So, what happens when I find myself suddenly without the freedom to access my hentai collection for a week?  I rely on something I’ve kept ready for just such an emergency.  I took a bunch of caps on this game MONTHS ago, knowing one day, I would need them.  I didn’t make the proper edits though, so I’ll insert some of the more risque stuff later.

First off, let’s go over something.  There’s a website called Nutaku that hosts free online adult games.  When I first joined, there were only three of them, and two of those were actually hentai.  One of them is Aigis, a game that suffers from a whole host of problems but is infinitely more popular than the game I’ve spent the most time on (compared to other Nutaku games), Lord of Valkyrie.

Lord of Valkyrie kinda sells itself as a card-based game, and that general concept intrigued me.  I could build a deck of sexy maidens and improve them and win more cards to build a better deck with which to acquire more sexy maidens!  Well, that’s the idea, anyway.  And on the absolute most basic level, it delivers.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you all the ways it fails.

First off, it’s a “card game” in that you can collect item cards, monster cards, and valkyrie cards and make “decks” with them.  But really, the only “deck” you can make is a set of three fighters.  There’s no “drawing” involved; you set your fighters, and the rest of your cards sits in your inventory until you want to mix things up.  That’s fucking pathetic.

When you clear a stage, your reward is either items or cards.  Simple enough, right?  Only you, the player character, can equip items, and you gain EXP to level up.

Cards are just other fighters you can “recruit.”  So far, pretty normal.  Your cards are leveled up by “combining” other cards into them… basically, sacrificing them.  So, to level up your cards, you have to collect a LOT of cards.  Still pretty normal.

Here’s where it gets annoying.  Combining cards costs currency (gila), which you acquire by beating monsters and selling whatever you pick up.  You might have the materials you need to level up your cards, but you might not have the gila to do it.  A minor annoyance early on, but in late stages, it’s just one of many limiting factors.

Your cards can be leveled up to a level cap, but they can be strengthened further using Evolution.  Basically, if you combine a card with the same type, you can evolve that card into a second stage.  Monster cards can only be evolved once, to a Monster+ card.  Valkyrie cards can be evolved twice, to a Valkyrie ++ card, and it’s upon evolution to the ++ stage that you see a Valkyrie’s H-scene (monster cards, even humanoid females, don’t get H-scenes).  So if you’re in this game for the hentai, the goal seems clear: evolve as many Valkyries to ++ ASAP.  But if you care about maximizing your battle potential, you don’t want to do that.  You can evolve your Valkyries as early as level 1, but they won’t reach their max stats unless you wait to reach their caps before you evolve them.  This means maximizing the levels of FOUR of the same type of Valkyrie, evolving them, then maximizing the levels of the TWO + stage Valkyries you just created to make a full potential ++ Valkyrie.  And that can take a LOT of gila.

Annoying?  You bet.  Now here’s where it gets FRUSTRATING.  It’s EASY to get Monster cards, but your goal is the Valkyrie cards – specifically, getting 4 of the same type.  But it isn’t easy getting four of the same type of any Valkyrie worth getting.  You get low-potential Valkyries just for clearing far enough into the story, but to get the good stuff, you have to beat Mega Bosses or play the Lottery.  First, the Mega Bosses.  They’re basically really powerful bosses that take powerful cards to beat.  They appear randomly and only for a limited period of time.  Very rapidly you will hit a wall where you can’t beat a Mega Boss on your own.  Your only chance will be to enlist the help of other players.  What this means is actually sending out requests to other (real) players to add them to your Comrades list, and whenever you encounter a Mega Boss, you can send requests to your Comrades to help attack said boss.  The major flaw here is that, for this to be successful, you need to have a Comrades list filled with players who are still active, powerful enough to make a dent in your Mega Boss’s HP, and happen to be playing in exactly the same time frame.  THEN, if you are successful in beating the Mega Boss, you have a CHANCE at a Valkyrie drop.  Naturally, you can also receive requests from other comrades to help attack their Mega Boss, but ONLY the player who initiates the Mega Boss fight can deliver the finishing blow… and it’s very easy to forget that you have an active Mega Boss, so you might end up using all your Force (more on that in a bit) to beat a Mega Boss and get no reward because your Comrade didn’t deliver the final blow.

So, why not just let it slide if someone forgets?  Because fighting against Mega Bosses uses up Force.  It’s basically a meter that fills up 1 point per minute, and you use it up to fight Mega Bosses or play PvP.  So you have a limited number of attacks before you need to very slowly fill up your Force gauge.  Similarly, you have a Stamina gauge that works the same way, and you use it to play through regular stages.  Anyway, if you spend Force on a Mega Boss and don’t get a reward, it’s basically a waste of preciously-charged minutes.

So you basically log in, use up all your Force and Stamina to progress and get rewards, then step out and ignore the game while your gauges refill.  Yep, this is pretty much Timegate Management: The Game.

Oh wait, there was another way to get Valkyrie Cards, remember?  Lotteries!  Well, if you log in to the game 5 days in a row, you get Continuous Login Tokens, which you can trade in for Lottery Gold (and you’re an idiot if you spend those on ANYTHING ELSE).  You can spend Lottery Gold to enter a lottery for a chance at rare Valkyries.  As you might guess, it takes a LOT of gold to get the rarer ones.  To make things worse, there are limited-time lotteries throughout the year where you have a chance at rarer, more powerful Valkyries… and when the event period ends, there’s no telling when or if you’ll get another chance at those Valkyries.  So if you spent a ton of Lottery Gold and only got 3 copies of one type… well, that just plain sucks.

Naturally, the limited time and timegating nature of this game means you have the option to pay real money for convenience.  Here’s the problem: the prices are fucking outrageous.  Outside of special sales, the cost of 10 lottery gold (10 chances to get one copy of what you want) is 4500 gold points.  How much is that?  Well, 100 gold points costs 1 dollar.  That’s right.  You can theoretically spend $45 and stand a damn good chance at not getting 4 copies of one Valkyrie type for a limited-edition hentai scene.  And the hentai scenes aren’t even all that good.  They’re all just a shitload of text and one still image.  And maybe an additional variant of the same image with cum added.  Whoopee.  You might as well spend that money on a commission.

Basically, if you play this game for the hentai, you’re doing it wrong.  But there’s really nothing else to play it for, so the only smart way to play it is patiently over a period of months.  In that time, all you’re really doing is maximizing your potential to collect cards to improve your Valkyries, endlessly improving your Valkyries, and occasionally finishing a set of 4 for a disappointing H-scene.  Unless you’re willing to spend completely absurd amounts of money, you are NOT getting 100% completion.

Oh, that’s right… there’s PvP, isn’t there?  Well, sorta.  Basically, you face off against another player’s deck, and whoever has the strongest cards and equipment wins.  Good luck if you don’t have the best Lottery equipment and leveled Lottery Valkyries, because that’s what determines the victory.  No strategy involved: just raw power and lots of money.

And you wanna know the worst part?  I’m still playing this fucking game because part of me still enjoys fully leveling some of these Valkyries and hopefully breaking through to the next PvP tier.  There’s nothing else going for it.  The hentai is disappointing, the story is random and practically nonexistent, there’s no point to the community aspects to it, and whatever isn’t a blatant grindy cash grab is horribly luck-based.  Why the FUCK am I playing this game?

I almost want to make a snarky remark at Huniepop’s expense, but on a technical level, Huniepop is actually a better game.  Sure, it’s a complete and utter waste of talent that literally drove away a talented writer due to creative differences (I guess the writer actually wanted to do something… CREATIVE with it), but gameplay-wise, it’s better than a blatant and unapologetic cash shop whore.  And YET… I keep coming back to Lord of Valkyrie.  Why?  I guess that’s just the draw of browser games.  They don’t require much effort, and rather than spending hours at a time on them, you spend a few minutes a day over months, so you don’t feel the gradual time investment.