>>100806
But I mentioned a double/quadruple feature, and there's three games here. What gives?

Well, I decided to break a personal rule of mine and not play the whole series before reviewing it. I saw the gameplay and ryona and it looked like the latest entry but less of it and with less polish, no actual differences present. Let's talk about Eternal Dread 3.

It's a good thing the term "stamina-action game" is gaining traction, because calling Eternal Dread 3 a Souls-like is equal parts accurate and unhelpful, it's like calling the first Halo game a "DOOM clone". It's not particularly difficult or unforgiving once you know what you're doing, and it's not particularly dark either, but it's a game where you manage resources, stamina, and mana while dodge-rolling around enemies with high-damage attacks. The core gameplay loop is that you are given an objective, either by the story or by the crafting system, and you go into the world to fight monsters and harvest resources and reach new areas to achieve those objectives. In combat, you dodge, block, and sprint to avoid damage at the cost of stamina, cast spells to deal damage or create openings to deal damage at the cost of mana, use your bow to deal damage from a distance at the cost of arrows. You use openings to swing with your sword, the only combat action that doesn't take some sort of resource with variable renewability, and which can do a decent amount of damage depending on your class.

Yes, you have a class. It determines which stats you gain and which abilities you can unlock. Some are focused on range, or magic, or melee combat, or resource management, and they can play quite differently, but it's not like it will be a whole new game if you play one class over another. Partway through the game you get the ability to multiclass, gaining access to a second skill tree. I'd recommend you choose a class which covers the weaknesses of your first, in this game specialization has diminishing returns unless you're going after a specific enemy. Being a good swordslady and a subpar mage is better than being a great swordsman who eats shit in a ranged battle. Equipment has special traits (think Minecraft enchantments) that can help you fit the mold you want anyways, and the crafting system lets you transfer these from whatever piece of equipment has them to whatever you want to have them at the cost of the original thing, so all you need to do is find ANY piece of gear with the enchantment you want.

Normally my deal is strategy/management games, and hack-and-slashers like this are far from my wheelhouse, but this one kept me engaged until the end so that's a good sign. There's no sidequests or really any sort of side content or story branching, but the class system freshens the game up a little if you get to the end and still want more. I did. A lot of strange enchantments, mechanics, and crafting recipes made a lot more sense then.

You won't want more of the plot, though. That's confused. It approximately makes logical sense, but it sways incoherently between being cartoon sexy funtimes and being grimdark. It has a graphics style that would let it get away with either, whether as a perfect fit or a dark irony, but it would have to commit to either side, and it just doesn't. You have to see for yourself how much it vacillates between oppressive and goofy. That's only the second-worst design choice this game made IMO, though.

This is probably the worst ryona game I've ever played. I don't mean the game is bad (in terms of gameplay it's actually my favorite), I mean the RYONA is bad. It is the most bloodless, sexless gore porn game I know of. For a game about demons slaughtering the last remnants of humanity, you'd think that you'd see corpses before act 2, but no, most of the bodies you see are women trussed up in bondage gear and tied to a pole or a cross. I thought they were just not moving at first, it wasn't until I got closer I realized they were dead. And while all the humanoid characters are wearing literal armored bikinis, that's ALL of them, even the skeletons. No one ever gets their tits out and the rape is only ever implied, and in fact if you take off your armor you get MORE covered-up. You can find playthroughs of this game on YT because it's so inoffensive. Making more mutilation assets is difficult, but every time I came across a new form of tied-up girl who looked completely unhurt but was supposed to be dead, I couldn't help but think that an impaled corpse would make for better decoration. The best death scenes in the game are the ones you get for killing too many people in one of the friendly areas, but you can't even do that until you're deep into the lategame because otherwise they'll tear you apart. Couldn't they have made an edited version with a goblin or something and used that rather than hanging my girl by her wrists and calling it good for the first fifteen levels?

This game desperately needs an H-patch.

The difficulty is screwed-up, too. Hard mode makes it so enemies level with you, but their XP doesn't. This doesn't make the game harder, it just makes traversing underlevelled areas more annoying. What's more, there are things like the surrender option that can give you a chance to escape a bad encounter and the potions that teleport you to the nearest checkpoint, but dying lets you keep XP and items and has no consequences besides respawning the enemies and setting you back. A permadeath mode could be a good addition with those features in mind, but there isn't one I know of.

There's also no animation player mode for you to see the ryona on demand, but for a 3d game like this that's much harder to make so I won't hold that against them.

Overall, it's an odd case. The game itself is so good it doesn't need ryona to sell it, which is good, because the ryona can't sell it unless you want it watered-down like crazy. How do you even score a game for a guro audience when the guro part is the weakest aspect? There's some good stuff here but not a lot of it and getting to it is the real adventure. To me it's a 9/10, but the more you want the ryona content, the more it will approach a 5/10.