GLORIA Review by Craxton (craxton@erols.com) Publisher: Himeya Soft. Cost: $35.00 U.S. from himeya.com Technical: Minimal. Should work on most 33MHz or higher PCs. Graphics: Good Sound: Good, but underused. NPCs: Very Good. Writing: Excellent. Plot: Solid. Interface: Bad. Sex: Excellent. Kinkyness: *Lots* of oral, Threesome, Penile torture with a straw (don't ask), Anal rimming, Rape (by main character), Tit-sex, Drunken sex, B&D Rape (again, by main character), possibly other stuff (I've only seen 88%) "Amazing vehicle. Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow." -Douglas Adams, from _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe._ GLORIA has all the elements of a smashing Hentai game and one ceaselessly irritating design flaw. I've not yet grown cranky enough to derail a game for a single flaw, and GLORIA was very enjoyable for it's other merits, but still... So here's the story: You're Kira, Japaneese exchange student to MIT. You get a letter from Michelle M. Gloria, offering you a job as tutor to the prestigious Gloria family. So you pack up and move lock, stock, and barrel into the Gloria mansion, setting up shop tutoring one of Michelle's daughters. Not entirely coincidentally, there's a conflict as to who will be the next head of the Gloria household, and sooner or later, you'll get dragged into it. Your actions over the course of the game will determine who takes the seat. There's also the matter of your love life to resolve. Or not resolve. Your choice. GLORIA is not the standerd Hentai game where you're free to move around, take in the atmosphere, and explore to uncover more of the plot. It's- well, C's Ware calls it a "Multi-Adventure Simulation", which is marketing-speak for "Hyperfiction", or to use a slightly more well-known term, "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story". But it's more complex then your standard CYOA. Decisions you make now could have consequences later, rather then just having immediate consequences. A better comparison might be Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series, but that goes too much the other way- GLORIA does not have a character sheet, or items you pick up during your adventure, or random elements, or any of the design points that make Dever's books so entertaining. The only real variables modifying the storyline are the decisions you make and the affection ratings of the Gloria women, which are in turn increased or decreased a result of your decisions. Which basically means that the decisions you make can and will open and close off plot branches later on. In that case the best analogy to use may be that GLORIA is an intricate puzzlebox disguised as a story. Here's the frustrating flaw I mentioned earlier- You're working this puzzlebox while blindfolded. The affection ratings aren't visible until the end of the game, and while your actions usualy have effects, they're not always foreseeable effects. Often, when attempting to get a specific result, you'll wind up stumbling in the dark, with no idea how to make things work out. Compounding the problem, you only have four save files, which annoys me because it's two too few. I usually found myself saving six times over the course of a full game. Come on, Himeya, GLORIA is already a Windows game, expend a little extra programming muscle for unlimited save files. But enough bitching about the gameplay. I said I enjoyed GLORIA, and I did. While badly implemented here, a branching plot is one of my favorite things to find in a game. It's the best possible way to make the player feel like he's DOING something, like his actions actually matter in the sense of the overall story. Furthermore, GLORIA contains one of the things that is required to elevate true Hentai above the level of simple porn- depth of character. The Gloria women are well sketched out, and they feel realistic. There are seven to acquiant yourself with- the acting mistress of the house Michelle, five daughters, and two maids who, among other things, tend to your sexual needs. (Yes, I can count. One of the daughters also acts as a maid. It's a bit complicated.) In addition to the girls, you have to deal with Georg, a fellow tutor who can be either friend or foe depending on how you play. All the characters have personalities which are consistant over the entire game, and they never feel like cardboard cutouts, the way characters in lesser games sometimes do. For example, one of the maids, Sicile, is what you'd call a nymphomaniac. This is the oldest Hentai cliche in the book, and can be deadly to a game if it's not handled well. It's handled well here. A lot of nympho Hentai girls revel in their insatiable appetites, take Akiko of Paradise Heights fame for example. Sicile is not Akiko. She's withdrawn and timid, with a persistant inferiority complex. When her secret comes out, it's not portrayed as something glorified, it's more like a tragic flaw. The net result is a character of depth rather then shallowness. The sex scenes are varied and occur with just the right frequency to not overrun the story. The scenes are also, for the most part, well-written, I think. What a confusing sentance. Let me elaborate: The writing is good, but it doesn't seem to match the Japanese dialogue. So you're best off turning the voiceovers off. (While I'm on the subject, Let take a moment to go into a "design" rant here. After "Divi-Dead", "Desire," "Love Potion", and now "GLORIA", I've decided that the C's Ware interface for a sex scene just isn't cutting it. Consider: you're given a line of text. If it's something your character is saying or doing, there's no sound, you just read it and click for the next line. If it's something you're partner is doing or saying, then you have to listen to the accompanying voiceover, which is often overlong and hideously overacted with overly dramatic pauses. (Not to mention the fact that "It would be my pleasure" on the screen could equate to a single word in the voiceover, which does nothing but embarrass the translator.) If you click before it's done, you advacne to the next line, but you also step on your partner's line, which breaks mimesis. Meanwhile you're mind has to switch between reading and clicking and reading, listening, and clicking. Forget it. And another thing, why is it the player character never has a voice in a C's Ware game? Are you the player suppossed to superimpose your own voice over the characters lines? Doesn't work, it's incongruous to hear every character's lines being spoken except yours, and you've still got the problem of waiting through the voiceover to click when you've already read what's being said. I always wind up turning the voice off and playing with just text. Text and no voices makes a first-person game. Voices and no text makes a third-person game. The C's Ware design is an ugly, Frankensteined combination of the two.) Two more things. Graphics: They're good, though not especially spectacular. But they work. Sound: hard to judge- there's only one real background song, and it plays in an endless loop throughout the game. This is rather stupid because, even during dramatic moments like a shootout in a parking garage, the game keeps on playing that bouncy, all-purpose tune in the background. The music itself isn't especially annoying, but come on, the jukebox feature has a perfectly good dramatic song, why not use it? Conclusion: GLORIA sometimes seems like the Hentai equivilent of TACTAE, in that you have to do so many seemingly insignificant things right to get the results you want. But despite this, it's varied, intricate, and very well written, with believable characters. Recommended.