Even if you live under a rock you know what hentai is, but if you’re reading this then you haven’t experienced it crossed with the entertainment style of visual novel video games. There are literally thousands of titles to choose from in Japan, and a few hundred have even been brought over to English for us to enjoy. Needless to say, it can be very difficult to choose which one to play first!
Should you get something with a serious story, where the adult content is just an extra treat? Or one that features gameplay elements? Maybe just a simple nukige?
I compiled this small guide to help newcomers to hentai visual novels find a game that will make your first experience an enjoyable one, or be introduced to a game you didn’t know existed. All games featured in this list are officially translated, uncensored and released in English. If you want to know more about a specific game title, just click on their respective names.
JRPG Style Hentai Visual Novels
If you want to level up your character and defeat some baddies along the way, some visual novels incorporate JRPG elements into them. Aselia and its sequel Seinarukana, are both high fantasy settings heavy on the JRPG elements.
Seinarukana
Seinarukana is the sequel of an older game Aselia the Eternal, both stories are very similar. Thrown into a world not his own, Nozomu must fight to bring his friends home, while also discovering the true nature of the being within him before he gets consumes by it. In Aselia you are Takamine Yuuto, an orphan who lives only to care for his sister and ensure they make it through their ordinary everyday lives. One day he is suddenly interrupted by a call from beyond Earth, he has been summoned through a mystical portal to the distant land of Phantasmagoria! The gameplay in both of these games is about squad management on a battlefield, so, it’s a bit more tactical than your standard JRPG.
Yumina the Ethereal
Yumina the Ethereal is from the same team that created Aselia and Seinarukana. It’s again, a game about traveling through dimensions. Yumina enters the “Student Council War” a massive election held to decide the student chairman, and the winner also receives the right to freely change any single school regulation. Starts off as a seemingly mundane competition, but the game’s protagonist and Yumina end up traveling to other dimensions with other female classmates. This game features dozens of hours of dungeon crawler gameplay with well-animated battle scenes, to make the action stand out more. Probably one of the best hentai JRPG titles out there.
Lightning Warrior Raidy III
For a more “old school” experience of dungeon crawling, check out the yuri themed Raidy series. The older titles, Raidy 1 and Raidy 2, might feel a bit outdated by today’s standards, but the Raidy 3 holds up to be a very fun experience, it also includes animated hentai scenes and a lot of lesbian monster girl action. The story is your usual good versus evil with a bit of comedy. When Raidy and her friends are unable to pay for their meal at an inn, they get in big trouble. The only way to pay off the debt and get their weapons back is to enter a dungeon and defeat an evil alchemist who’s been kidnapping the humans in the town to perform experiments on them. A nice addition to the third game is the fusion system, where you can fuse with Raidy friends and transform in these new and sexy Raidy forms.
Aselia and Seinarukana are more serious visual novels with many hours of gameplay, if you are looking for that in an hentai, you should go for those. The Raidy series should be for people who enjoy grinding in dungeon crawlers and don’t mind getting rewarded with a lot of hentai instead of an epic story. In between them, it’s Yumina the Ethereal, it includes a nice story with good dungeon crawling gameplay, and hentai is not the only reward here.
Nukige Hentai Visual Novels
Nukige is usually the most basic form of hentai, where the visuals make up for the lack of story. Games in this category will generally be enjoyed by anyone who wants to taste what “real” hentai is, and most of them are easy to recommend.
Sweet Home
Nympho Sensei Ryoko
Sweet Home and Nympho Sensei Ryoko are probably the best ones to be your first experience, featuring art from the famous artist Taichi Kiriyama. In Sweet Home the protagonist loses his house in a fire, and he’s forced to get back into his hot stepmother’s house, however, he didn’t know that while he was away, her house transformed into a shared house for young women. This is basically a comedy “harem” (protagonist having many love interests), and a good one at that. In Nympho Sensei Ryoko there is actually a nice twist, while in almost every hentai game you play as a male protagonist, here, you play as the horny female teacher. You can control every sex desire of Ryoko anytime and anywhere. The game features an innovative location system in which you choose which area of the school you’d like to go to and spend your day. You can go to the newly constructed school, or the (conveniently deserted) old school building, allowing you to choose where you want to make your naughty memories.
The Sagara Family + Chain Bundle
The Sagara Family is another classic harem since the protagonist needs to live inside a house alongside a hot widow and her four sexy daughters. At the start, things don’t go so well, but eventually, everything falls into place and you can decide which girls you’re going to date throughout your stay inside the Sagara’s family house. This game is included in a bundle with Chain, a detective story packed with action, adventure and most importantly sex.
Free Friends series
Free Friends 1 and Free Friends 2 are very casual nukige titles, with art created by Coffee Kizoku. Both games have similar stories and begin the same way. A girl starts using the famous message board “Free Friends”, where men pay to women to spend the night together. The only difference between them is that in the first game, you play as a teacher, and the girl you start going out with is a student from your academy. In the second game, a boy and a girl start dating without knowing they are actually brother and sister.
Princess X
Don’t get discouraged by the box art, Princess X might surprise you. The protagonist average life takes a turn for the weird when his dad tells him that he’s engaged. To multiple women. And they aren’t even human! Each new fiancee is stranger than the last, and they’re all madly in love with him. Worst of all, whoever he doesn’t marry might destroy the world! You have a naga, a centaur, a spider, a robot and other peculiar girls to choose from and interact with, in more ways than one. It’s possible that your first kid comes out of an egg.
If you don’t want to waste time on a serious story, and just want to buy a hentai game to look at the sexy women, you should get a nukige title. The easiest games to recommend are Sweet Home and Nympho Sensei Ryoko like it was said before. However, if you don’t mind your girls to have more than 2 legs and a tail, then you should get Princess X, it might just be the monster girl fix you need in your life.
Serious Hentai Visual Novels
Hentai Visual Novels can also be serious, very serious. Hentai listed here have a story to back it up, alongside the visuals. If you think nukige titles are too basic and bland for you, then you should take a look at these games.
Saya No Uta
Saya no Uta is a horror game with an hentai mask. The protagonist is a medical student who received experimental brain surgery after a traumatic accident. He survived but is left with warped senses that perceive the world as a hellish wasteland of pulsating flesh and twisted monsters. Into this world comes Saya, a girl who is the only thing that appears pure and beautiful. A seminal work of horror and Cthulhu / Lovecraftian occult fiction in the visual novel medium.
Kana Okaeri + Sensei 2 Bundle
Kana Okaeri is a story about a young girl that has a terminal disease, she happens to be the younger sister of the protagonist. It’s a very emotional story and one that you won’t soon forget. However, Kana Okaeri is the remake of the original version Kana Little Sister, and features new visuals, voice acting, and some animated hentai scenes. Either one is an amazing experience, but the remake is included in a bundle with Sensei 2. In this game when the protagonist father dies, he moves out of his home and lives with his childhood friend Kumiko, that is a teacher at his school, but he sees her as his sexual prey. It’s a nukige title and not that serious.
Yume Miru Kusuri + Little My Maid Bundle
Yume Miru Kusuri is a classic coming-of-age tale set in post-modern Japan, it lets you guide your character through stories of tender first love and the bittersweet reality of growing up in an imperfect world. You will be able to choose between the grown-up but vulnerable Mizuki, the sad Aeka or the playful (and slightly insane) Nekoko. This is a beloved visual novel, and one of the more serious titles featured here. It comes bundled with Little My Maid a popular visual novel based on traditional fantasy stories of Japan and Europe. Basically the protagonist finds himself invited to a mysterious mansion with three maids who will do anything to serve him, even their bodies. It’s again, another nukige title and not as serious as the featured game.
Kara No Shoujo Series
In Kara no Shoujo the year is 1956, some years after the end of World War 2, and a series of bizarre murders start happening in the city of Tokyo and an ex-cop turned private investigator, is asked to take on the investigation. This is a psychologically thrilling mystery, here, your investigative work and deductions directly influence the course of the story. Kara no Shojo – The Second Episode is a direct sequel to the first game and both are excellent titles if you enjoy this type of story.
If you want to experience something unique, you should get Saya no Uta. It might be a bit hardcore, but you can tone down some of the violence. Nevertheless, it’s one of the best visual novels ever released and one of the best works from Nitroplus. Kana Okaeri and Yume Miru Kusuri should be your top picks if you enjoy emotional stories. Kara no Shoujo is for people who enjoy murder mystery and detective stories, you won’t be disappointed if you fall into this category, it’s one of the best works from Innocent Grey studio.
There are more hentai visual novels than the ones featured here, this is just a beginner’s guide and not a ranking list. Feel free to add your opinions in the comments below for others to see, and suggest other games to the community, and check back soon for the 2nd part of this guide.
