Monmusu Fight is a 2D Fighting game set in a world inhabited by monster girls. We have a selection of 8 characters to choose from, chief among these being Mint, a half-dragon hybrid. If we play as her we are treated to the main story, while all others have only a small bit of text before and after their respective playthrough is over. All lines of dialogue are fully voiced in Japanese and have adequate English translated subtitles. It is not the type of story you’ll remember after putting the game down, or even good, but it does add context to the events occurring like this mysterious fighting tournament.
Reading the store page that has selling points such as “no difficult input commands” and “special moves are one button”, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine someone booting this right up thinking it is a walk in the park. I strongly advise taking a look at the manual first. This a perfect example of simple not equating to it being easy. It is a four-button fighter. You have a button for a basic attack, one for specials, a Super ability, and another to knock back a foe. Before you practice any of those, it is vital that you learn how to counter first or you will find yourself dunked around the screen like a basketball.
Ever play an online match against an opponent so good that you may as well put down the controller and make yourself a cup of tea until he finishes his combo? This is that type of game if you don’t learn how to counter. Luckily for us, it is simple once you understand how it functions. After every four or so strikes in a combo, a character will use the knock-back attack to toss her opponent across the screen and continue her onslaught. That knock-back attack is our brief window to turn the tides of a beating. Simply press the direction opposite of where you think an enemy will toss you to. As an example, you are in the air and your foe is going to drive you down into the ground, you press up. There are only two possible directions they can fling you towards at any one time, so you have a pretty good chance of escaping a combo if you know them.
Countering also restores a bit of life and your super meter. It is such an important aspect to the gameplay that it really should have been front and center of the included manual. There are no low, mid, or high attacks. Your basic attack just strikes at one hitbox and it does make defending pretty easy. A large percentage of your time will be spent mashing the key for basic attacks. Using the knock-back move before it automatically triggers after four strikes can be useful to confuse human foes, but does not seem to have any effect on the AI. Specials are mostly useful as a way to bridge the gap between you and an opponent, or to chain them into your basics. You can activate them thrice as indicated by the three bars at the bottom of the screen. They are refilled after enough time has passed, or instantly if you connect a knock-back attack.
Your Super ability refills solely after you manage to counter or when you land a knockback. You need to fill up all five letters of the word before it can be activated. Used offensively, these can be pretty devastating, though some characters are flat out better than others. It can also be used defensively. If you activate it when you are being combo’d, it will slightly damage your foe and give you some breathing room. Characters do fight differently but are mostly interchangeable. At its core, this is a single button fighter. What differentiates them most is how you can chain their few specials into a combo or how to land their Super. I wouldn’t call it perfectly balanced by any means, but I found all characters equally viable. The most unique and difficult to use is probably the Minotaur girl, Milch. Her Super while devastating has an extremely short range to it.
Something you may have noticed by now is that the Windows 10 taskbar is viewable in all of the pictures. That is due to this title having serious issues in “full-screen”, if you can even call it that. What it does is set your display to a very low resolution and sets it to a 4:3 ratio, yet the game itself is still windowed. Thanks to decreased screen real estate from the low resolution they set, the top of the title’s window completely obscures the character’s life-bars. It is still technically playable if you don’t mind the lack of a vital piece of knowledge. A better option is not going fullscreen, digging into the INI file and change the window resolution yourself. It is better than dealing with the stamp-sized window it defaults to, or stretching the image as I did for a less distracting viewing experience.
Monmusu Fight is an incredibly jank game. That is not without reason. It is running on an engine called Fighter Maker whose last update was in 2002. It is the same year that Morrowind and Vice City released, for reference as to how long ago that was. One of the stand out titles that uses this engine is Vanguard Princess, and they had this whole celebration when they managed to make it support a fullscreen mode at the end of 2019. That title released in 2009. Something you’ll notice upon booting this up is that there is a Versus mode. It only works with two players, there is no AI available for it, but it otherwise functions as you’d expect. Practice mode, on the other hand, also requires two players. You have to select a second character using the keyboard. The only thing that changes is you now both have infinite health.
It is so hacked together due to an ancient engine the developers had no idea how to workaround. Probably the most fatal of all flaws is the lack of being able to pick a difficulty. This is tuned to a more moderate fan of the Fighting genre. If you are a casual player, or are just here for the hentai, your choices are either to practice enough to see that content or give up. For the more seasoned player, it does not offer enough of a challenge. There is a Hard difficulty you can access, but you need to defeat the entire tournament every time you want to access it. That is seven, two round matches before you can play it how you want. It is not something you can play on a lunch-break or helps you want to hone your skills. For some reason, the AI never used their Super move despite the difficulty, giving you a significant advantage as well.
To get the most out of this game, you will need another player with you. There is this whole process of installing a third-party program to get this game online. I didn’t actually try it, so I can’t comment on this aspect. While it is a mess on the technical side of things, the simplified yet still in-depth combat system is a blast. There are a ton of little mechanics to it that would be so much fun to actually put to use. The AI isn’t good enough to motivate you to do so or pull them off themselves, sadly. Furthering the fatigue is that there are only two backgrounds in the entire game. There really isn’t much to see here, other than the flashy effects and character sprites. This brings me to the hentai. You need to finish an opponent with a Super move, which will then rip off her clothes and leave her in a stunned state.
Only three of the characters can do something when your foe is defeated and stunned. The boss called Adeth can grow a penis and repeatedly penetrate them, with an X-ray cross-section and all. She has an alternate demon form who is her own selectable character. In this form, she can summon a slime to abuse a stunned foe or use tentacles. You can speed up her motions, change between two forms of sex, and finish inside. Finally, you have a snaked creature named Reimia. Her’s have to do with physical pain. What she does with a stunned enemy is whip them or electrocute them. With all of these, it can be continued as long as you want and however many times. In order to move on to the next match, simply hit your foe with another Super to down her for good.
The other five characters are where this feature gets a little awkward. There is no point in trying to finish an opponent with a Super when using them. They will be stunned the same as always, but you will not be able to do anything to her. Each character does have their own unique dialogue and sexual encounter with tentacles once they reach the boss fight. This title does feature some Ryona (abuse fetish) within it. Some of the characters can be raped pretty violently or not penetrated at all, but whipped with tentacles until they urinate themselves from the pain. The voice actors do a convincing job screaming and some of the sound effects will have you grimacing a bit. It may disturb some people. It also does a solid job of causing you to want to defeat the boss knowing what’s in store for your character.
There is no gallery mode or anywhere to view the H content aside from working for it in-game. This title clearly has a lot of issues. With such a good portion of this review detailing them, it can be easy to think this is a terrible game. It is not. The core gameplay is a ton of fun and far more in-depth than it seems. A bit unbalanced yes, but the fast-paced, over the top spectacle of it is something not to be glossed over. With two backgrounds, most of the characters not able to perform lewd things after a battle, and no way to select difficulty, it does honestly get old quickly, however. Monmusu Fight is more of a guilty pleasure of mine than something I would flat-out recommend. It is, to be frank, not a good buy at its asking price of 15 US dollars. I’d play the demo first, and then catch it on a sale if I were to enjoy that.
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