Can an eroge’s adult content single-handedly manage to redeem its story and gameplay? For better or worse, The Heiress attempts to answer this question.

The Heiress, also known as Botsuraku Reijyo, is an RPG Maker game developed by OneOne1 and produced by SakuraGame. It was initially released on December 1st, 2016 in Japan, but the English version — and I use that term very hesitantly — was put on Steam on August 11th, 2017. What sets it apart from other games are the 3 game routes with 8 different endings, 46 animated character rape scenes, and no less than 45 different H-scenes. If you’re thinking, “Gee, that sounds pretty great! Where do I sign up,” don’t break out that wallet just yet; there are some caveats that have to be addressed.

First, I have to talk about the developer OneOne1. OneOne1 is a Japanese developer of hentai games and doujins. The games they make tend to focus on RPGs, with a few odd ones going into the action and visual novel genres. They love big breasts and molestation. A lot of that can be seen in their previous game to be released in the west, Dark Elf Historia. For a review of that title, click here.

The plot in The Heiress (or at least what I could understand of it) involves Alice, the daughter of some kind of prominent family. There was an attack against her family where both her mother and father were killed. There was some debate among the attackers whether to kill Alice or to sell her into slavery. That is when J, the family’s protector, came to the rescue. In exchange for her freedom, J and Alice were to pay the attackers a monthly stipend. J trains her to use magic guns, and once Alice became of age, she started to accept odd jobs to pay off her remaining debt.

This is the point where the player takes over. From here on, there are three main routes the story can take: one of purity, one of sex, slavery, and debauchery, and one of violence. I’ll leave the purity one to your imagination, as it’s just as boring as you think it is.

The game progresses by giving Alice a quest via a job board or from the game itself. Once the job is visible in the status menu, it is the player’s job to seek out and find the specific NPC that wants the quest done. This does sound a little redundant, and it is, but it becomes even more tiresome once you learn that the character names and area locations don’t always match up with what the quest giver’s general location is specified as. The redundancy doubles down again as once you find the correct NPC; you’ll be asked if you’d like to accept his specific quest. After agreeing to their terms, you can finally do said quest, which usually involves entering an area and battling monsters or bandits. Upon successful completion of a quest, Alice is given a sum of money. If unsuccessful, she receives nothing.

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Battles take place using an active time battle system. Alice’s gauge will fill up, allowing her to take action against an enemy. The gauge only takes one second to fill, which makes it RATHER pointless. Alice and her opponent usually end up trading attacks anyway. The other systems, TP (Tech Points) and MP (Magic Points) are self-explanatory. The few things I was quickly lost on were status effects. There were the common effects, such as blind and poison, but there are a few where I had no idea what happened.

If, by chance, you’ve been playing the game and Alice has lost her virginity, “pornographic attacks” have a possibility of happening in battles. Each of these attacks are animated with a few having a cross-section internal view. These attacks can happen at any time during a battle. The only requirement is that Alice has lost her virginity and is not wearing the “chastity belt” accessory.

Here’s where those statuses come in. Enemies in The Heiress can induce a horny status, an orgasm status, and even cum themselves to death. There is no documentation as to what any of this means, compounded by the fact that the Steam version of the game lacks a manual. After winning a battle, your character is treated to experience and gold. Levels will automatically increase your stats. Even a tiny bit of grinding, maybe 5 minutes long, can make Alice near undefeatable.

The difficulty in this game is not the battles but reaching your minimum gold requirement for paying off your debt. If you fail to meet a payment at the end of a line of quests, you’ll be sent into the sex slavery route. Otherwise, the game will present you with different choices to set Alice on her path of virtue or violence. Don’t worry, violence fans: there’s always murder sex if you’re so inclined.

Regardless of which route you decide to play, you’ll quickly find that the two female leads for The Heiress are vocal. Don’t get your hopes up as it’s nothing stellar. If you’re not into hearing Japanese women moan, you’re playing the wrong game. The sex moans and noises feel like more ambient noise. Alice’s voice actress does an okay job, but considering how often you’ll hear her ending battle quote, it’ll grow tiresome. The same goes for the music. Although they list a sound studio in the credits, it’s all basic RPG music. I struggle to even remember anything that stands out. In the game’s defense, it is a basic medieval fantasy RPG.

What makes everything fall flat on its face is the translation. Where do I even begin on this? If any readers are familiar with AGTH or basic machine translations, you’re not far off from this game’s translation. Character names rarely match one another and sound effects become unintentionally hilarious. For instance, the word child turns into “Christian,” as in the religious practitioner, and a sea dragon turns into a “pipefish”. In a few cases, the text is left in its original Japanese form. How this passes as an official translation is beyond me, and as a former fan translator, I’m offended. It is neither a translation nor a localization. If anything, I would call it a bastardization. Consequently, if a player can’t understand what’s going on in a game, they will have less investment in the story. If anything, the translation is detrimental to the game. If the art in the game starts to get me aroused, the text on screen takes me out of it.

No, that’s not a songbird in her vagina.

The art in The Heiress is what redeems the game. If you love big breasts and skimpy clothes, this is the perfect game for you. OneOne1 takes full advantage of the blonde haired, blue eyed, big-titted western woman. Unfortunately, the character portraits will always have the hand on waist pose, which is somewhat sad. As far as cutscene images go, I hope you like the gun pose shot; you’ll end up seeing it a lot. The hentai scenes are usually well drawn. There are a few where the proportions don’t quite match, but those quickly get another body superimposed over it. That being said, much of the game uses recycled art assets. One art piece may have as many as twenty different edits with a new shader or a character in various states of undress. The guns akimbo action pose alone has 383 different versions, which is just downright silly. The positive side, those small edits make the sex scenes more movie-like. I praise the game’s art not because it’s great, but because its quality stands out compared to the poor translation and monotonous gameplay.

As this is a game from Japan, the naughty bits are censored, but not the point you can’t see what’s going on. When it comes to cross-section images, the censorship backs off a bit. This doesn’t sound bad, but the game is locked at 640 x 480. Even going into the game files and pulling up the picture directly (assuming you patched it to enable the adult content) still has them at low resolution.

On The Heiress‘ DLsite page for the Japanese version of the game, it states there was an update to the game after release. In this update, the developers mention that they added an omake CG gallery with all pictures at a 1600 x 1200 resolution. Now that is quite an upgrade, but there has been no news on whether the North American release will get anything of the sort.

The Heiress has porn content for days. Lots of fetishes including lactation, pissing, pregnancy, and even tentacles. Quite a bit of corruption and public use, for those who enjoy that. What is disappointing is a lack of lesbian content. There are two points in particular that would be perfect for the job, and they missed it. The first such opportunity involves going into a woman’s bath, but nothing happens, save a nude model of Alice in her character portrait. One of the women in the bath even comments on how nice Alice’s body looks.  The second missed opportunity is an amazon village. Nothing but women NPCs, and yet not even a single attempted molestation takes place. They could have fit in a double fetish with both muscle and lesbian content at once! I’m glad they have what they put in, but they sadly missed a prime opportunity.

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Here we have a short RPG game that is killed by its own translation. If even a tiny bit of effort went into the translation for coherency, I could give it a pass. I checked out the reviews for the Japanese version and they were above average, which leads me to believe it’s not OneOne1’s fault, but SakuraGame, who released the English version. Even the instructions for patching the game to get the adult version are in broken English. It honestly makes me wonder if the Chinese translation they have available is any better.

The game is available in English from both DLsite for $17.43 and Steam for $3.99. The Steam version is censored and requires third-party modification to unlock the adult content.