About this game
So the village gets wrecked by taxes and Queen Mercedes just ships everyone off to Satan's Prison, which sounds like a real shithole. Rascal gets out because Jessica takes the fall for him, and now he's running to some elder in Macaron village talking about getting stronger. Classic setup. But here's the thing, right, the game doesn't really care about the prison break plot. It's all about what happens when two boys who grew up together, promised to love each other, get separated by some royal bitch's labor camp scheme.
The training with Elder Macaronia is where things get... weird. And by weird I mean tentacles. Lots of them. The elder's methods aren't exactly pushups and situps, more like "let's see how many monster appendages you can handle before you level up." The femboy protagonist thing works surprisingly well here because the art style leans hard into that soft anime look, all blushing and trembling, and the monsters are genuinely creative. Some of the monster girls have both sets of equipment if you catch my drift, and the game doesn't shy away from showing exactly what happens when they catch you. Censored though. Always censored. Why is it always censored? The pixel mosaics are thick enough to build a house with.
The romance between Rascal and Jessica gets explored through flashbacks mostly, which is sweet in a doomed kind of way. You're grinding through these dungeons, getting violated by plant things and slime creatures, and suddenly there's a tender moment where you remember holding hands in the wheat fields. Then back to the tentacles. The yaoi elements come through more with the monster encounters than the actual relationship, which is a choice I guess. Wish there was more actual interaction between the boys instead of just memories, but the game's clearly more interested in what the monsters are doing than the love story it promised. Still, the RPG mechanics are solid enough. Leveling up actually matters, the turn based combat gives you time to think about your life choices, and some of the boss fights are genuinely challenging. Not that you're playing for the combat.