Translated by GPT-4.
I’ve heard of Donadona for a long time. I picked it up on DLsite during a New Year sale but never got around to playing it. Before May Day, I wasn’t sure what to play, so I went with the flow and started my bad-kid journey in Asougi (is that a surname or some pun?).
Honestly, I didn’t expect to get so hooked; I ended up barely sleeping the whole holiday.
Ero
Why so addictive… well, mainly because the game is incredibly lewd.
Forget the cutscene CGs for a moment — the spring sales-driven RPG gameplay loop itself (with its sense of moral transgression) makes the cycle feel erotic. The game’s most interesting feature is the ero events triggered after special talents are sold in the spring. On one hand, the event CGs themselves are sufficiently sexy (the guilt factor is off the charts). On the other, as a light comedy-slash-romance game, these CGs cleverly separate the heavy, dark thematic discussions from the daily antics between Kuma and his harem. For a game that balances a breezy tone with a cyberpunk world, it achieves a curious experience of both not abusing the girls (you’re not going to lose on purpose just for the CGs, right?) and yet… abusing them?
The art is undoubtedly the game’s biggest highlight. As the saying goes, before a game sells, it’s art first, gameplay second, story third. Donadona’s visuals are absolutely top-tier in 2D art. The high-contrast, high-saturation palette, cyberpunk-style lighting, and distinctive character designs leave a lasting impression. As an eroge, the CG quality (including content) is absolutely premium. I can only describe it as fappable. (Here I must mention Nukige Island, which looks lewd but has CGs that aren’t lewd at all — not sure if I’ll get a chance to write my thoughts on that one.) If there’s a shortcoming, it’s that special fetish play is a bit scarce; it leans more toward pure love.
Character-wise, Porno is easily the most distinctive. In a pure-love-oriented hentai game, telling you up front that heroine A was once the top earner in spring sales is pretty niche. But Porno’s overall portrayal doesn’t emphasize this negatively; you can feel the distance between Kuma and Porno slowly closing without being put off by her backstory. As a relatively typical devoted-type heroine, Porno isn’t overly cliché (perhaps thanks to her mischievous loli side standing out). The other characters, well, they just fit their archetypes: the tsundere hasn’t fallen out of fashion (Kikuchiyo is adorable), kids are cute (Alice is hot) (guilt factor), and the big-breasted, lewd nurse is indeed lewd — but the character concepts are all too typical.
Game
As for gameplay, as long as a hentai game is sexy enough, it provides sufficient motivation. Still, Donadona’s light RPG experience is decent. The spring sales system is the game’s biggest highlight, but apart from the special talents mentioned above, the system as a whole lacks depth. By the late game, even spring sales (and dispatch missions) become meaningless because you’ll basically never run out of money.
The overall game loop fits the hentai game mold: light gameplay, heavy CGs and story — it meets expectations.
But the branching endings… who decided to lock the branch point so early in the game? And there’s no in-game item to unlock all CGs, so even just replaying for full CG completion requires a huge extra time investment.
Doing Bad Things!
What exactly is a “bad kid” in the game? Probably just a proxy for rebelling against rules and chasing freedom. The game only scratches the surface of this, and the ending is pretty hasty — but then, a hentai game doesn’t need to go that deep. The protagonist squad sacrifices others’ freedom to liberate Asougi. Maybe society as a whole is just one giant spring sales team, and we, as cogs, are gradually trained into what it wants as we turn. (What are you even saying!)