JAST USA is working with Japanese erotic game developer Ninetail on a Kickstarter to release Venus Blood Frontier in English. Now, I’m guessing most of you reading this have never even heard of Venus Blood, a niche series even within the niche erotic game industry of Japan. It’s actually had ten entries since it began in 2007, with an eleventh coming out in Japan at the end of this year, and the series maintains a small but dedicated following primarily because of two things: the very complex strategic gameplay, and the very hardcore erotica often involving tentacles. I’ve been a fan of Venus Blood Frontier for a while, and I’m lucky enough to get the chance to translate it if this Kickstarter succeeds. If anything I say here sounds appealing to you, see if you can contribute something to the Kickstarter so we can bring this game to the English-speaking public. There’s also a demo you can check out on the Kickstarter page, but you’ll probably get a more complete idea of what the game is about and how it works if you read this first.
Venus Blood Frontier’s Gameplay
Venus Blood Frontier is a grand strategy game in the vein of something like Nobunaga’s Ambition, or Sengoku Rance, if you want a comparison in the realm of adult games. You conquer enemy territory while protecting and managing your own lands, that part is fairly simple. The complexity comes in how you form and organize your army.
There are about 200 types of generic units you can create, along with around 15 unique characters who join as the story progresses or through special conditions. A unit is mostly defined by its skills, its types, and which types it’s super-effective against.
One of the heroines, Tilca, for example, has:
Types: Woman/God/Flying/Knight
Super-Effective Against: Flying/Tree/Undead
Skills:
- Additional Attack: Hits multiple times
- Evade: Chance of avoiding ranged attacks
- Parry: Chance of avoiding normal attacks (Except critical hits)
- Ambush Alert: Avoids enemy ambushes, which mix up the order of your units
- Knight Boost: Powers up other units on the team with the Knight type
(Note: The translations for these have not been finalized yet.)
You create teams of up to six of these units. Skills are all passive and you have little control in battle aside from which enemy unit you want to target, so the core of the game is creating teams of units that support each other effectively. Tilca is an adequate damage dealer at the start and supports knights, so if you wanted to build a team around her, you might want to look at units with the Knight type who offer other benefits, like a guard, healer, or something with the ability to ambush the enemy.
Units have up to six base skills, plus two skills that can be added by applying special titles and an additional two skills through equipment, meaning that there is an enormous number of options to consider when you’re creating your teams. You can also only create one of each type of unit, so you need to be selective about what team gets what unit. There are over a hundred different skills to consider, and you can spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to form your teams (as I have).
The game can be punishingly difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing, but if you want to breeze through all that, there’s an Easy difficulty setting that makes it mostly trivial.
But What About the Sex Part?!
The main concept of Venus Blood Frontier is that you’re Loki in a semi-Norse-mythology-influenced world, and you’re leading an army that’s fighting and capturing goddesses. Thor and Odin are now cute girls because of course, they are. Once you’ve captured a goddess, you have the option to corrupt them via numerous sexual escapades that frequently, but don’t always, involve tentacles to some degree, with futanari being probably the second most common fetish that comes up. Corrupted goddesses become more powerful from a gameplay standpoint and much hornier from an H-scene standpoint. There are scenes of corrupted goddesses sexually abusing non-corrupted ones depending on what order they’re corrupted in, and then they screw each other when they’re both corrupted. I can’t go into gritty detail, but there are about 80 H-scenes and they go into some weird and fascinating territory, if you want a lot of variety. There are five goddesses who have this corruption mechanic and most of the H-scenes, then a number of other girls with fewer H-scenes.
Again, if that summary of what to expect piques your interest at all, please consider donating to the Venus Blood Frontier Kickstarter so we can make this happen.
