Foreword
After coughing my soul out for months, this review comes out on time, multiple weeks after completion.
I went into Marauder of Dystopia with lots of experience in these types of games. I like games with combat, meaningful character progression and systems worth exploring. I also am a min-maxing nerd. Finding advantages to trivialize games is part of what I consider fun. My take and view on this game might be vastly different compared to casual players who don’t spend tons of time exploring every nook and cranny of a game. Unless you are like me and open up options before pressing Start Game, don’t worry if the things I mention are hard to keep up with or feel pointless. Chances are they are. Alright, time to cook.
Story
Marauder of Dystopia starts off with the assassin girl Kazuki on one of her typical missions, given by her secret company, to rat out a small enemy base. As this is meant as an introduction to the combat system and a short rapid fire run down on who she is and what her character is like, this feels sufficient, quick, doesn’t waste time, and yet doesn’t reveal everything to leave room for more development later.
Back in the village after reporting her success on her mission, we get introduced to Kazuki’s boyfriend, who acts as the village doctor. She met him many years ago and was impressed with his kind way of caring for the weak. It is said they have known each other for over three years, yet haven’t had any sex or other intimacy. This is hard to believe and feels very out there. Maybe that’s just me but I can not imagine being openly close to my partner I date without having a massive desire to touch them and more. Maybe this is the Japanese virgin brain mentality culture springing forth, maybe I am just weird, who knows. All I know is, I can not identify with this way of thinking and it feels very child like, which is weird considering the game genre. I personally appreciate adult brains in adult games with adult themes.
We then learn about the boyfriend, Bruno, wanting to go overseas to study for a while. This supposedly doesn’t take too much time and he’d be back soon enough to reunite with Kazuki and her then grown resolve to finally get some first blood flowing outside of her usual assassination battles. Meanwhile Kazuki gets some important missions to get rid of some corrupt regime and possibly liberate the country of the clouds of darkness, coating its people in misery. You might see where this is going. We get presented a loving but pure couple, a boyfriend that is out of town, a shy virgin girl on dangerous missions against vile and corrupted people… yes that’s right. Unless you fight properly, take the right choices and prepare for what is to come, Kazuki is in for a world of NTRape defilement treatment.
Not to spoil the story completely, there will be (mostly lewd) elements of typical fantasy monsters, bandits, knights, mercanaries, drugs, enslavement, black mailing, mind break, corruption, betrayal, tragedy, death and sadness, rape, ntr, guilt, epic battles, liberation, wholesome moments and more.
Marauder of Dystopia features different endings and paths for the player to take and it is up to you to figure out how to get to them. This is not a cryptic puzzle, so most paths are somewhat obvious, others less so. Do you want to spare the evil monster controlling wizard pleading for his life, and not slice his head off to show how kind you are compared to the enemy? Or do you strike him down and make sure he doesnt reveal what he may have still hidden up his sleave against you, in case you falter and give him an opening to counter attack? Do you go to that one inn and have “a drink” with the totally not suspicious looking guards or will you rather focus on doing your job and killing them?
I myself went for the full battle ready hardcore serious assassin style with pure determination route, as I like to call it. Skipping all the epic parts, at the end you get a, lets call it, “good ending”. Although I wasn’t too happy with how the story concluded in that route, I can see how this is still pretty wholesome, kinda?
I admit, I have not played through every single possible route and seen all the dialouge and mission types. I did however play parts of them after finishing my first playthrough. You can “continue” your playthrough after completing the game by starting a new game while keeping all your gear, skills and levels obtained till then. This is also known as a NG+ (New Game Plus, for those who are familiar with Dark Souls, for example). Unlike other NG+ in games like Dark Souls, Ender Lilies and other soulslike games, the scaling in Marauder of Darkness is kinda fucked. The enemies do not get harder. You just start at the beginning as if you just started the game, but you are already overpowered. Not only will you one shot everything, but nothing can hurt you either. Your base defense while fully naked and wearing a chocker accessory to half your stats is still high enough to have enemies deal 0 damage or even miss you entirely. You do however unlock a new command in battle to just surrender/suicide, which is very helpful if you want to just skip combat and get to the juicy parts that may await you in case you do not win the encounters. So for that reason alone, I would suggest new players to play Marauder of Dystopia “seriously” first, make every effort to just finish the game without every getting downed, stay a virgin and meet up again with Bruno to then go ham in NG+ and discover all the other routes the game has to offer.
Gameplay
The gameplay is simple yet offers quite a bit of variety. You play Kazuki alone, no team, Katana only, can purchase or find bracelets, rings, etc. that boost stats, give you immunities to certain status effects or enable other interesting features like doubling exp gain by halfing stats, increase gold gained and so on.
You gain exp and level up naturally. Every few levels you unlock new blade arts/magic skills like a Lightning Strike against one foe, multiple targets or a Lightning Multi Strike against one target, as a type of finisher ability. There are different typical elements like Fire, Ice, Lightning, Physical and also buffs like Speed Stance to get your turn bar filled up faster, Defense Stance to survive especially painful attacks or Attack Stance to increase your damage by a lot to dish out as much damage as you can in a few moves. To know when to use each skill and remember an enemy’s elemental weakness, as well planning your battle ahead and managing your skill points is the key to the game’s combat and will make the difference in you winning or suffering utter defeat. This style of combat is surprisingly complex and I would love to see this in regular large scale games.
To be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the combat parts of Marauder of Dystopia way more than the eroge, as the art style is not really to my liking. I prefer either fine pixel art, animations or very specific styles that are hard to describe. To keep this part short, I wasn’t a fan of the proportions of Kazuki’s body, the line art felt too simple and generic, the monsters also cheap and more like random assets mashed together with some paint level of cum stickers. I think I would have enjoyed the sex scenes more if they were just conveyed in dialouge alone with some minor character sprites in the background. But that’s just me. You do you.
Back to the gameplay, I noticed very early on that once you left an area with monsters and entered it again, it would respawn every enemy. So grinding enemies for exp to go into the next battle overlevelled was a possibility. If you want smooth gameplay and not run into issues of sudden defeat, I would recommend to grind some areas every now and then a couple of times until you can one or two shot an entire pack of enemies with an ability. I did quite a bit of levelling myself and ended the game at around level 50. That is quite high and to enjoy somewhat challenging battles, you probably want to end the game at around level 40. Though since I knew what I was doing and learned elements as well as utilised my equipment very well, levelling up a lot may still be the more prefereble choice if you wish to complete Marauder of Dystopia first as a pure virgin and not have to reset and reload the game after a defeat.
The encounters in Marauder of Dystopia trigger upon contact with enemies on the field or through scripted cutscenes. Fleeing from a battle will erase the enemy you ran into, so they wont block your path. There is a speed battle option, though just pressing skills manually felt faster and more fluent to me.
I recommend creating frequent save files on different slots in case you run into an unfortunate situation you cant back out off or in case you wish to explore other paths and choices, though again, this is more so something I would recommend you to care about after your first playthrough.
Game features, media, sound, etc.
There is the typical Gallery you can access after unlocking the scenes. Kazuki is voiced by a pretty nice sounding VA who does a pretty good and convincing job portraying Kazuki’s character and feelings.
The music in Marauder of Dystopia is quite decent, though I wish there were different tracks for different zones for a change in enviroment, and to not have my ears bleed from the same few repeating sounds. As with almost every RPG Maker game, the devs never learn and always put the game volume to 100% while 5% is usually enough to burst my ears. So put your computer volume to 10% before opening up the game to ensure the survival of your eardrums. There is also no option to set the sound effect volume, which is kinda bad in my opinion.
The character profile of Kazuki tells me her name, profession, nickname, height, her three sizes and if I am still a virgin. Yet, I have no idea how old Kazuki is. The three sizes don’t make sense looking at her character sprite and this info just feels pointless to me personally. I find it odd to keep track of how much cc (cm³) of cum has been accumulated within her body from all her defeats. Just not my fetish. Toilet usage is a perversion stat… so yeah you can use the toilet in your house but peeing is apparently something only perverts do… damn, idk. I am not a fan of pee and other stinky situations in games so I would appreciate if this would be an option I can just disable entirely, as seeing that makes me wanna become a nun instead of cum.
I also wish there was an option to see the ingame controls or be able to adjust them. There is a readme.txt inside the game folder that tells you the controls, but that is hidden away quite well. I also miss the “always dash” option to not have to hold down the Shift key till my fingers cramp up. The victory music is very loud and is most likely a “sound effect” which we dont have an option to tune… unfortunately.
There are a couple of translation errors like the doctor being called Youth in title but Bruno in text boxes. I didn’t keep track of the whole timeline and details but as I mentioned earlier, Kazuki and Bruno dating for 3 years without sex feels very out there and I doubt it that this could happen for real.
When tasked to go to the hideout of my organisation, I shit you not, it took me forever and ever to find it. If you blink or can’t guess where to go, you will be stuck for a while here and that is the beginning of the game. To help you out, the hideout is at the far back inside the church, down the stairs behind the priest. Yeah maybe that is logical for some people like the cave behind a waterfall, to me this took like 15 minutes of searching. I wish there was a quest log to actually check what happened and where my quest objective lies next. If you happen to play this game for a bit, save and come back weeks later, good luck trying to figure out what to do again and where to go.
There are also some characters with random translations like one guy being named Adolph and/or Adolf in text. Maybe not the smartest name to use, not even considering how the translation is just off but hey. There are some more bugs like a quest in which you have to replace three slave girls, which can be repeated by going to the same spot again, repeating the scene. Most bugs don’t seem to be game breaking, but who knows if there are some that do break the game. I have not actively searched for them.
Final thoughts
Marauder of Dystopia is fun as a RPG Maker game. The story is surprisingly good and combat is very fun up to level 45~50, after which you don’t get new skills and just start one shotting everything. The music is okay, albeit lacking variety. Voice acting is pretty decent. I am not a fan of the art style for the ero scenes but that’s just personal taste. The game lacks some key features like sound effect volume adjustments and a dash button. There are different endings and paths to take that alter the story and what you do completely, so that is very fun to explore and I recommend you do after a “pure” playthrough in New Game Plus.
I don’t like giving numbered ratings for games, as a number alone doesn’t tell you anything besides that it’s a number. So take into account what you’ve read me recount about the game, try to put into perspective what my background is and preferences are, and decide if you can see yourself playing this game.
Overall I would say I had fun with the game, for different reasons, and would recommend you give it a go. The game is available on Steam. There are ways to patch and uncensor things and I’m sure you’ll find ways to do so in the common places on the internet, though the game is totally fine even unpatched.
I hope you enjoyed my first quick review of Marauder of Dystopia and it inspired you to try it out or helped you avoid wasting time with it. Whichever benefitted you more, I hope I managed to waste your time reading in a way that makes your day feel better than before. Until next time, friend! Happy Gaming! <3
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