arrows at once if the meter is half full or more. While that last one is cool in theory, it is a massive liability. It takes far too much time to cast, and you’ll be a sitting duck for a couple of seconds as it finishes its animation. To make matters worse, despite it being bound to a separate button, it will still activate the next time you use your basic attack if your meter is full enough. That was the source of many painfully avoidable situations where I took damage. This could have been a massive issue if the game was more challenging, but as is, it’s more akin to a common hindrance.
Your magic meter, meanwhile, has its own uses. For one, you can deplete a portion of your meter to create a temporary shield that destroys incoming projectiles. It refills slow enough that you still need to focus on dodging. Another big reason to hold off on casting a shield if possible is the ultimate attack you are able to pull off with a full magic meter. It clears the screen of all projectiles and causes Foresia to let out a massive laser attack that will destroy almost anything in its way. It is perfect for getting out of tight situations as you are overwhelmed or simply to cause considerable damage to a boss. While it does have some shmup elements, it is more similar to something like Gauntlet. It is much easier to pick up and play than I’m making it sound like.
Foresia The Curse Oath can be played with either a controller or with a keyboard + mouse. As you can see from the button icons on the bottom left, and by how awkward some of the menus can be to navigate, I highly suspect that this was a mobile game. That would also explain why your tracking arrows activate while pressing the basic attack button. It was probably meant to be activated by holding it. That’s my theory, at least. If that is not the case, they simply did a poor job on the menu’s UI. You’ll probably want to keep your mouse handy while navigating the town menus with a controller. It is much less of a problem while in combat. In fact, the large UI makes it easy to tell what’s going on with just a glance.
Something I’ve yet to talk about is the leveling up system. After you slay enough foes, you will gain a level and increase your strength to cause more damage with each hit. The cool part is that it also completely heals your character. Leveling up mid-battle can be quite the blessing and since it becomes harder to level up in the future, grinding out for higher stats is ill-advised. That is the only way of regaining health during a wave. Each level consists of five waves, though oddly enough, the boss shows up in the second to last. During this phase, you have to slay a specific number of its minions to advance as it attacks you. It’s not until the final wave you can finally kill the boss.
A fair amount of the characters are fully voice acted and have plenty to say. The actors put plenty of emotion into their performance to further enhance the feel of having a living world. As for the story itself, I can’t say. I neither speak nor write Japanese, so the only real info I can give there is that they seem to have tried? Yeah, that should make it clear why this shouldn’t be taken as a review, lol. I did finish it to completion, though. In total, that took me about 6.5 hours, and that would have been massively increased if I didn’t button mash my way past all the story sections. It is undoubtedly impressive it offered as much as it did even with those conditions.
Most of the H scenes will occur after defeating a boss or falling in battle. From what I could gather, Foresia has some kind of lewd curse from her days as a sex slave. It is not uncommon that even after defeating a boss, you still end up banging it. Whatever the case, the CG art is of very high quality, and their animations are pretty solid. All of the sex is fairly vanilla vaginal penetration, though on many occasions, seemingly unconsenting. One scene had a skeleton gangbang, which was interesting to watch, to say the very least. They somehow still had a meaty penis to take her to the bone zone and are hilariously enough blurred out. I can’t even with this scene.
Another good chunk of the CGs comes from working at the brothel. You eventually learn new positions, which result in new scenes and an increased income as you become ever lewder. There are also some personal toys that you can purchase, such as vibrators that you can use on yourself before going to bed. Chatting with people around town and buying drinks for them can also lead to some more sex scenes. This title is simply jam-packed of both H content and regular gameplay in an excellent fusion of the two. To my knowledge, there is no way of quickly unlocking all the H content. You will have to interact with everything and progress through the story to see them all.
One feature that I have little knowledge about is the Libido stat. Doing lewd acts increases it while masturbating before bed lowers it. The higher the libido, the less clothing you can wear while up and about town, but other than that, I don’t know what it does. Foresia runs on the Unity Engine and displayed no glitches or crashes during my time with it. It is very stable and runs at high framerates such as 144 fps without issue. Upon booting it up for the first time, it will launch in a 1920x1080p window. By pressing Alt and Enter, you can enter a fullscreen mode. This won’t increase the internal resolution, however. It will simply scale to fit your monitor from that original resolution and may appear blurrier if your monitor exceeds 1080p.
After you conquer each of the ten missions and surmount the final threat the Demon Lord poses, you will unlock Challenge mode. It is a boss rush mode in which you can take them all on back to back. Disappointingly enough, the bosses don’t scale to your level, so the earlier ones will quickly succumb to your attacks. It is a fun mode but could have been more. While there is not much to do after beating the game other than replaying old levels, getting there was quite a fun journey. Foresia: The Curse Oath is packed with content and a game worth playing in its own right, with the high-quality hentai being icing on the cake. It is difficult to recommend to someone that doesn’t read Japanese, as even if they get over that initial hurdle, they will be missing out on a significant portion of the game. Here’s hoping it will one day be translated like the developer’s other game, Dragonia. There is a demo available for those curious enough to try it, and who knows, it just may grip you. Language barriers be damned.
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