Oh boy, here we go again, a game I need to put a disclaimer on before I start the review. Moero Chronicle H is a dungeon crawler, and while the developers may want you to think the H stands for Hyper, I’m pretty sure it stands for hentai (don’t google that, please). Despite being unable to play in public or around other people, I actually got rather hooked, and not for the scantily clad monster girls.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, the world of Moero Chronicle has you take up the position of Io, a young boy who lives in a world of humans and monster girls, and who has, apparently, a rather large libido that he’s trying to supress or some such. In the middle of a hearty run in the nearby plains he passes out. Upon being woken up his cough cliché cough childhood friend and monster girl Lillia, he’s told by the mayor of his town that he has to go save the world.
Why? Because recently monster girls have turned against the humans, and no one really knows why. Why Io though? Well, apparently he’s lazy and hasn’t contributed anything useful to the village, so the mayor sends him off. Joined by Lillia, and a pervy otter thing named Otton who is on a journey to collect…panties… Io heads off to save the monster girls from whatever is making them violent and aggressive. By rubbing, pinching, poking, and tapping them. Yes, really.
You’ve heard of the minigame in Monster Monpiece? Well, this is technically a “sequel” of sorts. While most of the game is standard dungeon crawler fare, walking around a dungeon one tile at a time, getting into random turn based battles, there are a few things that Moero Chronicle does different to the standard. The first is Io’s actions. While you can have a party of up to five monster girls in a party, Io is constantly doing…something, in the background. He’s the only one who can escape or use items. He can also charge up “desire” and transfer it to a mon-girl to give her a boost to her next move. And yes, it does stack. Mwuhuhu.
When you get into a fight with a monster girl, you begin what is essentially a stripping battle. You can either beat them up, or what I found significantly easier, break their clothes. Yes, you strip them, then you rub them down. Yes, I’m serious. No, you don’t want to be playing this in public. Yes, I’m grateful the Switch can turn into a “handheld”. The last interesting aspect is the “trait” system, where each character has two traits, which range from “sort of useful” to “I really want those bonuses”. Traits can increase attack and defense, or provide various other bonuses. Traits come in nice little titles such as “tiny tits” and “cute butt”. Once again, yes, very serious.
So, ignoring the more…fanservice-y aspects, what is there to Moero Chronicle H? Quite a lot, surprisingly. First off, there are a lot of unlockable characters. Like, tons of them. You can unlock them by finding them in the field, chasing them down, stripping them, then molesting them…maybe I should rephrase that, but that’s the general gist. After unlocking, you can go visit the inn to put them in your party, visit them in their room for an event scene, craft items through the “egg” system, give them presents to raise affection, rub them a bit, or change their job class. Yup, even with a myriad of monster musume, they still have four jobs each.
You start with the default job unlocked, and each subsequent job is unlocked through gifting the girl “job panties”. Now, this is a mechanic that annoyed me, pissed me off a little, and had me appreciating it. Essentially, the four jobs are unlocked by: default, a treasure chest, a special collection point that has a chance of spawning over a normal collection point every time you enter a stage, and defeating “special” enemies that have a little heart above their heads. Unfortunately the game doesn’t exactly let you know that you need to get the girl’s affection to a full heart then talk to them to unlock the option. Also, the outfits are rather…disappointing. They’re all basically just underpants, I was kind of hoping for an actual “class change” type outfit.
Moero Chronicle suffers a bit from the same thing most dungeon crawlers do: becoming a grind and difficulty spikes. As you get further and further into the game, there are bigger “spikes” between stages, meaning you’ll probably have to go back and grind out a lot of money or levels. I’d suggest you up the difficulty for bonus cash and exp if you need to go back to grind. Unfortunately, the battle text can be a little too fast as well, making it difficult to catch status inflictions or battle notifications. The auto battle and battle speed up are quite nice to see implemented though. As a nice bonus, if you do fail the rubbing game against a monster girl, they’ll simply reappear a little later and you can pick up again from the start of the rubbing portion.
Overall, while maybe a little…iffier for more general audiences, with a wide variety of characters and customization, as well as the auro combo battle bonuses and rather interesting characters, I definitely came away liking Moero Chronicle H as a dungeon crawler. It wasn’t brutally unforgiving “cough” Dungeon Travelers 2 “cough”, but still a decent challenge. It helps that the music is pretty good and the boss theme is really solid. The plot may be a little lacking, but the customization makes it fun trying to build your own broken team. If you don’t feel awkward owning it, and are into dungeon crawlers, give it a try.
Game Information
Nintendo Switch
Developer(s):
Compile Hearts
Publisher(s):
Idea Factory International
Genre(s):
Dungeon Crawler
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation Vita
PC
Source:
Provided by Publisher
Article by Richard
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