Others - Magical Monstergirls Academy [v0.8.2] [Wataponno]

(version 0.8.2)
Might be a little biased after the ant boss fight but holy shit is this game's combat dogshit.

Art is decent and the animations are nice, but aside from spaming you cant skip past animations during combat, with the jank nature of the combat sometimes having an enemy obscure the goods. You can also change your gender if you take the bracelet in your room, though only outside of combat and it doesn't seem to have any benefit aside from different animations.
(Think gender-swapping could be a bit more interesting if male-form can do more damage and have more stamina but slower stamina regeneration while female-form has more mana & faster mana and stamina regeneration but deals weaker damage)

Controls are simple to understand, you're on a grid during combat and you use WASD or the mouse to move, but you have to keep an eye on your stamina which usually runs out after 2-3 moves, and personally it feels like thats the bare minimum. To cast spells, you either press E to bring up 4 spells to insta-cast at the cost of mana that regenerate at a snails pace unless you collect blue orbs which usually spawn in pairs, with potency of these spells depending on how much mana you have. You could press Q instead and play DDR to cast at the cost of stamina with the risk of hurting yourself if you fumble to much.

Enemies usually have 1 attack that is telegraphed with an animation and a tile being highlighted yellow/orange and hitboxes may linger a little longer than they should. I also think you should take into consideration that there is a bit of a delay during the animation after you cast so take that into consideration as well if your a pro-gamer like me or just used to something more fast-paced.

Outside combat, you mainly explore dungeons with the same control scheme, with enemies represented with a skull icon with a certain number with a certain amount of nearby hostile enemies being dragged into combat should you touch one of the skulls, excluding bosses or unique enemies that have differently colored skulls. Personally, unless you have ever played Touhou, this segment can be a huge slog if enemies are unavoidable, particularly at the atlantis section that has tight maps. Also, sometimes you might spawn into a map and get locked off from fighting bosses, or collecting essences and blooms due to RNG.

As for progression, you can also collect essence and blooms (idk blooms are used for) from both sexing enemies after widdling down their health, or through exploring the dungeon which can be used to unlock spells and scenes or upgrade any spells you own. However, sometimes its is pretty much RNG on whether or not you could sex an enemy since you could be spamming in their direction at full stamina but go onto a random tile and you teleport to them. And this might be personal preference, but I think essence should be purely relegated to spells since encountering and getting a scene is more than enough to earn it in the gallery, and I think they should not cost roughly the same amount as a spell when it feels like a slog whenever your grinding, and Monster Hunter has spoiled me rotten.

I haven't really paid attention to the plot or dialogue since I was often spamming through it all so I can't comment aside from saying its mostly fine skipping it all aside from one or two occasions.

Overall this game feels below average with average, boring and somewhat broken combat that doesn't feel nearly as good as Megaman battle Network or One Step From Eden, and if you prefer ending a fight early its becomes even more of a slog after seeing the animations. The art and CGs are good but I was never attracted to the pixel aesthetic in any H-game so it somewhat spoiled the lewdness for me, albeit not to the same degree as Scarlet Maiden.

(The rest is just a mini-rant after a dogshit boss-fight)
As far as I have gotten, the game is at its worst during one boss fight against an ant queen constantly spawning in very fast and mobile ant-girls to kick your shit in. In this particular fight, the game glitches and there is a reasonable chance you may not move into another row, and the ant-queen's attack deals damage to one entire row while dealing bleed and almost one shotting you if you don't have a shield. Add onto the fact that the ant girls might box you in if your unfortunate enough to be in a corner and its infuriating.

Play the prequel. It's strictly superior and is one of the best NSFW games overall.
If you've already completed it and want more...

v 0.8.2
The game is not complete trash like it was a year ago. We can now buff spells and inventory, and the bug boss is finally defeatable (instead we've got the moon boss, but more on her later).
But I have two very clear reasons to deduct two stars.

The first disaster is controls. The prequel was keyboard- (more like console-) only, with 6-8 buttons doing everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. Picking an enemy, infusing a classmate, jumping in dungeons, playing lesson minigames, picking Fae's form and so on. Here half of controls is on mouse and the other on keyboard, and both are fucked up.
The mouse controls are counterintuitive. You may accidentally close the game when closing the grimoire. You struggle to navigate around school, because it's split into two identical-looking halves, even the same garden is two different locations now. (And, of course, half of the rooms from the prequel were relocated just because.) The travel spells and combat spells share the same "Spells" tab, and you always have to turn the page. You've got several inventories, I can't even count them (up to five?), each of them having a separate job. The endless wait for the room objects to shine is the least annoying piece of this mouse control.
And even the good old keyboard controls have degraded. In combat, we're now a melee mage. A melee. Mage. Who can't look upwards or downwards, who needs to rest after taking every step (severe cardio problems), who still relies on the gamey barrier from prequel and endlessly mashes it at the moon bossfight.
The icing on the cake is the lack of tutorial, so stuff like several inventories or finding the jungle dungeon you're supposed to figure out all by yourself.

The second disaster is dungeon navigation + arcana grind + moon bossfight combo.
In prequel, if you couldn't beat enemies, you roamed previous level several times (or played training minigames). The previous level was always the best place to grind arcana and stat increases. With time, navigation was getting better as your field of sight slowly enlarged, while shift-jumping allowed you to skip battles.
Here, if you want to grind arcana, you roam the starter level. It has no walls, few enemies and lots of boobs, which give the same 10 arcana on any level. One run can net you 50-100 arcana, while one lategame spell upgrade can easily cost 400 arcana.
You could also farm arcana with sex, but there's no option to increase sex speed (or I haven't found it). Although sex is the best way to farm ovaries plants (which buff items).
So you don't grind, walk through the whole game and then meet the moon boss. Who crushes your shield like a beer can (with no way to train max shield size, although it was possible in prequel). So you mash shield spell, evade her attacks, and then she just starts carpet-bombing you. You renew shield, heal and cure bleed (that's three different spells with sizeable schemes), while she sends a 3x3 nuke every three seconds.
Okay, that's a nice boss (I wonder if the final boss can be any tougher). You need better spells, so you go grinding... and get stuck in the worst grind in videogame history.
In the middle of which, it's hard to skip dozens of pointless battles, which was easy in prequel.

In general, the game could be quite good. But, for now, it's unpolished as hell (and that's better than it was a year ago).

P.S. The best spell is the second last one, "Shadow Claw". Out of 16 spells, you only need two: this one and the shield one. Don't waste arcana on anything else.

a roguelite you can appreciate one-handed.

MMA's presentation is through the roof. the animation is phenomenal, the art is the exact kind of pixel art that gets me (read: well-shaded), and the music is absolutely stellar -- though i can't say i would've chosen a drum n' bass-slash-industrial metal mashup to dungeon-crawl to, given the setting. still, it's far better than most h-games can brag about, rhythm games included.

under MMA's bra are are a few needling flaws, though. the battle system is interesting but easy to cheese -- the shield spell in particular is absurdly good -- and the voice acting is just okay, though i do like how much fun the actors seem to be having. i'd prefer if there were options in the menu to turn that off, or, barring that, it'd be nice if the options menu existed.

the only thing MMA needs besides that is better signposting. if i'm stuck carrying this heavy-ass grimoire around with me, at least let me write down a quest log in it.

This came as a surprise, really loving this game here. There should be more developers playing around with this kind of high-detail pixelated art-style for animations.
Personally also found the overall experience enjoyable, there's nothing that stood as annoying and that's kinda rare nowadays.
Wish there was a way to zoom in battle during scenes.

Support the developer if you can.

[0.5 Review]

Game felt pretty easy. I played the initial game, Magical Waifus Academy. While the first game had great art but was a poor gameplay experience, this game has a much better gameplay experience and gameplay loop.

The controls still feel a bit bad. I would like better inputs but the game itself is pretty light and the animations/art is amazing.

A lot of scenes. The game is pretty intuitive on next steps for the most part.
It could have better font choices.

There is a bug regarding the Wyvern/graveyard content where the Wyvern doesn't appear at all. There's also an issue with the Jungle area not being intuitive to navigate or some mobs do not spawn. So you'll miss some scenes without cheats.

It seems like this game was made with some passion put into it. Great animations, engaging gameplay. Right now the game a bit raw, but it's only 0.5 version. And nothing weird with the map here, just stylized that way. Look at the map and you will see your current location. Hope to see future updates!

Game is perfectly playable and easy to get all content within 1h.
Art is adorable, animations are great, battle system is unique and pretty fun once you learn how it works.
A lot of unique enemies with 2 type of unique battle sex animations each (male and female protagonist version).
Out of battle navigation is strange, but you are provided with map to find your way around, and it take like 2 minutes to explore entire area.
Dungeons are not my cup of tea - searching something in the darkness is just not much fun.

Nice and detailed animations, good varity on positions, pretty much a wellrounded buffet.
The gameplay or combat rather is easy to get used to and can be surprisingly tacticly in later stages with a lot of enemies.

v0.5
Navigation is kinda shit, there are no quest markers so you frequently get lost, the mix of mouse directions and WASD is kinda painful, but once you get used to navigate with the mouse and fight enemies with WASD and button mash magic spell combos you memorised, the game is fanrastic, great combat, great and plentiful H-scenes, too bad the gallery doesn't open them all.
Can't wait for next updates.

The gameplay is not fun, is just arrow mashing and waiting during combat. It makes you not even bother paying attention to the sexual attacks of the opponents, as you have to use your time fast.
Navigation feels like a slough and is very unclear if you have to find a new location. The quests seem broken, as if the game says you gained essance (they use a special name for it, I didn't even bother to recall), you might just not obtain it at all.
Saving to file is a crapshoot, and the codes might just corrupt your game in the next version as it did in the past.
I do not recommend playing this, just search up the cutscense and pixel art animations, and spare yourself the frustration. This game blows, and not in a fun way.

Version 0.5
I like this game, art is really good and the option to change MC gender on the fly is great. Combat is fun, but shallow for now, also it's hard to figure it out on your own. I don't know about story, because i rarely care about it in porn games.
Overall solid start I nope dev adds more depth to combat ex. new spells

Holy shit is this game bad. No way to speed up the dialogue other than mashing random buttons and hoping one of them skips the fucking slowest dialogue in existence (it's shift by the way).

The fucking movement is frankly retarded outside of combat, had to constantly check the map to reorientate myself, i really fail to understand why you can't just move via the map.

Combat is meh, boring to say the least.

Animations are fine, bit too early to tell how good they will be. But what's in so far is decent.

Story? Couldn't care less since it's pretty generic and requires you to play the previous game to understand fully.

Overall, there is some potential here but until the bugs get ironed out and the shit ass control scheme is overhauled, I would not recommend this, at all.