vgperson, I love many of the games you translate, but sometimes I don't know what you see in a specific creator. tachi is one of those creators. This is the third game by tachi I've played, which constitutes all the ones vgperson has translated, and the most positive thing I had to say about any of them was that Moonlight Ghost was "all right". (And I never did finish the post-game for that, and also I think I played it like six years ago, so even that opinion may vary.) I didn't like Hello? Hell...o? at all, but I bought this because I made it my mission to play every game vgperson translated, and because I wanted to give tachi's longest game the benefit of the doubt.
But oh. Oh it just isn't fun.
Let's start with the visuals. It's almost entirely default RPG Maker VX Ace assets, which are unfortunately, in my opinion, some of the ugliest default assets in the series (though I rather like most of the default portaits). No environment is very interesting, everything looks very flat, etc. I don't necessarily hate a game for using default assets - as someone who can't do any art myself, it's a little hard to blame people for that. Helen's Mysterious Castle, a different RPG Maker game I just finished, uses a good deal of default assets, and I enjoyed it a lot. But using default assets means that everything else has to make up for it... and it doesn't, but more on that later. The only thing that appears to not be a default or borrowed asset are the pictures of the girls, which... haa. It's not a crime to not be a great artist, but if a significant portion of the appeal of your game involves sexy pictures of cute anime girls, perhaps the anime girls should actually be well-drawn enough for people to find them sexy. I wince at the extreme level of objectification present in some of the outfits, but I like cute and sexy girls, so some good art would have certainly appealed to me. Yet the proportions are janky as hell, many of the faces look odd, a lot of the breasts are bizarrely-shaped... these aren't girls I want to see more lewd pictures of! And I suspect there are many men straighter than I who would agree.
But visuals aren't the most important aspect of a game by any means. How's the gameplay? Well, bestie, it's boring as hell. Everything's basically left in as the default, so there's no real strategy. Over and over again, I found myself auto-playing through all the battles, with occasional breaks to use healing and revival items, and that was enough to win almost every single time. There's not anything interesting to explore in the dungeons, so there's no appeal there, and though I only played up to the first Dark Lord defeat (which, by checking the achievements, it will be very obvious that that is far from the actual end of the game), the prospect of doing this over and over and over and over and OVER again made me want to bash my head against a wall. It's not fun! It's not interesting! There's no satisfaction! (Also, is the All-Drink broken, or a joke item, or something? Because it was supposed to heal and revive my entire party, yet when I used it to do just that, it did absolutely nothing but heal one party member. What the hell.)
But even the worst of gameplay can be saved by good writing. I confess that I often look for games with good storylines, and RPG Maker games especially, since due to the simplistic nature of the engine, the raw gameplay itself is rarely the primary appeal. And this would be very possible, if there were good writing here. It's one of those generic, self-parodying JRPGs that breaks the fourth wall a lot and passes that off as humor. Occasionally it would make me chuckle, but mostly it just retread a lot of the same old ground. A game certainly doesn't have to be funny to be interesting, but there's just nothing else of interest there! The characters are all two-dimensional - some of the girls scarcely even seem to get *one* dimension, and are often reduced to gimmicks with weaksauce affection conversations that don't compel me to do the insane amount of grinding required to unlock more affection with them. Not to mention the fact that one girl is still in high school while wearing an insanely skimpy outfit (and while you can certainly be an eighteen-year-old while in high school, the fact that according to a mention on TV Tropes, the main character apparently tells her he won't do anything past a kiss on the cheek until she graduates, seems to suggest that she is Very Much Underage), and another girl is at the receiving end of the unbelievably frustrating trope of "oh she's so pretty when she takes off her glasses" that needed to die at least a century ago (especially since said girl looks cuter with glasses anyway), means that really the events that were probably supposed to be cute and sexy did nothing but bore me and make me mad. The plot, as far as I can tell, seems to just be going through tons more dungeons, and fighting tons more dark lords after you defeat the first one. Nothing original here - nothing worth noting.
Overall, my final review is that I will not be playing any more games by tachi after this, and unless someone tells me that this game radically changes for the better, I will also not be playing Hero and Daughter anymore. It feels like every bad isekai of the past five to ten years put into video game form - and at least some of those have good art! If you want a game with an interesting strategy element to the gameplay, a fun and kind of addictive sense of weapon upgrade progression, and a much better, much more charming, and much less sexist take on a self-parodying JRPG with some serious elements and a level of uniqueness to the story, go play Helen's Mysterious Castle. It looks better, plays better, and costs a lot less than this!
