Lightning Warrior Raidy is definitely the most anticipated Hentai Game title this year. Sales seem to agree with me. Raidy became one of the best selling H-Titles going gold by pre-orders alone. It’s fairly understandable though. Raidy is supposed to be a Hentai-RPG, a genre that, here in the english-speaking countries at least, comprises of mainly two games, “Knights of Xentar” and “Brave Soul” both of which are considered solid and highly replayble. Hentai and Fantasy RPG seem to go well together and yet no company is bringing the games over here. So when “Raidy” was announced, the whole of otakudom screamed with joy! Uber-Geeks like myself know that Raidy is essentially a remake of an old game made in the golden days of a computer named PC9800. Lots of Hentai Game making companies got started there by the way, and a google search for “Raidy” and “PC9800″ will bring out some very interesting results, like the first 2D games made by a company named Illusion, way before the time of 3D acceleration cards. Raidy was a title that was way above the norm, combining Dungeon-Crawling RPG action with strong Hentai-Visuals. The title was supposedly good enough to spawn a remake and two subsequent sequels. The games were available to Japan but not in here… until now.

So now the game is here, ready to be played and enjoyed. How does it fare to the hype?

Read more to find out.

If you read the story synopsis, you probably know the plot. You are Raidy, a woman warrior with the power to command Thunder. She doesn’t know how she got that power, but she used it to get by as an adventurer. During one of her trips she encounters a village where the women and men dissapeared within a tower that appear sometime ago. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to explore the tower, find what happened to the women and the men that went in there, kill the bad guys and get the heck outta there before the smell gets to you.

All in a day’s work, right?

That’s all there is to the plot by the way. There are no plot twists and no turning points. You find out what’s going on, you kill the bad guys, and that’s it. I have to say, having been an RPG fan since the days of Final Fantasy I on the NES, it was a bit of a dissapointment. Nevertherless, one can excuse the shallowness of the plot if they realise that Raidy was a title that really didn’t expect much of its audience. After all, how much plot twists can the average hentai lover handle. They want tits and tentacles dammit! Not plot twists!

The fact that the company didn’t expect much of its audience is also shown by the battle system. There is the “Attack” command, the “Defense” command, the “Spell” command, the “Item” Command, the “Escape” command and that’s about it. The “Spell” command only activates Raidy’s thunder attack, nothing else. Hence, the battles are overly simple: Just keep attacking, use a spell if the enemy is too powerfull, and heal if necessary. There is really nothing else to it.

At least the fights are fun to look at. ALL the game’s enemies are drawn like cute women. Lets say the enemy you are fighting is a Minotaur. What you see before you is a cow-girl… I think you get the picture. Once you defeat the enemy, she gets undressed and takes a sexy pose, like is those “Degraded Hentai Women” types. Yes, I am not kidding.

Like all good dungeon crawlers, you get a whole lot of exploring to do. You have to explore the Dungeon Thoroughly, find the imprissoned girls, find any items hat might help you and THEN fight the boss before you can advance the level. If you try to fight the boss without finding the girls or the secret items you will find yourself watching a Game Over Sequence where Raidy is effortlessly defeated, degraded and sexed up. The whole thing is infuriating if you spend a considerable amount of time leveling up like most RPG players. All the levels in the world aren’t going to help you if you don’t speak to imprisoned girls properly or if you don’t find that secret pair of earrings. So save often…

The problem with the whole exploration aspect of Raidy is that all the places look alike. Even the fake walls that you can pass through, don’t have any distinguished features. Which means you will spend a lot of time bumping your head here and there, fighting monsters and feeling lost until you find the map and significantly reducing the frustration factor of the game. The game becomes MUCH easier once you obtain it. The whole “lost” thing does have a purpose though: it allows you to level up significantly so that you can handle the much-harder later stages, where healing up before every battle is necessary if you want to survive. Speaking of healing, there is no “rest” command anywhere, so make sure you save up on those healing potions. You will need them later.

The music in Raidy is fine… for about an hour or so. It’s the same music for every stage except the last one, without any variations. It’s also short in length, which means it won’t be long before you get fed up with it and decided to shut it down and put something more moody on the stereo. The battle and boss themes are nicely made but nothing to shout about. Nebuo Uematsu this is not. The voice acting in the dialogue scenes is good, though I sometimes get the feeling that the Raidy voice actress is not up for it in there.

Where the Raidy voice actress shines is in the Hentai scenes, both the good ones where she acts self-righteously and the bad ones where she screams in pain and pleasure. The hentai scenes themselves are quite well drawn. It’s mainly yuri S&M stuff with very little sex inside. There is an orgy scene and a couple of straight sex scenes, but it’s fairly straight and nothing unusual. The best Hentai Scene by far is the last one, where you get to choose between the good and the bad endings. I suggest doing the good ending first and then going for the bad one. You will appreciate it more.

Both “Knight of Xentar” and “Brave Soul” had a good replay value. Heck most Hentai Games have a good replay value, what with your trying to find all the alternative paths and CGS and everything. Raidy is no different, right?

Wrong! Unfortunately, Raidy is a one-way game. You go, you explore, meet the girls, find the items, fight the boss, lose once intentionally to get the “Bad End” and then fight him again and win to get the good one and move on. There are no side quest, no alternative paths, apart from the very end which means that you will pretty much get all the CGs and scenes in your first playthrough. Shame…

So, in the end, is Raidy worth the hype? The answer is “most certainly not”. It fails to meet the expectations of a an RPG-Playing otaku. Nevertheless, it’s worth buying it, if only to give the incentive to the game companies to bring the far more superior sequels here as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Lightning Warrior Raidy, Games Hentai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.