(Note: this review is very much off-the-cuff, so I meander from point to point. Sorry for any confusion)
[b]Bottom line up front: Would I recommend this game? If you have $8 to burn and like the isekai genre, yes. Otherwise, this probably isn't the game for you.[/b]
Monster Girl Fantasy is a game that certainly has a place in the modern anime scene.
Protag-kun is summoned to a fantasy land after he passes out studying for one of his classes. He quickly meets a fairy who escaped capture by slavers and agrees to help her rescue her family, doubling down on this decision when it is discovered that one of the people behind the slavers has teleportation magic, which means they may be involved in his summoning.
The characters were what intrigued me the most, with how all of them had their own reasons to join the protagonist's party, and how they all seemed to have their own opinions on assorted actions your character performs.
Through your actions you can raise their loyalty level, which provides boosts to stats with each level, and past loyalty level 2 (which is harder to get than you'd imagine) you can invite them to bed, which results in no H-scene for you, but it's a nice touch of flavor.
Another interesting design choice was the removal of levels for stat gains. It emphasizes the importance of skills and equipment in a way that I've only seen done once. But that leads me back to a nitpick: In the early game, there were no random encounters whatsoever.
All encounters were fixed battles discovered on the map, and once those were done, those were gone. The only way to grind for money through the early game was in what felt like an orphaned mechanic where you could run through the first dungeon and gather up to nine mushrooms to sell for a total of 45 gold. That was fine, but I found they wouldn't respawn until I actually sold them all, so that meant it took like 5 minutes to get enough gold for a single piece of equipment. Figuring this was the norm, I chose to break the game over my knee by hacking in a ton of gold. (Yeah, I cheated, but only because I figured there would be no way to escape an excessively tedious and dull grind besides that.)
After you gain your third party member, Nei, the next area actually has a cave with random encounters that not only drop money, but items you can sell for additional funds, and not only did random encounters start occurring past that point, you also gained money from them all. At this point I felt bad for cheating, but carried on.
Then I ran into a slight... problem. After completing a quest, I unlocked the ability to buy magical items from an out-of-the-way vendor, including stat boosters for MP and Agility. That would be fine... but they were valued at 80g apiece. 80g for +4 to a stat, or +20 to MP. Given that everyone's base stats are somewhere around 10 before factoring in equipment, this doesn't bode well in the slightest. And sure enough, the next region offered Luck boosts, and the final region offered boosters to every stat.
I've seen this before in other RPGMaker games where at some point, it becomes more cost effective to save up money to boost a particular stat you care about (usually Attack/M.Attack) instead of trying to bother upgrading to the next tier of weaponry. Fortunately, each piece of equipment has its own sets of bonuses and special effects that may make it worth it to have them equipped depending on the scenario, but that doesn't resolve the bigger issue. While I hacked in money myself, I could easily see someone just making that their new 'level grind'. Spamming attack boosters and the like to increase damage dealt and decrease damage taken, which then negates any significance removing the level system had to begin with.
Aside from that, I've got a few larger complaints.
1. A lack of polish. I found several areas where I accidentally went out of bounds and found a few typos in the dialogue. I feel almost like there's some rebalancing that needs to occur in some places, but I'll hold my tongue on that since I hacked.
2. The length. Without spending too much time grinding, the game comes out to about six hours worth of playtime. You have a protagonist, four party members that are basically thrown into your lap, two optional ones at the end of really long, confusing dungeons, and one more optional one who feels almost like an alternate ending, and the game doesn't give enough time to really explore half of them. Of course, that may also be because I never, ever, ever found the sidequests needed to get anyone but Nei to Loyalty Level 2, and never even found the one to make Noira Loyalty Level 1, but even then I feel like I know almost nothing about these people who joined the party.
3. Orphaned mechanics? As previously mentioned, a lot of emphasis was placed on the respawning Darkcaps in the mines, making me think that was going to be the primary way a person could grind money. The presence of a loyalty system and how you can decline literally every person from ever joining the party feels almost like you could make them leave the party if you screw up bad enough. At several points, moral ramifications of actions come into question (such as the use of Attraction Spray to artificially increase your Loyalty Level), but at no point do they ever get expanded on. Also, the fact that nothing drops money in the early game, only for things to start dropping money in the mid to late game was a switch that happened at the same time as random encounters suddenly became a thing, indicating a sudden shift in design philosophy.
As a whole, this game has a fair few flaws, but has a respectable story that... honestly, I just wish was longer and expanded more upon.
Overall, I'd rate it a 3.5/5. A couple evenings I don't regret spending.
